Feeling, Writing, Thinking (On the OT 1.0)
'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
Okay, I'll speak.
You see, writing relaxes me; work settles me.
For some reason this evening has turned hard. I've had a good week, even a very good one, even two or maybe three. I've gone into pleasant places inside myself I once only hoped were real. 'Don't quit before your miracles:' I haven't.
But, still, tonight.
Sometimes my faith flies through and past me like the gust from a shut door. This evening, for no reason, I feel anxious about God. I think the cure for me is to put something onto paper, well, e-paper.
***
First, the OT is not the product of a single divine mind as I was always taught. To say so is absurd. Many who believe that have never read the entire thing; this I can understand. Those who have read it and still believe it, I can't understand. Even if we accept the harsh covenantal God, the conditional love and salvation, the judgment and child-destruction and piquing nationalism, the internal problems are too vast and the prophetic nuances too diverse to read it as a cohesive unit. Fair enough. There is a very human component to the revelation of the prophets and certainly to the prior histories which never claim to be divine in the first place.
Yet Jesus was born into this particular faith-nation, and according to the Evangelists, claims pieces (at least) of this text are all about him.
Strangely, many seem to be. I realize that all OT passages later applied to Christ had a different meaning in their own time. I believe some were applied overzealously, even incorrectly if such a thing can be done incorrectly, by the NT writers. But Isaiah 53 is eerily close. If Israel is the servant, or the author of 2nd Isaiah is the servant, the servant suddenly, and for the first time in the OT, becomes without sin. The same nation that even the writer of 2nd Isaiah has berated as stiff-necked suddenly becomes the meek and God-driven sacrificial lamb, a human or nation without guilt which is sacrificed for the sins of the many and then is exalted above all others. The chapter stands out to me as ambiguous and awkward placed next to the chapters around it. I'm with the Ethiopian of Acts: who the heck is the servant here, the prophet, the nation, who?
The early followers of Jesus, while probably aware of however the servant text had already been interpreted, saw it in a new and explosive way. A way I have to say makes spooky sense. A way Jesus himself probably saw it. Something similar is true with Isaiah 7, the famous young/woman virgin passage.
First, it's quite possible, though I know no evidence exists at this time, that the Septuagint writers had a manuscript of Isaiah which did use a less ambiguous term. I'm not a Hebrew scholar, but I have heard this is true of Jeremiah. A group of manuscripts was discovered in this century which featured different versions of Jeremiah, but one of them was letter for letter what we have in the LXX. Any input on this is appreciated.
Even if the Septuagint writers did not have a variant reading, even if the only 'sign' in Isaiah relates to the age of the child when the kings are dead (and this is quite possible) it's odd that Matthew applied this very un-Messianic passage to Jesus unless Mary was already rumored to have delivered a virgin. I suppose he could have felt that a deity should have been virgin-born, but that was by no means a universal pagan concept; the virgin birth of ancient deities is far overstated. I don't believe it was a Jewish expectation, that God would someday invade the earth by overshadowing a willing woman (unlike Zeus' conquests) and produce a human child!
But now I am getting over my amateur head.
The fact for me is that there are strange passages in the already strange OT which foreshadow the Christ of the gospels. And not all the ones we'd expect. Some messianic expectations are left unfulfilled or are only fulfilled metaphorically, like the return of Elijah from Malachi 4 discussed in the Synoptics. Jesus says in Mark 6 that Elijah has indeed come "and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him." He could be talking about the historical Elijah, but Mark says the disciples assume that Jesus is referring to JBap and this seems reasonable considering John's end. (On a sidenote: after months I finally looked up something EddieF tossed out on edgeoffaith: he noted that here JBap is Elijah and in John 1 he's not Elijah. Not really. In John JBap says he's not Elijah when questioned; this hardly discounts Jesus' metaphoric response to the disciples and application of OT prophecy both to JBap and himself in my mind). The point I'm windily making is that Jesus applied the OT prophecies loosely also!
Still, some from the Psalms and Isaiah seem awkward in their original context yet were directly fulfilled by events in Jesus' life.
Much more interesting to me right now is how Christ is depicted by the Evangelists using OT parables and language. Many question that Jesus saw himself as Divine. Again, all I have are the Evangelists' accounts, but reading the OT, if nothing else, has opened my eyes to what they are really saying about Jesus.
Two examples: here is a passage from Ezekiel 34:
'As for you, my flock, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will judge between one sheep and another, and between rams and goats….
'Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says to them: See, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you shove with flank and shoulder, butting all the weak sheep with your horns until you have driven them away, I will save my flock, and they will no longer be plundered. I will judge between one sheep and another. I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. I the LORD will be their God, and my servant David will be prince among them. I the LORD have spoken.
