Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 1.4: Evidence and Reason

Here's the previous bread crumb.

1. I hit a small crisis of faith at the end of my first year at Asbury. I was learning to read the text of the Bible in context. It felt very familiar because it was basically the application of the scientific method to interpretation. Given the literary and historical evidence, what is the most likely meaning of the text?

I have taught this method for the last thirty years at IWU and elsewhere. David Smith now travels around teaching it from church to church. People who love the Bible usually love it because it so obviously does its best to listen to the Bible and let it say what it says.

For me, it came with a problem. The more I listened to the text, the more it unraveled the biblical interpretations of my childhood. Indeed, the more it called into question some of the core assumptions I had about the Bible.

2. What day is the Sabbath? It’s clearly Saturday in the Old and New Testaments. I heard an ingenious interpretation once of the idiom, “the first of sabbaths” in Mark 16:2 and Matthew 28:1. The phase basically means the first day of the week. But one of the professors at Frankfort Bible College suggested it meant that these verses were declaring that Sunday—the first day of the week—was now the Sabbath. In other words, that Sunday after the resurrection was the “first of sabbaths” for Christians, switching the Sabbath day from Saturday to Sunday.

Ingenious!

Many of my former students will know that when I call something “ingenious” like this, it is a backhanded compliment. I’m really complimenting a person’s ability to take their intellect and use it to wiggle out of a clear interpretation of the text.

That was the challenge I faced at the end of my first year at Asbury. Would I approach the text with the goal of making it say what my tradition wanted it to say? Or would I go with the most likely conclusion? Would I “cook the books”? Or would I go with the evidence? That sounds easy until you get into some of the choices.

3. As I’ve mentioned, a key issue for me was the way the New Testament interpreted the Old Testament. It didn’t seem to follow the rules of inductive Bible study. The New Testament didn’t seem to interpret the Old Testament in context. The evidence seemed to say clearly to me, “The New Testament read the Old Testament in a spiritual, more-than-literal way.” At least that’s how I would later put it.

Isaiah 7:14 was not originally a prediction about a virgin birth 700 years later. In context, it was a sign to King Ahaz in the 700s BC about a child who would be born as a sign that Judah would survive the Assyrian threat. If it were only about the virgin birth, it wasn’t a very good sign to the very person to whom Isaiah was giving it. In that case, a sign for him would come 700 years after he was dead.

I found this dynamic repeatedly. Applying the rules of inductive method to the text often yielded straightforward results... that were different from the way the New Testament read the verses. This created a bit of a problem for me in my early days at Asbury.

4. Take Psalm 110:1: “Yahweh says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’” This psalm was likely about the king of Judah. The psalmist was referring to Yahweh—the LORD in all caps—telling the king (the “lord”) that he would win in battle against his enemies. No problem.

My problem was that this is not the way the New Testament reads the psalm. Indeed, this verse might have been the central passage to help the earliest Christians interpret the resurrection. They took this verse to mean that God had enthroned Jesus as Lord after he rose from the dead (e.g., Acts 2:34-35). Indeed, in Mark 12:35-37, Jesus himself uses this verse to befuddle his debaters.

The twentieth century Paul Ricoeur had a concept that has since been helpful to me in interpretation. He spoke of a “first naïveté” when you don’t even realize that your interpretation isn’t reading in context. [1] Then you undergo some cognitive dissonance, and you realize your first interpretation was "incorrect." You gain some “critical distance” in your understanding. You move from a pre-modern to a modern understanding.

But then, he spoke of a “second naïveté,” when you realize that you can re-adopt your initial interpretation—not as what the text originally meant but as a more-than-literal reading. The text itself is not bound by its original meaning, so it is not wrong to read it differently. And you can do so with eyes wide open rather than without knowing you are doing it.

Another example is the way Acts 2:27 interprets Psalm 16. In Acts, Peter takes Psalm 16:10 in relation to Jesus staying in the grave. “You will not leave me in Sheol.” Read in its original context, the psalmist was likely saying that Yahweh would not let him die. God would not abandon him to the grave but would save him from his enemies.

But you could argue that Acts 2 was reading the verse in a “fuller sense,” a sensus plenior, as we mentioned in the previous chapter. On the Day of Pentecost, Peter hears the words in relation to Jesus—God would not leave Jesus in the realm of the dead after he died. Acts 2 takes the verse as a prophecy of resurrection.

5. Key in both of these interpretations is the assumption that David was the author of these psalms. The headings of the psalms call them psalms of David. But these headings were added when the psalms were collected—not when they were written. David didn’t title his own psalms, “A Psalm of David.” The editor of the psalms did. And if Psalm 137 is any indication, the final collection took place over 500 years after David.

For this reason, evangelicals have often not seen the headings of the psalms as necessarily inspired. There is a strong impulse of tradition to accept them, and perhaps most evangelicals do. But I was trained to think they could be viewed with an objective eye. [2]

Take Psalm 51. The tradition is that this is David repenting for his sins in relation to Bathsheba. It is a very strong preaching tradition and well known across the church. But, inductively, you get to verse 18—“Build the walls of Jerusalem.” Weren’t the walls of Jerusalem already built at the time of David? Yes, they were.

So, it raises the question. Might this verse actually fit the time after the Jews returned from Babylon when the walls of Jerusalem needed to be rebuilt? The psalm can indeed be read in this way. That is probably the consensus of most Old Testament scholars.

Of course, you will tick off a lot of people—including a lot of pastors—if you suggest such a thing. The traditional reading of the psalm is so strong, so often preached, that it is practically dogma. This is indeed a dynamic I have observed often. Our traditions about the Bible are usually far more important to us than the Bible itself. We get VERY upset when they are undermined by scholars, even if the text itself is compelling.

(I have often felt like a great “party pooper” as a teacher, so much so that I have often—more frequently than I would like to admit it—pulled my punches. As a “feeling” personality in Myers-Briggs, leaving my students feeling good about their faith was more important to me than giving them “the cold hard facts.” Contrast the "thinking" Bud Bence who often provoked faith crises in his teaching. :-) )

6. To be fair, there are plenty of places where the New Testament itself reasons under the assumption that David wrote most of the psalms. This was the tradition and assumption of the day. So we get into the question of the difference between the point of biblical statements and any cultural framework those points may come in. What is in the envelope of revelation, and what is actually being revealed?

This is scary stuff, and it was once very scary to me. I could see where these lines of thinking were going, and it was very unsettling. At one point my mother thought I was rebellious for seeming to always pick the opposite side than the one she lobbied for. But I did not experience myself that way. I experience myself as being drug "kicking and screaming" by the evidence and reason. 

I often turn to 2 Corinthians 12:2 as an example of revelation coming within the ancient assumptions of the biblical world. Paul talks about being taken up into the third sky or third heaven. We have examples of Jewish cosmology from the time (e.g., the Testament of Levi) that picture the heavens as layers of sky with God in the third sky—the highest heaven.

So, what is the "envelope" that revelation comes in here, and what is the revelation itself? The point of Paul’s comment is that he was taken into the very presence of God. I would argue that the picture of the universe here is the envelope. The way the heavens are structured is not Paul’s point. It is the way he expresses the point within his ancient worldview. 

We see the same thing in Philippians 2 when he speaks of every knee bowing before Christ—above the earth, on the earth, under the earth. Here is another ancient picture of the universe that is not the point. The point is that everything in the universe will acknowledge Jesus as Lord.

You are seeing the origins of my “incarnational” sense of hermeneutics. God meets us where we are and takes us from there. I concluded that this is how revelation worked with the authors of Scripture. God revealed truths to them from within their own ancient cultural frameworks, and he took them from there. This approach allowed me to let the text be the text while preserving Christian orthodoxy.

7. You can also see in my reflections here my attempt to process an inductive reading of the Bible over the years with the concerns of my evangelical community in mind. How can I affirm the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture and yet let the text speak for itself? 

To be frank, I have come to strongly dislike this question. What God thinks is what is true--not what a particular theological community insists must be true. I know that, at its best, the evangelical community is trying to guard the faith. But from a different point of view, it can be seen as resisting an honest search for truth, which is what God actually thinks. 

At the time, I didn’t find anyone to guide me through these questions. I’ve often wished I could go back in time to help myself at various points. There were those no doubt who could give me answers that didn’t ring true to the text. They tended to create more doubt in me than peace. There were probably those somewhat hidden voices who could have led me away from my faith community.

For me, the question was whether God wanted me to use my mind or not. Does God want me to be irrational as an act of obedience? Or is God a God of truth? Did God want me to exercise blind faith and reject what seemed to me to be the straightforward meanings of the text? Was it a test?

In the end, I decided that God was a God of truth. I decided that “all truth is God’s truth.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that all truths are obvious. Indeed, it is rational to decide, in a particular instance, to go against the evidence in one’s conclusion. The key, it seemed to me, was to be honest about it.

So many evangelical thinkers to me seemed to “cook the books.” They pretended to be following the evidence when in fact their (sometimes hidden) presuppositions were really steering the ship. They acted like the evidence demanded a verdict, but they were skewing the evidence in the direction they wanted it to go.

As I was heading into my second year at Asbury, I determined that I would let the most likely conclusion be my guiding star. Rather than use my intellect to see if it was possible to make the text say what my tradition wanted it to say, I would try to go with the most probable interpretations. I would become a scientist of the text and the truth, believing that God is truth and that the truth is what God believes—not what my tradition wants him to believe.

I have since come up with a twisted parable to illustrate the coherence between God and an evidentiary/logical approach to truth. Let’s say someone could sit down and prove to God that he did not exist. He is so aligned with the truth, he would say, “Fair enough,” and disappear.

