The first of this series was Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship. Here is the second New Testament post.
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When we are talking about copies of the New Testament, a manuscript is a handwritten copy, most of which certainly date to the medieval period before the invention of the printing press in the late 1400s. As you would expect, we have fewer truly old manuscripts than we do later ones because of the wear and tear of time. We have none of the original manuscripts of any biblical writing and the vast majority date later than AD1000.
Some find this situation unnerving, but we are in a much better position when it comes to the New Testament than we are other ancient writings like those of Homer or Plato. We have a fragment of John that dates to about 30 years after it was written--almost unheard of. We have a collection of most of Paul's writings (minus the Pastorals) that dates to around AD200 (p46, one of the Chester Beatty papyri)--also quite amazing when it comes to such things.
The best introduction to the science of the textual criticism of the New Testament, the branch of biblical studies that studies manuscripts and tries to identify what the books of the Bible originally said, is Bruce Metzger's The Text of the New Testament. [1] Metzger is also responsible for the very helpful, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. [2] This resource goes through the most significant variations among the thousands of manuscripts we have and explains why the editors of the standard Greek New Testament picked the particular options they did.
Another good introduction is Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland's, The Text of the New Testament. [3] Kurt Aland was instrumental in putting together the standard text of the Greek New Testament as it now stands. There are two primary versions, although both now have the same text. The "Aland" version is typically a red Bible with a "textual apparatus" at the bottom to tell the most significant variations from the text the editors have chosen. [4] The "Nestle" version is typically a blue Bible and has been around longer. [5] It now has the same text as the "Aland" version, but a much more extensive textual apparatus at the bottom.
The "external evidence" we have, the evidence from various manuscripts and writings, falls into about five different types. First are papyri, manuscripts written on scrolls made from papyrus strips. They are typically the oldest manuscripts and are written in all capital Greek letters without any breaks between words or punctuation. The punctuation we now find in our Bibles is thus entirely a matter of the judgment of interpreters. It is thus possible to argue from time to time that a statement should really be a question or that something is a quote from somewhere else rather than an author's claim or that a period should be put somewhere so that a new thought begins.
"Uncial" manuscripts tend to date from about the 300s to the 800s and are on animal hide or "vellum." Rather than scrolls, uncials are in book form (i.e., in codex form), making it possible to have the entire New Testament on them. Two of the most important uncial manuscripts date from the early 300s, Codex Sinaiticus (symbolized by the Hebrew letter א) and Codex Vaticanus (symbolized by B). Although the standard Greek text currently in use does not read exactly like these two, most textual scholars believe these two manuscripts are examples of the best tradition of manuscripts, usually called the Alexandrian tradition.
"Minuscule" manuscripts are written in lower case Greek cursive and are medieval copies, largely dating from a handful in the 900s to around 1500 when copies began to be made with the printing press. We have well over 5000 of these. By the Middle Ages, the text of the New Testament had become relatively standardized, so most of these fall into what scholars often call the Byzantine tradition. When people speak of the Majority Text, they are largely referring to this textual tradition. Most surviving manuscripts are medieval and most read very similarly.
We have two other very important witnesses to the text of the New Testament. One are the early church fathers, the quotations that various significant figures in Christianity made of the biblical text. These fathers are as old as the oldest manuscripts and thus give an important witness to the text of the New Testament, although we have to be careful because all we have of their writings are also copies of copies. We thus have to do textual criticism on manuscripts of them just as on manuscripts of the New Testament itself. It is understandable if some of their copyists may at times have harmonized their quotes with the text of the Bible as these copyists knew it in their own time.
A good example of the significance of quotations in the fathers is the ending of Mark, Mark 16:9-20. The manuscript evidence for this ending being original is not very good. The oldest copies we have of Mark do not have it. Several early Christians do not seem to know about it and two very important Christians from the 300s and 400s say that few manuscripts of Mark they knows have it. But at the same time, two very important witnesses of the late second century, Irenaeus and Tatian, seem to know of the ending. The strongest argument from the "external evidence" of manuscripts, therefore, comes from early church fathers.
A final major witness to the text of the New Testament are translations of it into other languages like Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and so forth. Again, some of these translations, like the Old Latin, can be as old as any Greek manuscript. While one may not always be able to tell the exact wording of the Greek original, they can help a person choose between known Greek options.
The science of textual criticism primarily developed over the last two hundred years. The 1800s in particular saw significant findings of old manuscripts that called into question the originality of the "received Greek text," what had come to be called the textus receptus. The origins of this particular edition of the Greek New Testament, which stands as the basis for the King James or Authorized Version, is quite interesting.
With the invention of the printing press, the humanist, Renaissance, Roman Catholic scholar Erasmus embarked on a race to be the first to put the Greek New Testament in movable type. Using a half dozen or so manuscripts, all of which were medieval, he quickly put together an edition of the Greek New Testament that understandably corresponded mostly to the Byzantine tradition. For his first edition, he did not have any copies of the last part of Revelation, so he actually created a Greek text by translating back from the Latin. The result was some readings that ironically appeared in not a single Greek manuscript!
By the 1551 edition of Stephanus, the Erasmus text had reached somewhat of a standard form. For the first time, chapters were divided into verses. These verse divisions remain the basis for the current numbering in the New Testament. [6] In a few instances, later findings of earlier manuscripts have suggested that a verse of Stephanus' text was not originally there. The result is a "missing verse" like Acts 8:37. But no one has taken this verse out. Rather, the earliest manuscripts suggest instead that the verse had been added in centuries after Acts was written.
In a few instances, the textus receptus has retained some of the peculiarities of Erasmus' venture. For example, the reading in Revelation 22:14 in the King James Version, "they that do his commandments" is a leftover from Erasmus initially translating back from Latin into Greek because he did not have any Greek manuscripts here. There are some Greek manuscripts that read this way, but we wonder if he would have gone with the more likely, "those who wash their robes" if he had initially had any Greek manuscripts of this verse at the time.
Perhaps the most famous Erasmus story has to do with 1 John 5:7. The full verse appears in only eight of the over 5000 known Greek manuscripts. It appears in the main text of no known Greek manuscript prior to Erasmus. If original, this wording of the verse would be the clearest statement of the Trinity in all of Scripture. Accordingly, Erasmus received some pressure to put it in a later edition of his text. He remarked that he would if a Greek manuscript could be shown to have it. His journal later suggested he believed the one he then received had been created for that very purpose. Since the verse has such incredibly weak support and in fact was unknown at the time of the great Trinitarian controversies of the 300s and 400s, it seems incomprehensible that they be original.
In the centuries after Erasmus, there was an increasing sense that his Greek text was not original at various places. J. J. Griesbach (1745-1812), for example, suggested that in general, the shorter of two variations (the lectio brevior) is more likely to be original. It is not always the case, but more often than not. He also recognized the very important principle that the more difficult reading (the lectio difficilior) is more likely to be original. The reason is that copyists were more likely to "fix" problems than to cause them when copying.
Hiding here is probably the most important principle of textual criticism of all, at least when it come to internal evidence, evidence based on the way the text reads rather than on what manuscripts have a certain reading. This is the rule that says the most likely original reading is the one that would best explain how the other variations came about. Because copyists were more inclined to add material to clarify things or to smooth out difficulties, the shorter readings and the more difficult readings most of the time are the more likely readings, and the older manuscripts tend to have these readings.
One of the greatest discoverers of manuscripts was Constantin von Tischendorf (1815-74), the "Indiana Jones" of manuscripts. His biggest discovery was Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete Greek manuscript of the entire Bible known at present. It dates from the early 300s. Tischendorf came across it while staying at St. Catherine's monastery on the Mt. Sinai peninsula, where it was in a bin of material destined to be burned for heat. He strongly suggested it should not be burned and, by way of politics, eventually managed to get the manuscript out of Egypt and to him in Germany.
Some of the most groundbreaking discoveries both of manuscripts and of method were thus in play by the late 1800s. But it was undoubtedly the work of Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-92) that finally established the current trajectory of New Testament textual criticism. In 1881, they published a critical edition of the Greek New Testament that incorporated the consensus of textual scholars as it had developed over time. Their second volume laid out the method currently in use of weighing variations against each other on the basis of both internal and external evidence. In terms of external evidence, they divided existing manuscripts into various traditions, the most important of which were the Alexandrian that they preferred (e.g., Sinaiticus and Vaticanus); a Western textual tradition whose principal representative was Codex Bezae (D) and some Old Latin manuscripts; and the Byzantine tradition that most surviving manuscripts exemplify.
The science of textual criticism has not stood still since the days of Westcott and Hort. It is generally agreed that they relied too heavily on the two manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Nevertheless, older papyri have been discovered since them and these finds generally support the conclusions of Westcott and Hort. Certainly we have also seen a few scholars who have applied their intellect to finding ways to reinterpret the evidence. One such attempt focuses on the "Majority Text" of the Greek New Testament, considering the reading that most manuscripts have as more likely original than the reading favored by "weighing" the manuscripts by age, tradition, and internal features. However, by far the vast majority of textual scholars accept the dictum of Westcott and Hort that "manuscripts must be weighed, not counted" and would thus consider the text used in most modern translations of the Bible to be by far the most likely original wording of the New Testament books.
[1] (Oxford: Oxford University, 1964). The fourth edition has been revised by Bart Ehrman (2005).
[2] (London: United Bible Societies, 1971).
[3] Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
[4] Put out by the United Bible Societies, now in its fourth, revised edition (2006).
[5] Put out by the American Bible Society, now in its 27th edition (2004).
[6] The chapter divisions had only been added in the early 1200s by a man named Stephen Langton.
Showing posts with label critical issues in Bible. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critical issues in Bible. Show all posts
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
14. Between the Testaments
I want to back up one from last week, #15 The New Testament Canon,
to #14. Between the Testaments.
The first in the series is #1 Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship.
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The Old Testament certainly provided the texts in which the New Testament heard God's voice and and the foundational stories by which the early Christians understood their identity. But in many respects, it was the Jewish background in the two hundred years before Christ that provided the lenses, the interpretive keys, through which they read those Old Testament texts. In this respect, one might almost say that the "intertestamental period," or perhaps more accurately, early Judaism is more directly the background to Christianity than the Old Testament itself.
We have titled this section "Between the Testaments" because it would seem a fairly Christian, especially Protestant way of referring to the period from the late 400s when books like Ezra and perhaps Malachi were written and the arrival of Jesus around 4BC. At the same time, we have mentioned that many scholars think parts of the Old Testament were written much later than this time (e.g., those who date Daniel to the 100s BC). Similarly, the Roman Catholic Old Testament has books like Wisdom that may actually have been written in Paul's lifetime. These considerations make a term like "intertestamental" less than clear in what it refers to.
Two more accurate terms are early Judaism and Second Temple Period. Second Temple Period refers to the time between when Zerubbabel rebuilt the temple in 516BC and its destruction by the Romans again in AD70. Early Judaism generally refers to this same period and refers to the formative period of Judaism before it became somewhat standarized in rabbinic Judaism. We generally speak of Israelites rather than Jews in the Old Testament. The word Jew is related to Judah, the primary tribe to survive the first destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity. We thus start to speak of the "Jews" after the return from captivity in 538BC.
The Persian period of Jewish history stretches from 539BC, when Cyrus defeated Babylon, to 332, when Alexander the Great took over Palestine. The Jewish literature from this period we have is arguably in the Writings of the Old Testament, books like Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther, and the post-exilic prophets. One of the most important aspects of this period is the development of Diaspora Judaism, Jews who lived outside of Palestine and were "scattered" in the world.
By the time of Christ, more Jews were living outside Palestine than in it. At the time of the New Testament, more Jewish lived in just one section of the Egyptian city of Alexandria than lived in all of Jerusalem. The Babylonian captivity (586-538BC) resulted in major Jewish presences in Babylon and Egypt, then later in Ecbatana in Persia. At Elephantine in Egypt, there was actually an alternative Jewish temple with priests and sacrifices. Some of the oldest surviving Jewish documents are the Elephantine papyri from this Jewish mercenary community in Egypt.
In 332BC, Alexander the Great took over Palestine and it passed into Greek hands. Perhaps the chief contribution of Martin Hengel (1926-2009) to biblical scholarship was his Judaism and Hellenism (1973). In this classic work, Hengel demonstrated that it was anachronistic to draw sharp distinctions between Greek and Hebrew thought at the time of Christ. Judaism had been hellenized for over three hundred years before Jesus was born and Greek influence had affected even the most sectarian of Jewish communities. Stanley Porter is another scholar of recent times who has perhaps argued more for the prevalence of Greek in Galilee at the time of Jesus than anyone else.
Hellenistic Judaism thus refers to Greek-speaking Judaism, whether in Palestine or throughout the Mediterranean world. One of the classic treatments of such Judaism at the time of Christ was Victor Tcherikover's (1894-1958), Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (1931). Also destined to be a classic is John Collins' Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (2000), which specifically discusses Hellenistic Jewish literature of this time period.
Much of the Greek Jewish literature we have seems to come from Egypt, Alexandria in particular. We have excerpts from individuals like Ezekiel the Tragedian, Demetrius the Chronographer, and Artapanus that date from around 200BC. Ezekiel is notable for its apparent ease with Moses sitting on God's heavenly throne, while Artapanus is striking in its comfort with the idea that Moses made up the Egyptian gods for them because of their lack of understanding. The Letter of Aristeas dates from the 100s and tells the legend of how the Pentateuch was translated into Greek, the Septuagint. Although this account is not likely quite the way it happened, it does reflect the likelihood that the Pentateuch was first translated into Greek in Egypt around 250BC. Aristeas is notable for the way it considers Zeus the same as the Jewish God.
The best known Hellenistic Jew is of course Philo of Alexandria, who lived from about 20BC to AD50. His life thus coincides significantly with the life of Jesus and the formative decades of Christianity. He is perhaps best known for his allegorical, non-literal interpretations of the Pentateuch. He accepted the literal interpretations, but considered the allegorical superior.
His interpretations demonstrate significant philosophical influence, particularly that of Middle Platonism, a form of Platonism that emerged in the first century BC. He followed in what was apparently a longstanding practice of using Greek philosophy to interpret Scripture, most notably Aristobulus from around 200BC. In later life he became embroiled in the politics of Alexandria.
Around AD38, riots broke out against the Jews of the city in the aftermath of a visit by Herod Agrippa I (cf. Acts 12). After things calmed down, Philo led a delegation to the emperor Caligula to settle the question of whether the Jews were truly citizens of the city of Alexandria or not, a visit he tells of in his treatise, Embassy to Gaius. Caligula was assassinated before making a decision, but the emperor Claudius who followed him judged that the Jews were not citizens and should be content with their place in Roman society.
The Philo of Alexandria group of the Society of Biblical Literature has invested a great deal of effort both in its yearly Studia Philonica Annual, which not only includes articles on Philo, but an exhaustive bibliography on all publications on Philo. A new commentary series on the works of Philo has also ensued.
Josephus is the best known Jewish historian. Although he was from Jerusalem and an Aramaic speaker, his historical writings have all survived in Greek. He was of priestly descent and upper class. He was actually a Jewish general in the Jewish War against Rome in AD66-73, although he surrendered and later took the position that the Romans were in the right (Jewish War). He went on to live in Rome and eventually wrote his Antiquities of the Jews, a key source of information on much Jewish history. It contains, for example, some of the key background information we have on groups like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes (Antiquities 18; cf. also War 2). Steven Mason, more than any other scholar, has distinguished himself as the chief expert on Josephus in our time.
The real watershed in the Jewish history of this period is the Maccabean crisis. It is perhaps safe to say that the New Testament as we know it would not have existed if this crisis had not taken place. The Maccabean crisis brought to a head the most hellenizing forces in Israel in relation to more traditional forces. The result was the solidification of Jewish identity in distinction from the surrounding culture and a political empowerment it had not known for hundreds of years.
We do not have a large amount of non-biblical Jewish literature prior to the crisis of 167BC. The book of Tobit is in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament, and probably dates to the 200s BC. It involves the popular piety of burial of the dead and shows the beginnings of an interest in demons and the naming of angels, topics absent from the older books of the Old Testament.
The earliest version of Sirach dated to around 200BC and is a Proverbs-like collection of wisdom, also in the Catholic and Orthodox Bible. It was then translated into Greek in Egypt later in the 100s. It is perhaps most striking to us in its very biased view of women and the absence of any meaningful sense of afterlife. In this way it remains still similar to the Old Testament's general lack of awareness of any meaningful life after death and perhaps was created by a segment of Jewish society that became the Sadducees less than fifty years later. Matthew 11's imagery of taking on Jesus' yoke and learning of him may be an allusion to this book (e.g., ***). Sirach 24 also is a very important personification of wisdom that sees wisdom incarnated in the Jewish Law.
Tobit and Sirach, along with Wisdom, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Judith, and Baruch, are the chief writings that are in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments, but not in most Protestant Old Testaments (the Episcopalians are an exception). Also including in the Roman Catholic canon are expansions to the book of Esther in Greek that smooth out some of the theological problems it raises and three short additions to Daniel (Susanna, Prayer of Azariah, and Bel and the Dragon). We mentioned in the section the Old Testament Canon that these books seemed to have had a kind of second or deuterocanonical status up until 1545, when the Roman Catholic Church promoted them in response to Luther's demotion of them.