The rest of this chapter is about the anger the LORD feels toward the priests who are misleading his sheep and also, as noted in this passage, those in power who are exploiting the poor (I assume this is what fat sheep are up to with the lean).
Fair enough. It's a nice chapter with a beautiful and hopeful ending. So?
Most of you who read know what's coming: from Matthew 25: I'm only including the first two paragraphs:
"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
The parallel is just too close to be accidental: Jesus is placing himself, the Son of Man, in the role of the LORD God as judge in Ezekiel. This material is special Matthew, or M, and it could have come either from material collected by the disciple or from the redactor only. If ahistorical, it's a darned bold redaction. Note also that the parable changes so that Jesus stands in for the sick and suffering, and that lack of charitable action is what condemns the goats, or shows that they have in fact been goats among the sheep all along.
I've run across other examples:
From Isaiah 55:
"Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
"Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.
Contrast this with John 6:
Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.
And:
"I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
And in John 7:
On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him."
Could the flesh and blood passage be a later addition reflecting first century eucharistic experiences? Maybe. Could the final passage, when Jesus speaks about himself, at a critical moment in Temple ritual, in a way no OT prophet ever did be an invention of the author? Perhaps. But again, I'm interested in how close the content is to what we find the LORD God saying in Isaiah. In short, Jesus speaks directly to people like an updated version of Jehovah. As BW3 has noted, without any 'thus says the LORD' prefixes.
The point is that the Jesus of Mark and John not only saw himself as the fulfillment of the OT prophecies consistently, vague as some of them were and are, he also put himself in the place of God himself.
And that's what's interesting me about the OT these days: Jesus' own continual echo of it, his elevation of himself smack into the center of it. 'Before Abraham was, I am.' Sure, that's a big one. But there are many other examples and I'd like to know them better.
Will this convince mythicists who believe Jesus didn't exist at all? Or those who think the Gospels are completely fictional characterizations of a very different person? No. It might in fact strengthen their convictions (always look at a person's first premise before you listen too long). So far, I've found neither of those explanations reasonable. What I find is claim after claim to deity by Christ in the Gospels using the sacred texts of his nation, not a few scant half-references as I once believed. The old Lewis' trilemma actually makes more sense to me: either Jesus was religiously mental (thinking Under the Banner of Heaven here) or a con artist (much less likely) or he was, or may, in fact have been God's agent to a desperate and wounded world speaking, in an updated and love-centered language, the religious language they already knew
***
Now it is time for me to start the barbecue, get the chicken ready, and let the feelings in me roll. Work helps me get a handle on my feelings, and this has been work! I don't know what's causing me to hurt (I think it's more than Chris getting kicked off AI, though that was awful) but I do know it will pass. Anxiety and depression always do. I also know that the stronger my pain or symptom, the closer I am to whatever needs to be felt, to the person inside me that needs to be nurtured. Selah. That is real. Sailing is real. My wife is real. My son is real. I am real.
May God continue to show me his reality! I see through a really dark glass. I have placed faith in Jesus, I don't doubt this, but those of you who know me know…when it comes to experiencing God or faith-assurance, mostly, I sail into the wind, beating every mile.
Love to all and sincere thanks for reading. Comments and insights welcome as always.
Comments
You've hit on something that I've just started to study: the differences between the way that Christians and Jews read the Hebrew scriptures.
One thing that we have to understand is that, in general, Jews and Christians have different source texts for their versions of the same Bible (the Hebrew Bible, which we call the "Old" Testament - "Old" here is often seen as anti-Semetic, though it is certainly not the case that everyone who uses that term does so for anti-Semetic reasons, but I'll have to get into that later). The Septuagint, a Greek language version of the Hebrew Bible, was the dominant version in first century Palestine, for the obvious reason that, as part of the Roman empire, most first century Palestinian Jews, and almost all Diasporic Jews, spoke koine Greek.
The Greek Septuagint was, then, the Bible that Jesus and his followers were most familiar with, and so it is the Bible which shaped the formation of the New Testament texts. But Jewish Bibles are taken not from the Septuagint, but rather from what we call the Masoretic text. This is a Hebrew text, which may reflect the Hebrew text which the translators of the Septuagint used.
But, that the Septuagint was translated from the Hebrew into Greek, and that it, rather than the Hebrew text, was the text that the Gospel writers were responding to, creates some interesting textual and theological problems. The "virgin" birth, which you allude to in your post, is one such problem.