Of course, this is a ridiculous thought experiment. But it is meant to show the complete alignment of God with rational and evidentiary truth. I know that is a controversial thought and some would no doubt argue that it places reason and evidence above God.

I disagree. The problem is not with God. It is with me. It is with me as a knower. God is not nervous about his own existence. The problem is my egocentric predicament, a concept I learned in Dr. Bross’ philosophy class at Central Wesleyan College. I am stuck inside my head. The world exists, but I see it “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV).

I suppose that decision set me on a path of some deconstruction. Traditions were now open to critique. Everything was open to critique. Over the years, I have certainly not been the smartest of scholars. But I would like to think that I am one of the most honest of scholars. And that has perhaps made me seem smarter than I actually am at times. Because--at least in my heart of hearts--I try to let the chips fall where they may.

[1] Especially in his work, The Symbolism of Evil (Yale University, 1967).

[2] We will get into this sticky wicket more in a later chapter. What do we do with the fact that the New Testament authors seem to assume traditional authorship of the Old Testament books?

7.1 Learning Biblical Greek (Hermeneutical Autobiography)

It's pretty crazy to have five posts a week from five different writing projects with a different one almost every day of the week. So I thought I might do a two week cycle instead -- three days on one project, three days on the next, Sunday for Bible. Then complete the cycle the next week. That way the posts have more continuity rather than jerking readers in a different direction every day.

With that in mind, here is a continuation of yesterday's project, previously my Monday project -- a hermeneutical autobiography. Earlier posts at the bottom.
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1. I started off college as a chemistry major. I said I was going to be a doctor or a surgeon. I don't know if it was ever real to me. I don't think my mother necessarily thought it would happen. Probably a good thing. I probably would have left a scalpel in someone.

Near the end of my first semester at Central Wesleyan College, I felt like God was calling me into ministry. My mother wasn't surprised. My father advised I continue another semester as a chem major and then if I felt the same way, change my major then.

It's funny. I have doubted almost everything in my life at one point or another -- especially during the years from 1977-1987. But I didn't have any doubt that God wanted me to go to Central, and I never doubted that God was calling me into ministry. Strange things.

2. I dove into biblical Greek the fall of 1985. I would take enough Greek at Central to be a Greek Bible major alongside having general Bible and Religion majors as well. I enjoyed Greek. I had taken 2.5 years of Latin in high school, so it wasn't completely foreign to me. I knew about cases and changing endings on words. 

Knowing what I know now, I was not great at it, although I got As. Even with a Greek Bible major, I had to study my rear end off to pass the Greek competency entrance exam at Asbury. But I did pass it, and I guess not many did. David Thompson's study book was very helpful. I would only get really good at Greek when I became a Teaching Fellow and had to teach it. Along with philosophy, biblical languages have probably been my areas of greatest teaching giftedness.

I remember my brother-in-law having me try to read the Christmas story in Greek after my first semester. Of course, I couldn't. Not only is Luke some of the hardest Greek in the Bible, but you can't really do much with Greek after only one semester with it taught the traditional way. I would explore a different teaching approach later where you might have a better chance, but on vocabulary alone I was doomed in 1985.

I had Herb Dongell for my first year. He was very much the rote memorization type of teacher. He even had us learn all the accent rules. I remember trying to tutor a dyslexic ministry major on the accent rules the next year. We just busted out laughing at one point because of how silly some of the rules sound. "If the second to last syllable is long and the last syllable is short, if the second to last syllable is accented, it will take a circumflex."

3. If you asked me why a pastor should learn the biblical languages, there is of course the matter of always having to rely on someone else's word for it if you don't know them. There is frankly a lot of shlock out there coming from pulpits in the name of Greek and Hebrew. There's a lot of crazy stuff out there. Biblical languages are treated like magic tricks.

Most American pastors don't have the aptitude to learn them. This is why I never advocated that they be required in my circles. It ends up being a waste of time. Keith Drury and Russ Gunsalus had data ready to talk me out of requiring it at Wesley Seminary but I never had a thought of requiring it. When you forget 95% of what you didn't learn the week after finals, it's a bad use of time.

I pioneered Greek for Ministry and Hebrew for Ministry courses at Wesley Seminary. The goal was to teach use of the tools and the categories-meaning of the languages rather than expecting full memorization. I think there is much more hope for teaching the significance of Greek and Hebrew than having people memorize everything. In the years since, I have hammered YouTube with Greek and Hebrew videos. I even have a couple Hebrew courses on Udemy. 

But most American pastors simply won't be able to do it -- or more likely, will learn just enough to get it wrong. When I became a teaching fellow in biblical languages at Asbury in 1990, my predecessor had a sign on his desk that said, "Just remember. People are stupid." I thought that was awful. By the way, I am stupid in so many ways. But, 35 years later, I get what he was saying about seminary students and Greek. Most people just can't do it on any level of proficiency, not in the amount of time we give to it.

This is a parable, I suspect, for truly understanding the Bible in depth. (Keith Drury would kill me for saying this -- at least he would have at one point.) Most simply aren't going to. The purist says, "But they should, especially pastors!" The realist and pragmatist says, "Everyone has a different giftedness. Some people can climb mountains. Other people enjoy looking at them."

If I could go back to theological education 60 years ago and change the way Greek and Hebrew were taught, I've wondered if they might still be required. I would teach the significance of the categories of the language, much like a book I wrote last year. The free tools available make it so much easier now to learn the important things -- even more than when I wrote those Greek and Hebrew for ministry courses ten years ago.

4. The greatest value I experienced from these languages is the way they helped me enter the biblical worlds on a whole new level. When you are reading the Bible in English, it's like you are watching the biblical world on TV. You're not really there. It's really hard to get out of your culture and assumptions and get into the biblical worlds. The languages are a baptism by fire into their worlds.

Most Christians will never really enter that world on a deep level, including most pastors. It's like the person that eats at McDonalds when they're traveling Europe. They're joking about you in French behind your back, but you're oblivious because you don't speak the language. The taxi driver is charging you three times as much as normal but you don't know it.

Learning the biblical languages was the first step in beginning to read the Bible on its own terms rather than my terms. This was especially the case with Hebrew, which I didn't really start learning in depth until seminary...

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1. The Memory Verse Approach

2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry

3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law 

5. An Easter Morning in Galatians

6.1 Adventures in the King James Version
6.2 Beyond the King James Version

6.2 Beyond the King James Version

Mondays I am writing about my journey with Scripture in college, seminary, and beyond. Earlier posts are at the bottom. The previous post started chapter 5, "Adventures with the King James Version."
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5. I did not change my mind about the King James version over night. I wrestled with the question for about a year and a half after that college paper before I finally accepted the scholarly consensus.

For one thing, I wasn't sure who to believe about the manuscripts. In the 1978 version of the NIV, there was a note in a couple places that went like this: "The earliest and most reliable manuscripts do not have verses..." It was a bold claim. It said that the further back in history you go, the less you find these verses in the handwritten copies of the New Testament.

More recent editions of the NIV have softened the tone a little. So with regard to John we now find this note: "The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11." This is the story of the woman caught in adultery. It does not appear in the oldest Greek manuscripts of John.

Whaat???

6. You can see how unsettling notes like these were at first. You'd grown up with the King James Version. You'd heard this story of the woman caught in adultery your whole life. As a pastor, maybe you'd preached from this story your whole ministry. And now some new Bible implies it doesn't belong in the Bible.

I heard a sermon on the woman caught in adultery this past year. And I still from time to time hear people quote the Great Commission from Mark 16:15 (as opposed to Matthew 28's version). I don't usually point out to them that the verse probably wasn't part of Mark originally. But there's the note in the NIV2011 of Mark 16: "The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have verses 9–20."

I get it. It looks sinister. "They're cutting verses out of the Bible," people said and then invoked the condemnations of Revelation 22:18-19 about removing things from the book. [1] A book came out in 1993 called New Age Bible Versions that was extremely convincing if you didn't know anything about the subject. [2] By the time it came out, I was starting my doctorate and knew a fair amount of the debate so I found it pretty funny. 

For example, it tries to malign a famous Bible scholar from the late 1800s because he wrote in his journal that he liked to have evening strolls talking about "metaphysics." The author didn't know what metaphysics is in philosophy, which is clearly what this scholar meant. But she assumed he was talking about spirit guides and the kinds of spiritualist trends that were taking place in the 90s. 

I had a really good laugh about that one. But on a much more serious note, she suggested some translators of the NIV got Alzheimer's as God's judgment on them. This book had immense impact among those who didn't really understand the subject.

7. What you should realize is that scholars are not trying to take verses out. They have concluded that verses like the longer ending of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery were added in during the first few centuries of Christianity. It is natural for us to think of the King James Version (KJV) as old and the NIV as relatively young (not so much any more). But when we are talking about the handwritten copies they are translated from, the NIV Greek manuscripts are older than the KJV ones -- generally much older.

The 1611 King James Version was good scholarship for its day. But we now have manuscripts that are 1000 years older than the ones they used. This is just another example of tradition resisting change. You grow up with a faith that involves a mixture of gold and hay, but it's hard to realize which is which. You feel like someone is attacking your faith when they are only refining it. It's perfectly understandable.

The tradition of the Greek behind the KJV was so strong that it prevailed long after scholars realized that it wasn't likely as original as the older manuscripts that were being discovered in the 1800s. It was two individuals in particular -- B. F. Westcott and Fenton Hort -- who finally managed to dislodge the Greek "textus receptus" behind the KJV in Greek editions of the New Testament.

