Four hundred years of silence need explaining, and Paul explains them in a single sentence. It is worth reading slowly, because both halves of it are doing work.

But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law.Galatians 4:4

“When the fullness of the time had come”

Not when the time was up. When it was full.

Look back at what those centuries produced. Persia gave way to Greece, Greece to Rome. The world learned one language, and the Hebrew Scriptures had already been carried into it. The Jews were scattered through every city of the empire, and in nearly every one of those cities there was a synagogue where those Scriptures were read aloud in a Greek anyone could follow. Rome had built roads between all of them, and kept those roads safe.

None of that existed when Malachi laid down his pen. A message that would have died inside one province had it stayed in Hebrew could now cross an empire — and did, within a single lifetime.

The silence was not absence. It was preparation.

“Born under the law”

The second half needs saying plainly, because four hundred years of distance can make the Gospels read like the founding of a new religion. They are not that.

Jesus and His disciples lived as observant Jews, under the Torah, within Israel.

He was circumcised on the eighth day and presented in the temple. He kept the feasts and went up to Jerusalem for them — the Gospel of John is largely organised around those journeys. He taught in synagogues on the Sabbath. He wore the tassels the Law commands, and the woman with the haemorrhage reached for one of them. He was called Rabbi, by His followers and His opponents alike. He told a healed leper to go and show himself to the priest and make the offering Moses commanded. He said He had not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets.

His disciples were no different. After the resurrection they are still in the temple daily. Peter has never eaten anything unclean, and says so. Paul, years into his mission to the Gentiles, takes a Nazirite vow and goes to the temple to complete it.

So when Jesus argues with the Pharisees, it is not an outsider attacking a foreign religion. It is an argument inside the family, over the meaning of a Law all of them hold sacred — and it is fierce precisely because they share so much. Read that way, the Gospels stop sounding like a rejection of the Old Testament and start sounding like what they are: the continuation of it.

The sentence that finishes four hundred years later

Go back to where the silence started. The last words of the Old Testament, as your Bible arranges it, are a promise about Elijah:

“He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”Malachi 4:6

Then four hundred years of nothing. An old priest named Zechariah is serving his course in the temple, drawing the lot to burn incense, and an angel tells him his wife will have a son. And of that son the angel says this:

“He will go before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children.”Luke 1:17

That is the same sentence. The last promise of the Old Testament is picked up in the first chapter of Luke — and picked up not by a narrator explaining a fulfilment, but by the angel himself, as though no time had passed at all.

The empires had changed three times. The language had changed. The temple had been defiled, cleansed, and rebuilt by an Idumean. And God resumes mid-sentence, exactly where He left off.

The silence is over. Turn the page.