Rabbi Randall M. Falk, co-author (with retired Vandy religion professor Walter Harrelson) of Jews and Christians: A Troubled Family, writes:
The other important difference between the books found in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Old Testament [note: the first difference is their order of appearance - Jews and Christians order their common scriptures slightly differently, which is not a major issue] is the translation of some of the texts. The oldest extant manuscript of the Hebrew Scriptures is the Masoretic texts, in which a group of Jewish scholars added vowels and punctuation marks to an earlier text. Many of the Christian translations of the Old Testament, on the other hand, are based on the Septuagint, a Greek translation of Hebrew manuscripts thought to have been more ancient than the Masoretic text. [note: Falk does not mention something equally important, which is that while many newer Christian translations of the Old Testament do take the Masoretic text into account, Christian theology, and particularly Christology, was shaped by the Septuagint] There can be considerable difference in translations of words into English from the Hebrew and Greek texts. This leads to some significant differences in interpretation of certain passages, and it is one of the things that makes the study of Scripture so fascinating. For example, in the book of Isaiah most scholars translate the word "almah" from the Hebrew as "young woman." Many translations from the Greek, however, record the Greek translation of the Hebrew as "virgin" in English. This ultimately affects the story of the birth of Jesus and his parenthood.
In other words, the story of the virgin birth of Jesus responds to a reading of Isaiah which is only found in the Greek text, not in the original Hebrew.
There is, of course, much more to say on the subject of how Christians and Jews read the same scriptures differently, and the role that language plays in shaping those differences, but we can't say it all at one time, can we?
as I said, you belong in the Academy. Thank you for this information.
This is very interesting; I'd still like to ask my rector (he's out of town) where he heard that several versions of Jeremiah were discovered this century (well, last) with only one matching the LXX precisely. It could mean, as I say here, that the LXX Isaiah came from another, older and better, manuscript.
But if nothing else, it says to me that there is a complex, creative, if not tenuous relationship between the HB and the NT writers. The NT writers used the LXX widely, constantly, in their writing and their thinking. But I don't find the old simple model: here are the prophecies, here are the precise fulfillments, or not quite.
Faith is required, once again, though not a blind faith.
After I posted I was wondering how much of the doctrine of atonement comes from the atoning servant passages; how much of that did Jesus understand to be directed at him, how much of it was connected after his unexpected death? At this time there can be no definite answer to that very specialist question, I suppose.
For it's also true that sacrificial atonement is throught the HB, absolutely throughout. From Genesis on. It's eerie. Abraham didn't have to give his son; millenia later, God did. Animal sacrifice for sin is minutely proscribed, then shown to be insufficient by the Deuteronomist, some prophets and psalmists, if not accompanied by the contrite, or circumcised heart! It's St. Paul talking! He is a Jew who is one inwardly.
The writer of Hebrews take a perfectly logical position reviewing the Tanahk: clearly the old system wasn't sufficient; we needed a better sacrifice. Jesus was both high priest and sacrifice once and for all.
Why would God need a son to die? Why would God need a sacrifice of any kind to overcome human deficiency? Are the animal sacrifices in cultures around the world all premonitions of the One who would die? Or did the early Christians, in part, misunderstand Jesus' mission? Did he himself misunderstand it in part? Did he have to die to usher in the kingdom?
From the gospels, it seems so.
I know that the atonement is at the heart of Christian theology, or very close to the heart, as has been since the first century. It is true I can believe Jesus was God's son and special emissary, a resurrected miracle-worker, unique in human history, I believe place faith in him and worship him, and not understand either the incarnation or the atonement. But those ideas are very early, perhaps Jesus early (and all the historical Jesus questions just dumped out all over my desk and are falling on the floor).
What keeps me in my faith is not an inerrant, miraculous bible document, but the Voice of the gospels, and the still-powerful arguments for the resurrection itself. Also my spiritual experience which is not simply beta wave stimulation!
I'll close with this: I also went back and read the Matthew 25 passage again. It's wonderful, charity-based and mystical, beyond anything I know in religious literature (where the God directly places himself in the role of those in need) but then ends with the goats tossed into the pit of eternal fire prepared for the devil!
Yikes! I've long believed, since Jesus talked about individuals being consumed, burned like trash or tares, at the judgement that those not saved would be destroyed in the 'second death.' I know M 25 is a parable; I know the sheep aren't sheep, etc., and the complexities regarding Hebrew end-time statements are far beyond me at this time.
Yet as a sensitive person, I hate to think of anyone suffering eternally. Also, I know Jesus may have been referring to Enoch or Daniel, and as always, speaking the language of his community, though refocusing it on loving action. It's also possible he knew something no one had yet known: that hell, in some form, is real.