They did focus their argument on two key manuscripts that dated from the early 300s. One was found in the Vatican, called Codex Vaticanus. The other was found at a monastery on the Sinai peninsula -- Codex Sinaiticus. Mind you, even earlier Greek manuscripts have been discovered since then, and they largely support the readings of these two.

I grew up with these two men being demonized -- Westcott and Hort. Books like the New Age Versions of the Bible seemed to think that they could undermine the newer versions of the Bible if they could malign Westcott and Hort (and apparently the translators of the NIV). This is called the ad hominem fallacy -- where you attack the people rather than making an actual argument.

But Westcott and Hort only systematized what most experts of the biblical text already thought at the time. And, as I mentioned, even earlier manuscripts have since been found.

8. I should note, there were some very educated hold outs in favor of the traditional Greek text, the "textus receptus" or "received text." In the late 1800s, John Burgon argued that the manuscripts Westcott and Hort most relied on were corrupted manuscripts. F. H.A. Scrivener argued similarly. In the mid-1900s, E. F. Hills wrote a book called The King James Defended that I already mentioned.

In this present time, there are Majority Text scholars who are quite knowledgeable of the manuscripts and who have some very clever arguments against the majority. Indeed, in this reactionary moment in history with so much information at our fingertips, I sense a possible resurgence of cleverly argued "Greek behind the King James" support. We are living in an upside down time, a decade of unreason and irrationality.

9. Let me return to my own pilgrimage. After I became committed to the truth rather than tradition, I still didn't know what to make of the manuscript situation. After all, Burgon could have been right that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were bad manuscripts. "Maybe that's why they have survived," it occurred to me. "Because no one used them."

Interestingly, modern manuscript studies that are based on computer analysis have seemed to undermine to some extent the families and grouping of manuscripts that I studied in college and seminary. [3] When I took a course in textual criticism with Bob Lyon at Asbury, we heard about the Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine manuscript traditions. 

In my mind, I reduced them to 1) manuscripts that were like Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, 2) manuscripts that were like Codex Bezae, including many Latin manuscripts, and 3) all the medieval manuscripts that pretty much read the same way. The first group, I would later concede, had readings that were most likely original.

But to be frank, I didn't put as much stock in it as many did. It seemed to me like some wanted to systematize things a little too much. It was more of a trendline than anything you could absolutely depend on.

Majority Text scholars like James Snapp argue extensively from quotations by the church fathers and from early translations of the New Testament into other languages. This is very clever. It is to say, "There may not be early Greek manuscripts that support the traditional reading, but here's an early quote of it from so and so, and here is an early Syriac manuscript with it." Of course, you have to do textual criticism on the manuscripts of the church fathers too. [4]

10. So, the manuscripts -- or external evidence -- did not convince me. The arguments were far too complicated, far too minute. I have found over the years that minutia is often a tool to try to undermine the most likely. "The evidence looks like it supports x, but let me bombard you with a web of intricate details that show it's really y." 

Much of what is going around in political circles these days falls into this category. The result is that you feel really smart with secret knowledge when really it's just a smokescreen to wiggle out of the most likely conclusions. And you can smirk at your "uninformed friends" who think x seems right.

It was not the external evidence, which was very strong, but what is called the "internal evidence" that ultimately convinced me to change my mind.

Internal evidence is based on common sense. The most likely original reading is the one that would explain where the other readings came from. For example, take 1 John 2:23: "Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either, but the one who acknowledges the Son has the Father as well." Some copies of 1 John only have the first part: "Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either."

Was there some evil copyist who deliberately chopped this verse off? Not likely. The easiest explanation is an "eye skip." Two lines in the manuscript ended with "the Father." You copy the first line, looking from the original to the new copy. When you look back, your eye goes to the second line instead of the first (because they both end in "the Father"). Without realizing it, you have left a whole line of text out.

If you understand the scenario, this makes perfect sense. In fact, if you have ever copied something, you may have done this yourself. Most of the variations among the manuscripts are simple mistakes like this one. There was no evil fiend involved -- unlikely for someone whose job is to copy the Bible. 

Here's another one. In later Greek, the letter upsilon and the letter epsilon were both pronounced the same. That means that the Greek for "our" and the Greek for "your" sounded exactly the same. So, it is no surprise that the original text of 1 John 1:4 is uncertain. Some manuscripts say "our joy" and others say "your joy." Clearly, some copyist misheard what word was being said because the two words sound the same.

11. It was thus common sense that won out in the end for me. Why would anyone remove the story of the woman caught in adultery? It is a magnificent story that most find to resonate deeply with the character of Jesus. It might even be based on a story that actually happened. It makes much more sense that it was added in as an oral tradition about Jesus in search of a home -- rather than a story someone took out very early in church history.

Westcott and Hort suggested two rules that are not absolutes but more like trends. "Choose the more difficult reading" as more likely to be original (the lectio difficilior). Why? Because copyists were more likely to try to "fix" the unclear than to mess up the clear. "Choose the shorter text" because material was more likely to be added for clarity than to be cut out (the lectio brevior). Again, the second one is less powerful than the first, but it does seem to work much of the time.

Take Mark 16:9-20. Verse 9 starts the chapter all over again in a different style. We had already heard about the women at the tomb. Mark 16:9 acts like the first 8 verses weren't even there, like the copyist stepped out to use the restroom while the first eight verses were being read. 

We can have intricate arguments about the manuscript evidence (although not the Greek ones -- you have to bring in the fathers and the versions because the Greek tradition for this ending being early is very weak). But these verses don't read like they belong there. They summarize the resurrection appearances of the other Gospels. They don't continue the train of thought from 16:1-8.

Apparently, someone tacked an existing summary of resurrection appearances from elsewhere onto Mark 16:8. Why? Because otherwise the chapter ends saying, "The women told no one because they were afraid." It's a weird way to end the Gospel. You can see that someone would want to cap that tooth. In fact, there is another shorter ending as well among the manuscripts.

So choose the reading as original that would best explain how the other readings came about. Choose the more difficult reading. Well, the more difficult reading is for it to have ended at 16:8 with the women telling no one. It's obvious why the other readings would have arisen. 16:8 is just a strange way to end the story. It seems incomplete.

So amid all the intelligent sounding, clever arguments to the contrary, informed common sense time and time again comes out in support of the scholarly consensus and the text used in modern versions. There is no conspiracy here. In fact, it makes perfect sense that the church smoothed out the Greek text as the Bible was increasingly read as part of the liturgy of worship. In the 300s, as Christianity becomes legal and the church begins to standardize doctrine and canon, the text of the Bible becomes standardized as well.

12. Near the end of my textual criticism class at Asbury, Dr. Lyon asked me if I was a "closet textus receptus man." I was still a little unsure, but I fell off the log on his side in the moment. He was of course well-known in scholarly circles for his work with Codex Ephremi Rescriptus. Over time, my confidence in the scholarly consensus would only increase. Again, not because of the manuscripts but because of common sense.

Let me reveal the effect this pilgrimage had on me. I feel like I am particularly gifted at seeing the big picture and seeing connections and patterns. I have seen this pattern over and over again. There is a tradition. It is something a group has its identity strongly wrapped around. Then someone comes along with new evidence or a new perspective that seems to go against the tradition. That person perhaps has studied the subject more thoroughly. Perhaps they are somewhat of an expert on it.

Conservatism is, in its root meaning, a resistance to change, often in the name of preserving truth. But in my opinion, it is also often resistance to new insight. It is often the elephant that Jonathan Haidt writes about in The Righteous Mind. [5] The elephant is going to go where it wants to go. And when the stability of your world is based on the status quo, you're going to want to stick with the status quo. This is why the young are typically more open to new ideas than the old -- they have less invested in tradition and the status quo.

So, some very intelligent traditionalists -- perhaps I might even call them sentimentalists -- go to town trying to explain away the new data or the new evidence. It is an identity-preserving dynamic. It is exactly what Thomas Kuhn has said that "normal science" does in the face of new scientific theories. [6] It is entirely predictable and often ingenious.

I would see this pattern so often as I continued my education that I could smell it a mile away. Instead of pursuing the evidence to its most likely conclusion, one's intelligence is applied to try to argue for the traditional position. In Jonathan Haidt's imagery, the elephant rider comes up with smart-sounding reasons for why the elephant is going in the right direction.

I've called it "cooking the books." It's making arguments that might even seem silly to someone with an open mind. When you're in an echo chamber in a bubble, people are not looking necessarily for good arguments. You just need any argument that will give you an excuse to continue thinking what you already think. I would see this pattern over and over in seminary and in the years beyond.

13. There really aren't a lot of huge textual issues like the ending of Mark or the woman caught in adultery in John. No one need worry about losing their faith over this question of the text. Indeed, one of my takeaways from this journey is that God must be focused on the message of the Bible, not the minute details of the text. 

Of course this goes against some of the teaching you hear about how meticulous the copyists of the Hebrew Bible were. I hate that sort of stuff because it sets people up for a faith crisis later -- when there was no need for it. The meticulous copyists were the Masoretes in the Middle Ages. From what I can tell, some earlier copyists were more like The Message in temperament. The "Western" text of Acts is way longer and for no ideological reason. Someone just added a mess of details.

I want to end with 1 John 5:7. The KJV of this verse is the most Trinitarian verse in the Bible. The problem is that there isn't a Greek manuscript before the 1400s that has it. It is never mentioned as far as we know in any of the Trinitarian debates of the 300s -- rather odd if it had existed at the time. Even the man behind the Greek text of the KJV -- Erasmus -- didn't think it was original.

There's nothing wrong with the content of the verse. It's good theology. It just wasn't at all likely in the original version of 1 John. That's what the evidence and common sense say. 