Various other Eastern churches add other books to their canons. The Orthodox Church, for example, includes 1 Esdras in its canon, a mixture of Ezra, Nehemiah, and a very little else. Also added to the Orthodox canon are the very hellenistic book of 4 Maccabees as well as the brief Prayer of Manasseh. 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and a few other books are even further added to the Ethiopian canon of the Old Testament.
1 and 2 Maccabees tell various aspects of the Maccabean crisis, which took place between 167 and 164BC. In 198BC, the (Greek) Syrians to the north, the Seleucid dynasty, had finally defeated the (Greek) Egyptians to the south, the Ptolemy dynasty, and had taken power in Palestine for the first time since Alexander the Great had taken over the region. Antiochus IV Epiphanes was particularly hostile and did significant damage to the city in 175BC.
In the days that followed, he derailed the traditional line of high priests, in effect giving power to the highest bidder. The result was an extreme hellenization of Jerusalem, with even the building of a Greek gymnasium and eventually laws against circumcision and forced sacrifice to other gods. 1 Maccabees is the primary source for this crisis. In 167BC the temple was defiled and a period of guerrilla warfare ensued, with the family of Judas the "hammer," or macchabeus, emerging the victor. His prother Jonathan would take the title high priest and then later, a great nephew, Aristobulus, would take the title king.
2 Maccabees is much less focused on history and more on God's vindication of the righteous. It was possibly, though not definitely, written by a Pharisee in the first half of the first century BC, prior to the Romans taking power over Palestine in 63BC. 2 Maccabees is most notable for its strongly physical understanding of resurrection, involving intestines and all. It also seems to have a sense of vicarious suffering of the righteous for others, as seven righteous Jewish brothers hope that their suffering might bring an end to God's wrath on the Jewish people. Some, although perhaps not most, think that it gives us the first instance of Jewish belief in creation out of nothing. Hebrews 11:35 may allude to the core story of the book.
The books of Judith and Baruch may also date to the period after the Maccabean crisis. Judith is a tale about a woman who kills a foreign general by cleverness. Judith, like Esther and Susanna, is part of a striking group of Jewish writings whose heros are women. Baruch is a lament over the suffering of God's people.
The Maccabean crisis probably more than anything else gave rise to the Jewish groups we know of from the time of Christ. Although we cannot say for certain, the Sadducees were very possibly priestly "sons of Zadok" who were displaced from the priesthood first by the Syrians and then by the Maccabean or Hasmonean priests (family name). They were upper class and "conservative" in theology and practice--like most of the Old Testament they had no sense of an afterlife. Although it is often said they did not believe in angels and only used the Law as Scripture, these depictions both come from problematic interpretations of single comments in the background literature.
The Pharisees and Essenes may have both in their own ways have been the heirs of the hasidim or faithful ones from the Maccabean crisis. These are individuals whose zeal for the Jewish law during the crisis led them to choose to die rather than to fight on the Sabbath. The Pharisees would become the most influential Jewish group in the first century BC, although they only numbered about 6000. Most Jews were simply common folk, the people of the land, and did not belong to any group.
The Pharisees are known both for their strict law keeping and their belief in a future resurrection of the dead. The Maccabean crisis empowered a kind of conservatism and traditionalism that groups like the Pharisees and Essenes embodied. The image of Judas Maccabeus, who ironically himself was more of a pragmatist, would become the consummate example of Jewish zeal of "Judaismos." The various revolutionary groups around the time of the Jewish War (Zealots, Sicarii) no doubt looked to him as a model.
The most conservative group we know of within the Judaism of the period are the Essenes. They seem to have roots in an apocalyptic form of Judaism that reached back into the 200s BC but really seems to have solidified sociologically in the early 100s. The book of 1 Enoch is a compilation of five different writings that grew and expanded over some three hundred years. It seems to have become sacred literature for those who eventually found their way to become the Dead Sea community on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, a group most scholars consider to have been one kind of Essene.
The earliest books in 1 Enoch are the Book of the Watchers (chaps. 1-36) and the Astronomical Book (chaps. 72-82). The later does not clearly endorse a solar or lunar calendar over the other, but its solar version (364 days) became the calendar of the Essenes and the Dead Sea Sect. This was one significant later bone of contention between the Dead Sea sect and the Jerusalem temple, which operated on a lunar calendar (354 days).
The Book of the Watchers is intriguing for a number of reasons, not east because Jude 14-15 quote from 1 Enoch 1:9 and seems to assume Enoch was in fact the speaker of these words. It is, however, the virtually unanimous conclusion of scholarship that The Book of the Watchers dates in its current form to the beginning of the 100s BC. 1 Peter 3:20 seems to allude to the fallen angels of this story as well. While Paul locates the primary origins of earthly evil in the sin of Adam, the Book of the Watchers seems to locate it with the sin of certain angels during the time of Noah and the Flood.
For example, one part of the Book of the Watchers sees the origins of demons in the spirits of the fallen giants who were the offspring of sexual unions between angels and human women. This story is sometimes (though not always) suggested as the background of the curious statement in 1 Corinthians 11:10 that a woman should veil her head "because of the angels," remembering that Paul believed in bad angels as well as good ones. Also, if we set Daniel 12 out of consideration, 1 Enoch 22 becomes the oldest clear sense of varying rewards for the dead, probably also including a resurrection of some sort.
Two other sections of 1 Enoch date to just before and just after the Maccabean crisis. Again, if we leave Daniel out of consideration, the Apocalypse of Weeks (1 Enoch 93, 91--the chapters are strangely out of order) is the oldest known historical apocalypse, which is a revelation of soon coming events by a breakdown of history into ages leading up to the present. The prophet is usually a dead figure from the distant past, in this case Enoch. Such apocalypses are usually easy to date based on when the predictions go awry. As we saw in our discussion of critical issues in Daniel, this is why most non-evangelical scholars date the later chapters of Daniel to around 165 BC during the Maccabean crisis. The Dream Visions (chaps. 83-90) also give two historical apocalypses that are dated to the decades just after the Maccabean crisis for this reason.
It would seem that the group that went on to form the Dead Sea community was related in some way to the apocalyptic Judaism that produced the books of 1 Enoch. Around the year 150, a book called Jubilees presented an interpretive version of Genesis, sometimes placed in a category called rewritten history. Also about this time, an unknown high priest of the Jerusalem temple, which the Dead Sea Scrolls call the Teacher of Righteousness, may have been replaced by Jonathan Maccabeus when he assumed the high priesthood (the proposal of James VanderKam). This event may have marked the beginning of the group we call the Essenes.
Although the Dead Sea community probably did not settle at the Dead Sea until about 100BC, the origins of its parent groups probably goes back to the mid-100s when the Teacher of Righteousness was replaced by Jonathan. The dominant view is currently that the group that settled at Qumran on the northwest side of the Dead Sea were in fact those who stored the Dead Sea Scrolls in the nearby caves and they they were a subset of broader Essenism. Thus there were many other Essenes (Josephus says 4000) and the Dead Sea community was only a small group of them, perhaps an even stricter sect than most.
Other hypotheses have not won much support, including Norman Golb's suggestion that the scrolls were unrelated to the nearby Qumran community and were deposited by individuals fleeing Jerusalem in the Jewish War. Another suggestion is that of Lawrence Schiffman, who argued the scrolls are Sadducean in some broad sense. It is true that the scrolls show some affinities to Sadducean perspectives on some issues, but these can probably be accounted for in light of priestly influence by way of the Teacher of Righteousness.
Some broader Essene documents were actually known before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. The Covenant of Damascus (CD) had been known since before the turn of the century and was suspected to be Essene. Certainly 1 Enoch and other writings that the Dead Sea community seemed to have considered Scripture were known.
But the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) potentially presented a much deeper look into the history of this movement. A writing called Some of the Works of the Law (4QMMT) may very well reflect the advice of the Teacher of Righteousness to Jonathan Maccabeus as Jonathan (the first "Wicked Priest") was about to assume the high priesthood. After the Teacher lost this battle, a wealth of Essene literature arguably arose, ranging from a collection of hymns, the Hodayot (1QH) to plans for an end times temple in the Temple Scroll (1QT) to a description of the final end times battle in the War Scroll (1QM). These Essenes produced a number of commentaries, most notably the Habakkuk Commentary (1QHab).
These writings potentially illuminate the New Testament in a number of ways. For example, the Hymns have a sense of human sinfulness and divine predestination that are not unlike themes we find in Romans. The very phrase "works of Law" that appears so centrally in Romans and Galatians may be illuminated by the intra-Jewish argument of 4QMMT. The Habakkuk commentary interprets Habakkuk by a method now known as pesher, where words in Scripture are directly applied to contemporary situations. Although it is debated, this highly non-contexual, contemporary method of interpretation is not unlike Matthew's highly non-contextual method of interpretation.
A number of other documents, including other commentaries and worship documents were found among the eleven caves. 4QFlorilegium shows that the early Christians were not the only ones to use Psalm 2 in relation to the Messiah. 4QTestimonia confirms that other Jews collected Scriptures according to topics, giving some credance to the possibility that the early Christians might have collected Jesus' sayings, as we will see in a later section. Some (though not all) argue that 11QMelchizedek is important background to Hebrews 7's imagery of a heavenly priest from the order of Melchizedek. Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4QShirShab) indicates that some Jews saw their worship as a participation in heavenly, angelic worship. Although the majority may still see the "worship of angels" in Colossians 2:18 as worshipping angels, a number now suggest it is participation in angelic worship that is there in view.
The story of the discovery of the DSS is fairly well known. Allegedly, a Bedouin shepherd found the first cave after throwing a rock into a cave and hearing a jar break. The better known scrolls from Cave 1 then came out fairly quickly, including a new Community Rule (1QS) that was very much like the Covenant of Damascus, except perhaps more sectarian. One of its key features was its prediction of two messiahs, one of a kingly sort and the other a priest. One by-product of the DSS is a recognition that the word "messiah" was somewhat ambiguous in itself. That is to say, there may not have been any absolute sense of what a person meant at the time if they referred to "the messiah."
Some of the most central scholars of the early days were Eleazar Sukenik, who was one of the earliest Jewish scholars consulted, and Roland de Vaux, who did the first major excavations at Qumran after the cave discoveries. J. T. Milik was also a major interpretive player early on. Many of their initial suggestions have been significantly refined. The 1990s in particular saw a major movement forward in Qumran studies as all the remaining fragments were made available for study. Although many cried conspiracy, the slowness of academia effectively kept the scrolls from study until by some sly work photographs were finally made of all the fragments by Biblical Archaeology Review in 1991.
Gabriele Boccaccini (Beyond the Essene Hypothesis, Eerdmans, 1998) has recently made some very plausible suggestions about the history of Essenism in relation to the Dead Sea Scrolls and some of the associated literature that was not found there. He suggests, as we have described, that the community at Qumran was an off-shoot of broader Essenism. He then suggests that broader Essenism continued to write literature that has survived but was not a part of the Qumran library. For example, although the Epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 91-108) is known at Qumran, it is only the first chapters. Boccaccini suggested that the later chapters date from after the Qumran founding.
One important aspect of the Dead Sea discoveries was the absense of the Parables of Enoch, chapters 38-71 of 1 Enoch. The implication is perhaps that this book did not exist at the time that the Qumran community split off from broader Essenism. This is very significant for study of the gospels, because the Parables have the closest background to the way some sayings use the phrase Son of Man. The final judgment scene of Matthew 25 is very similar to that of various scenes in the Parables. Jesus' usage of the phrase would not have been ambiguous if the Parables were widely known at the time, suggesting they date to the early or mid-first century AD.
Other apocalyptic writings of the first century before and after Christ include the form of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs we have. The Testament of Levi in this form depicts three heavens, with God in the highest heaven. The Ascension of Isaiah has similar layers of heaven, seven in all, with increasing degrees of holiness as one ascends. The Apocalypse of Abraham is significant for its sense of disembodied life after death, and the Testament of Job attests speaking in tongues among non-Christian Jews. Some of these writings are later than the New Testament.
Other writings from the century before and after Christ cannot be obviously located with a particular group. The Psalms of Solomon date to not long after the Romans took control of Palestine and chapter 17 is a principal background text to the idea of a human, political messiah whom God would eventually send to crush the Romans. The book of Wisdom is very difficult to date precisely, but it is a very important background text alluded to in Hebrews 1:3 (Wis. 7:26). It is part of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments and actually shows up as a candidate for the New Testament canon in the first few centuries of Christianity. Although it is debated, it seems to affirm a resurrection. It demostrates some philosophical influence and was perhaps written in Alexandria.
Another writing that perhaps dates to the century before Christ is the Life of Adam and Eve, which is the first known Jewish writing to equate the serpent of the Garden of Eden with Satan. It thus serves as significant background to Paul's sense of the Genesis story as the point when the world went amuk. Satan is envious of the role God has given to Adam in the creation and refuses to bow down before the image of God.
to #14. Between the Testaments.
The first in the series is #1 Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship.
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The Old Testament certainly provided the texts in which the New Testament heard God's voice and and the foundational stories by which the early Christians understood their identity. But in many respects, it was the Jewish background in the two hundred years before Christ that provided the lenses, the interpretive keys, through which they read those Old Testament texts. In this respect, one might almost say that the "intertestamental period," or perhaps more accurately, early Judaism is more directly the background to Christianity than the Old Testament itself.
We have titled this section "Between the Testaments" because it would seem a fairly Christian, especially Protestant way of referring to the period from the late 400s when books like Ezra and perhaps Malachi were written and the arrival of Jesus around 4BC. At the same time, we have mentioned that many scholars think parts of the Old Testament were written much later than this time (e.g., those who date Daniel to the 100s BC). Similarly, the Roman Catholic Old Testament has books like Wisdom that may actually have been written in Paul's lifetime. These considerations make a term like "intertestamental" less than clear in what it refers to.
Two more accurate terms are early Judaism and Second Temple Period. Second Temple Period refers to the time between when Zerubbabel rebuilt the temple in 516BC and its destruction by the Romans again in AD70. Early Judaism generally refers to this same period and refers to the formative period of Judaism before it became somewhat standarized in rabbinic Judaism. We generally speak of Israelites rather than Jews in the Old Testament. The word Jew is related to Judah, the primary tribe to survive the first destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity. We thus start to speak of the "Jews" after the return from captivity in 538BC.
The Persian period of Jewish history stretches from 539BC, when Cyrus defeated Babylon, to 332, when Alexander the Great took over Palestine. The Jewish literature from this period we have is arguably in the Writings of the Old Testament, books like Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther, and the post-exilic prophets. One of the most important aspects of this period is the development of Diaspora Judaism, Jews who lived outside of Palestine and were "scattered" in the world.
By the time of Christ, more Jews were living outside Palestine than in it. At the time of the New Testament, more Jewish lived in just one section of the Egyptian city of Alexandria than lived in all of Jerusalem. The Babylonian captivity (586-538BC) resulted in major Jewish presences in Babylon and Egypt, then later in Ecbatana in Persia. At Elephantine in Egypt, there was actually an alternative Jewish temple with priests and sacrifices. Some of the oldest surviving Jewish documents are the Elephantine papyri from this Jewish mercenary community in Egypt.
In 332BC, Alexander the Great took over Palestine and it passed into Greek hands. Perhaps the chief contribution of Martin Hengel (1926-2009) to biblical scholarship was his Judaism and Hellenism (1973). In this classic work, Hengel demonstrated that it was anachronistic to draw sharp distinctions between Greek and Hebrew thought at the time of Christ. Judaism had been hellenized for over three hundred years before Jesus was born and Greek influence had affected even the most sectarian of Jewish communities. Stanley Porter is another scholar of recent times who has perhaps argued more for the prevalence of Greek in Galilee at the time of Jesus than anyone else.
Hellenistic Judaism thus refers to Greek-speaking Judaism, whether in Palestine or throughout the Mediterranean world. One of the classic treatments of such Judaism at the time of Christ was Victor Tcherikover's (1894-1958), Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (1931). Also destined to be a classic is John Collins' Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (2000), which specifically discusses Hellenistic Jewish literature of this time period.
Much of the Greek Jewish literature we have seems to come from Egypt, Alexandria in particular. We have excerpts from individuals like Ezekiel the Tragedian, Demetrius the Chronographer, and Artapanus that date from around 200BC. Ezekiel is notable for its apparent ease with Moses sitting on God's heavenly throne, while Artapanus is striking in its comfort with the idea that Moses made up the Egyptian gods for them because of their lack of understanding. The Letter of Aristeas dates from the 100s and tells the legend of how the Pentateuch was translated into Greek, the Septuagint. Although this account is not likely quite the way it happened, it does reflect the likelihood that the Pentateuch was first translated into Greek in Egypt around 250BC. Aristeas is notable for the way it considers Zeus the same as the Jewish God.
The best known Hellenistic Jew is of course Philo of Alexandria, who lived from about 20BC to AD50. His life thus coincides significantly with the life of Jesus and the formative decades of Christianity. He is perhaps best known for his allegorical, non-literal interpretations of the Pentateuch. He accepted the literal interpretations, but considered the allegorical superior.