I could to this full-time if I didn't have other responsibilities. These questions occur to me naturally when reading the Bible, and it makes sense to search for answers!
Thanks again S. It could be argued that I have to work through these things to do ministry at any level, lay or pro. Perhaps, then, God is moving over the surface of my own dark waters.
t
A couple of things:
1. Not to be contrary, but you don't have to do these things in the sense that there is some external authority over you compelling you to study. You get to do these things. I suspect that it is, in fact a great joy to you, which comes out of the context of your relationship with God.
I know for me this is one of the ways in which I relate to God, and if it is compelled then the compulsion is internal, part of my innate being, my ontology.
Having just been made responsible for the Education ministries in my church, I've been thinking a great deal about the nature of religious education within the church as opposed to without the church. Having studied Religious Studies along with Philosophy in college, I am used to approaching religious education as the study of a religion rather than study within the context of a religion. But for ministry we are studying our religion as a part of our religious tradition. That connects study to worship. Our study exists to fascilitate contact with and worship of God.
To do ministry, then, answering all of these questions is not as necessary as being able to communicate the ways in which we connect to God, and allowing that connection to bring others into a similar connection. That does not mean that critical study has no place in the body of faith, but it does mean that its place is not essential (part of the essense).
So, rather than being a prerequisite for effective ministry (lay or clergy), I suspect that you are asking and attempting to answer these questions because something inside you drives you to do it. It is part of your relationship with God. As I suppose, as it is part of your relationship with God, it is necessary for your particular ministry, and mine as well. But we should be careful not to impose this as a norm on all faithful Christians seeking to minister to others.
2. As for the notion of atonement, I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. It comes into Christianity as a reponce to Judaism in general and temple worship in particular. That aspect of the religion of ancient Israel is not as much a part of Rabbinical Judaism, though it is still used as a metaphor, just like in Christianity.
But, if it is merely a metaphor and no longer a concrete practise, does its place in the worship lives of Christians and Jews depend on its ability to continue to speak to us? If so, then I suspect that in many cases the notion of atonement has limited use. It very rarely speaks to me, anyway.
Marcus Borg argues that Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for our sins was a way in which the early Jewish followers of Jesus made his death a constructive rather than destructive one. It is not reflected in any of the sayings of Jesus which are considered to come from the historical Jesus. Rather, it is the voice of the early church trying to do two things:
i. Trying to make sense of the devestating death of Jesus. Remember, in early Christianity the cross was still a scandal, not a sign of victory.
ii. Trying to connect Jesus to the mythos of ancient Israel. Jesus' death, after the fact, can indeed be seen through the eyes of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It can be seen with sacrificial imagery. But that was not, according to Borg, part of the ministry of the Jesus of history.
My own Christology sees the saving work of Jesus more through the stories of Exile and Return (God, through Jesus, was with me when I was away from my home, wandering, lost and lonely, bringing me back to my home, which is ultimately in God) and Exodus (while I was oppressed and enslaved God heard my cry and sent Jesus, my deliverer, to rescue me). Atonement just doesn't speak to me.
But it could still be a useful metaphor for other Christians, and atthe very least should be seen as an important part of our tradition. In other words, just because I don't get anything from it, that doesn't mean I have the liscense to try to remove it from our religion. But neither is it a point of emphasis in my life, my faith, or my ministry.
again, powerful comments. I often get the feeling you and I are climbing the same mountain, and somehow you're able to tell me what it looks like from much higher up.
A couple quick things (before I trot off to campus, hacking with the chest cold which invariably follows even the mildest upper respiratory infection):
In some ways, I have to know God is trustworthy before I can trust him. This is in some sense sad, but true, and is in fact who I am. My spiritual experience isn't enough for me unless I know my faith in Christ is founded on a historically viable faith. What makes my belief different from Buddhism or Hinduism or Mormonism or for that matter Judaism? Christianity is one of the world religions, and I'd like to know as much about its initial context, its history, its reliability, about what makes it unique and true, as I can. I remember Chesterton prefaces Everlasting Man (or was it Orthodoxy)with a quote something like, 'There are two ways to get home, and one is to stay there all along.' I can't do that; neither could he. Like Chesterton and Lewis and others, I distrust my own spiritual experience unless it is accompanied by rational support. I'm not making myself perfectly clear, but while I see my need to know as a gift, as something which puts me into a different class of Christians, something I am proud of, I also believe there are emotional wound-roots which coexist with my active and curious mind. Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself, for:
I know the adulation, the 'press' Christian apologists often get because their work shores up a faith which in fact requires faith. We aren't here looking at Christ perform miracles and then debating whether he fits the bill as the Messsiah, or whether his motivations for such miracles are Godly; in fact, we're not looking at much of anything at all. We know (apart from what we experience individually within) based on ancient testimony which has been heavily criticized in the last 200 years; we live within a church tradition formed by intelligent men but in a pre-skeptical age. Those of us who have to sort through all the hard questions sometimes get looked up to as higher spiritual examples as we provide the answers we've found. I'm skeptical of being looked up to (probably because I looked up to several and was hurt) and wary of any impact it might have on me personally. I think we all do what we have to do, and those of us gifted in this way perhaps have a lesser gift, at best an equal gift, to those gifted in charity, or hospitality, or mercy. Those traits are what I want to see increase in my life; I can't help the active mind which rolls around throughout my blog.