Modern versions aren't part of some conspiracy to get rid of the Trinity. It's just that sometimes the facts don't say what we want them to say. 

[1] Of course, that verse was about removing teaching from the scroll of Revelation. The Bible wasn't packaged together when those verses were written. The scroll of Revelation traveled on its own then. And it is about the message of Revelation, not individual words. 

This is another example of what I have called a pre-modern or unreflective reading of the Bible. Our understandable default is to read the Bible as it appears to us, not as it actually is.

[2] G. A. Riplinger, New Age Bible Versions: An Exhaustive Documentation of the Message, Men & Manuscripts Moving Mankind to the Antichrist's One World Religion (A. V.. 1993).

[3] For example, by scholars using the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method or CBGM. My good friend Matt Whidden is deeply involved in such studies.

[4] I have worked a little with the Passion Translation of the Gospels. Its paraphraser, Brian Simmons, seems to consider the Syriac version of the Gospels almost a direct line to Jesus himself. By calling it the Aramaic text, he essentially claims to get behind the Greek to Jesus himself. It also allows him to consider original many of the traditional verses absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts. But ultimately, he is just finding a way to give priority to later Syriac manuscripts.

[5] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013).

[6] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1962).

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1. The Memory Verse Approach

2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry

3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law 

5. An Easter Morning in Galatians

6.1 Adventures in the King James Version

5.1 An Easter Morning in Galatians

On Mondays, I'm writing on my journey with Scripture in college, seminary and beyond. I jumped the gun last week with the King James Version, missed a step. Backtracking this week to 1987. Previous posts at the bottom.
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1. There are three key pivot points in my spiritual pilgrimage. I've already mentioned one. It was an afternoon when I was ten years old at a February camp meeting when my conscience suddenly awakened. A period of about ten years of terror began when I struggled to find peace despite constantly praying for it. [1]

The second major pivot point in my spiritual journey happened on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1987. This was about a year after a relationship had fallen apart because of my self-doubt. Questions about the "standards" I have discussed was one of the symptoms. The woman I had dated returned to normal dress after the relationship ended.

While dress standards had been around me growing up, my parents had not emphasized them, so I'm not sure that they had really been very important to me before I went to college. As a man, I wasn't too restricted. It was more of something to which I assented. So now that it was personal, I couldn't see the meaning in them. Many of the rules of my context didn't make sense to me (like no dancing) even though I had no trouble keeping them. 

2. In retrospect, I wonder if my moral development was also working in the background. I totally agree with Søren Kierkegaard, Lawrence Kohlberg, and others that blind rule-keeping is a lower stage of moral thinking. In duty-oriented ethics, rules don't necessarily have to have meaning. Their meaning is in the fact that they are rules. 

This is where legalism can come in -- morality can simply become a checklist to do or not do. The rules become the goal rather than the meaning of the rules. In the hands of some personalities, we multiply rules because we like rules. We like structure. We like certainty. Although our understanding of the Pharisees is often a caricature, we know them especially for their penchant to reduce God's expectations to rules, subrules, sub-subrules, etc.

I had what I thought was a revealing conversation with my dad some time after I returned from my studies in England. I don't know what issue we were specifically discussing, but he finally exclaimed, "What don't you do?" (There were many answers I could have given him -- I don't murder, I don't steal). I'm sure we were talking about something that our branch of Wesleyanism didn't do that I now didn't have a moral problem with. Don't get me wrong -- my dad was a compassionate, reasonable man.

But it revealed that my father's church culture had programmed him to see morality primarily in terms of do's and don'ts. It was a hyper-duty based ethic. I wonder how many American Christians -- especially evangelicals -- think this way. It is a "law and order" mentality. It thrives on clarity, certainty, and concreteness. It requires less wrestling with the complexity of life or motives. Rather, it's thinking is, "This is the rule. Did you break it."

3. On Easter morning 1987, I felt compelled for some reason to read through the book of Galatians. I don't think I had ever done something like that. I read through a whole book of the Bible in one sitting -- in the atomized King James Version, no less.

As I read, I felt the Spirit telling me that I aligned far more with the Judaizers that Paul was fighting against than with Paul. (I should add, I had a very old perspective understanding of Paul at this time.) Paul was telling the Galatians that a right standing with God was a gift. It wasn't something you could earn by being good enough. God was looking for faith in Christ not works of law.

Galatians 5:2: "Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing." 

Interesting that it was considered important in my circles to have male children circumcised. This was part of our hermeneutic that didn't really differentiate the Old Testament from the New Testament. You applied it all equally (inconsistently). So even though Paul tells the Galatians not to get circumcised, we did it because the Israelites did, and somehow we read the Old Testament as if we were Israelites too.

Galatians 4:9-11: "Now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain."

Paul was not telling the Galatians that they needed to shape up and start keeping the Old Testament rules. He was, in effect, arguing for a heart-oriented approach. He was telling them they did not have to keep certain Old Testament rules. (I would now say the Israel-specific ones like circumcision, food laws, and sabbath observance.)

I would now categorize Paul's ethic (and Jesus') as a "virtue-based" ethic. It is an approach that says, "When your heart is right, your actions will be on the right track as well." It is a movement from who we are as Spirit-filled believers (being) to right action (doing). For sure, our ignorance can cause some malfunction in this process. But in theory, if we are led by the Spirit, we will walk by the Spirit (Gal. 5:16).

4. There was at that time a student on the campus of Central Wesleyan College (where I went to college), the daughter of a professor, who was perhaps the most Spirit-filled person I knew at the time. She had recently gotten back on track with her faith, and she exuded a contagious love for the Lord. As I reflected on Galatians, it occurred to me that here was someone who was far closer to the Lord than I was, and yet she didn't keep any of the rules I grew up with.

She had very short hair, for example. When one of my aunts cut her hair short, members of my family said she had "backed up on light," which meant that she had known better and chosen to rebel against God. This girl on campus wore jeans. She had earrings. And yet she clearly was filled with the Spirit.

In that sense, Galatians 5:22 was convicting. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." That sure didn't seem like a good description of most of the "entirely sanctified" holiness people I grew up with. [2] Me? Peace? Ha!!

Joy? That's not how I perceived them. "Love"? No, I can't say that that's the first word that came to me. "Peace," "kindness," "gentleness"? No, not really. Curmudgeon would have more been my impression. "Self-control" -- yes!! In gobs.

It would increasingly seem to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with my previous paradigm when the key indicators of the Spirit seemed to be absent in those in my world who most emphasized the Spirit. Those who most believed in entire sanctification seemed to me the least to fit the checklist.

5. That Easter Sunday was a turning point. It wasn't that the change would have been immediately noticeable. I kept keeping the "holiness" rules. Like I said, the holiness rules didn't really affect men very much anyway.

But you might call it a Protestant moment. Back to the Bible. I was re-orienting myself around Scripture in a new way. Now the question was, "What does Scripture actually say?" rather than "How can I interpret this verse in a way that agrees with my tradition?" 

The scientific thinking that had developed in high school and that I had pursued initially as a chemistry major at CWC came into play. [3] Gather evidence from Scripture. Form hypotheses about what it might mean. Test the hypothesis against the text. Refine your conclusion. It is basically the inductive Bible study method that I would learn at Asbury Seminary the next year.

A note of caution. It is a dangerous thing to be loosed from your childhood paradigm. This is why it is so important for children to be discipled well -- and with a reasonable form of faith. The training of a child is deeply ingrained on the psyche. It is a deep structure. It is intuitive, not rational. It is not easily shaken.

As I was being loosed from my childhood paradigm, it would not be easy to replace with something so deeply ingrained. You can believe something with your mind, but that is a fairly weak power over your life, despite what many think. Ideas can come and go easily. It's the deep, gut "beliefs" that direct our actions. They are more affective than cognitive. [4]

Perhaps part of what I'm saying is that you will take easy answers when it is your tribe, when you're in the bubble. Now I would increasingly need good reasons. Now I would need substance.

6. This was also the beginning of peace. The restlessness of soul that began that February afternoon in 1977 had lasted ten years. Insecurity about whether I was saved. "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned." "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned." "What if I can't remember a sin so I can confess it? Does that mean I can never be forgiven for it?" "Has the Lord come back?" "Where's my mother? Is she still here?" "Am I sanctified?" "Have I wanted sanctification enough?"

Some of this neurosis no doubt came from my brain development and general personality. But the Devil also used it with great delight.

Now as I started seminary, I was headed for days of peace and joy, some of the happiest days of my life. Although I loved my family, a cloud of oppression would come over my soul when I would visit home. Then the freedom of the Lord -- the freedom of Galatians -- would return after a day or too back at seminary. It was not a freedom to sin. It was the joy of the Lord. 

The one version of God -- unintended no doubt -- was a sheriff sitting there with his revolver just waiting to blow me away if I stepped out of line. The other was a God who was rooting for me to win and helped me get back up if I fell. The one god almost smiled with fiendish delight as I neared a cliff. He nudged Gabriel and said, "Watch this -- he's about to fall off." The other was a God who redirected me away from the cliff without me even knowing it. 

The one God said, "Mercy triumphs over judgment" (Jas. 2:13). The other was a god who couldn't control his temper because he was insecure -- just a big guy. He would blow up uncontrollably whenever someone stepped over an arbitrary line he drew just to test me. One was a God of love, the other a god of legalism. One was a God who could sympathize with our weaknesses (Heb. 4:15). The other had no time for anyone who wasn't perfect.

It was the difference between a mature God and a childish one who was less mature than I am. 