His interpretations demonstrate significant philosophical influence, particularly that of Middle Platonism, a form of Platonism that emerged in the first century BC. He followed in what was apparently a longstanding practice of using Greek philosophy to interpret Scripture, most notably Aristobulus from around 200BC. In later life he became embroiled in the politics of Alexandria.
Around AD38, riots broke out against the Jews of the city in the aftermath of a visit by Herod Agrippa I (cf. Acts 12). After things calmed down, Philo led a delegation to the emperor Caligula to settle the question of whether the Jews were truly citizens of the city of Alexandria or not, a visit he tells of in his treatise, Embassy to Gaius. Caligula was assassinated before making a decision, but the emperor Claudius who followed him judged that the Jews were not citizens and should be content with their place in Roman society.
The Philo of Alexandria group of the Society of Biblical Literature has invested a great deal of effort both in its yearly Studia Philonica Annual, which not only includes articles on Philo, but an exhaustive bibliography on all publications on Philo. A new commentary series on the works of Philo has also ensued.
Josephus is the best known Jewish historian. Although he was from Jerusalem and an Aramaic speaker, his historical writings have all survived in Greek. He was of priestly descent and upper class. He was actually a Jewish general in the Jewish War against Rome in AD66-73, although he surrendered and later took the position that the Romans were in the right (Jewish War). He went on to live in Rome and eventually wrote his Antiquities of the Jews, a key source of information on much Jewish history. It contains, for example, some of the key background information we have on groups like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes (Antiquities 18; cf. also War 2). Steven Mason, more than any other scholar, has distinguished himself as the chief expert on Josephus in our time.
The real watershed in the Jewish history of this period is the Maccabean crisis. It is perhaps safe to say that the New Testament as we know it would not have existed if this crisis had not taken place. The Maccabean crisis brought to a head the most hellenizing forces in Israel in relation to more traditional forces. The result was the solidification of Jewish identity in distinction from the surrounding culture and a political empowerment it had not known for hundreds of years.
We do not have a large amount of non-biblical Jewish literature prior to the crisis of 167BC. The book of Tobit is in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament, and probably dates to the 200s BC. It involves the popular piety of burial of the dead and shows the beginnings of an interest in demons and the naming of angels, topics absent from the older books of the Old Testament.
The earliest version of Sirach dated to around 200BC and is a Proverbs-like collection of wisdom, also in the Catholic and Orthodox Bible. It was then translated into Greek in Egypt later in the 100s. It is perhaps most striking to us in its very biased view of women and the absence of any meaningful sense of afterlife. In this way it remains still similar to the Old Testament's general lack of awareness of any meaningful life after death and perhaps was created by a segment of Jewish society that became the Sadducees less than fifty years later. Matthew 11's imagery of taking on Jesus' yoke and learning of him may be an allusion to this book (e.g., ***). Sirach 24 also is a very important personification of wisdom that sees wisdom incarnated in the Jewish Law.
Tobit and Sirach, along with Wisdom, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Judith, and Baruch, are the chief writings that are in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments, but not in most Protestant Old Testaments (the Episcopalians are an exception). Also including in the Roman Catholic canon are expansions to the book of Esther in Greek that smooth out some of the theological problems it raises and three short additions to Daniel (Susanna, Prayer of Azariah, and Bel and the Dragon). We mentioned in the section the Old Testament Canon that these books seemed to have had a kind of second or deuterocanonical status up until 1545, when the Roman Catholic Church promoted them in response to Luther's demotion of them.
Various other Eastern churches add other books to their canons. The Orthodox Church, for example, includes 1 Esdras in its canon, a mixture of Ezra, Nehemiah, and a very little else. Also added to the Orthodox canon are the very hellenistic book of 4 Maccabees as well as the brief Prayer of Manasseh. 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and a few other books are even further added to the Ethiopian canon of the Old Testament.
1 and 2 Maccabees tell various aspects of the Maccabean crisis, which took place between 167 and 164BC. In 198BC, the (Greek) Syrians to the north, the Seleucid dynasty, had finally defeated the (Greek) Egyptians to the south, the Ptolemy dynasty, and had taken power in Palestine for the first time since Alexander the Great had taken over the region. Antiochus IV Epiphanes was particularly hostile and did significant damage to the city in 175BC.
In the days that followed, he derailed the traditional line of high priests, in effect giving power to the highest bidder. The result was an extreme hellenization of Jerusalem, with even the building of a Greek gymnasium and eventually laws against circumcision and forced sacrifice to other gods. 1 Maccabees is the primary source for this crisis. In 167BC the temple was defiled and a period of guerrilla warfare ensued, with the family of Judas the "hammer," or macchabeus, emerging the victor. His prother Jonathan would take the title high priest and then later, a great nephew, Aristobulus, would take the title king.
2 Maccabees is much less focused on history and more on God's vindication of the righteous. It was possibly, though not definitely, written by a Pharisee in the first half of the first century BC, prior to the Romans taking power over Palestine in 63BC. 2 Maccabees is most notable for its strongly physical understanding of resurrection, involving intestines and all. It also seems to have a sense of vicarious suffering of the righteous for others, as seven righteous Jewish brothers hope that their suffering might bring an end to God's wrath on the Jewish people. Some, although perhaps not most, think that it gives us the first instance of Jewish belief in creation out of nothing. Hebrews 11:35 may allude to the core story of the book.
The books of Judith and Baruch may also date to the period after the Maccabean crisis. Judith is a tale about a woman who kills a foreign general by cleverness. Judith, like Esther and Susanna, is part of a striking group of Jewish writings whose heros are women. Baruch is a lament over the suffering of God's people.
The Maccabean crisis probably more than anything else gave rise to the Jewish groups we know of from the time of Christ. Although we cannot say for certain, the Sadducees were very possibly priestly "sons of Zadok" who were displaced from the priesthood first by the Syrians and then by the Maccabean or Hasmonean priests (family name). They were upper class and "conservative" in theology and practice--like most of the Old Testament they had no sense of an afterlife. Although it is often said they did not believe in angels and only used the Law as Scripture, these depictions both come from problematic interpretations of single comments in the background literature.
The Pharisees and Essenes may have both in their own ways have been the heirs of the hasidim or faithful ones from the Maccabean crisis. These are individuals whose zeal for the Jewish law during the crisis led them to choose to die rather than to fight on the Sabbath. The Pharisees would become the most influential Jewish group in the first century BC, although they only numbered about 6000. Most Jews were simply common folk, the people of the land, and did not belong to any group.
The Pharisees are known both for their strict law keeping and their belief in a future resurrection of the dead. The Maccabean crisis empowered a kind of conservatism and traditionalism that groups like the Pharisees and Essenes embodied. The image of Judas Maccabeus, who ironically himself was more of a pragmatist, would become the consummate example of Jewish zeal of "Judaismos." The various revolutionary groups around the time of the Jewish War (Zealots, Sicarii) no doubt looked to him as a model.
The most conservative group we know of within the Judaism of the period are the Essenes. They seem to have roots in an apocalyptic form of Judaism that reached back into the 200s BC but really seems to have solidified sociologically in the early 100s. The book of 1 Enoch is a compilation of five different writings that grew and expanded over some three hundred years. It seems to have become sacred literature for those who eventually found their way to become the Dead Sea community on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, a group most scholars consider to have been one kind of Essene.
The earliest books in 1 Enoch are the Book of the Watchers (chaps. 1-36) and the Astronomical Book (chaps. 72-82). The later does not clearly endorse a solar or lunar calendar over the other, but its solar version (364 days) became the calendar of the Essenes and the Dead Sea Sect. This was one significant later bone of contention between the Dead Sea sect and the Jerusalem temple, which operated on a lunar calendar (354 days).
The Book of the Watchers is intriguing for a number of reasons, not east because Jude 14-15 quote from 1 Enoch 1:9 and seems to assume Enoch was in fact the speaker of these words. It is, however, the virtually unanimous conclusion of scholarship that The Book of the Watchers dates in its current form to the beginning of the 100s BC. 1 Peter 3:20 seems to allude to the fallen angels of this story as well. While Paul locates the primary origins of earthly evil in the sin of Adam, the Book of the Watchers seems to locate it with the sin of certain angels during the time of Noah and the Flood.
For example, one part of the Book of the Watchers sees the origins of demons in the spirits of the fallen giants who were the offspring of sexual unions between angels and human women. This story is sometimes (though not always) suggested as the background of the curious statement in 1 Corinthians 11:10 that a woman should veil her head "because of the angels," remembering that Paul believed in bad angels as well as good ones. Also, if we set Daniel 12 out of consideration, 1 Enoch 22 becomes the oldest clear sense of varying rewards for the dead, probably also including a resurrection of some sort.
Two other sections of 1 Enoch date to just before and just after the Maccabean crisis. Again, if we leave Daniel out of consideration, the Apocalypse of Weeks (1 Enoch 93, 91--the chapters are strangely out of order) is the oldest known historical apocalypse, which is a revelation of soon coming events by a breakdown of history into ages leading up to the present. The prophet is usually a dead figure from the distant past, in this case Enoch. Such apocalypses are usually easy to date based on when the predictions go awry. As we saw in our discussion of critical issues in Daniel, this is why most non-evangelical scholars date the later chapters of Daniel to around 165 BC during the Maccabean crisis. The Dream Visions (chaps. 83-90) also give two historical apocalypses that are dated to the decades just after the Maccabean crisis for this reason.
It would seem that the group that went on to form the Dead Sea community was related in some way to the apocalyptic Judaism that produced the books of 1 Enoch. Around the year 150, a book called Jubilees presented an interpretive version of Genesis, sometimes placed in a category called rewritten history. Also about this time, an unknown high priest of the Jerusalem temple, which the Dead Sea Scrolls call the Teacher of Righteousness, may have been replaced by Jonathan Maccabeus when he assumed the high priesthood (the proposal of James VanderKam). This event may have marked the beginning of the group we call the Essenes.
Although the Dead Sea community probably did not settle at the Dead Sea until about 100BC, the origins of its parent groups probably goes back to the mid-100s when the Teacher of Righteousness was replaced by Jonathan. The dominant view is currently that the group that settled at Qumran on the northwest side of the Dead Sea were in fact those who stored the Dead Sea Scrolls in the nearby caves and they they were a subset of broader Essenism. Thus there were many other Essenes (Josephus says 4000) and the Dead Sea community was only a small group of them, perhaps an even stricter sect than most.
Other hypotheses have not won much support, including Norman Golb's suggestion that the scrolls were unrelated to the nearby Qumran community and were deposited by individuals fleeing Jerusalem in the Jewish War. Another suggestion is that of Lawrence Schiffman, who argued the scrolls are Sadducean in some broad sense. It is true that the scrolls show some affinities to Sadducean perspectives on some issues, but these can probably be accounted for in light of priestly influence by way of the Teacher of Righteousness.
Some broader Essene documents were actually known before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. The Covenant of Damascus (CD) had been known since before the turn of the century and was suspected to be Essene. Certainly 1 Enoch and other writings that the Dead Sea community seemed to have considered Scripture were known.
But the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) potentially presented a much deeper look into the history of this movement. A writing called Some of the Works of the Law (4QMMT) may very well reflect the advice of the Teacher of Righteousness to Jonathan Maccabeus as Jonathan (the first "Wicked Priest") was about to assume the high priesthood. After the Teacher lost this battle, a wealth of Essene literature arguably arose, ranging from a collection of hymns, the Hodayot (1QH) to plans for an end times temple in the Temple Scroll (1QT) to a description of the final end times battle in the War Scroll (1QM). These Essenes produced a number of commentaries, most notably the Habakkuk Commentary (1QHab).
These writings potentially illuminate the New Testament in a number of ways. For example, the Hymns have a sense of human sinfulness and divine predestination that are not unlike themes we find in Romans. The very phrase "works of Law" that appears so centrally in Romans and Galatians may be illuminated by the intra-Jewish argument of 4QMMT. The Habakkuk commentary interprets Habakkuk by a method now known as pesher, where words in Scripture are directly applied to contemporary situations. Although it is debated, this highly non-contexual, contemporary method of interpretation is not unlike Matthew's highly non-contextual method of interpretation.
A number of other documents, including other commentaries and worship documents were found among the eleven caves. 4QFlorilegium shows that the early Christians were not the only ones to use Psalm 2 in relation to the Messiah. 4QTestimonia confirms that other Jews collected Scriptures according to topics, giving some credance to the possibility that the early Christians might have collected Jesus' sayings, as we will see in a later section. Some (though not all) argue that 11QMelchizedek is important background to Hebrews 7's imagery of a heavenly priest from the order of Melchizedek. Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4QShirShab) indicates that some Jews saw their worship as a participation in heavenly, angelic worship. Although the majority may still see the "worship of angels" in Colossians 2:18 as worshipping angels, a number now suggest it is participation in angelic worship that is there in view.
The story of the discovery of the DSS is fairly well known. Allegedly, a Bedouin shepherd found the first cave after throwing a rock into a cave and hearing a jar break. The better known scrolls from Cave 1 then came out fairly quickly, including a new Community Rule (1QS) that was very much like the Covenant of Damascus, except perhaps more sectarian. One of its key features was its prediction of two messiahs, one of a kingly sort and the other a priest. One by-product of the DSS is a recognition that the word "messiah" was somewhat ambiguous in itself. That is to say, there may not have been any absolute sense of what a person meant at the time if they referred to "the messiah."
Some of the most central scholars of the early days were Eleazar Sukenik, who was one of the earliest Jewish scholars consulted, and Roland de Vaux, who did the first major excavations at Qumran after the cave discoveries. J. T. Milik was also a major interpretive player early on. Many of their initial suggestions have been significantly refined. The 1990s in particular saw a major movement forward in Qumran studies as all the remaining fragments were made available for study. Although many cried conspiracy, the slowness of academia effectively kept the scrolls from study until by some sly work photographs were finally made of all the fragments by Biblical Archaeology Review in 1991.
Gabriele Boccaccini (Beyond the Essene Hypothesis, Eerdmans, 1998) has recently made some very plausible suggestions about the history of Essenism in relation to the Dead Sea Scrolls and some of the associated literature that was not found there. He suggests, as we have described, that the community at Qumran was an off-shoot of broader Essenism. He then suggests that broader Essenism continued to write literature that has survived but was not a part of the Qumran library. For example, although the Epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 91-108) is known at Qumran, it is only the first chapters. Boccaccini suggested that the later chapters date from after the Qumran founding.
One important aspect of the Dead Sea discoveries was the absense of the Parables of Enoch, chapters 38-71 of 1 Enoch. The implication is perhaps that this book did not exist at the time that the Qumran community split off from broader Essenism. This is very significant for study of the gospels, because the Parables have the closest background to the way some sayings use the phrase Son of Man. The final judgment scene of Matthew 25 is very similar to that of various scenes in the Parables. Jesus' usage of the phrase would not have been ambiguous if the Parables were widely known at the time, suggesting they date to the early or mid-first century AD.
Other apocalyptic writings of the first century before and after Christ include the form of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs we have. The Testament of Levi in this form depicts three heavens, with God in the highest heaven. The Ascension of Isaiah has similar layers of heaven, seven in all, with increasing degrees of holiness as one ascends. The Apocalypse of Abraham is significant for its sense of disembodied life after death, and the Testament of Job attests speaking in tongues among non-Christian Jews. Some of these writings are later than the New Testament.
Other writings from the century before and after Christ cannot be obviously located with a particular group. The Psalms of Solomon date to not long after the Romans took control of Palestine and chapter 17 is a principal background text to the idea of a human, political messiah whom God would eventually send to crush the Romans. The book of Wisdom is very difficult to date precisely, but it is a very important background text alluded to in Hebrews 1:3 (Wis. 7:26). It is part of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments and actually shows up as a candidate for the New Testament canon in the first few centuries of Christianity. Although it is debated, it seems to affirm a resurrection. It demostrates some philosophical influence and was perhaps written in Alexandria.
Another writing that perhaps dates to the century before Christ is the Life of Adam and Eve, which is the first known Jewish writing to equate the serpent of the Garden of Eden with Satan. It thus serves as significant background to Paul's sense of the Genesis story as the point when the world went amuk. Satan is envious of the role God has given to Adam in the creation and refuses to bow down before the image of God.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The New Testament Canon
It is with great delight that I skip to the New Testament. I thought the series was getting too heavy. The first of the series is:
Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
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The question of how the New Testament canon developed is tied up with the question of the diversity of early Christianity and how it coalesced in the 300s and 400s as orthodoxy. Some of the earliest works in this area were quite simplistic, although they often represented key insights at the same time. Such a work was F. C. Baur's (1792-1860) Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ in 1845. In it he applied the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel to the development of New Testament thought. As a result, he dated and located various New Testament writings in accordance with whether they seemed to belong to Jewish Christianity, Pauline Christianity, or what he considered the synthesis of the two, Catholic Christianity.
Baur's work raised significant issues that are still discussed today. To what extent was early Christianity Jewish, for example? Baur also more than anyone else raised the question of how the New Testament writings fit in the flow of first and second century history (rather than just reading them as self-standing texts). Some of his observations continue to have impact on New Testament interpretation today, such as the way in which Acts tends to smooth over early conflicts between Paul and Jerusalem Christianity or the fact that the theology of the Pastoral Epistles seems to differ somewhat from Paul's earlier letters.