Sometimes I think I need to sort through evidence and counter-evidence, attain, funnily, something close to a graduate education in the Bible and Christianity so I can synthesize my own beliefs fully; know what I actually believe in light of the active skeptical community and questions I have myself. And then, it is perhaps true, I will hold a deeper conviction than many; what I hope for most is that I will begin to trust God and my spiritual practice will deepen. My friend Sheri says it well. She knows I'm looking for the experience of God. This is true.
On the atonement: it is possible the Christians misunderstood Jesus and the Jesus-tradition of the Kingdom became that changed; I can see the early evangelists inventing, or interpreting Jesus' death, in light of a sacrificial atonement for all humans, but that makes more sense without the resurrection and the early evangelists certainly believed in that. With it, it is still possible, but Borg is stepping out in faith himself: we don't know that those passages were added to the gospels at a later time, that the sacrifical atonement throughout the HB somehow got misplaced on Jesus who in fact came and died and rose for some other reason. Next to the resurrection, Jesus death for our sins is the center of our tradition, I agree, and I certainly won't toss it without good reason. In fact, we may never know in this life exactly what God's perspective is and was. I remember Lewis downplaying the atonement in Mere Christianity, noting that the church had understood it different ways over time. I'll have plenty of time to think about this in the future. Of course, some of the most elevated passages in all the epistles deal with the sacricial atonement of Jesus in very concrete terms.
And why do we want to toss the atonement? Perhaps in part because it seems derived from the earlier Jewish cultus, from the practice of other ancient peoples who sacrificed to gain favor of the gods, but also because it doesn't make sense to modern humans that the God of the universe would need an atonement to accept us, love us, receive us; Crossan argues this very thing. He may be right, but if there's one verse in the Bible which is surely true, it's that God does not think our thoughts or act according to our ways. You know this, of course. It's hard to say what God needs and doesn't need to admit us into his presence in this life and after death. Perhaps Jesus did die for the sins of the world. He must have died for something.
One thing I love about your comment is that you've taken another piece of the Bible, the Exile and Return, and found a center of personal spirituality. And that is one thing the Bible does do! It may not be perfect, it may be filled with human material, but different pieces of it affect us all differently, and it seems, bring us to God by slightly different paths. My priest often notes that every Christian organization and individual pick and choose parts of the Bible that meet their needs. The Pharisees, actually, did that, and apparently Jesus felt they emphasized the wrong part or misunderstood the entire thing (you search the scriptures for salvation, but the scriptues point to me)! But so many have found faith through the scriptures. I did myself, reading through Mark and then John: Jesus at the high point of the festival shouting to the crowd, 'if anyone is thirsty, let him drink from me.' That stuck to me as very unlikely to be invented, and God spoke to me (as the second witness Jesus talks about in John) and I prayed a little prayer from the heart and here I am: a Jesus-truster. You have been touched by the political experience of Israel, as critical as I am of the prophets' interpretation of God's role in that experience. If it was not included in the Bible, you wouldn't have it. If John's story about the living water wasn't there, I wouldn't have it either.
And so it goes.
I do have lots to learn, but I'm hoping as I learn my trust in God grows. That would be a great thing. And then hopefully I can assist others with the perspective and information that comes from my own struggles.
I will say that I believe I'm at it as honestly as a person can be at something like this: I'm not looking for evidence to prop up orthodoxy I've already committed to; I'm looking for the best perspective I can find based on all the evidence we have. Am I biased? Sure, some, but truthfully, I find the evidence for the resurrection very strong, for the historical nature of most of Jesus' statements in the gospels also very strong. I may change my view; certainly the gospel question is very complicated, but so far I'm convinced Jesus was unique in human history.
But now I'm preaching to the choir and the choir director.
All the best Chris, I have to run.
t