[1] I've also been working on at least two other sets of "life notes" including a more general one, Notes Along the Way. 

[2] I tell about my journey with entire sanctification in Notes Along the Way and in the preface to A Brief Guide to Biblical Holiness.

[3] Again, I discuss this pilgrimage in more detail in Notes Along the Way.

[4] I talk about this in other writing projects like I'm Right; You're Wrong: A Philosophical Pilgrimage. See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013) and James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016).

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1. The Memory Verse Approach

2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry

3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law 

10. Adventures in the King James Version

Back in January, I started once again to try to capture my hermeneutical journey. Reviewing what I wrote so far, I feel like it's turned out pretty well. I think I might now continue plugging through this journey on Mondays.

Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach

2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry

3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law
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1. As I've mentioned, I grew up reading the King James Version. It didn't seem too hard to understand, although in retrospect I'm sure I would have understood a great deal more if I had been reading something like the New Living Translation (NLT) or The Message. Of course they didn't exist at the time. 

The main alternatives in my youngest years were the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the Good News Bible New Testament (GNB). In the late 70s, the full New International Version (NIV) came out. 

The RSV was in a different social plane from mine -- Methodists and higher church folk. I wasn't exposed to it until seminary. It was the version used at Asbury Seminary when I went there in 1984. My grandfather Schenck so despised th GNB that he used it to even out his bed, I heard.

When the NIV came out, a friend of my family pitched it to the morning Bible study (it might have been a special afternoon meeting) at Frankfort Camp Meeting. Paul Sebree had gone to Frankfort with my mother. My dad returned from the session a bit disgruntled. In typical fashion, Sebree had suggested parents were putting their children's souls in danger to have them read the King James when something so much more understandable was available.

I believe my parents gave me my Thompson Chain Reference KJV as a high school graduation present in 1984. I took it to college and tried to read a chapter a day. It was fairly easy going until I would get to Exodus 21. Then what was obscure legislation commenced, cubits and all. The prophets were also tough sleding for me since I didn't know much about the context. I would read until I got to a verse quoted in the New Testament and then, suddenly, Jesus was there in a verse. Then it returned to the incomprehensible.

When I got to Exodus 21, I would often lapse in my daily reading for some time until I managed to push through Leviticus. I do believe I was attention deficit, although I was never diagnosed. It was excruciatingly difficult to hold my attention. I didn't discover the focusing effect of coffee until England, unfortunately. 

In retrospect, Dr. Sebree probably had a point about the NIV, although he presented his case abrasively, as was his style, as I recall.

2. I remained a KJV advocate in college. My mother began to feed me resources, as she increasingly came under the spell of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale and its radio station. (Those were also the days of the rise of the Christian bookstore.) One was Edward F. Hills' The King James Version Defended. I also had a copy of Ted Letis' compilation on the Majority Text when it came out in 87.

This was the first of an unfortunate pattern where my mother would feed me fundamentalist literature that I was eager to receive but that eventually I came to conclude was not correct. She thought I was rebelling, but that was not the case. I remained uncertain for some time about many of these things. But eventually, you have to make up your mind.

I also didn't have a guide into this literature. I have often wished that I could go back in time and explain what I was trying to read to myself. I was recently complimented for having a gift at taking difficult concepts and being able to break them down so that they are more understandable to the uninitiated. I will take that compliment for it is born of the difficulty of trying to grasp so many hard things myself.

In my final year at Central Wesleyan College, Dr. Bob Black came. I think he was hands down the best professor I had at CWC, although I loved them all. I had him for the whole year for church history. In the fall of 1986, I wrote my final paper arguing for the corruption of the manuscripts (the handwritten copies) behind modern versions of the Bible.

3. I probably should take a moment to explain. We do not have any of the original copies of the Bible. All we have are copies of copies of copies. The oldest copies of New Testament books go back to the 100s and there aren't many of them, and none of them are the whole New Testament. The oldest copies of the Old Testament go back to the 100s BC.

This is nothing to worry about, in my opinion. Everything we know suggests that the manuscripts we have are pretty reliable. There are variations among these manuscripts -- handwritten copies, but they leave us with a relatively small degree of uncertainty. No doctrine is in danger (although the KJV of 1 John 5:8 would help a lot with the Trinity if it were original).

The majority of manuscripts date to the Middle Ages, AD900 and later. These all tend to read similarly and support the Greek behind the KJV. The Greek text behind the KJV is sometimes called the "textus receptus" or the "received text." Sometimes this tradition is also called the Majority Text because most manuscripts read this way. [1]

Case closed? Probably not.

The reason is that the oldest manuscripts tend to read a little differently than these medieval manuscripts. The reason modern versions of the Bible tend to agree against the KJV text is because most of them follow the older manuscripts. There's a famous rule of "textual criticism," which is the science of trying to determine what the original text said. The rule goes like this: "Manuscripts must be weighed, not counted." More on all this in a moment. 

4. My thesis in Dr. Black's class was creative. The pro-KJV crowd likes to blame modern versions on two manuscripts from the 300s, "Codex Sinaiticus" and "Codex Vaticanus." [2] To be fair, Bishop B. F. Westcott and Fenton Hort in the late 1800s had effected a revolution in the text of the New Testament using these two manuscripts at the center of their arguments. I had read somewhere that these two manuscripts might have been part of an initiative by Eusebius under Constantine's charge to have 50 copies of the Bible made.

Here comes the creativity. Eusebius and Constantine argued for a compromise position on the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea in AD325. (By the way, this month and year is the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea) They suggested that perhaps Christ was of a similar substance (homoiousios) to God the Father, while the orthodox position would end up being that he is of the same substance (homoousios).

So, argued I, these "heretics" were behind Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Therefore, they were bad manuscripts. Therefore, modern versions of the Bible are bad. Brilliant!

I received an ever so kind note from Dr. Black on my paper. The problem with my argument is that the overwhelming majority of the variants in the manuscripts have nothing to do with theology (and absolutely nothing to do with the homoousios/homoiousios debate). The vast majority of variations are actually pretty mundane, like spelling errors or omissions because of eye skips. I had made a clever argument. Just not a good one...

[1] There is technically a difference between the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus. The story of the Greek text of the Textus Receptus is a fun one involving some clever entrepreneurship. This is specifically the text that was used in 1611 to create the KJV New Testament. 

Although they are very similar in content, the concept of the Majority Text distances the debate from the historical particularities of the KJV story. More or less, the idea is that the majority of manuscripts have always been right. All we need do is count them, and we will know the text of the Bible that God chose to preserve. This sounds compelling at first, although I'll argue that, in the end, it just doesn't seem to be the same as the original text.

[2] A codex is a book form. Prior to this point in history, books tended to be on scrolls. However, it can be argued that the desire to have all the books of the Bible together caused a movement toward the book format.

9. The New Testament and Old Testament Law

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach

2. Adventures in Interpretation

3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context

5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

7. Keeping the Sabbath
8. The Sabbath as Conviction
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11. This is where we step back and talk about hermeneutics. In the pre-modern, unreflective interpretation of my childhood, the entire Bible pretty much was flattened out in its meaning. Instruction in Deuteronomy might apply directly to today just as much as a verse from Philippians. There was sometimes little distinction between the "old" covenant and the "new" covenant. 

Our tradition did process some verses differently. We could eat pork chops without a thought, for example (Lev. 11:7-8). But a family member once suggested a mustache was inappropriate because of Leviticus 19:27: "Do not mar the corners of your beard." 

Why was one binding and the other not? I don't think the reasons were very well thought out. We were just following our traditions which made sense to us because we grew up with them.

Someone might say, "The prohibition on pork was part of the ceremonial law, which Jesus did away with. We are not under law but under grace" (Rom. 6:14). But then my mother might say, "Jesus said that he did not come to destroy the law. Not one jot or tittle will pass from the law" (Matt. 5:17-18). 

I needed a consistent hermeneutic. How can we tell what still applies directly to us and what doesn't? What is "all time," and what is "that time"?

Sacrifices
12. I have resonated with something that G. B. Caird of Oxford used to teach. Start with what seems clear and then move toward what is unclear. So let's start with sacrifices: Leviticus 1-5. The way for a Christian to apply these chapters to today seems very clear.

I don't know of any Christian groups today that offer sacrifices (although never say never). There are no Jewish groups that offer sacrifices today -- only the Samaritans, who still exist as a people group. I have it on eyewitness accounts that some Jews have accrued some red heifers for a time when the temple is re-constructed. But let's establish with clarity before it happens that there is NO PLACE for reconstituted sacrifices from a Christian biblical perspective.

Why? Because of the book of Hebrews clearly says so. "With one sacrifice, Christ has perfected forever those who are being sanctified" (Heb. 10:14). The chapter begins by saying that the Levitical sacrifices never were able to perfect those who offered them (10:1). If they could have, they would have stopped being offered (10:2). 10:4 goes one step further: "It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins."

Let that sink in. Hebrews implies that not a single Old Testament sacrifice was actually effective in itself to take away sins! They were rather foreshadowings of the one effective sacrifice of Christ. Without us, none of the people of Israel were able to be perfected -- not even Moses (Heb. 11:40). Similarly, Hebrews 7:19 says, "the Law perfected nothing."

Let's be very clear here in case some kooky Christian group should pop up saying the contrary. To say that sacrifices are still needed or could be valid in some way today would be an affront to Christ. Hebrews is definitive. No other sacrifice was EVER effective in itself to take away sins. NOT A SINGLE animal sacrifice was ever anything but a pointer to Christ. Anything else would be blasphemy because it would negate the sacrificial work of Christ.

