Do Christians follow the old testament or only the new?

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There’s a reason Christians preserved the Old Testament instead of just disseminating the New. It had to be a really good one, because preserving scripture over the course of centuries at the time of the Romans was not the easy or cheap thing we think of it today. The process of canonization was laborious and expensive.

Christians even went so far as to preserve books that the expelled Jews didn’t see fit to canonize in their Bible. These are called deuterocanonical books, literally “of the second canon.” They’re necessary to show that the Christian split from Judaism wasn’t something that just happened out of the blue. These books separate the Old Testament from the Hebrew Bible. However, they’re not included in most Protestant Bibles as a matter of principle.

The books of the Maccabees tell a story of Jewish rebels establishing a Jewish monarchical state and struggling to retain their identity in the face of increasing “Hellenization,” the incursion of Greek ideas and culture into their way of life. Among the accounts were one of thousands of defenders of the conservative faith being slaughtered because they refused to fight on the Sabbath. The kingdom doesn’t end well. One interesting thing is that 1 Maccabees details the origin of Hanukkah even though the story wasn’t seen fit to include in the Hebrew Bible.

The Book of Baruch adds additional flavor to the story of Jeremiah, arguing that the Jews lost their way, were disobedient towards God, and begging for repentance. Christians use it to teach wisdom and submission to the divine.