At the same time, Baur's method and many of his fundamental ideas were seriously flawed. For example, he imposed the dialectic of Hegel on history in a rather artificial and overly simplistic way. And some of his key decisions on documents like the letters of Ignatius or the so called Clementine literature are now universally rejected, effectively pulling the rug out from under his entire approach. These writings show that Paul was not so rejected, nor "catholic Christianity" so late as he supposed.
More than anyone else, we have J. B. Lightfoot (1828-89) to thank for setting this record straight. His careful, multi-volume work on The Apostolic Fathers (1885-89) established the authenticity of the letters of Ignatius and dated them to the beginning of the 100s, which undercut Baur's hypothesis fundamentally. "Apostolic fathers" here refers to a number of key authors and writings mostly just after the New Testament in the early second century, books like 1 Clement (90s), 2 Clement (anonymous sermon), the seven genuine letters of Ignatius, the letter of Polycarb, the Epistle of Barnabas (not by Barnabas), the Didache, and so forth.
This same tension between key insights and fundamental skew typifies a good deal of German biblical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth century. A scholar might make a very important observation but then construct from it a rigid system of thought that is then imposed on the rest of the data. We arguably saw this pattern in Wellhausen's interpretation of the Pentateuch, and we see it in Baur's paradigm for New Testament development. We arguably will see a similar pattern in the work of later Germans like Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920).
One work that did not show this tendency, and that in fact was much more circumspect methodologically, was Walter Bauer's (1877-1960), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity in 1934. His work asked the important question of whether in fact we can really speak of an "orthodoxy," a clear sense of who the true Christians were and what they believed, in the 100s. His conclusion, now widely accepted, was that we cannot really speak of a clear orthodoxy at this time. Perhaps most Christian historians today would in fact question whether we can meaningfully speak of Christian orthodoxy until the late 300s and 400s.
The thread we now think of as the true heirs of Jesus and Paul runs through individuals like Clement and Ignatius around the year 100 through Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus in the second century. Then there was Cyprian in the 200s and perhaps most importantly Athanasius in the 300s. In 325 the now official understanding of the Trinity was proposed and approved. In 367 Athanasius put forward the current list of New Testament books. But debates over the precise nature of Christ continued into the 400's, with key players like the Cappadocian fathers, Augustine, and many others. Early in the 400s Jerome's Latin translation of the Vulgate helped standardize the biblical text for the West.
It can be a little startling for a conservative Protestant first to look at this developmental process closely, for it is fairly clear that a good many assumptions we make about biblical foundations and fundamental biblical teachings were not at all obvious or foregone conclusions among Christians for some three to four hundred years after Jesus had ascended to heaven! The Trinity and the full divinity of Christ, beliefs that we rightly take for granted and assume to be solid bedrock biblically, were not at all obvious to a dozen generations of the earliest Christians. And so we rightly see a growing reemphasis on the importance of the Spirit and the Church among orthodox Protestants today. Much of the clarity we have on these subjects apparently does not come as much from the text alone as we might at first think but from Spirit-led Christian tradition.
It is thus appropriate for Christians to assert by faith that God ever so patiently and in no hurry guided these developments. And it would seem that He did so using individuals in positions of institutional leadership and utilizing macro-politics. Some current movements wish to distance themselves from the systems of bishops and then later from the politics of church councils, sometimes called by secular authorities like the emperor Constantine. And here it is important to observe that none of these influences was singularly definitive on the shape orthodoxy took.
For example, Constantine did not determine the outcome of the Council of Nicaea, nor did a political body of Christians enforce a particular list of New Testament books, a New Testament canon, on Christianity. Politics and authorities were certainly involved, but the outcome was bigger than these forces. The Arian understanding of Jesus, which saw him as the first created being, dominated the church of the 300s, despite the fact that the orthodox Athanasius had won the day at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Similarly, although Athanasius advanced the current list of authoritative New Testament books, it was never universally adopted by any political body.
Nevertheless, in order for us to remain orthodox, Christians must put at least some credence in the politics of the first few Christian centuries, even though we also affirm that the final verdict on matters like the canon and the Trinity were as much a matter of the mysterious moving of the Holy Spirit among grass roots Christians. And we should also acknowledge that the beliefs of Christians remained somewhat rough around the edges, moreso than the West and even the East might like to admit. Recent works like Philip Jenkins', The Lost History of Christianity (HarperOne, 2008), rightly point out that forms of Christianity long continued in Africa and Asia that did not exactly take the same positions on key issues as Western Christianity and, indeed, whose Old Testament canons in particular varied a little from "orthodox" Christianity.
The most significant body of early Christian literature that is not in the New Testament canon is the Gnostic literature, most of which was discovered in Egypt at Nag Hammadi in 1945. In the mid-twentieth century, it was quite common for scholars (e.g., Rudolph Bultmann) to see Gnostic thought as key to the development of early Christian thought. The so called History of Religions or in German, religionsgeschichtliche Schule, believed early Christian understandings of Christ to result directly from Gnostic influence.
Today, we still find a whole stream of New Testament scholarship that emphasizes the Gnostic stream of early Christianity, sometimes seeing it as a more direct heir to the teaching of Jesus than the New Testament gospels themselves. Scholars like John Dominic Crossan (1934-) believe documents like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, neither of which go back to these disciples, to have just as much a claim to represent Jesus and earliest Christianity as Matthew or Mark. We will return to these ideas in our look at the gospels and the historical Jesus. However, most scholars would now rightly recognize that Gnosticism proper was not a coherent religious movement until the late first and early second century. Gnostic elements in early Christian thought thus do not have a serious claim to represent the thinking of Jesus or Paul.
The process of canonization went something like the following. First the New Testament books were written over about a fifty year period. The letters of Paul were first, written in the 50s and perhaps 60s to specific churches in specific situations. The gospels and Acts all likely reached their current form after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70, although it is possible that Mark dates from the pre-70 period. The dating of the general epistles depends on one's conclusions on authorship, thus ranging from dating them primarily in the 60s to some who would date a book like 2 Peter to the early second century. Johannine literature and Revelation are often dated to the 90s in their current forms.
According to Walter Bauer, we cannot speak of any clear orthodoxy or canon in the second century. Certainly the bulk of Paul's writings seem to have had enjoyed wide acceptance among Christians, although there were Christian Jewish groups like the Ebionites who would not have used them. One of the most notable moments in the development of the canon was perhaps the first known "canon list" by the Gnostic Marcion (ca. 150). Marcion did not believe that the God of the Old Testament was the Father of Jesus Christ. He believed that the material world was evil and thus that its Creator could not be good. His version of the New Testament canon was a truncated version of Luke and a portion of Paul's letters.
Although it is debated, Hans von Campenhausen (1903-89) suggested that it may very well have been the rejection of Marcion's canon list that inspired other Christians to begin to develop a more appropriate one (The Formation of the Christian Bible, 1968). Scholars disagree whether the Muratorian Canon dates from the late 100s or a couple centuries later, but if original, it represents a very early list of books that accepts the four gospels, Acts, and Paul's writings, although not many of the general epistles. If we are to go by the harmony of the gospels created by Tatian (the Diatesseron) and by the bishop of Lyon, Irenaeus, the four gospels in our current Bible enjoyed significant agreement by the late 100s, although certainly many more Gnostic gospels were in use in Egypt at the time.
Discussion in the next two hundred years thus centered around the edges of the New Testament canon: Hebrews, Revelation, Wisdom, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Peter, and so forth. Authorship became important, as books like Hebrews and 2 Peter likely would not have been included if Pauline and Petrine authorship had not become accepted. Antiquity might also be thought a criterion. Hermas was too late and not connected to an apostle, dating to about AD150. How widely a book was used shows up in Eusebius' (ca. 263-339) discussion of the canon, showing that the use of a book widely by churches across the Mediterranean was a factor. It seems significant to note that the debate did not center on whether these books were inspired.
The first list we know of that agrees exactly with the list Christians currently use appears in the Easter Letter of Athanasius in AD367 (this dispels the strange but popular rumor that the canon was set at the Council of Nicaea in 325). Although no canon list has ever been adopted by a universal council of Christendom, a Western council at Carthage, North Africa, did adopt Athanasius' list in 398. Nevertheless, different Christians did continue to use varying books over the next few century.
Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
__________
The question of how the New Testament canon developed is tied up with the question of the diversity of early Christianity and how it coalesced in the 300s and 400s as orthodoxy. Some of the earliest works in this area were quite simplistic, although they often represented key insights at the same time. Such a work was F. C. Baur's (1792-1860) Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ in 1845. In it he applied the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel to the development of New Testament thought. As a result, he dated and located various New Testament writings in accordance with whether they seemed to belong to Jewish Christianity, Pauline Christianity, or what he considered the synthesis of the two, Catholic Christianity.
Baur's work raised significant issues that are still discussed today. To what extent was early Christianity Jewish, for example? Baur also more than anyone else raised the question of how the New Testament writings fit in the flow of first and second century history (rather than just reading them as self-standing texts). Some of his observations continue to have impact on New Testament interpretation today, such as the way in which Acts tends to smooth over early conflicts between Paul and Jerusalem Christianity or the fact that the theology of the Pastoral Epistles seems to differ somewhat from Paul's earlier letters.
At the same time, Baur's method and many of his fundamental ideas were seriously flawed. For example, he imposed the dialectic of Hegel on history in a rather artificial and overly simplistic way. And some of his key decisions on documents like the letters of Ignatius or the so called Clementine literature are now universally rejected, effectively pulling the rug out from under his entire approach. These writings show that Paul was not so rejected, nor "catholic Christianity" so late as he supposed.
More than anyone else, we have J. B. Lightfoot (1828-89) to thank for setting this record straight. His careful, multi-volume work on The Apostolic Fathers (1885-89) established the authenticity of the letters of Ignatius and dated them to the beginning of the 100s, which undercut Baur's hypothesis fundamentally. "Apostolic fathers" here refers to a number of key authors and writings mostly just after the New Testament in the early second century, books like 1 Clement (90s), 2 Clement (anonymous sermon), the seven genuine letters of Ignatius, the letter of Polycarb, the Epistle of Barnabas (not by Barnabas), the Didache, and so forth.
This same tension between key insights and fundamental skew typifies a good deal of German biblical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth century. A scholar might make a very important observation but then construct from it a rigid system of thought that is then imposed on the rest of the data. We arguably saw this pattern in Wellhausen's interpretation of the Pentateuch, and we see it in Baur's paradigm for New Testament development. We arguably will see a similar pattern in the work of later Germans like Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920).
One work that did not show this tendency, and that in fact was much more circumspect methodologically, was Walter Bauer's (1877-1960), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity in 1934. His work asked the important question of whether in fact we can really speak of an "orthodoxy," a clear sense of who the true Christians were and what they believed, in the 100s. His conclusion, now widely accepted, was that we cannot really speak of a clear orthodoxy at this time. Perhaps most Christian historians today would in fact question whether we can meaningfully speak of Christian orthodoxy until the late 300s and 400s.
The thread we now think of as the true heirs of Jesus and Paul runs through individuals like Clement and Ignatius around the year 100 through Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus in the second century. Then there was Cyprian in the 200s and perhaps most importantly Athanasius in the 300s. In 325 the now official understanding of the Trinity was proposed and approved. In 367 Athanasius put forward the current list of New Testament books. But debates over the precise nature of Christ continued into the 400's, with key players like the Cappadocian fathers, Augustine, and many others. Early in the 400s Jerome's Latin translation of the Vulgate helped standardize the biblical text for the West.
It can be a little startling for a conservative Protestant first to look at this developmental process closely, for it is fairly clear that a good many assumptions we make about biblical foundations and fundamental biblical teachings were not at all obvious or foregone conclusions among Christians for some three to four hundred years after Jesus had ascended to heaven! The Trinity and the full divinity of Christ, beliefs that we rightly take for granted and assume to be solid bedrock biblically, were not at all obvious to a dozen generations of the earliest Christians. And so we rightly see a growing reemphasis on the importance of the Spirit and the Church among orthodox Protestants today. Much of the clarity we have on these subjects apparently does not come as much from the text alone as we might at first think but from Spirit-led Christian tradition.
It is thus appropriate for Christians to assert by faith that God ever so patiently and in no hurry guided these developments. And it would seem that He did so using individuals in positions of institutional leadership and utilizing macro-politics. Some current movements wish to distance themselves from the systems of bishops and then later from the politics of church councils, sometimes called by secular authorities like the emperor Constantine. And here it is important to observe that none of these influences was singularly definitive on the shape orthodoxy took.
For example, Constantine did not determine the outcome of the Council of Nicaea, nor did a political body of Christians enforce a particular list of New Testament books, a New Testament canon, on Christianity. Politics and authorities were certainly involved, but the outcome was bigger than these forces. The Arian understanding of Jesus, which saw him as the first created being, dominated the church of the 300s, despite the fact that the orthodox Athanasius had won the day at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Similarly, although Athanasius advanced the current list of authoritative New Testament books, it was never universally adopted by any political body.
Nevertheless, in order for us to remain orthodox, Christians must put at least some credence in the politics of the first few Christian centuries, even though we also affirm that the final verdict on matters like the canon and the Trinity were as much a matter of the mysterious moving of the Holy Spirit among grass roots Christians. And we should also acknowledge that the beliefs of Christians remained somewhat rough around the edges, moreso than the West and even the East might like to admit. Recent works like Philip Jenkins', The Lost History of Christianity (HarperOne, 2008), rightly point out that forms of Christianity long continued in Africa and Asia that did not exactly take the same positions on key issues as Western Christianity and, indeed, whose Old Testament canons in particular varied a little from "orthodox" Christianity.
The most significant body of early Christian literature that is not in the New Testament canon is the Gnostic literature, most of which was discovered in Egypt at Nag Hammadi in 1945. In the mid-twentieth century, it was quite common for scholars (e.g., Rudolph Bultmann) to see Gnostic thought as key to the development of early Christian thought. The so called History of Religions or in German, religionsgeschichtliche Schule, believed early Christian understandings of Christ to result directly from Gnostic influence.
Today, we still find a whole stream of New Testament scholarship that emphasizes the Gnostic stream of early Christianity, sometimes seeing it as a more direct heir to the teaching of Jesus than the New Testament gospels themselves. Scholars like John Dominic Crossan (1934-) believe documents like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, neither of which go back to these disciples, to have just as much a claim to represent Jesus and earliest Christianity as Matthew or Mark. We will return to these ideas in our look at the gospels and the historical Jesus. However, most scholars would now rightly recognize that Gnosticism proper was not a coherent religious movement until the late first and early second century. Gnostic elements in early Christian thought thus do not have a serious claim to represent the thinking of Jesus or Paul.
The process of canonization went something like the following. First the New Testament books were written over about a fifty year period. The letters of Paul were first, written in the 50s and perhaps 60s to specific churches in specific situations. The gospels and Acts all likely reached their current form after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70, although it is possible that Mark dates from the pre-70 period. The dating of the general epistles depends on one's conclusions on authorship, thus ranging from dating them primarily in the 60s to some who would date a book like 2 Peter to the early second century. Johannine literature and Revelation are often dated to the 90s in their current forms.
According to Walter Bauer, we cannot speak of any clear orthodoxy or canon in the second century. Certainly the bulk of Paul's writings seem to have had enjoyed wide acceptance among Christians, although there were Christian Jewish groups like the Ebionites who would not have used them. One of the most notable moments in the development of the canon was perhaps the first known "canon list" by the Gnostic Marcion (ca. 150). Marcion did not believe that the God of the Old Testament was the Father of Jesus Christ. He believed that the material world was evil and thus that its Creator could not be good. His version of the New Testament canon was a truncated version of Luke and a portion of Paul's letters.
Although it is debated, Hans von Campenhausen (1903-89) suggested that it may very well have been the rejection of Marcion's canon list that inspired other Christians to begin to develop a more appropriate one (The Formation of the Christian Bible, 1968). Scholars disagree whether the Muratorian Canon dates from the late 100s or a couple centuries later, but if original, it represents a very early list of books that accepts the four gospels, Acts, and Paul's writings, although not many of the general epistles. If we are to go by the harmony of the gospels created by Tatian (the Diatesseron) and by the bishop of Lyon, Irenaeus, the four gospels in our current Bible enjoyed significant agreement by the late 100s, although certainly many more Gnostic gospels were in use in Egypt at the time.
Discussion in the next two hundred years thus centered around the edges of the New Testament canon: Hebrews, Revelation, Wisdom, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Peter, and so forth. Authorship became important, as books like Hebrews and 2 Peter likely would not have been included if Pauline and Petrine authorship had not become accepted. Antiquity might also be thought a criterion. Hermas was too late and not connected to an apostle, dating to about AD150. How widely a book was used shows up in Eusebius' (ca. 263-339) discussion of the canon, showing that the use of a book widely by churches across the Mediterranean was a factor. It seems significant to note that the debate did not center on whether these books were inspired.