13. This issue is pretty easy for Christians, including for those who see a strong continuity between the Old Testament and today. Old Testament sacrifices were symbols of the sacrifice of Christ. They foreshadowed his one offering. They were calls for a raincheck. They were promises, and Christ was the fulfillment. 

In this way, the sacrifices of Leviticus were fully valid, but they were not meant to be permanent. We do not have to literally offer them today because their true meaning was found in Jesus' death on the cross. We "keep" them by trusting in the atoning death of Christ.

However, let me be clear about something else. No one in the Old Testament understood this plan. In fact, I doubt many of the earliest Christians understood Christ's death to be a full replacement of the temple sacrificial system. Paul offers a sacrifice in Acts 21:26. I have argued that it was not until after the temple was destroyed that the scope of Christ's sacrifice really began to sink in. 

I know an Old Testament professor who once suggested that, if you had told the author of Leviticus about Jesus, he would have said, "Of course, that's what these sacrifices were about." Let me say that I cannot imagine that would be the case in the slightest. In fact, the thought seems ludicrous to me. 

Sacrifices were pervasive in the ancient world. While some prophets rightly indicted those who used them as an excuse for unrighteousness (e.g., 1 Sam. 15:22-23; Isa. 1:11-17; Jer. 7:21-23; Hos. 6:6; Amos 5:21-24; Mic. 6:6-8), it's hard to imagine that any of these prophets imagined sacrifices would ever go away.

It makes sense to us that they are no longer necessary because we grew up with this understanding. No one questions it in the church today and not even Jews offer sacrifices. It is an "easy issue" because it isn't debated in our traditions today. But it was not an easy issue in the first century, and it wouldn't have been at all in Old Testament times. However, given Hebrews, it should be an easy issue for biblical Christians.

It does illustrate a fundamental hermeneutical principle. From a Christian perspective, the New Testament provides more final answers and more precise understandings than the Old Testament. In this case, Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament instruction, and we no longer need to offer animal sacrifices.

Israel-Specific Law
14. Many Christians make a distinction between the "ceremonial law" and the "moral law" of the Old Testament. Bible scholars regularly point out that this is an anachronistic distinction. Jews did not consider circumcision or the food laws to be "ceremonial." Jews kept the whole Law because it was all part of God's covenant with Israel.

How then can we differentiate the parts of the Old Testament that Paul seems to consider less binding from the parts he considers fully binding? Suffice it to say, there are countless scholarly books written on this subject. I was present at a multi-day colloquium once that tried to solve the question of "Paul and the Law." They failed to come to a consensus.

Here's how I have come to parse Paul on the Law. Paul himself tells us that "to the Jews I became as a Jew that I might gain Jews. To those under the Law I became as someone under the Law (though I am not under the Law) in order that I might gain those under the Law" (1 Cor. 9:20). Similarly he says, "to those without the Law I became as one without the Law (although I am not without the law of God but I am under the law of Christ) in order that I might gain those without the Law" (9:21).

We have to be careful because Paul's words are almost always "vectored," by which I mean he presents his positions to move his audiences in particular directions. He is a good rhetorician. He puts things in a certain way to try to have a certain effect. For example, I suspect that Paul largely observed the Jewish Law himself (cf. Acts 21:24, also vectored in the opposite direction).

But the key is this. For Paul, the mission to the Gentiles had complexified the question of the Law. He was furious at Antioch when Peter wouldn't eat with Gentiles over fears they would defile him (Gal. 2:11-14). These experiences were formative. As long as they weren't sexually immoral, Paul had no time for those Jewish believers who wouldn't associate with Gentile believers. To him, someone who had kept the Law so scrupulously as a Pharisee, they were hypocrites.

The distinction was not between the ceremonial and the moral for him. It was between aspects of the Law that applied to both Jew and Gentile and those commands that got in the way of the Gentile mission. I call the latter "Israel-specific law." Circumcision? It got in the way. It was Israel-specific. Gentiles were justified by faith and didn't need to be circumcised. In fact, he told the Gentile Galatians they would fall from grace if they did it (Gal. 5:4).

I suspect that what Paul was doing was more or less giving full status to those Gentile God-fearers who had faith in Christ. God-fearers didn't need to be circumcised. God-fearers did not need to observe the Jewish food laws. When Paul determined they could be justified by faith, they did not need to do anything more than they had done before as God-fearers. Meanwhile, for Paul, Jews who kept those particulars did not have any greater status before God because faith was the standard.

This became the normative position for Gentile Christianity. Mark 7:19 is a parenthetical remark from Mark that reflects this perspective of the Pauline mission toward Gentiles ("all foods are clean"). (Matthew, by the way, did not include that parenthetical remark if it was in the copy of Mark he used.) Gentiles were not expected to keep the Jewish food laws.

Christ's Law
15. Although Paul does not systematize his thinking, there are clearly parts of the Jewish Law that he considered binding on Gentile Christians. For example, there isn't a sexual prohibition from Leviticus 18 that Paul mentions that he did not consider to be binding on the Gentile church. What makes the difference? He doesn't explain. It may seem obvious to us, but it probably seemed a little arbitrary to some first-century Christians that he would consider the sexual commands binding but the Sabbath commands not.

Paul did see the love command as the essence of all Christian ethics (Rom. 13:10), as did Jesus (Matt. 22:37-40). Perhaps that is what he means by "Christ's law" in 1 Cor. 9: 21. I suspect something of this sort is what he means in Romans 2:14 when he talks about Gentiles who keep the Law even though they don't have the Law by nature like Jews do. They weren't circumcised so by definition they didn't keep the Law, so Paul must have some essence of the Law in view rather than the full Law.

The bottom line is that he does expect all believers to keep a certain core of the Law. He not only considers this core universal, but you will not make it to the kingdom if you persist in not keeping these key elements (cf. 1 Cor. 6:9-10). Most if not all of this core correlates to the love command for him.

16. So what do we make of Matthew 5:17: "Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill." If you read 5:17-20 in isolation from the rest of the chapter, you might come away with the way many have read these verses, namely, that God requires us to keep all the commandments of the Old Testament.

But the rest of the chapter explains what Jesus means. For example, simply not killing doesn't fulfill the commandment. If you hate, you've violated it. Similarly, not doing the act of adultery (or getting together with another woman by divorce) does not fulfill the commandment if you lust in your heart or discard your wife legally because you want another woman.

This is not simply a matter of keeping each commandment even harder. With regard to keeping vows, Jesus says not even to make them. This is not a deepening of the third commandment. It removes the very making of vows in the first place. It changes the assumptions of the command. 

Even further, Jesus contradicts instruction to Israel to take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Deut. 19:21). While Deuteronomy tells Israel to show no pity, Jesus tells individuals to turn the other cheek. He contrasts his teaching with the commandment.

It seems clear to me that fulfilling the Law in Matthew 5 doesn't mean keeping every "least" commandment in the Law (like not trimming beards, not eating pork, circumcising). It seems to mean loving your neighbor (and enemy) down to the least matter (Matt. 5:43-48). Once again, the New Testament gives the definitive verdict on how to keep the Old Testament Law.

17. Let me sum up the two big hermeneutical principles that were developing as I processed the Bible in my final years of college. The first is that every word of the Bible was first written to ancient audiences. The first meanings were meanings from their world in their languages and in their contexts and situations. Not a word of the Bible was originally written to me.

That means that I am always forced to process the distance between that time and my time. Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it has a different meaning today than it did them. Simply applying the words to today blindly can result in everything from the bizarre (veil head coverings) to that which is contrary to the trajectory of the kingdom (slavery).

The second principle is that, from a Christian perspective, the New Testament provides a key lens on the Old Testament, although thus far was have only talked about the Law. This fact suggests that we cannot securely apply the Old Testament directly to today until we have taken the New Testament into account. 

The application of the Bible to today must first "integrate" the biblical material itself into a biblical theology. The application of Scripture should come from "What does the Bible as a whole say?" far more than "What does this individual verse say?"

These insights took time to develop. No doubt as I return to my personal narrative you will see some of the process that led to these fuller hermeneutical conclusions. Let me return now to a key event that took place in my final semester of college.

8. Sabbath as Conviction

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
7. Keeping the Sabbath
_______________________
7. So should we follow the Seventh Day Adventists and start meeting on Saturdays, the seventh day of the week? 

Here's where we get to the crucial part. In Colossians 2:16, Paul and Timothy tell the Colossians not to let anyone judge them because of their non-observance of laws relating to "food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath." The mention of the Sabbath suggests that the "philosophy" that Paul and Timothy are warning about is a Jewish one or at least a pseudo-Jewish one. From the description, it is more religious than philosophy as we think of it.

What do Paul and Timothy tell this overwhelmingly Gentile congregation (cf. 2:11)? He tells them not to let anyone condemn them if they do not keep the food laws or the Sabbath as the Jews do. That is to say, he does not require Gentile believers to keep the Jewish Sabbath.

Let that sink in. They don't say, "You don't have to observe Saturday specifically, but be sure to take one day of rest to keep the Ten Commandments." They don't say, "Keep the principle of the Sabbath although you don't have to keep the letter." Paul simply tells the Gentile Colossians that they are not obligated to keep the Sabbath.

8. The Wesleyan Discipline used to have a statement in the Special Directions about "merchandizing on the Sabbath." Again, it was moved from membership requirements at some point to this special section so that the values of the traditionalists remained on the books, but the rule was not technically required. Clever politics again. 

(Again, mind you, the Sabbath was never Sunday in the Bible, so we never kept the biblical Sabbath in our history. This rule was about Sunday, which is never the Sabbath in Scripture.)

