In recent years, biblical studies scholars and theologians, among others, have begun to regard the term "Old Testament" as problematic in terms of both political correctness and interfaith dialogue. While a number of alternatives have been floated, the most dominant option has come to be the "Hebrew Bible" or, more accurately, the "Hebrew Scriptures," since the Bible is really a late invention of the printing press.

But as an Orthodox Christian, I find this latter term just as troublesome, for a few reasons. Overall, I find its categories to be too narrow, historically and theologically.

First, for first-century Jews (Christian or not) the Scriptures were not entirely in Hebrew. While the rabbis would eventually narrow their sacred canon to the Hebrew books of the Tanakh (the Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim), the Scriptures of Jesus's day included Greek books not preserved in Hebrew (cf. the LXX). To reduce the Jewish Scriptures to 'the Hebrew Scriptures' (as the Protestants have) is to exclude a huge swath of books that first-century Jews (including Jesus and his apostles) embraced as sacred scripture. The later reduction by Jewish rabbis and Protestant theologians does a disservice to those Jews who held the first two books of Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, and Greek sections of Esther and Daniel as holy Scripture.

To the great rabbis of their day, calling those books 'Apocrypha' and treating them as secondary would be a nonsensical anachronism coined in retrospect by those who had taken scissors to 'God's word.' 

Second, for those willing to acknowledge the reality of Jewish Scriptures written or preserved in Greek, then we ought surely to include 'the New Testament,' because it tells the Jewish story in essential texts of the Tanakh that forecast a 'New Covenant' with the Jews (e.g., Jeremiah 31-33) and a promised deliverer (i.e., the Messianic Son of David).

The New Testament is a collection of Jewish Scriptures written by Jewish authors about their Jewish Messiah, addressed first of all to Jewish readers and their converts (included as prophesied in the Abrahamic covenant and the prophecies of Isaiah).

While those Jews who did not identify Jesus as their Messiah would reject the New Testament witness, one way that Christians today can resist our habitual supersessionism and Greek-Hebrew dualism is by not contrasting the Hebrew Scriptures with the Greek New Testament. Rather, I propose that Christians consider referring to the Jewish Scriptures (LXX and NT inclusive) or, as Jesus and the NT writers did, simply "the Scriptures."

For Christians who worship Jesus Christ as God's Son, Israel's Messiah, and the world's Savior, the entire Bible is a cohesive drama of redemption culminating in God's restored and extended covenant. For Christians, it should not be a big leap to include all the books of the first Christians Greek and Hebrew Bible (the LXX), nor to acknowledge that all our* books are fundamentally Jewish Scriptures (from Genesis to Revelation).