The first list we know of that agrees exactly with the list Christians currently use appears in the Easter Letter of Athanasius in AD367 (this dispels the strange but popular rumor that the canon was set at the Council of Nicaea in 325). Although no canon list has ever been adopted by a universal council of Christendom, a Western council at Carthage, North Africa, did adopt Athanasius' list in 398. Nevertheless, different Christians did continue to use varying books over the next few century.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
1 Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
The potential beginning of this possible booklet is coming into view. Here's my thought for the first section. Drafts of subsequent sections include...
2. Biblical Hermeneutics
3. The Old Testament Canon
4. Genres in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
6. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
7. The Poetic Sub-Genre
8. Critical Issues in the Psalms
9. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
10. Critical Issues in Isaiah
11. Critical Issues in the Other Prophets 1
12. Critical Issues in the Other Prophets 2
__________
The issues of this booklet have been the source of great controversy in the past. Interestingly, the controversy has died down quite a bit these last thirty years or so, even in evangelical circles. The focus among evangelicals turned much more to soul winning and growing the church in the eighties and nineties. Then this decade has seen a resurgence of interest in serving the world, ministering to the poor and needy worldwide.
To many of our youth, perhaps even our pastors, these issues may seem very foreign, things they've never heard about. In some ways, they seem so tangent to doing the work of the ministry. I personally find them largely tangential to hearing God speak through the Bible. It seems to me a minister should have heard of them, but should not spend too much time worrying about them. In those instances where these issues have come up, young ministry students often say things like, "Who cares who the author was--the message is true."
Hiatuses of this sort provide rare opportunities for reflection and potential reassessment. Was the fervor and zeal of past evangelicals warranted? If it was for its time, is it still warranted? Why did they respond so vigorously? What was going on historically and sociologically at the time? A few decades can potentially bring a clarity those in the middle of battle did not have at the time.
On the other hand, of late we have also seen a revived defense of traditional evangelical concerns in some circles as well. While evangelicalism was busy growing the church, some of its children went to seminary and got doctorates in a context where they were not as pressured to come to a particular conclusion on these issues. In the context of that freedom, some of them found ways to reconcile their faith with certain elements of broader biblical scholarship. Some traditional evangelicals have suddenly found scholars in their midst who are evangelicals but who do not draw as rigid boundaries as were sacrosant in some circles at one time.
My goal in this booklet, in addition to making sure ministers have at least heard of these issues, is to try to find a middle way of faith that respects both what the late Robert Webber called "traditional" and what he called "younger" evangelicals (The Younger Evangelicals 2002). Obviously there are many younger evangelicals with traditional views and there are older evangelicals who hold broader views than some of their contemporaries. Indeed, it is clear that these categories are biased toward the younger evangelicals, one of which I would consider myself.
But my goal is not to try to convert either "traditional" or "younger" evangelicals to a particular position on specific issues. The middle way I seek is not a particular position on these issues but a general attitude toward them in relation to faith. First, I am urging honesty in relation to the evidence. Most of us, including myself, usually think we are more objective than we actually are. Objectivity is often best found in the conflict of opposing views. Although the internet age has made it more and more difficult, it has often been easy enough for "conservative" and "liberal" alike to surround themselves with those who agree with some supposed party line. Objectivity is difficult to find in such enclaves.
Whatever we might disagree with in postmodern trends, the overall climate has drawn our attention to the fundamental role faith inevitably plays in our understanding of reality. X does not always mark the spot. In a world where we admit the evidence is less conclusive than the previous age assumed, we realize it is not irrational to take a faith position even when the evidence does not currently seem in our favor.
This situation potentially gives us great freedom. We do not need to skew the evidence in order to take a position that is more possible than probable. Although others may disagree, I have long felt that scholars of both conservative and liberal stripe sometimes confuse what it is possible to argue for and what is a more probable reading of the evidence. In a postmodern age, we can be up front about our presuppositions and need not pretend that the evidence is always in favor of the positions we take.
An even more important development in twentieth century thinking is the realization that, regardless of the origins and history of a text, meaning is ultimately a function of a person hearing or reading it. If we reflect on this phenomenon a while, it may eventually transform our perspective on these sorts of issues. Why has scholarship these last two centuries, both conservative and liberal alike, spent so much time arguing over meanings the text had in the past when in order for it to be God's word today, it must have an inspired meaning today?
What a tremendous irony! Certainly Christianity will not have much credibility if it claims the Bible was not also God's word in the past. New religions that claim to have timeless truth but that only started a few years ago have never been very credible. But it seems peculiar that we have expended so much time and energy questing after meanings of the past when we need a word from God today.
So we hope in the next few pages to cover some of the basic issues that have been raised these last two centuries in biblical scholarship. We believe a minister should at least be aware that they exist. We wish to respect those who take varied positions on them, while trying to be as honest as we can be about the way the issue seems to lie evidentially. We presuppose Christian faith, but do not insist that faith necessarily requires a specific position on every issue.
Again, we believe that what is important to hear the books of the Bible as Christian Scripture is to read them with Christian eyes. It is not necessarily to read them in their original meanings, although these meanings were also surely God's speakings to ancient peoples and situations too. It is thus Isaiah read through Christian eyes, assisted by the Holy Spirit, that is God's word for us today. The process by which Isaiah reached its current form, whatever it was, was surely filled with inspiration as well, perhaps with God speaking to more than one ancient individual along the way. But coming to a firm conclusion on these sorts of issues will not necessarily help us hear God's word in this text.
And so it is with a spirit of faith that we proceed through these issues. These sorts of issues have been called "critical" issues in the past. No doubt some in the past used this term to suggest that other scholarship was uncritical, that is, not objective. The historical critical method was thus promoted as an approach that was really interested in the truth, as opposed to those who disagreed. That sort of hostile bias was no doubt part of the reason fundamentalists and evangelicals fought so vehemently against such claims that very often were hostile to faith. As we said earlier, we hope that the current climate and hiatus from such battles might make it possible for us to be critical thinkers about these issues and full of faith, regardless of our specific conclusions.
2. Biblical Hermeneutics
3. The Old Testament Canon
4. Genres in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
6. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
7. The Poetic Sub-Genre
8. Critical Issues in the Psalms
9. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
10. Critical Issues in Isaiah
11. Critical Issues in the Other Prophets 1
12. Critical Issues in the Other Prophets 2
__________
The issues of this booklet have been the source of great controversy in the past. Interestingly, the controversy has died down quite a bit these last thirty years or so, even in evangelical circles. The focus among evangelicals turned much more to soul winning and growing the church in the eighties and nineties. Then this decade has seen a resurgence of interest in serving the world, ministering to the poor and needy worldwide.
To many of our youth, perhaps even our pastors, these issues may seem very foreign, things they've never heard about. In some ways, they seem so tangent to doing the work of the ministry. I personally find them largely tangential to hearing God speak through the Bible. It seems to me a minister should have heard of them, but should not spend too much time worrying about them. In those instances where these issues have come up, young ministry students often say things like, "Who cares who the author was--the message is true."
Hiatuses of this sort provide rare opportunities for reflection and potential reassessment. Was the fervor and zeal of past evangelicals warranted? If it was for its time, is it still warranted? Why did they respond so vigorously? What was going on historically and sociologically at the time? A few decades can potentially bring a clarity those in the middle of battle did not have at the time.
On the other hand, of late we have also seen a revived defense of traditional evangelical concerns in some circles as well. While evangelicalism was busy growing the church, some of its children went to seminary and got doctorates in a context where they were not as pressured to come to a particular conclusion on these issues. In the context of that freedom, some of them found ways to reconcile their faith with certain elements of broader biblical scholarship. Some traditional evangelicals have suddenly found scholars in their midst who are evangelicals but who do not draw as rigid boundaries as were sacrosant in some circles at one time.
My goal in this booklet, in addition to making sure ministers have at least heard of these issues, is to try to find a middle way of faith that respects both what the late Robert Webber called "traditional" and what he called "younger" evangelicals (The Younger Evangelicals 2002). Obviously there are many younger evangelicals with traditional views and there are older evangelicals who hold broader views than some of their contemporaries. Indeed, it is clear that these categories are biased toward the younger evangelicals, one of which I would consider myself.
But my goal is not to try to convert either "traditional" or "younger" evangelicals to a particular position on specific issues. The middle way I seek is not a particular position on these issues but a general attitude toward them in relation to faith. First, I am urging honesty in relation to the evidence. Most of us, including myself, usually think we are more objective than we actually are. Objectivity is often best found in the conflict of opposing views. Although the internet age has made it more and more difficult, it has often been easy enough for "conservative" and "liberal" alike to surround themselves with those who agree with some supposed party line. Objectivity is difficult to find in such enclaves.
Whatever we might disagree with in postmodern trends, the overall climate has drawn our attention to the fundamental role faith inevitably plays in our understanding of reality. X does not always mark the spot. In a world where we admit the evidence is less conclusive than the previous age assumed, we realize it is not irrational to take a faith position even when the evidence does not currently seem in our favor.
This situation potentially gives us great freedom. We do not need to skew the evidence in order to take a position that is more possible than probable. Although others may disagree, I have long felt that scholars of both conservative and liberal stripe sometimes confuse what it is possible to argue for and what is a more probable reading of the evidence. In a postmodern age, we can be up front about our presuppositions and need not pretend that the evidence is always in favor of the positions we take.
An even more important development in twentieth century thinking is the realization that, regardless of the origins and history of a text, meaning is ultimately a function of a person hearing or reading it. If we reflect on this phenomenon a while, it may eventually transform our perspective on these sorts of issues. Why has scholarship these last two centuries, both conservative and liberal alike, spent so much time arguing over meanings the text had in the past when in order for it to be God's word today, it must have an inspired meaning today?
What a tremendous irony! Certainly Christianity will not have much credibility if it claims the Bible was not also God's word in the past. New religions that claim to have timeless truth but that only started a few years ago have never been very credible. But it seems peculiar that we have expended so much time and energy questing after meanings of the past when we need a word from God today.
So we hope in the next few pages to cover some of the basic issues that have been raised these last two centuries in biblical scholarship. We believe a minister should at least be aware that they exist. We wish to respect those who take varied positions on them, while trying to be as honest as we can be about the way the issue seems to lie evidentially. We presuppose Christian faith, but do not insist that faith necessarily requires a specific position on every issue.
Again, we believe that what is important to hear the books of the Bible as Christian Scripture is to read them with Christian eyes. It is not necessarily to read them in their original meanings, although these meanings were also surely God's speakings to ancient peoples and situations too. It is thus Isaiah read through Christian eyes, assisted by the Holy Spirit, that is God's word for us today. The process by which Isaiah reached its current form, whatever it was, was surely filled with inspiration as well, perhaps with God speaking to more than one ancient individual along the way. But coming to a firm conclusion on these sorts of issues will not necessarily help us hear God's word in this text.
And so it is with a spirit of faith that we proceed through these issues. These sorts of issues have been called "critical" issues in the past. No doubt some in the past used this term to suggest that other scholarship was uncritical, that is, not objective. The historical critical method was thus promoted as an approach that was really interested in the truth, as opposed to those who disagreed. That sort of hostile bias was no doubt part of the reason fundamentalists and evangelicals fought so vehemently against such claims that very often were hostile to faith. As we said earlier, we hope that the current climate and hiatus from such battles might make it possible for us to be critical thinkers about these issues and full of faith, regardless of our specific conclusions.
11 Critical Issues in the Other Prophets 2
And now the second installment to finish out critical issues in the other prophets. Previous posts in this series include:
1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
8. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
9. Critical Issues in Isaiah
10. Critical Issues in the Other Prophets 1
And now, the other prophets, again...
_______
Christian Interpretation
From the time of the exile on, we are not surprised to find an increasing expectation that, one day, God would restore the fortunes of Israel. One day, a king from the line of David would rise again. Not all Jewish literature in the centuries after exile necessarily had such an expectation, but some of the post-exilic material in the prophets understandably does.
One critical issue in the prophets is material about such a coming king that appears in the writings of prophets who lived prior to the exile (e.g., Micah 5:2; Isa. 23:5-6). Some scholars see this material as part of the post-exilic editing of the prophet, since such predictions would have made little sense when there was actually a king ruling on the throne. Traditionally, of course, such statements have been read as centuries long anticipations of Jesus. Certainly one's presuppositions about the supernatural can come into play in one's conclusions--is it possible for a person to see the future so far in advance? At the same time, one might believe in prophecy and yet still conclude that it is more likely this material comes from after the exile.
The Christian belief that Jesus is enthroned as cosmic Lord at God's right hand in heaven is a significant upgrade from the prophetic sense that a great human king would once more assume Israel's throne. For example, Micah 5:2-4 predicts the return of a presumably human descendant of David who will restore the boundaries of Israel. It does not seem likely that anyone prior to the first century AD would have understood this verse in relation to a Messiah who had come to Bethlehem from heaven.
Indeed, the imagery in Micah of a ruler arising from Bethlehem need not even be taken originally in reference to the location of the king's birthplace. One might easily read it as a statement of the lineage of the king. In that case we find at least two possible shifts in the Christian reading of this passage in Matthew 2:6 from its original meaning. The one is its application to Jesus, who at least initially is a far different kind of king that Micah had in mind (suffering, cosmic). The second is taking the verse as an indication of birth location rather than general lineage.
Those New Testament authors who quote from the prophetic writings thus continue to read verses at varying removes from their original contexts. One of the easiest examples of this dynamic is Matthew 2:15's use of Hosea 11:1. Hosea 11:1 in its original context talks about how God brought Israel out of Egypt in the Exodus but that Israel then turned to other gods and did not serve Yahweh. Matthew strikingly lifts the words "out of Egypt I called my son" out of the verse and reads it in relation to Jesus returning from Egypt as a child after those seeking to kill him had died.
A reading of prophetic texts in greater continuity with the original meaning is Hebrews' and Paul's use of the new covenant concept in Jeremiah 31:31-34 (38:31-34 in the Greek Old Testament). The passage originally is a somewhat poetic prediction of the eventual restoration of Israel after its captivity in Babylon. Hebrews and Paul's understanding is in continuity with this anticipation but it is also "fuller" and richer. For Hebrews, the law written on our hearts is mediated by the Holy Spirit dwelling inside us, and in Paul and Luke the new covenant is inaugurated by Jesus' blood. Jeremiah knows none of these specifics, but provides a general framework into which the "fuller sense" of these early Christians fit easily.
Composition
We encounter the same sorts of issues with sources and editing in the other prophets as we do in Isaiah and other books. Did, for example, Jeremiah undergo some editing by "Deuteronomists," similar hands that supposedly edited Deuteronomy and the historical books? Did Amos and Hosea get edited in the southern kingdom after being directed toward the northern kingom? The reasoning behind such suggestions, whether they be true or not, are tensions between material that obviously fits the situation of the prophet and then other material that seems anachronistic or in tension with other things the prophet says.
For example, some scholars suggest that Micah 4-5 date to the period after the exile and 6-7 even later. Micah himself lived in the 700s BC. Zechariah 1-8 are sometimes called "First Zechariah," since it seems to go together as a coherent book. Then the tone and subject matter changes significantly in chapters 7-8, again leading some scholars to consider it from a different setting. Each individual will have to decide what they think of such suggestions.
Zechariah 9-14 and Malachi seem to be in a slightly different situation from other suggestions about sources and such. This material appeared at the end of scrolls of "The Twelve," which we think of as the Minor Prophets. But it is debated whether the name of a prophet actually appears in any of these chapters. Malachi in Hebrew simply means "my messenger," and Zechariah is not mentioned anywhere in what now appears as Zechariah 9-14.
Some scholars thus suggest that the prophecies from Zechariah 9 to Malachi 4 were originally a somewhat miscellaneous collection of prophecies at the end of scrolls containing the so called minor prophets. At the same time, the material of Malachi does hang together under the heading "oracle of the Lord to Israel through my messenger" (or through Malachi). Since the New Testament never references any of this material by the names Zechariah or Malachi, it would seem as if nothing would keep a person from any of these options if one so concluded, except for tradition.
Historical Issues
One of the big issues in the prophets is whether one believes that God exists and tells people the distant future. One of the criticisms that has often been made of scholarship on the Old Testament is that some scholars do not even believe prophecy is possible. In such cases, it is little surprise they think material is late, since they do not believe someone can predict the future in the first place. Undoubtedly there is truth to this criticism. At the same time, a person might believe in the possibility of true prophecy and yet still conclude it most likely that certain material was written much later.
Another historical issue in prophecy has to do with predictions that, at least on the surface, do not seem to have come true. On the one hand, the Jews would scarcely have preserved the prophetic writings if they did not believe they had largely turned out to come to pass. Most prophetic material had to do with the immediate situation of the prophet. So in those instances when predictions were made, they were soon either verified or discounted, and Jeremiah indicates that this is the way one distinguishes a true prophet from a false one (cf. Jer. 28:8-9; Deut. 18:22). Of course, not all prophecy was predictive--much of it indicted current practices like idolatry and mistreatment of the poor, orphans, widows, and so forth.
At the same time, we do encounter instances that seem hard to reconcile with other historical material from the ancient world. Such circumstances sometimes led later interpreters to take predictions allegorically or figuratively. Another possibility is to take such predictions in relation to an age yet to come, the "end times." For example, it is difficult to reconcile Ezekiel's prediction of the fall of Tyre or that Nebuchadnezzar would conquer Egypt (Ezek. 29:8-12) with the evidence from elsewhere. Haggai 2 seems to adjust the prophecy about the splendor of the rebuilt temple in light of the fact that the temple did not turn out to be as grand as pictured in Haggai 1.