I was present at the General Conference where that language was completely removed. There was a brief rabbinic moment. A person representing the older holiness wing of the church stood up and said, "I wonder what Nehemiah would say about what we are doing given how strongly he forbid Israel from buying and selling on the Sabbath."

Then someone else stood up and read from Romans 14:5-6: "One person considers one day above another. Another person considers every day the same. Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind. The one who minds the day minds it to the Lord." The context of this statement is Paul talking about how Christians with different convictions should get along with each other. Clearly, matters of the Jewish Law are under discussion, especially the food laws.

Romans 14 won the day at the General Conference. The prohibition on merchandizing on the Sabbath was removed from The Discipline

9. Paul's instruction in Romans 14 was to 1) operate on the basis of faith and giving glory to God and 2) be fully convinced. You can be wrongly convinced, of course (14:22). 

So one person is truly and fully convinced of what God requires of them. (Some people no doubt fool themselves or try to get away with things, but God is not fooled. That's God's business to sort out.) Then, another person is truly and fully convinced of something else. They both will stand individually before God.

So one person -- probably Jewish -- believes he or she must keep the kosher food laws. No pork. No blood. No eel. Another believer -- probably Gentile -- wants to eat pork. "Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind." Both are equally spiritual in God's eyes if they are truly operating from faith.

Similarly, one person -- probably Jewish -- believes he or she must set aside sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday as a Sabbath. They will not work on this day. They will not buy or sell on this day. No problem, Paul says. "Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind." 

But another person -- probably Gentile -- treats every day as God's day. They give every day to the glory of God. They live for the Lord on every day. They do not set aside a Sabbath or a special day of rest without work. Paul considers this person of equal spirituality to the other person if he or she is truly operating from faith.

Romans 14 indicates that two people can do exactly the same thing and one be sinning while the other isn't. The key is whether the action proceeds from faith (Rom. 14:23). One person does not set aside the Jewish Sabbath but does so fully convinced that it is not required of him or her and in full faith, giving every day to the Lord equally. He or she is not sinning. 

Another doubts significantly. He or she also does not keep the Sabbath but deep down really believes they should. He or she is not truly convinced and is actually resisting the Lord. That person is sinning.

10. On a side note, as someone who struggled with doubt, I don't think that Paul had the kind of navel-gazing in mind that I used to do when he talks about not having faith. James' comments on the "double-minded man" were once torture to me (Jas. 1:6-8). However, I believe hyper-introspection is largely a modern phenomenon, perhaps a hangover from the Romantic era of the late 1700s/early 1800s. 

I suspect Paul and James would look at young hyper-introspective Ken as crazy. "What's wrong with you man?" Being double-minded, I suspect, was about having clearly divided loyalties, not about neurotic introspection. Introspective doubts are doubts about yourself, while the doubts Paul and James have in mind are doubts about serving God.

11. I had a Sabbath discussion once with someone from my holiness background and presented what seems to me the clear teaching of Paul. There are no passages in the New Testament that instruct believers to keep the Sabbath. In fact, Jesus himself was criticized for not keeping the Sabbath the way his opponents thought it should be kept. His response was that he was Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28).

Mind you, I assume that most Jewish Christians -- including Paul -- largely continued to observe the Sabbath. But it seems to me that Gentile believers felt less constrained to keep it. And Paul does not seem to have put any pressure on them to keep it.

In the discussion I had with someone, the other person noted that the Sabbath commandment goes back to creation (Exod. 20:11). Doesn't that imply that it is universal, that it is built into the universe?

My response? "I know. Isn't it crazy? Paul doesn't care." 

That is to say, it doesn't seem to be of any concern to Paul that he is telling Gentile believers that they do not have to keep one of the Ten Commandments. It doesn't seem to bother him that, in a real sense, he is making the keeping of the fourth commandment culturally or individually relative. If you are a Jew, keep it. If you are not, it's a matter of personal conviction.

This seems to me the clear meaning of the text. Only our own faulty assumptions make it difficult. Paul doesn't seem to care. Whether Gentiles keep the Jewish Sabbath is a matter of personal conscience and conviction for him.

11. This is where we step back and talk about hermeneutics... 

7. Keeping the Sabbath

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
_______________________
1. I've already shared a bit about my family's theology of the Sabbath growing up. First, we understood Sunday to be the Sabbath. We certainly went to Sunday School, morning and evening services on Sunday. We did not believe you should have a job on Sunday, and we did not buy or sell on Sunday to cause others to have to work. We didn't have a problem with cooking on Sunday.

In our family, we did not watch TV on Sunday, although exceptions could be made. We didn't generally throw a baseball or do sports on Sunday. It was to be set aside as a fairly serious day. We often took a nap on Sundays, which we called the "Wesleyan hour" after a long-running Wesleyan radio program on Sunday afternoons.

Occasionally, we would travel on Sundays, although this was unusual. We could eat out on such trips because "the ox was in the ditch" (Luke 14:5). After I was married, my dad knew that we did not have any convictions against eating out on Sunday. A couple times when Angie prepared a meal for us all on Sunday we kind of felt like my Dad was disappointed that we weren't planning to eat out. After all, why miss an allowed exemption to eat out on Sunday when you can? We chuckled about that. It's like some family members who didn't believe in having a TV but sure seemed to enjoy watching our TV when they came over.

2. I didn't really struggle too much with this set of rules. I did feel bad to miss the television premiere of Star Wars and Star Trek and other movies when they premiered on TV. You see, we weren't allowed to go to movies, so to this day I haven't seen E.T. or other famous movies of my childhood. In my last year of college, it became possible to rent movies and watch them on VHS. I'm still not sure I've seen the first Star Wars all the way through -- or the first Star Trek. An older lady at church loved Star Trek and somehow got a cassette tape of the first movie from the cinema. I listened to that thing a number of times.

Apart from a class trip to see animated Cinderella in the fifth grade (my mother went with me as a chaperone), the first movie I ever saw in a cinema was The Dream Team in 1989. I felt a little uneasy going to the movies then. I think it had been moved to the Special Directions of the Wesleyan Church by then and had become a suggestion not to go rather than a membership requirement. That was a clever political move the denomination made in those days. Rather than get into a direct fight with ultraconservatives over an old tradition, they just put it in the Special Directions section. That way it still felt like it was a requirement without it really being a requirement.

There obviously isn't a verse in the Bible about not going to movies. It was one of our "traditions of the elders" (cf. Mark 7:3). If many conservatives in my background didn't think you should own a TV, they certainly didn't think you should go to movies. I'm sure it was felt that movies depicted lifestyles that were inappropriate. 

Entertainment itself probably smelled of sin to some. After all, it was pleasurable in a self-oriented way. It could involve comedy, and sometimes I fear it was hard for some to distinguish between seriousness and holiness. Some probably thought it a waste of time when you could be doing something helpful or worthwhile. 

I imagine there were even some who weren't sure whether fiction was appropriate for a Christian. Is fiction lying? After all, it is a story that didn't actually happen. Don't tell Jesus that with his parables. A parable is a short fictional story, after all. Upon posing this fact, I've had some people respond, "How do we know the parables weren't real stories?" 

How do we get off into such craziness? Just because a story did not happen in history doesn't mean it's lying or even that it's not true. Good grief. Everyone knows it isn't something that happened in history. No one is deceived! Fictional stories teach us all kinds of truths. The story Nathan the prophet told David wasn't a story that actually happened, but it told a truth so powerfully that David repented. 

4. It's worth remembering that all these debates were our version of the Jewish traditions of the elders. Like good rabbis, holiness folk debated what made you unclean and what didn't. When VCRs came out, I heard that holiness folk debated whether you could have a TV if you didn't watch anything but good videos using a VCR. For example, if you only used the TV to watch Gaither videos, was it ok to have the equipment then? Was the machine intrinsically unclean or did the things you watch on it make it unclean? Sounds a lot like Romans 14.

Sunday meals at camp meetings were a wonderful example of holiness "Mishnah" (the name for the collection of Jewish oral traditions on keeping the Law first written down about AD200). On the one hand, you weren't supposed to buy or sell on Sundays. But you wanted people to drive in from all over to come to Sunday worship. How would they eat if they didn't know anyone with a cabin there?

The solution was a "free will offering." You were allowed to give on Sunday -- it wasn't actually buying a meal or selling one. So a man would sit there and take "donations" (with a suggested amount). Wesleyan guilt did the rest. People gave a donation for their meals that, coincidentally, was what they would otherwise have been charged.

Another important concept I already mentioned was to "abstain from all appearance of evil." This idea came from the King James of 1 Thessalonians 5:22. The verse was taken to mean that you should not do anything that even could be interpreted as doing the wrong thing. For example, if someone sees you go into the cinema, you might be going to see Cinderella, but someone might think you're going in to see something seedy or violent. 

"Abstaining from the appearance of evil" meant not going at all so no one would even think you were going to the movies to watch something bad. The same with owning a TV. You didn't want to tempt yourself to watch something bad, and the very association of the TV with bad things meant you shouldn't have one.

Or if you go into a restaurant that has a bar (like Applebees), someone might think that you are going in to drink even if you aren't (see also 1 Cor. 8:10). Bowling alleys were frowned on because people smoked a lot in there, and they didn't seem like the right kind of people. People might think you were smoking or drinking, so don't go so they don't see an "appearance" of you doing evil. In more recent times, many bowling alleys have become less smokey, and it was interesting to think of my dad going bowling with other people from his church in Lakeland in retirement.

Of course, 1 Thessalonians 5:22 didn't actually mean anything like this. A better translation would be "Stay away from every form of evil." The idea is to abstain from every kind of evil not anything that even looks like it might be evil.

