Uncertainty, Take 3

I'll continue to babble and edit it down and into something that is tight and researched (I'm in Florida right now for my mother's 80th birthday).

It seems impossible to go very deeply at all into biblical studies and not soon realize how great the volume of different interpretations and proposed scenarios there are for what the meaning of practically any biblical passage might really be. As I frequently tell New Testament survey classes, if a true false question begins, "Some scholars think...," the answer to the question is probably true, because you can't throw a rock and not hit a scholar who thinks some thing about just about everything.

Let me spin out just two or three cases in biblical ambiguity. One comes to mind in light of the Da Vinci Code. The Bible of course never tells us that Jesus was married. But then again, we wouldn't know Peter or James was married either if Paul had not chanced to mention this fact really quite incidentally in 1 Corinthians 9:5. We think to ourselves, "Surely the Bible would mention if Jesus were married." But the point is of course that this is "we" thinking to "ourselves." What if in fact this issue is far more significant to us that it would have been to the authors of the gospels? We would have mentioned it. But you could make a good case that the matter would have been a matter of indifference to them.

[By the way, while I don't think Jesus was married, I can't think of anything heretical about this suggestion in itself. We believe Jesus was fully human. We don't believe sex is evil. Only the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions have theological problems with this, since they have come over time to view sex as an activity for the less than perfect or a necessary evil. Now the idea that Jesus had a child wierds me out.]

And now for the case of semantic ambiguity. After the resurrection, Mary Magdalene says to Jesus (without knowing it's Jesus), "They have taken my Lord away, and I don't know where they have put him" (John 20:13). The word Lord is our case in point. In many languages, the word Mister actually is the same as the word Master (case in point). In Spanish, Jesus is Senior, and, oh look, there's Senior Smith. In German, Jesus is der Herr and look, there's Herr Schmidt. So in Greek, Jesus is kurios. And there's Kurios Dukakis.

So is Mary asking where her Mister is?

I don't think so. First, I really don't know if this convention goes as far back as the first century. But notice that when Mary finds out it's Jesus, she calls him Rabboni, teacher. Funny not to call your husband something a little more spectacular when you realize it's him. And I doubt that Thomas is calling Jesus husband when he says a little later, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28). Well, my point was just one in semantic ambiguity and to give a taste of how much reading between the lines is involved in biblical interpretation.

Let me spin out another perfectly plausible scenario behind the creation and incorporation of the material in Philippians 2:6-11. The evidence does not of course suggest that this is what actually happened--the following scenario is simply wild and unsubstantiated speculation. But it is perfectly possible, as countless other wild speculative scenarios might be. And of course that is my point: the smallest tidbit of added evidence might lead us to modify our understanding of countless biblical passages vastly, even in precisely the opposite direction to current understanding.

In AD39ish, the emperor Gaius Caligula tried to set a statue of himself up in the Jerusalem temple. He was talked out of it by Herod Agrippa 1 (see Acts 12) and Petronius, the Roman procurator at that time. Well you can imagine that this event sent shockwaves throughout the Jewish world. It's hard for me to imagine that it didn't spawn a lot of thinking on Daniel 11, which talks about a king from the north setting up an "abomination of desolation" in the temple.

Sometime in the 40's, a Jew named Philo wrote a little treatise about his embassy to Gaius. Some have suggested (there's the line) that he may have written it for the emperor Claudius as a warning--don't mess with the Jewish people because God watches out for us. I find this improbable--what emperor would care? But that's not important right now.

One line near the end of this treatise is striking. Philo suggests that it's not so easy to counterfeit the "form of God." Philo is probably playing on the image Caligula tried to set up in the temple. But I suspect he's also saying that Caligula himself was not really in the form of a god either.

Now for the wild speculation. Let's say Apollos takes a trip to his home town of Alexandria in the early 50's sometime. He comes across the treatise there, which everyone is enjoying because it puts down Caligula. The line "form of God" strikes him. Unlike Caligula, Jesus really did have the form of a god, but unlike Caligula, he didn't treat his divine royalty as something to exploit, but he took the form of a servant. Here we remember that the OT refers to human kings as sons of God (2 Samuel 7:14; Psalm 2:7; 89:27) and even as God (Psalm 45:6; Isaiah 9:6).

So Apollos goes hymnic, and writes a poem with something like the following in sense:

Although [Jesus] had the authority of divine royalty
He did not think of it as something to exploit
But he emptied himself
And played the role of a servant

After he became like mere mortals
And looked like a mere man to us
He humbled himself
And became obedient to death

Therefore God super-exalted him
And bestowed on him the name above all names
That every knee should bow and tongue confess
That Jesus Christ is Lord.

Now it seems to me that I have created a scenario here that is perfectly plausible and I think I could defend this interpretation of the words in Philippians and reconstruction of its original form in a doctoral level journal. I'm not saying that this is the right interpretation, only that I think I could defend it and that no one could easily prove it wrong even if we cannot prove it right either.

So this is my point. I have been able to speculate on a series of events and meanings that are quite different from the usual understanding of these words. Usually the phrase "form of God" is taken to refer to Christ's pre-existent divine nature. His becoming in the likeness of humans is usually taken as a reference to the incarnation. But if we know just one little bit of data--that the author of this hymn that Paul expands on in Philippians had read Philo's Embassy to Gaius and had been struck by the line "form of God" in it--then our interpretation of the Philippian hymn would have to change significantly.

Well, you know the tales of ambiguity never cease. I could go on and on and would enjoy doing it, but it would kill you with boredom. How about my current translation of Galatians 2:16: "since we know a person is not justified by works of law unless by way of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, even we [Jews] have exercised faith so as to be incorporated into Christ Jesus so that we might be justified by a Christ-like faith and not by works of law..." Compare it to any translation you have.

My goal at this point of the paper is merely to argue that the meaning of the biblical text is really far more ambiguous than most Christians would imagine. Which of my many examples these last three posts makes that point best?