Ezekiel 40 and following similarly looks to a wondrously rebuilt temple, a prediction that we presumably need to take symbolically if we consider it still in force. The temple rebuilt in 516BC was nothing of this caliber, nor was Herod's refurbishment that began in 20BC. Given Hebrews' sense that no more animal sacrifice should take place and that the true tabernacle is in heaven, it is difficult for us as Christians now to believe that God's glory could again return to an earthly temple (cf. Ezek. 43:1-5) and thus that this prophecy could come to pass in a literal sense. Daniel 11 reads like a history of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes IV until verse 40, where his downfall and death in the land of Israel is seemingly predicted. Again, all the indications from elsewhere are that he died elsewhere under different circumstances. Some interpreters thus relate that part of the chapter to the end times and an "antichrist" of a different age.
These are difficult issues and no doubt ingenious solutions have been offered to explain them. They raise the possibility not least that God might change His mind in response to human action, such as we see in Jonah 3-4 when Nineveh repents. However, many of these instances seem much less profound. One must either simply take by faith that there are explanations for the seeming anomalies or adjust one's sense of what inspiration entails or what the inspired meaning of Scripture is.
Jonah presents its own issues. Many interpreters suggest the story of Jonah itself was a parable or novella that was never meant to be taken as a depiction of history. At first glance it is hard to object to this suggestion, since no one would then be accusing Jonah of lying or being wrong. Jesus never suggests that the prodigal of his parable was ever a real person or that he really knew of an incident with a Samaritan near Jericho. This approach to Jonah would put it in a similar category, true but not historical
There are features of Jonah's story that are difficult from a historical standpoint. We have no record of a mass repentance and turn to Yahweh in the extensive annals and records of Nineveh from this period, capital of the Assyrian empire at the time (the same kingdom that destroyed the northern kingdom in 722BC). The idea that it would take three days to cross Nineveh also seems quite a shocking claim from an archaeological perspective (Jonah 3:3). Again, if we believe we must take Jonah historically, we are justified in believing by faith that there are explanations for such things, even if we do not know them at this point. No doubt many ingenious explanations have already been offered.
On the other hand, if a person is inclined to take the story as a parable of sorts, we have once again to deal with the fact that Jesus seems to refer to the story as historical event. Jesus in Matthew and Luke offers the sign of Jonah as the principal sign he had to offer to his detractors. Matthew 12:38-41 and Luke 11:29-32 both seem to take the Jonah story literally and historically. We thus face the same issue with Jonah that we face with the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the Davidic authorship of the Psalms, and the Isaianic authorship of chapters 40-66. Of course even if Jonah were novelistic in nature, it is possible that the historical Jonah did have a tussle with a fish and preached with success in Nineveh.
Lamentations
Although Lamentations appears in the Writings of the Hebrew Bible (among the "five scrolls" or Tefillim), it is couched between Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the Christian Bible. It is traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, although technically it is anonymous. Lamentations never mentions its author, although it is clearly a lament over the destruction of Jerusalem. Confer with 2 Chronicles 35:25 for the possible connection between Lamentations and the prophet Jeremiah.
Lamentations is a lovely example of artfulness in the Bible. It consists of five poems, each of which is shaped by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The first, second, and fourth poems are acrostics with twenty-two stanzas, each of which begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet (which has 22 letters). The third has three stanzas per letter. The fifth has twenty-two stanzas, but they are not alphabetical. Psalm 119 is also an acrostic psalm.
1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
8. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
9. Critical Issues in Isaiah
10. Critical Issues in the Other Prophets 1
And now, the other prophets, again...
_______
Christian Interpretation
From the time of the exile on, we are not surprised to find an increasing expectation that, one day, God would restore the fortunes of Israel. One day, a king from the line of David would rise again. Not all Jewish literature in the centuries after exile necessarily had such an expectation, but some of the post-exilic material in the prophets understandably does.
One critical issue in the prophets is material about such a coming king that appears in the writings of prophets who lived prior to the exile (e.g., Micah 5:2; Isa. 23:5-6). Some scholars see this material as part of the post-exilic editing of the prophet, since such predictions would have made little sense when there was actually a king ruling on the throne. Traditionally, of course, such statements have been read as centuries long anticipations of Jesus. Certainly one's presuppositions about the supernatural can come into play in one's conclusions--is it possible for a person to see the future so far in advance? At the same time, one might believe in prophecy and yet still conclude that it is more likely this material comes from after the exile.
The Christian belief that Jesus is enthroned as cosmic Lord at God's right hand in heaven is a significant upgrade from the prophetic sense that a great human king would once more assume Israel's throne. For example, Micah 5:2-4 predicts the return of a presumably human descendant of David who will restore the boundaries of Israel. It does not seem likely that anyone prior to the first century AD would have understood this verse in relation to a Messiah who had come to Bethlehem from heaven.
Indeed, the imagery in Micah of a ruler arising from Bethlehem need not even be taken originally in reference to the location of the king's birthplace. One might easily read it as a statement of the lineage of the king. In that case we find at least two possible shifts in the Christian reading of this passage in Matthew 2:6 from its original meaning. The one is its application to Jesus, who at least initially is a far different kind of king that Micah had in mind (suffering, cosmic). The second is taking the verse as an indication of birth location rather than general lineage.
Those New Testament authors who quote from the prophetic writings thus continue to read verses at varying removes from their original contexts. One of the easiest examples of this dynamic is Matthew 2:15's use of Hosea 11:1. Hosea 11:1 in its original context talks about how God brought Israel out of Egypt in the Exodus but that Israel then turned to other gods and did not serve Yahweh. Matthew strikingly lifts the words "out of Egypt I called my son" out of the verse and reads it in relation to Jesus returning from Egypt as a child after those seeking to kill him had died.
A reading of prophetic texts in greater continuity with the original meaning is Hebrews' and Paul's use of the new covenant concept in Jeremiah 31:31-34 (38:31-34 in the Greek Old Testament). The passage originally is a somewhat poetic prediction of the eventual restoration of Israel after its captivity in Babylon. Hebrews and Paul's understanding is in continuity with this anticipation but it is also "fuller" and richer. For Hebrews, the law written on our hearts is mediated by the Holy Spirit dwelling inside us, and in Paul and Luke the new covenant is inaugurated by Jesus' blood. Jeremiah knows none of these specifics, but provides a general framework into which the "fuller sense" of these early Christians fit easily.
Composition
We encounter the same sorts of issues with sources and editing in the other prophets as we do in Isaiah and other books. Did, for example, Jeremiah undergo some editing by "Deuteronomists," similar hands that supposedly edited Deuteronomy and the historical books? Did Amos and Hosea get edited in the southern kingdom after being directed toward the northern kingom? The reasoning behind such suggestions, whether they be true or not, are tensions between material that obviously fits the situation of the prophet and then other material that seems anachronistic or in tension with other things the prophet says.
For example, some scholars suggest that Micah 4-5 date to the period after the exile and 6-7 even later. Micah himself lived in the 700s BC. Zechariah 1-8 are sometimes called "First Zechariah," since it seems to go together as a coherent book. Then the tone and subject matter changes significantly in chapters 7-8, again leading some scholars to consider it from a different setting. Each individual will have to decide what they think of such suggestions.
Zechariah 9-14 and Malachi seem to be in a slightly different situation from other suggestions about sources and such. This material appeared at the end of scrolls of "The Twelve," which we think of as the Minor Prophets. But it is debated whether the name of a prophet actually appears in any of these chapters. Malachi in Hebrew simply means "my messenger," and Zechariah is not mentioned anywhere in what now appears as Zechariah 9-14.
Some scholars thus suggest that the prophecies from Zechariah 9 to Malachi 4 were originally a somewhat miscellaneous collection of prophecies at the end of scrolls containing the so called minor prophets. At the same time, the material of Malachi does hang together under the heading "oracle of the Lord to Israel through my messenger" (or through Malachi). Since the New Testament never references any of this material by the names Zechariah or Malachi, it would seem as if nothing would keep a person from any of these options if one so concluded, except for tradition.
Historical Issues
One of the big issues in the prophets is whether one believes that God exists and tells people the distant future. One of the criticisms that has often been made of scholarship on the Old Testament is that some scholars do not even believe prophecy is possible. In such cases, it is little surprise they think material is late, since they do not believe someone can predict the future in the first place. Undoubtedly there is truth to this criticism. At the same time, a person might believe in the possibility of true prophecy and yet still conclude it most likely that certain material was written much later.
Another historical issue in prophecy has to do with predictions that, at least on the surface, do not seem to have come true. On the one hand, the Jews would scarcely have preserved the prophetic writings if they did not believe they had largely turned out to come to pass. Most prophetic material had to do with the immediate situation of the prophet. So in those instances when predictions were made, they were soon either verified or discounted, and Jeremiah indicates that this is the way one distinguishes a true prophet from a false one (cf. Jer. 28:8-9; Deut. 18:22). Of course, not all prophecy was predictive--much of it indicted current practices like idolatry and mistreatment of the poor, orphans, widows, and so forth.
At the same time, we do encounter instances that seem hard to reconcile with other historical material from the ancient world. Such circumstances sometimes led later interpreters to take predictions allegorically or figuratively. Another possibility is to take such predictions in relation to an age yet to come, the "end times." For example, it is difficult to reconcile Ezekiel's prediction of the fall of Tyre or that Nebuchadnezzar would conquer Egypt (Ezek. 29:8-12) with the evidence from elsewhere. Haggai 2 seems to adjust the prophecy about the splendor of the rebuilt temple in light of the fact that the temple did not turn out to be as grand as pictured in Haggai 1.
Ezekiel 40 and following similarly looks to a wondrously rebuilt temple, a prediction that we presumably need to take symbolically if we consider it still in force. The temple rebuilt in 516BC was nothing of this caliber, nor was Herod's refurbishment that began in 20BC. Given Hebrews' sense that no more animal sacrifice should take place and that the true tabernacle is in heaven, it is difficult for us as Christians now to believe that God's glory could again return to an earthly temple (cf. Ezek. 43:1-5) and thus that this prophecy could come to pass in a literal sense. Daniel 11 reads like a history of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes IV until verse 40, where his downfall and death in the land of Israel is seemingly predicted. Again, all the indications from elsewhere are that he died elsewhere under different circumstances. Some interpreters thus relate that part of the chapter to the end times and an "antichrist" of a different age.
These are difficult issues and no doubt ingenious solutions have been offered to explain them. They raise the possibility not least that God might change His mind in response to human action, such as we see in Jonah 3-4 when Nineveh repents. However, many of these instances seem much less profound. One must either simply take by faith that there are explanations for the seeming anomalies or adjust one's sense of what inspiration entails or what the inspired meaning of Scripture is.
Jonah presents its own issues. Many interpreters suggest the story of Jonah itself was a parable or novella that was never meant to be taken as a depiction of history. At first glance it is hard to object to this suggestion, since no one would then be accusing Jonah of lying or being wrong. Jesus never suggests that the prodigal of his parable was ever a real person or that he really knew of an incident with a Samaritan near Jericho. This approach to Jonah would put it in a similar category, true but not historical
There are features of Jonah's story that are difficult from a historical standpoint. We have no record of a mass repentance and turn to Yahweh in the extensive annals and records of Nineveh from this period, capital of the Assyrian empire at the time (the same kingdom that destroyed the northern kingdom in 722BC). The idea that it would take three days to cross Nineveh also seems quite a shocking claim from an archaeological perspective (Jonah 3:3). Again, if we believe we must take Jonah historically, we are justified in believing by faith that there are explanations for such things, even if we do not know them at this point. No doubt many ingenious explanations have already been offered.
On the other hand, if a person is inclined to take the story as a parable of sorts, we have once again to deal with the fact that Jesus seems to refer to the story as historical event. Jesus in Matthew and Luke offers the sign of Jonah as the principal sign he had to offer to his detractors. Matthew 12:38-41 and Luke 11:29-32 both seem to take the Jonah story literally and historically. We thus face the same issue with Jonah that we face with the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the Davidic authorship of the Psalms, and the Isaianic authorship of chapters 40-66. Of course even if Jonah were novelistic in nature, it is possible that the historical Jonah did have a tussle with a fish and preached with success in Nineveh.
Lamentations
Although Lamentations appears in the Writings of the Hebrew Bible (among the "five scrolls" or Tefillim), it is couched between Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the Christian Bible. It is traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, although technically it is anonymous. Lamentations never mentions its author, although it is clearly a lament over the destruction of Jerusalem. Confer with 2 Chronicles 35:25 for the possible connection between Lamentations and the prophet Jeremiah.
Lamentations is a lovely example of artfulness in the Bible. It consists of five poems, each of which is shaped by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The first, second, and fourth poems are acrostics with twenty-two stanzas, each of which begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet (which has 22 letters). The third has three stanzas per letter. The fifth has twenty-two stanzas, but they are not alphabetical. Psalm 119 is also an acrostic psalm.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
10 Critical Issues in the Other Prophets 1
Previous posts in this series include:
1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
8. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
9. Critical Issues in Isaiah
Too much involved in this one for me to crank it all out at once, so here's the first installment.
_________
We best begin to locate the prophetic writings of the Old Testament by dividing them into those prophets who lived before the exile of Judah to Babylon (586BC), those who date from the time of the exile, and those who were "post-exilic," who prophesied after the exile. Here we are speaking of the time when the prophet himself lived, in distinction from when the books we now have in the Old Testament were written or reached something like their "canonical" form, the way they appear in the Bible.
Amos and Hosea prophecied not only before the exile of the southern kingdom, but before the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722BC. They are almost unique among the prophets because they prophesied to the northern kingdom, although their prophesies were preserved in the southern kingdom. Some scholars argue that the form of Amos and Hosea we now have shows the hands of editors in the southern kingdom. Jonah was also prophet in the northern kingdom who lived before the exile (cf. 2 Kings 14:25). However, the book of Jonah itself does not include any prophecy to the northern kingdom, since it concerns prophecy to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian kingdom.
Isaiah, Micah, Nahum, and Zephaniah prophesied around the time when the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel (722BC). Nahum in particular celebrates the justice of the northern kingdom's destruction. Habakkuk and Jeremiah then lived just before the time of the Babylonian invasion. The first wave of captives were taken to Babylon in 597BC.
Ezekiel and Obadiah then lived and prophesied at the beginning of the exile. Ezekiel and Daniel are both figures located not in Jerusalem or Judea, but prophesying in Babylon itself. The book of Daniel appears in the Writings rather than the prophets, and we will cover its issues in a later section. If one accepts the "three" Isaiah hypothesis, then the middle chapters of Isaiah (40-55) would also date from the last part of the exile in Babylon.
Haggai and Zechariah lived in the time just after return from exile (538BC) and urged the rebuilding of the temple, which took place in 516BC. If one accepts the three Isaiah hypothesis, Isaiah 56-66 would also date to this period. Then Malachi and perhaps Joel would date from the 400s BC.
Textual Criticism of the Old Testament
The branch of biblical studies that tries to determine the way the original texts of the Bible were worded is called textual criticism. It is surprising, even disturbing sometimes to some the first time they hear that we have none of the original documents of the Bible. For those who deal in ancient documents, however, it is exciting to know how many ancient copies of the biblical books that have actually survived. Things fall apart, and we thankfully have a wealth of copies of the Bible in comparison to what has survived of all other ancient writings.
Over a hundred years ago when archaeologists began to discover very old copies of the New Testament, many Christians were disturbed to find significant differences at some points, like the fact that the oldest copies of Mark did not have Mark 16:9-20. But these differences did not call into question the vast majority of the way the Bible had been printed over the years. As we would expect, there were those who reacted vehemently against these discoveries because it raised questions where all had previously been assumption. [1] They were caught off guard and, indeed, many of the scholars who raised such issues were hostile to faith.
But by the time the Dead Sea Scrolls came around in the late 1940s, the idea that the original text of the Old Testament might have differed a little from the text Christians bought in the Christian book store was not as shocking. These scrolls, which mostly date to the century before Christ, were about a thousand years older than any copies of the Old Testament we had at the time. For the most part, they confirmed the way the Old Testament had been printed in the Bibles of the day. In some other cases, the Dead Sea Scrolls pointed to alternative wordings we had known about, but had not used.
For example, the Old Testament was translated into Greek in the Egyptian city of Alexandria from around 250BC to just before the time of Christ. We informally call this Greek translation, the Septuagint, based on a legend about 70 Jews who translated the Pentateuch. We had known for years that this Greek translation sometimes was worded differently than the Masoretic text, the medieval text from about AD900 that had been used as the basis for printed Bibles since the invention of the printing press. In some places, the Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed that the Septuagint was actually more original than the Hebrew text that stood behind our Bibles at the time.
For example, the King James Version of Deuteronomy 32:8 reads, "When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance... he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel." Yet we had always known that the Greek Old Testament of this verse said that God set the boundaries according to the "sons of God" rather than of Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that the original reading of Deuteronomy was likely "sons of God," referring to the spiritual powers worshipped by other nations. We have already mentioned the likely henotheism of ancient Israel in passages like Psalm 82. In any case, we can see why some rabbinic Jews might have wanted to alter the text.