5. In contrast to all the "traditions of the elders" that were part of my holiness background, there actually is a good deal of biblical teaching on the Sabbath. Exodus 20:8-11 told the Israelites to set the Sabbath day apart as holy. What did that mean? It meant not to work on the Sabbath (20:9). No one in your household was supposed to work either (20:10).

Not working on the Sabbath was a big deal in much of the Old Testament. A man gets stoned to death in Numbers 15 for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Nehemiah 10 and 13 give stern commands to Israel not to buy or sell on the Sabbath.

It is fascinating to me that, today, everyone in my Wesleyan circles believes that observing a Sabbath is important but 1) it doesn't necessarily matter which day it is, 2) it is often associated with setting aside a day of worship more than a day of rest (although there has been a "rest" movement in recent decades), and 3) it doesn't usually involve any prohibition on buying or selling. Given how many rules I grew up with around the Sabbath -- and my own struggle through them -- I find these contemporary practices hermeneutically sloppy.

6. First, Sunday is never equated with the Sabbath in Scripture. That is to say, Christians are not keeping the Old Testament Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath, when we worship or set aside Sunday. The Seventh Day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists are half right. I have always said that the Seventh Day Adventists are often right about something they observe in the biblical text. They're just wrong in the application. They find minority texts and then go with them instead of the ones the majority of Christians have focused on for two thousand years.

Sunday is the Lord's Day. It is the day that Christians gather together to celebrate Jesus' resurrection. Every Sunday is a little Easter. John of Patmos had his vision on the Lord's Day (Rev. 1:10). As far as I can tell, it was a work day in the New Testament. I picture some early Christians meeting at dawn on the Lord's Day, and I picture local assemblies meeting in the evening for a meal together (the Lord's supper, cf. 1 Cor. 11:17-34).

Since the Bible itself never transfers or equates Sunday to the Sabbath, this is an "outside the Bible" interpretation. It is a Puritan development in recent centuries. It is a piece of modern Mishnah, a modern tradition of the elders. The early church fathers did not consider the Jewish Sabbath obligatory (Didache, Justin Martyr) or even rejected it (e.g., Epistle of Barnabas). As we will see, the New Testament did not consider it obligatory either, especially for Gentile believers.

Equating the two reflects a common pattern among Christians where we ascribe something we practice to Scripture when it isn't actually stated in Scripture. It reflects an unreflective of reading of the Bible where we insert our assumptions into the text when the text doesn't state them. We "glue" pieces of the Bible together and say they're the Bible when in fact we are providing the glue from outside the Bible, from our traditions or our minds.

7. So should we follow the Seventh Day Adventists and start meeting on Saturdays, the seventh day of the week? ...

6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I

4. So what was 1 Corinthians 11 really about? 

We know that the central problem of the Corinthian church was disunity (1:10). They were divided into various factions. Some of the original believers there might be called the "Paul" group because they were loyal to him and his authority. But there were apparently others who used Apollos as an excuse to disregard Paul's instructions. Apollos had come to disciple the community after Paul and no doubt took slightly different approaches to various issues -- just like your pastors vary a little from one to the next.

Here are some of the lines of disunity at Corinth. Some wealthy individuals apparently got drunk at the Lord's Supper while others went hungry. Some were taking others to court. Some may have wanted to use Jesus as an excuse to divorce. Tongues speakers perhaps thought they were spiritually superior to others who didn't speak in tongues. Some had no problem eating at pagan temples while others found this practice highly problematic. 

Welcome to the church at Corinth!

1 Corinthians 11 arguably has to do with disorderly worship at Corinth, a theme Paul will explore in more detail in chapters 12-14. In chapter 14, Paul sets down rules for the exercise of spiritual gifts. One prophecy at a time. One speaking in tongues at a time but only if there is an interpreter. No more than two or three in a gathering.

5. The situation in chapter 11 relates to the social awkwardness of men and women in close quarters -- especially with wives praying and prophesying in the worship. Remember that they gathered in house churches. We can imagine that this was a sexually tense situation, with men and women together in unusual proximity.

Paul's goal in 1 Corinthians 11, I would argue, is not only to reduce disorder but to reduce the sexual tension by making sure everything is "in its place." Because the dynamics have everything to do with the cultural situation, the specifics don't translate directly to today. What translates to today are 1) removing barriers to worship, including the full participation of women in worship and 2) not creating an environment conducive to adultery.

How does he do this? By making sure that the wives in the assembly wear their hair veils. This would likely have been odd to do in a home -- especially for the matron of the house. But the hair veil served as a kind of wedding ring indicating that a woman was "taken." Additionally, it was an instrument of modesty. 

We've already mentioned that different cultures have different thresholds for sexual attraction. Dresses in the 1800s went nearly to the ground. If a woman in a dress going to the knees had walked around Victorian England, she would have raised lots of eyebrows by showing some leg.

Women's hair was apparently quite enticing in certain Jewish circles of the first century. In the Jewish novel, Joseph and Asenath (dating to the first or second century AD), the widow Asenath begins to wear a hair veil when she remarries Joseph. The veil thus indicated that a woman was married.

In the worship at Corinth, the covering put the situation into order. Now, when a wife prayed or prophesied in worship, her hair veil made her modest in the face of the other husbands in the congregation (not to mention God and the angels, who were putatively male -- you don't want angels lusting after you like they did in the days of Noah). "Keep your eyes to yourself," it said. "I'm married."

The hair veil thus gave authority to the wife to pray and prophesy in the presence of other men and the angels. As a quick sidenote, you'll notice that I am speaking extensively about wives rather than women in general. Unmarried women did not wear the hair veil. The word for women in these passages (including 1 Timothy 2) arguably should be translated wives because women were not normally conceptualized as free agents in the culture like they are today. Most of the women in the congregation would have been "women-as-wived."

6. Let's skim the passage with this background in view. First, Paul assumes that Christ is the head of the man and the man is the head of the woman (11:3). He is affirming the cultural pattern of his day to establish order in worship.

There is some debate over whether "head" (kephale) means authority or source in the New Testament, including here. I am sympathetic to the source argument, and it has some evidence in 11:8 and Ephesians 4:15-16. This idea of the husband as the nourisher and origin of the wife thus has some textual basis.

However, the likelihood that this headship imagery has some background in Aristotle pushes me in the other direction. In Aristotle's Politics 1254b10-20, he sets down a structure for the home VERY reminiscent of Colossians 3:18-4:1 and Ephesians 5:21-6:9. There is thus nothing distinctively Christian about the household structure here. It is exactly what everyone thought. It is only when Paul moves in the direction of the value of the wife, slave, and child that he is being distinctively Christian.

(I might add that in Plato's Republic, the head symbolizes the rulers of society, so we can't argue that the notion of the head as authority was not present in the background.)

So the household structure in this passage is just as cultural as the wearing of hair veils. I sense that many egalitarians -- who have not lived as I have under the implementation of the teaching on hair length -- have a subconscious impulse to try to make as much in this passage directly applicable to today as possible. So while the hair length and covering can be assigned to the cultural domain, there is a hesitancy to recognize that the headship language is cultural as well.

Yet, as I have indicated, this structure comes from Aristotle and Hellenistic culture. You won't find it articulated in the Old Testament. More importantly, it pulls against the spiritual equality that is a fundamental implication of the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:17; Gal. 3:28).

Paul is trying to hold both things in tension in 1 Corinthians 11. Women can clearly pray and prophesy in worship -- that's what's driving the instructions in 1 Corinthians 11. Yet this radically new situation of the Spirit is creating some cultural complications too. So Paul reaffirms those cultural patterns so that the Spirit can continue to flow through the wives of the assembly.

7. So a man should not have his head covered (11:4). It needs to be uncovered to reflect Christ. The expression "having against head" hints at what they would have known without having to be told. We are talking about veiling in this passage. Not a face veil as in Muslim culture, but a hair veil like we used to wear during Christmas plays with a towel covering our hair.

In 11:6, Paul pulls out the big guns. If the wife is not going to cover, it's like her shaving her head like disgraced women sometimes are. The audience gasps. No, not that! OK. So put a veil on it.

Our puzzling verse, 11:10 now becomes clear. She is not only engaging the husbands around her when she prays and prophesies. She is engaging the spiritual realm of God and angels too, who are putatively male (for some strange and uncomfortable reading, see Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body). The hair veil "authorizes" her spiritual activity in the presence of all these "males." Its purpose is to enable her to fully participate in the ministry of the church. 

8. I end where this chapter started. By the time I was a boy, most Wesleyans were not too concerned about men and women's hair anymore. In the sixties, some Wesleyan young men had the Beatles cut. And women were at least cutting their hair to shoulder length. Our tradition never wore prayer bonnets like the Quakers and others.

Nevertheless, in my corner of the Wesleyan world, some of these verses in 1 Corinthians 11 were like memory verses. "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her" (11:15). "If a woman be not covered, let her also be shorn" (11:6). "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him" (11:14).

Most Christians at the time basically ignored verses like these. They "deselected" them in their paradigms without much thought. But as someone with a hyperactive conscience, I needed a basis not to see them as binding on men and women today. The basis was the discovery of context. "Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it doesn't accomplish the same purpose."

A bun doesn't have any meaning today. A hair veil not only has no meaning today -- it would actually be somewhat offputting. Far from saying, "Everything is in order here," it would create unnecessary distance with those we want to lead to Christ. Ironically, a wedding ring performs much of the same function as the hair veil today.

Context is everything. That was a lesson I was only beginning to learn in my late college/early seminary years.