Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

-----

Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Bible - Historical Criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bible - Historical Criticism. Show all posts

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Why Women May Speak, Lead, and Teach in the Church




Junia Is Not Alone,* and Neither are Plenty of Others:
Women and Leadership in the New Testament

by Allan R. Bevere
October 22, 2019

John MacArthur is at it again. In a recent conference, MacArthur reiterated his view that the New Testament is clear that women should not serve as pastors or in any leadership roles above men. (You can listen to his comments here.) But is it so clear? Actually, I believe it is clear, but in favor of women in church leadership.

I am going to give a quick fly-over of the pertinent passages that speak to women in ministry, but first let me make what I think is a crucial observation. All too often in making a case for or against this or that issue in looking at the Bible, we can narrowly focus on one or two passages of Scripture that seem to settle the question. The problem with such an approach is two-fold: first, it fails to understand those passages in their larger canonical context, in this case the canon of the whole New Testament. Second, and related to the first, is that when the passages in question are seen in light of the larger canonical context, a different understanding of particular Scriptures can emerge. In the case of women in leadership, the three passages often used to deny a place for women in ministry are 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, 1 Corinthians 14:33-40, and 1 Timothy 2:8-15. I will deal with these Scriptures in due course. Before that, I want to do a quick fly-over of the relevant New Testament passages that give us the larger picture of the question at hand.

The Gospels:

Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42)-- in the well-known story of Martha running around the kitchen practicing hospitality for Jesus and her other guests, she complains that Mary is not helping but rather sitting at Jesus' feet listening to his teaching. When the focus of this text is on Martha's complaint, what can be lost is that Rabbi Jesus is allowing and even commending Mary's posture as a disciple. Only disciples of the rabbi were permitted to sit at his feet, and that honor was reserved for men alone. It is reasonable to assume that if Mary was permitted to be a disciple, she was expected at some point to carry on his teaching to those around her. What Jesus is doing here is a radical reorientation of social convention.

The Samaritan Women (John 4:1-42)-- The first surprise of the story is that Jesus addresses a women and a Samaritan, something that no Jewish male in the first-century with any self-respect would do. The Samaritan woman herself is shocked that Jesus would even initiate conversation. After this encounter, the woman (I wish she had been named) returns to her villages and tell of her conversation with Jesus. John tells us "many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony..." (v. 39). Many from her village became disciples because of her preaching.

The Women at the Tomb (Matthew 28:1-10; Mark 16:1-8; Luke 24:1-12)-- I am excluding John's resurrection account because I want to deal with Mary Magdalene separately. All four Gospels are in agreement that female followers of Jesus were the first to hear of the resurrection of Jesus and the first to proclaim it to Jesus' male disciples. If one were trying to invent a fable of the resurrection of Jesus in first-century Judaism, having women as the first witnesses to resurrection would not be the way to tell the story. In first-century Judaism, women were generally considered to be unreliable witnesses, and this was especially true in Roman culture (cf. Luke 24:11). So, why do all four Gospels tells us women were the first witnesses? Because that's the way it actually happened. With the differences in the resurrection accounts, this is the one detail on which all four agree.

Interlude:

It is important to note that when Paul offers the nutshell of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, the women are conspicuously absent.

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me (vv. 3-8).

I do not believe that Paul purposely omits this detail, as he says at the outset, "For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received." But what seems to have happened in the two-plus decades after the event of Easter is that the women attested to in all four Gospels have dropped out of the basic proclamation-- perhaps for evangelistic reasons in contexts, both Jewish and especially Gentile, where the testimony of women was not respected. This is only conjecture, but it does make sense of the omission.

Now back to the task before us.

The central claim of the Gospel is that Jesus was raised from the dead. If the tomb was not empty, if Jesus' bones are still somewhere on the outskirts of Jerusalem waiting to be found, then Christianity is indeed nothing more than a hopeful fable unmoored from reality. It is the critical and essential claim of the Gospel-- and God entrusted that initial proclamation to women. They were the first preachers of the resurrection of Jesus.