In a few rare cases, the Dead Sea Scrolls have presented us with texts we had never known before. For example, the transition from 1 Samuel 10:27 and chapter 11 had often puzzled interpreters. Where did this Nahash the Ammonite come from in 1 Samuel 11, showing up unannounced. The Dead Sea Scrolls have a paragraph after 10:27 that helps explain, now included in the New Revised Standard Version:
"Now Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eye of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer. No one was left of the Israelites across the Jordan whose right eye Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had not gouged out. But there were seven thousand men who had escaped from the Ammonites and had entered Jabesh-gilead."
If this paragraph is original, it would fill a gap in the existing storyline.
The reason we are addressing the textual criticism of the Old Testament in this section is the fact that the Greek text of Jeremiah presents some very interesting and significant variations from the Hebrew. The Greek text is about an eighth shorter than the Hebrew text as we have it. Several passages are missing. Also interestingly, the oracles against the nations, which appear in chapters 46-51 in our Bibles, are inserted after 25:13 in the Greek. One of the fragments of Jeremiah found at Qumran seems to confirm at long last that the Greek is probably the more original version.
These sorts of findings cause us to sit back and reflect on the way we approach the biblical text. The initial reaction in such cases is often to deny a new idea without truly examining it. Significant intellectual energy might be applied to finding ways to finesse the evidence to make a different interpretation plausible. And maybe in some cases, these alternative explanations are correct. It is telling, however, that what is initially troubling to one generation often poses no issues to the next, implying that the initial reaction had more to do with emotion and perceived insecurity rather than substance. Textual criticism, which was a big issue to some in the late 1800s was not a big issue for their grandchildren in the 1900s.
So evangelicals came to grips with textual criticism long ago. Anyone who uses the New International Version or the English Standard Version implicitly accepts the science of textual criticism as valid. But as one person said, we have to wonder about an approach to the Bible that puts a premium on an inerrant text we do not have and has no problem with an "errant" text we do have! [2] Apparently God was not concerned to correct anyone about the order of the text of Jeremiah these last few thousand years, which implies that He is not as concerned with the minute details of the biblical text as some think He is.
There are popular legends you sometimes hear about the care with which the Bible was copied. But these stories come from the medieval period and do not seem to apply to the time of Christ or Old Testament times. All the evidence from the first three centuries of Christianity, as well as the formative period of the Hebrew Bible, seems to point rather to a kind of fluidity to these texts. Indeed, it is difficult to decide what it might mean to speak of the "original manuscript" of a text like Isaiah or Jeremiah. A good argument can be made that they were more like living oracles, snowballs that started rolling through Israel's history with core prophetic material from the prophets themselves, then gathering material for a century or two after the prophet himself had passed from the scene.
A good argument can be made that God inspired reinterpretations and expansions of them for later generations. Then at some point they reached certain roughly fixed forms that were passed along as somewhat independent traditions of how the texts read. Some would strongly object to this model. For them it is very important to think that Jeremiah himself either wrote the book in its current form or that he was still alive to approve most of it in this form even if someone else might have edited the material together. Each will have to make up his or her own mind.
However, as we mentioned in the Introduction, regardless of what the biblical texts meant in the past, the crucial moment for them as Scripture for me and for you is now, as I read it. Do I need to know the original meaning of Jeremiah to hear God speak throught it? Do I even need to know the textual history or the original wording of Jeremiah to hear God speak through it? Surely the answer to these questions is a resounding "No!" From a pragmatic perspective, very few people have heard God's word through these texts if we can only hear God through the original meaning.
This is why I do not think it should bother us if in fact we have been looking at a "less than original" form of Jeremiah--or the ending of Mark--all these centuries. God did not and does not need the original wording to speak to us. And it is why I believe on a broader scale that we should be open to any scholarship that is honestly trying to hear these texts in their original contexts, even if some of their suggestions are initially unnerving. A case can be made that some evangelicals have made a cottage industry out of trying to put out perceived fires set by new evidence, a kind of well established coping mechanism. In an age that emphasizes authenticity, this type of scholarship may not yield much fruit among those who might otherwise believe.
If we accept that we can read the text Christianly, regardless of its so called original meaning, the preoccupations of twentieth century evangelical scholarship become largely tangential. Again, this is not to say evangelical scholarship has been wrong all the time, only that it has often seemed blatantly biased in its treatment of evidence rather than even attempting transparency in its motivations. God has and does speak through the biblical text whether a person has studied these issues or not. The New Testament itself models this approach, as we have seen, for its authors heard God speaking in the Old Testament text often despite its original contexts.
[1] Even today, there are a few Christians who might call themselves "King James only," an artifact of a century ago.
[2] Although I personally object to using the word "errant" of the text we do have. It is no error when something attains its intended standard.
1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
8. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
9. Critical Issues in Isaiah
Too much involved in this one for me to crank it all out at once, so here's the first installment.
_________
We best begin to locate the prophetic writings of the Old Testament by dividing them into those prophets who lived before the exile of Judah to Babylon (586BC), those who date from the time of the exile, and those who were "post-exilic," who prophesied after the exile. Here we are speaking of the time when the prophet himself lived, in distinction from when the books we now have in the Old Testament were written or reached something like their "canonical" form, the way they appear in the Bible.
Amos and Hosea prophecied not only before the exile of the southern kingdom, but before the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722BC. They are almost unique among the prophets because they prophesied to the northern kingdom, although their prophesies were preserved in the southern kingdom. Some scholars argue that the form of Amos and Hosea we now have shows the hands of editors in the southern kingdom. Jonah was also prophet in the northern kingdom who lived before the exile (cf. 2 Kings 14:25). However, the book of Jonah itself does not include any prophecy to the northern kingdom, since it concerns prophecy to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian kingdom.
Isaiah, Micah, Nahum, and Zephaniah prophesied around the time when the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel (722BC). Nahum in particular celebrates the justice of the northern kingdom's destruction. Habakkuk and Jeremiah then lived just before the time of the Babylonian invasion. The first wave of captives were taken to Babylon in 597BC.
Ezekiel and Obadiah then lived and prophesied at the beginning of the exile. Ezekiel and Daniel are both figures located not in Jerusalem or Judea, but prophesying in Babylon itself. The book of Daniel appears in the Writings rather than the prophets, and we will cover its issues in a later section. If one accepts the "three" Isaiah hypothesis, then the middle chapters of Isaiah (40-55) would also date from the last part of the exile in Babylon.
Haggai and Zechariah lived in the time just after return from exile (538BC) and urged the rebuilding of the temple, which took place in 516BC. If one accepts the three Isaiah hypothesis, Isaiah 56-66 would also date to this period. Then Malachi and perhaps Joel would date from the 400s BC.
Textual Criticism of the Old Testament
The branch of biblical studies that tries to determine the way the original texts of the Bible were worded is called textual criticism. It is surprising, even disturbing sometimes to some the first time they hear that we have none of the original documents of the Bible. For those who deal in ancient documents, however, it is exciting to know how many ancient copies of the biblical books that have actually survived. Things fall apart, and we thankfully have a wealth of copies of the Bible in comparison to what has survived of all other ancient writings.
Over a hundred years ago when archaeologists began to discover very old copies of the New Testament, many Christians were disturbed to find significant differences at some points, like the fact that the oldest copies of Mark did not have Mark 16:9-20. But these differences did not call into question the vast majority of the way the Bible had been printed over the years. As we would expect, there were those who reacted vehemently against these discoveries because it raised questions where all had previously been assumption. [1] They were caught off guard and, indeed, many of the scholars who raised such issues were hostile to faith.
But by the time the Dead Sea Scrolls came around in the late 1940s, the idea that the original text of the Old Testament might have differed a little from the text Christians bought in the Christian book store was not as shocking. These scrolls, which mostly date to the century before Christ, were about a thousand years older than any copies of the Old Testament we had at the time. For the most part, they confirmed the way the Old Testament had been printed in the Bibles of the day. In some other cases, the Dead Sea Scrolls pointed to alternative wordings we had known about, but had not used.
For example, the Old Testament was translated into Greek in the Egyptian city of Alexandria from around 250BC to just before the time of Christ. We informally call this Greek translation, the Septuagint, based on a legend about 70 Jews who translated the Pentateuch. We had known for years that this Greek translation sometimes was worded differently than the Masoretic text, the medieval text from about AD900 that had been used as the basis for printed Bibles since the invention of the printing press. In some places, the Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed that the Septuagint was actually more original than the Hebrew text that stood behind our Bibles at the time.
For example, the King James Version of Deuteronomy 32:8 reads, "When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance... he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel." Yet we had always known that the Greek Old Testament of this verse said that God set the boundaries according to the "sons of God" rather than of Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that the original reading of Deuteronomy was likely "sons of God," referring to the spiritual powers worshipped by other nations. We have already mentioned the likely henotheism of ancient Israel in passages like Psalm 82. In any case, we can see why some rabbinic Jews might have wanted to alter the text.
In a few rare cases, the Dead Sea Scrolls have presented us with texts we had never known before. For example, the transition from 1 Samuel 10:27 and chapter 11 had often puzzled interpreters. Where did this Nahash the Ammonite come from in 1 Samuel 11, showing up unannounced. The Dead Sea Scrolls have a paragraph after 10:27 that helps explain, now included in the New Revised Standard Version:
"Now Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eye of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer. No one was left of the Israelites across the Jordan whose right eye Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had not gouged out. But there were seven thousand men who had escaped from the Ammonites and had entered Jabesh-gilead."
If this paragraph is original, it would fill a gap in the existing storyline.
The reason we are addressing the textual criticism of the Old Testament in this section is the fact that the Greek text of Jeremiah presents some very interesting and significant variations from the Hebrew. The Greek text is about an eighth shorter than the Hebrew text as we have it. Several passages are missing. Also interestingly, the oracles against the nations, which appear in chapters 46-51 in our Bibles, are inserted after 25:13 in the Greek. One of the fragments of Jeremiah found at Qumran seems to confirm at long last that the Greek is probably the more original version.
These sorts of findings cause us to sit back and reflect on the way we approach the biblical text. The initial reaction in such cases is often to deny a new idea without truly examining it. Significant intellectual energy might be applied to finding ways to finesse the evidence to make a different interpretation plausible. And maybe in some cases, these alternative explanations are correct. It is telling, however, that what is initially troubling to one generation often poses no issues to the next, implying that the initial reaction had more to do with emotion and perceived insecurity rather than substance. Textual criticism, which was a big issue to some in the late 1800s was not a big issue for their grandchildren in the 1900s.
So evangelicals came to grips with textual criticism long ago. Anyone who uses the New International Version or the English Standard Version implicitly accepts the science of textual criticism as valid. But as one person said, we have to wonder about an approach to the Bible that puts a premium on an inerrant text we do not have and has no problem with an "errant" text we do have! [2] Apparently God was not concerned to correct anyone about the order of the text of Jeremiah these last few thousand years, which implies that He is not as concerned with the minute details of the biblical text as some think He is.
There are popular legends you sometimes hear about the care with which the Bible was copied. But these stories come from the medieval period and do not seem to apply to the time of Christ or Old Testament times. All the evidence from the first three centuries of Christianity, as well as the formative period of the Hebrew Bible, seems to point rather to a kind of fluidity to these texts. Indeed, it is difficult to decide what it might mean to speak of the "original manuscript" of a text like Isaiah or Jeremiah. A good argument can be made that they were more like living oracles, snowballs that started rolling through Israel's history with core prophetic material from the prophets themselves, then gathering material for a century or two after the prophet himself had passed from the scene.
A good argument can be made that God inspired reinterpretations and expansions of them for later generations. Then at some point they reached certain roughly fixed forms that were passed along as somewhat independent traditions of how the texts read. Some would strongly object to this model. For them it is very important to think that Jeremiah himself either wrote the book in its current form or that he was still alive to approve most of it in this form even if someone else might have edited the material together. Each will have to make up his or her own mind.
However, as we mentioned in the Introduction, regardless of what the biblical texts meant in the past, the crucial moment for them as Scripture for me and for you is now, as I read it. Do I need to know the original meaning of Jeremiah to hear God speak throught it? Do I even need to know the textual history or the original wording of Jeremiah to hear God speak through it? Surely the answer to these questions is a resounding "No!" From a pragmatic perspective, very few people have heard God's word through these texts if we can only hear God through the original meaning.
This is why I do not think it should bother us if in fact we have been looking at a "less than original" form of Jeremiah--or the ending of Mark--all these centuries. God did not and does not need the original wording to speak to us. And it is why I believe on a broader scale that we should be open to any scholarship that is honestly trying to hear these texts in their original contexts, even if some of their suggestions are initially unnerving. A case can be made that some evangelicals have made a cottage industry out of trying to put out perceived fires set by new evidence, a kind of well established coping mechanism. In an age that emphasizes authenticity, this type of scholarship may not yield much fruit among those who might otherwise believe.
If we accept that we can read the text Christianly, regardless of its so called original meaning, the preoccupations of twentieth century evangelical scholarship become largely tangential. Again, this is not to say evangelical scholarship has been wrong all the time, only that it has often seemed blatantly biased in its treatment of evidence rather than even attempting transparency in its motivations. God has and does speak through the biblical text whether a person has studied these issues or not. The New Testament itself models this approach, as we have seen, for its authors heard God speaking in the Old Testament text often despite its original contexts.
[1] Even today, there are a few Christians who might call themselves "King James only," an artifact of a century ago.
[2] Although I personally object to using the word "errant" of the text we do have. It is no error when something attains its intended standard.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
9. Critical Issues in Isaiah
Previous posts in this series include:
1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
8. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
_________
As we mentioned earlier, the Hebrew Bible is divided into three parts: the Law, Prophets, and Writings. We can further divide the Prophets into two parts: the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve). Isaiah thus leads off the prophets proper.
Prophecy was not a phenomenon limited to ancient Israel. The Old Testament itself illustrates this point not only with reference to the prophets of Ba'al (e.g., 1 Kings 18:19) but also in the character of Balaam, who is not an Israelite and free lances for whatever god from which a person might want to hear (e.g., Num. 22:4-6). Texts discovered from throughout the Ancient Near East (ANE) reinforce this observation.
The primary function of a prophet would seem to be that of a messenger from the gods, with the message uttered in the form of a prophetic oracle. The intended audience of such oracles was not a generation centuries in the future but the message was for those who were the actual individuals standing in front of the prophet as the message was given. In that sense, the prophetic texts of the Old Testament are, at least in the first instance, compilations of speech uttered orally on previous occasions.
It is now recognized that the transition from oral prophecy to written record of prophecy need not have been long. For example, Isaiah 8:16 mentions Isaiah's testimony being bound up by his followers. Jeremiah 36:4 mentions Baruch as his "secretary." At the same time, nothing about inspiration requires that it had to be the prophet himself that wrote it down, let alone edited the prophecies of a lifetime into a collection of prophecies.
The nature of such collections is such that the writings of the prophets have probably to some extent been "de-contextualized" from their original settings in real life (their Sitz im Leben, situation in life) and "re-contextualized" because of being repackaged as a new literary whole. The same is of course true of the sayings of Jesus as well in the gospels. Such re-contextualization inevitably results in some change in meaning and connotation. The larger the prophetic book, the more relocation and thus the greater potential shift in meaning.
We witness an apparent transition from the early days of prophecy in Israel to the prophets of the later monarchy (rule by king). This transition follows the shift from a period when Israel was a loose collection of tribes with no real common leadership to the more centralized days when kings ruled. The prophets and "seers" of the earlier days (cf. 1 Sam. 9:9) were apparently very "charismatic" figures, for lack of a better word, who often acted in groups. Saul comes on a group of such prophets after he is anointed king. He finds them processing from sacrifice with musical instruments.
When Saul joins them, a spirit from God possesses him and he goes into a kind of prophetic frenzy (1 Sam. 10:10). In another part of 1 Samuel, Saul actually strips his clothes off when this happens, and he lies naked for a whole day and night (1 Sam. 19:24). Similarly, when David brings the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, he dances and leaps largely uncovered (2 Sam. 6:14, 16, 20).
These sorts of texts remind us that the concept of the Satan was not yet around when they were written. What 2 Samuel 24:1 attributes to God, 1 Chronicles 21:1 attributes to Satan. It is difficult for us, from a New Testament perspective to think that it was God directly who sent an "evil spirit" on Saul and led him to throw a spear at David (1 Sam. 16:14)! And so from a Christian perspective, it is not completely clear to us which spiritual powers were really responsible for various spiritual activities attributed to God in the Historical Books.
By contrast, the prophets of the Latter Prophets date from the later monarchy on. At least in presentation, they seem much less frenzied than the earlier companies of prophets (Ezekiel is a noticeable exception at points). Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel may all have been priests. Their messages often have to do with social justice (concern for the poor, widows, orphans, etc.), although we do find engagement with geo-political events, concern for appropriate worship of Yahweh, and so forth.
