Is using the word "Old Testament" Antisemitic?

This week over lunch at work someone was talking about the "Old Testament" at work, I forget the context but another coworker interrupted to say that saying the word "Old Testament" was antisemitic. She said that this was because it should be called the "Hebrew Scriptures". This information was taken from a class she took in university about Judaism. I was taken off guard by this, and couldn't think of what to say at the time, but I wanted to say something because I didn't agree. 

Why did Christians even include the Hebrew Scriptures in their canon of scriptures? 

That is because Christianity was initially a sect within Judaism, until mainstream Judaism decided that the followers of Jesus of Nazareth were not part of Judaism, but heretical. We even see in Acts that Christianity was seen as a sect of Judaism called "the Way", 

"But this I admit to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our ancestors, believing everything laid down according to the law or written in the prophets."  Acts 24:14

If you take a traditional view of the authorships of the New Testament books then you have almost exclusively Jewish authors with the exception of Luke who was a Greek and wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. The early Christian church viewed itself as the true Judaism (Israel) - and believed that anyone who rejected faith in Jesus Christ was cutoff from the true Israel. This is not meant to argue the validity of these claims in this post but the fact that this is how the early Church perceived themselves and Judaism. 

So, why did Christians call the Hebrew Scriptures the Old Testament? 

I am not sure when Christians began referring to the Hebrew Scriptures as the Old Testament (maybe someone can comment about the origin of this term). But the terms "New Testament" and "Old Testament" are used because of the centrality of the incarnation of Jesus Christ within the Christian faith. The books written before the appearance of Christ are labelled as the "Old Testament" and the books written after the appearance of Christ are called the "New Testament". This is not meant to be a put down to the Hebrew Scriptures as "old" and inferior but simply a reflection of the Christian perspective of history scriptural revelation. 

Christians chose to highly elevate the Hebrew Scriptures by retaining complete, unabridged copies of the books from within the Jewish canon of scriptures. Christians did not pick and choose from the books of the Hebrew Scriptures, they included them all and view each of them as equal in authority as any of the New Testament scriptures. 


I think I can see why it would annoy Jews that Gentile Christians don't put more emphasis on the origin of their Old Testament scriptures by calling them the Hebrew Scriptures, since they were written by ethnically Jewish/Hebrew authors. When I use the term I don't mean to slight Jews or Judaism - as well, I don't have a problem with calling it the "Hebrew Scriptures" because the term accurately reflects the origins of this portion of the canon. When I talk to Jews I will try to remember to refer to the scriptures as the Hebrew Scriptures, and not the "New Testament". However, I don't think it is fair to call Christians antisemitic for referring to the Hebrew Scriptures as the "Old Testament". Our differences lie in our interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures; which the Christian interpretation stems from teachings found in the Christian "New Testament" and in contrast Judaism's interpretation stems from teachings found primarily in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud. These contain very real and important distinctions but we both claim to be the "true Israel" based on the revelation of God through the "Hebrew Scriptures" which we both use the exact same text: word for word verbatim.