Mary Magdalene (John 20:1-18)-- Two things of note in the story of Mary Magdalene at the tomb: First, when she recognizes the risen Jesus, her exclamation is "Rabbouni," "rabbi" or "teacher." This was a title of respect from a disciple, a student to one's teacher. Second, Jesus tells Mary to go and tell the men-- his male disciples-- of her encounter. Once again, we see the role of women as the first preachers of the resurrection. (It is interesting to ask why the risen Jesus did not appear to Peter and the beloved disciple when they were at the tomb.)

The Book of Acts:

The Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:14-21)-- With the coming of the Holy Spirit comes the fulfillment of the words of the Prophet Joel-- "You're sons and daughters will prophesy" (v. 17). The Greek word "prophesy" (προφητεύσουσιν; prophēteusousin) means proclaim or preach. In the Didache (100-120 A.D.), an early manual of church discipline and order, the traveling evangelists are referred to as prophets. In Revelation 11:3 the two witnesses "prophecy or "preach" wearing sackcloth. One cannot miss the echos of the Old Testament prophets. In these last days, daughters as well as well as sons will preach the gospel. To exclude our daughters from the call to preach is to reject the work of the Holy Spirit in these last days.

Not only that, Peter quotes Joel that even the lowest of those on the first-century social status totem pole will receive the Holy Spirit and preach-- "Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy" (v. 18). Throughout the book of Acts we see that the coming of the Spirit results in proclamation and the gift of the Spirit is no respecter of social status or gender roles.

Paul's Letters:

Romans (16:1-16)-- There can be no mistaking that the Roman Church had women in ministry working alongside the men, but let me mention three in particular.

First, in verse 1 Paul mentions Phoebe who is a "minister" or a "deacon" (διάκονον; diakonon). It is not clear if at this point in the history of the early church whether a deacon is a formal church office, but Phoebe participates in the list of leaders Paul mentions; and she is mentioned first and singled out as a diakonon. It is also highly significant that in 15:8, the Apostle refers to Jesus as a diakonon. Moreover, it is obvious that Phoebe is the bearer of this letter to the Roman Church. If Romans is a draft of Paul's defense of his gospel before the leaders of the church in Jerusalem, as Richard Hays suggests, then Paul has entrusted this singularly important epistle to someone who has to be a trusted leader.

Second, in 16:3-4 Paul writes, "Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles" It is important that Prisca is mentioned first. In that world, the names of persons are listed in order of significance as in the Gospels when the writers often list in order Peter, James, and John (e.g. Matthew 17:1-2). In the Book of Acts, Peter emerges as the leader of the Apostles. Moreover, in Acts 18:18, Prisca (here Priscilla) is also mentioned before Aquila. Has Priscilla taken the lead in the couple's ministry? It is true that in 18:1-2 Aquila is given priority and mentioned first "with his wife Priscilla." Traditional gender roles are not completely rejected in the New Testament, but women in leadership in Roman Church does not conform to traditional conventions.

Third, and perhaps most important is Junia. "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was" (16:7). Notice that Paul refers to Junia (a female name) as "among the apostles" (ἀποστόλοις; apostolois). Apostolic ministry eventually expanded beyond the original Twelve. Moreover, Junia was in prison with Paul. Can it be doubted that she was there for the same reason Paul was-- proclaiming Christ crucified and risen? From the witness of the New Testament, it was church leaders who were arrested and subjected to punishment, which makes strategic sense. To stop an undesirable movement, cut off the head and the rest of the body will die.

Those who argue that Junia was a man-- Junias-- do not have the manuscript evidence on their side. The first reference to Junia's gender outside the New Testament comes from Origen (c. 185-254) who confirms she was a woman, possibly because there were those in his day uncomfortable with that truth and sought to obscure it. In other words, there would have been no debate over Junia(s) gender a century or two later if she had been a he.