Christian Interpretation
The New Testament quotes Isaiah and the Psalms more than any other books in the Old Testament. And as we have seen with the Psalms, the New Testament tends to take its words in a "fuller sense," a sensus plenior. To varying degrees, the New Testament was somewhat unconcerned to read Isaiah in context. Its paradigm for reading Scripture was not wired to look for original, contextual meaning but for how the words might be read spiritually in relation to Christ and the concerns of the early church.
We arguably find this hermeneutic at play in a number of well known instances. For example, when the Old Testament portion of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) first came out in 1952, a good deal of controversy rose over its translation of Isaiah 7:14: "Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." The issue of course is that this verse is a classic prophecy of the virgin conception in Matthew 1:23.
But the RSV was not denying the virgin birth. Indeed, it uses "virgin" in its translation of Matthew 1:23. The issue is that the Hebrew word 'alma in Isaiah 7 would not seem to demand a miraculous birth. Young women--in fact virgins--conceive all the time. They just conceive by way of sex rather than by miracle!
The original context of Isaiah 7 is the LORD giving a sign to King Ahaz in relation to two kings that were threatening him from the north. A young woman would give birth to a son as a sign to him, and before the child grew up, God would take the threat to the north away (7:16). Now if this prediction only applied to Jesus, then it was not a sign to Ahaz in any way. He died over 700 years before Jesus! Matthew reads Isaiah 7 with Spiritual eyes and sees a meaning no one, including Isaiah, had ever seen before Jesus.
We find this pattern of interpretation consistently throughout the New Testament. Prophecies that originally had to do with the immediate situations of the prophets are read figuratively, spiritually, in relation to the New Testament context. For this reason, the prediction-fulfillment argument for the truth of Christianity is dangerous and potentially counter-productive. It seems primarily through spiritual eyes that the Old Testament words are understood of Christ and New Testament events. So we potentially provide an opportunity for the skeptic when we argue that these verses "predict" Jesus.
One of the most important texts in Isaiah for us as Christians is Isaiah 53, a text that we relate to the sufferings of Jesus on our behalf. Interestingly, the New Testament does not actually engage this text as a witness to Christ's suffering very often. For example, Matthew 8:16-17 is the only text in the gospel that quotes it, and it uses it in relation to Jesus' healing ministry rather than his death. The main texts that read it in this way are 1 Peter 2:22-25 and Acts 8, where God uses this text to provide an opportunity for Philip to bring the gospel to an Ethiopian.
What is interesting about this text hermeneutically is that it poses some challenges to read in its literary context. The broader literary context equates the servant in question with Israel (e.g., 44:1, 21; 45:4; 49:3). But Isaiah 53 speaks about the servant suffering for "our" transgressions (53:5). If the "our" is Israel, then we have Israel suffering for Israel. In short, we can identify with the Ethiopian eunuch's question in Acts 8:34, "About whom is the prophet speaking?" Thus some Old Testament passages have elements that seem to have pushed later readers toward more than literal interpretations.
"Three Isaiahs"
The fact that New Testament authors were not wired to read the Old Testament in context immediately provides a warning for those who insist we must limit our understandings of Old Testament authorship to the names by which the New Testament references the Old Testament. When it comes to Isaiah, we have no good reason to suggest that the core material of the first half of the book does not incorporate prophesies that Isaiah himself uttered in the 700s BC. The points of debate come with the packaging of those prophecies together in the first half and with the authorship of the second half.
If you approach Isaiah inductively, letting its text generate your thoughts on matters like dating and authorship, you will immediately be struck with its second half. For example, Isaiah 36-39 is not prophetic material, but a historical narrative of events near the end of King Hezekiah's reign. This material is virtually word for word the same as material in 2 Kings 18-20. Like the Pentateuch, this material talks about Isaiah and things he does. Inductively, however, it does not read as if Isaiah is writing these chapters. In th light of what follows, it reads more like someone has excerpted Kings to provide a bridge between the time of Isaiah and a time two hundred years later.
Since the New Testament does not quote these chapters, the main reason someone would ascribe them to Isaiah is the current packaging of them in a book that begins in 1:1 to say, "The vision of Isaiah..." Proverbs also begins by saying its contents are "The proverbs of Solomon" but then goes on to include proverbs of the wise (24:23), of Agur (30:1), and of Lemuel (31:1). It is at least possible that the ancients did not think of such headings as having to extend to everything that followed.
However, the real controversy comes when we get to Isaiah 40-66. Once again, from an inductive perspective, Isaiah is mentioned nowhere in these pages. These chapters do not attribute their material to Isaiah. It is only the packaging of them in the same book as Isaiah 1:1 that starts us out with this expectation inductively.
But as we proceed inductively through the rest of these chapters, they do not seem to picture a setting in the time of Isaiah. The setting is that of Israel about to return from exile around the year 539BC. Isaiah prophesied in the late 700s. Nowhere is this setting clearer than in Isaiah 45:1, where the Persian king Cyrus is mentioned. Cyrus is the king who in 538BC allowed the Jews to return to Israel from Babylon. Isaiah 45 addresses him in the present and even past tense in 45:1.
We therefore cannot simply say that someone who dates this portion of Isaiah to the 500s does not believe in prophecy. These words would not have made much sense at all during the time of Isaiah or the intervening century until 586BC when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem. For example, Isaiah 61:4 speaks of God rebuilding ancient ruins and destroyed cities. The literary context both before and afterwards indicates that it is Jerusalem that is in view, a city that was not destroyed for 150 years after Isaiah and could not have been considered ancient ruins for some time after that.
Once again, the primary reason the authorship of these chapters in Isaiah is an issue is the way the New Testament quotes them. It is the fact that Jesus and the New Testament cite this material as material from Isaiah (e.g., Matt. 12:17). Unlike the Psalms, however, no New Testament author makes an argument on the basis of Isaiah's authorship. It is rather a matter of how the New Testament and Jesus reference the material in these later chapters. Each believer will have to decide whether the New Testament quotes such material within the categories of its day or whether God wants us to take from these references a timeless statement of authorship.
It is thus conventional since the commentary of Bernhard Duhm in 1892 to speak of Isaiah 49-55 as "deutero" or second Isaiah and Isaiah 56-66 as "trito" or third Isaiah. Material from the first part ("proto" Isaiah) thus was thought to go back to Isaiah. Isaiah 40-55 was thought to date from the time right before Cyrus allowed Israel to return from captivity and Isaiah 56-66 was thought to date from the period immediately following return in the late 500s BC. The idea is not that there were three different people named Isaiah. At most, some have suggested that a group of Jews preserved and extended the Isaianic tradition in the late sixth century.
As with Wellhausen's theory of the Pentateuch, the specifics have not gone unquestioned in the intervening days. And with the rise of literary approaches to the Bible in the 70s and 80s such as the narrative criticism we mentioned earlier, the study of Isaiah has focused more attention on the literary unity of the sixty-six books rather than the partitioning up of the book into parts. Common themes such as God as the "Holy One" appear throughout. Regardless of what one thinks about the historical origins of Isaiah's content, therefore, it is possible to read it literarily and theologically as a unity.
1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
8. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
_________
As we mentioned earlier, the Hebrew Bible is divided into three parts: the Law, Prophets, and Writings. We can further divide the Prophets into two parts: the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve). Isaiah thus leads off the prophets proper.
Prophecy was not a phenomenon limited to ancient Israel. The Old Testament itself illustrates this point not only with reference to the prophets of Ba'al (e.g., 1 Kings 18:19) but also in the character of Balaam, who is not an Israelite and free lances for whatever god from which a person might want to hear (e.g., Num. 22:4-6). Texts discovered from throughout the Ancient Near East (ANE) reinforce this observation.
The primary function of a prophet would seem to be that of a messenger from the gods, with the message uttered in the form of a prophetic oracle. The intended audience of such oracles was not a generation centuries in the future but the message was for those who were the actual individuals standing in front of the prophet as the message was given. In that sense, the prophetic texts of the Old Testament are, at least in the first instance, compilations of speech uttered orally on previous occasions.
It is now recognized that the transition from oral prophecy to written record of prophecy need not have been long. For example, Isaiah 8:16 mentions Isaiah's testimony being bound up by his followers. Jeremiah 36:4 mentions Baruch as his "secretary." At the same time, nothing about inspiration requires that it had to be the prophet himself that wrote it down, let alone edited the prophecies of a lifetime into a collection of prophecies.
The nature of such collections is such that the writings of the prophets have probably to some extent been "de-contextualized" from their original settings in real life (their Sitz im Leben, situation in life) and "re-contextualized" because of being repackaged as a new literary whole. The same is of course true of the sayings of Jesus as well in the gospels. Such re-contextualization inevitably results in some change in meaning and connotation. The larger the prophetic book, the more relocation and thus the greater potential shift in meaning.
We witness an apparent transition from the early days of prophecy in Israel to the prophets of the later monarchy (rule by king). This transition follows the shift from a period when Israel was a loose collection of tribes with no real common leadership to the more centralized days when kings ruled. The prophets and "seers" of the earlier days (cf. 1 Sam. 9:9) were apparently very "charismatic" figures, for lack of a better word, who often acted in groups. Saul comes on a group of such prophets after he is anointed king. He finds them processing from sacrifice with musical instruments.
When Saul joins them, a spirit from God possesses him and he goes into a kind of prophetic frenzy (1 Sam. 10:10). In another part of 1 Samuel, Saul actually strips his clothes off when this happens, and he lies naked for a whole day and night (1 Sam. 19:24). Similarly, when David brings the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, he dances and leaps largely uncovered (2 Sam. 6:14, 16, 20).
These sorts of texts remind us that the concept of the Satan was not yet around when they were written. What 2 Samuel 24:1 attributes to God, 1 Chronicles 21:1 attributes to Satan. It is difficult for us, from a New Testament perspective to think that it was God directly who sent an "evil spirit" on Saul and led him to throw a spear at David (1 Sam. 16:14)! And so from a Christian perspective, it is not completely clear to us which spiritual powers were really responsible for various spiritual activities attributed to God in the Historical Books.
By contrast, the prophets of the Latter Prophets date from the later monarchy on. At least in presentation, they seem much less frenzied than the earlier companies of prophets (Ezekiel is a noticeable exception at points). Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel may all have been priests. Their messages often have to do with social justice (concern for the poor, widows, orphans, etc.), although we do find engagement with geo-political events, concern for appropriate worship of Yahweh, and so forth.
Christian Interpretation
The New Testament quotes Isaiah and the Psalms more than any other books in the Old Testament. And as we have seen with the Psalms, the New Testament tends to take its words in a "fuller sense," a sensus plenior. To varying degrees, the New Testament was somewhat unconcerned to read Isaiah in context. Its paradigm for reading Scripture was not wired to look for original, contextual meaning but for how the words might be read spiritually in relation to Christ and the concerns of the early church.
We arguably find this hermeneutic at play in a number of well known instances. For example, when the Old Testament portion of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) first came out in 1952, a good deal of controversy rose over its translation of Isaiah 7:14: "Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." The issue of course is that this verse is a classic prophecy of the virgin conception in Matthew 1:23.
But the RSV was not denying the virgin birth. Indeed, it uses "virgin" in its translation of Matthew 1:23. The issue is that the Hebrew word 'alma in Isaiah 7 would not seem to demand a miraculous birth. Young women--in fact virgins--conceive all the time. They just conceive by way of sex rather than by miracle!
The original context of Isaiah 7 is the LORD giving a sign to King Ahaz in relation to two kings that were threatening him from the north. A young woman would give birth to a son as a sign to him, and before the child grew up, God would take the threat to the north away (7:16). Now if this prediction only applied to Jesus, then it was not a sign to Ahaz in any way. He died over 700 years before Jesus! Matthew reads Isaiah 7 with Spiritual eyes and sees a meaning no one, including Isaiah, had ever seen before Jesus.
We find this pattern of interpretation consistently throughout the New Testament. Prophecies that originally had to do with the immediate situations of the prophets are read figuratively, spiritually, in relation to the New Testament context. For this reason, the prediction-fulfillment argument for the truth of Christianity is dangerous and potentially counter-productive. It seems primarily through spiritual eyes that the Old Testament words are understood of Christ and New Testament events. So we potentially provide an opportunity for the skeptic when we argue that these verses "predict" Jesus.
One of the most important texts in Isaiah for us as Christians is Isaiah 53, a text that we relate to the sufferings of Jesus on our behalf. Interestingly, the New Testament does not actually engage this text as a witness to Christ's suffering very often. For example, Matthew 8:16-17 is the only text in the gospel that quotes it, and it uses it in relation to Jesus' healing ministry rather than his death. The main texts that read it in this way are 1 Peter 2:22-25 and Acts 8, where God uses this text to provide an opportunity for Philip to bring the gospel to an Ethiopian.
What is interesting about this text hermeneutically is that it poses some challenges to read in its literary context. The broader literary context equates the servant in question with Israel (e.g., 44:1, 21; 45:4; 49:3). But Isaiah 53 speaks about the servant suffering for "our" transgressions (53:5). If the "our" is Israel, then we have Israel suffering for Israel. In short, we can identify with the Ethiopian eunuch's question in Acts 8:34, "About whom is the prophet speaking?" Thus some Old Testament passages have elements that seem to have pushed later readers toward more than literal interpretations.
"Three Isaiahs"
The fact that New Testament authors were not wired to read the Old Testament in context immediately provides a warning for those who insist we must limit our understandings of Old Testament authorship to the names by which the New Testament references the Old Testament. When it comes to Isaiah, we have no good reason to suggest that the core material of the first half of the book does not incorporate prophesies that Isaiah himself uttered in the 700s BC. The points of debate come with the packaging of those prophecies together in the first half and with the authorship of the second half.
If you approach Isaiah inductively, letting its text generate your thoughts on matters like dating and authorship, you will immediately be struck with its second half. For example, Isaiah 36-39 is not prophetic material, but a historical narrative of events near the end of King Hezekiah's reign. This material is virtually word for word the same as material in 2 Kings 18-20. Like the Pentateuch, this material talks about Isaiah and things he does. Inductively, however, it does not read as if Isaiah is writing these chapters. In th light of what follows, it reads more like someone has excerpted Kings to provide a bridge between the time of Isaiah and a time two hundred years later.
Since the New Testament does not quote these chapters, the main reason someone would ascribe them to Isaiah is the current packaging of them in a book that begins in 1:1 to say, "The vision of Isaiah..." Proverbs also begins by saying its contents are "The proverbs of Solomon" but then goes on to include proverbs of the wise (24:23), of Agur (30:1), and of Lemuel (31:1). It is at least possible that the ancients did not think of such headings as having to extend to everything that followed.
However, the real controversy comes when we get to Isaiah 40-66. Once again, from an inductive perspective, Isaiah is mentioned nowhere in these pages. These chapters do not attribute their material to Isaiah. It is only the packaging of them in the same book as Isaiah 1:1 that starts us out with this expectation inductively.
But as we proceed inductively through the rest of these chapters, they do not seem to picture a setting in the time of Isaiah. The setting is that of Israel about to return from exile around the year 539BC. Isaiah prophesied in the late 700s. Nowhere is this setting clearer than in Isaiah 45:1, where the Persian king Cyrus is mentioned. Cyrus is the king who in 538BC allowed the Jews to return to Israel from Babylon. Isaiah 45 addresses him in the present and even past tense in 45:1.
We therefore cannot simply say that someone who dates this portion of Isaiah to the 500s does not believe in prophecy. These words would not have made much sense at all during the time of Isaiah or the intervening century until 586BC when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem. For example, Isaiah 61:4 speaks of God rebuilding ancient ruins and destroyed cities. The literary context both before and afterwards indicates that it is Jerusalem that is in view, a city that was not destroyed for 150 years after Isaiah and could not have been considered ancient ruins for some time after that.
Once again, the primary reason the authorship of these chapters in Isaiah is an issue is the way the New Testament quotes them. It is the fact that Jesus and the New Testament cite this material as material from Isaiah (e.g., Matt. 12:17). Unlike the Psalms, however, no New Testament author makes an argument on the basis of Isaiah's authorship. It is rather a matter of how the New Testament and Jesus reference the material in these later chapters. Each believer will have to decide whether the New Testament quotes such material within the categories of its day or whether God wants us to take from these references a timeless statement of authorship.
It is thus conventional since the commentary of Bernhard Duhm in 1892 to speak of Isaiah 49-55 as "deutero" or second Isaiah and Isaiah 56-66 as "trito" or third Isaiah. Material from the first part ("proto" Isaiah) thus was thought to go back to Isaiah. Isaiah 40-55 was thought to date from the time right before Cyrus allowed Israel to return from captivity and Isaiah 56-66 was thought to date from the period immediately following return in the late 500s BC. The idea is not that there were three different people named Isaiah. At most, some have suggested that a group of Jews preserved and extended the Isaianic tradition in the late sixth century.
As with Wellhausen's theory of the Pentateuch, the specifics have not gone unquestioned in the intervening days. And with the rise of literary approaches to the Bible in the 70s and 80s such as the narrative criticism we mentioned earlier, the study of Isaiah has focused more attention on the literary unity of the sixty-six books rather than the partitioning up of the book into parts. Common themes such as God as the "Holy One" appear throughout. Regardless of what one thinks about the historical origins of Isaiah's content, therefore, it is possible to read it literarily and theologically as a unity.
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