Something given to God as an act of worship, often animals and grains; the offering of animals made right the relationship between God and the worshiper.
(abbreviated OT) The name of the Hebrew Bible used in the Christian community; it presupposes that there is a New Testament; the term testament goes back to testamentum, the Latin equivalent for the Hebrew word covenant; for most Protestant Christians, the Old Testament is identical to the Hebrew Bible; for classical Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christianity, the Old Testament also includes the Apocrypha. See Introduction.
(also called oral law) In traditional Jewish pharisaic/rabbinic thought, God revealed instructions for living through both the written scriptures and through a parallel process of orally transmitted traditions; these oral applications of the Torah for contemporary situations later took written form in the Mishnah and other Jewish literature; the Jewish belief in both a written and an oral torah is known as "the dual Torah"; critics of this approach within Judaism include the Sadducees and the Karaites. See Conclusion.
In classical Christian thought, the fundamental state of sinfulness and guilt, inherited from the first man Adam, that infects all of humanity but can be removed through depending on Christ.
(from Greek for "correct opinion/outlook," as opposed to heterodox or heretical) The judgment that a position is "orthodox" depends on what are accepted as the operative "rules" or authorities at the time; over the course of history, the term "orthodox" has come to denote the dominant surviving forms that have proved themselves to be "traditional" or "classical" or "mainstream" (e.g. rabbinic Judaism; the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christian churches).