Galatians (3:28)-- "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." While this passage does not directly address leadership roles, it is another affirmation that in Christ, such stations in life should not be the basis for a church hierarchy. The main issue in Galatians is that there are some Jewish Christians who want to force Gentile converts to practice "the works of the law," that is, those identifying practices that marked out Jews as God's people from everyone else-- circumcision, kosher laws, Sabbath and holy day observance. For Paul, this relegates the Gentiles to second class status within the new covenant in Christ. So Galatians 3:28 is an affirmation of the irrelevance of these distinctions as a hierarchy within the church. To say that there is no "male and female," (and note that it is and not or) is to say that gender is not a determinative of equality and therefore hierarchy within the church. If there is to be no second class status based on these distinctions, it is reasonable to assume that such distinctions are of no account in the leadership of the church as well.

Philippians (4:2-3)-- Euodia and Syntyche (feminine names) are not getting along and that is causing enough of a rift in the church that Paul feels the need to briefly suggest they work things out. Paul refers to them as co-workers and "have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel." They are also mentioned with Clement, a man who is a co-worker as well.

Colossians (4:15)-- Paul says very little about Nympha other than there is a church that meets in her house. Whether her husband was an unbeliever or she was widowed we do not know. But hosting a congregation in her household would have made her "the house church leader and patroness."

We now come to three passages often used to exclude women from leadership.

1 Corinthians (11:1-16)-- It certainly appears that Paul affirms traditional gender roles here, but we should not expect it to be any different. Nevertheless, nowhere does the Apostle exclude women from leadership. Indeed, in verse 10 Paul states that a woman's veil in prayer is "a symbol of authority on her head." Moreover, there is also an equal kind of reciprocity that Paul affirms between men and women. "Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God" (vv. 11-12). This reciprocity is "in the Lord," as believers in their roles relate to fellow believers. Could it be that the maintaining of traditional family roles was for the sake of evangelism to unbelieving Jews and Gentiles, who had a particular understanding of household management, rather akin to Paul's concern for Christians not behaving in ways that cause others to stumble (1 Corinthians 10:23-33)?

In distinguishing between gender roles, Paul is affirming that women are in the church, in the covenant as women, on their own status (not as under the old covenant where women were included by virtue of the men because of circumcision). As it has been noted, "In worship they are to be their true selves; this also means... that women were not to copy men but to be women in their public ministries."

(14:26-36)-- Women should be silent in worship, but why and when? The context of chapter fourteen is about order in worship. In reading up to chapter 14, we know that women in Corinth are participating in worship, which also means speaking publicly. Here Paul's admonition of silence concerns the fact that in this context women, who were not granted the kind of education enjoyed by men, were apparently disrupting worship by asking their husbands to explain what they did not understand (perhaps during the sermon). They are not scolded for wanting to learn. They are reminded that there is a time and place appropriate for learning.

1 Timothy (2:8-15)-- Three things: First, while in other places Paul seems to reinforce traditional gender roles, here he does the opposite. Men do not have to be stoic tough guys in worship. They can and should lift "up holy hands without anger or argument." It's OK to worship and get caught up in the Spirit. In insisting that women dress modestly, Paul is not concerned with the women of the congregation turning on the men by dressing provocatively. To the contrary, women do not have to settle for being (to use modern phraseology) "trophy wives," whose purpose is only to be beautiful to look at in worship. They have more significant roles to play in the church.

Second, women are to "learn in silence with full submission." While this admonishment grates against our twenty-first sensibilities, it must not be missed that the women are permitted to learn, just like Mary sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus. This does go against conventional roles for women. Women are to learn silently so they might at some point be able to teach when ready. The verb translated "permit" is in the present tense and should be rendered "I currently do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man." This prohibition is temporary. Moreover, Paul may be trying to keep the church from going down the road of a female-run pagan cult. Tom Wright states,

There are some signs in the letter that it was originally sent to Timothy while he was in Ephesus. And one of the main things we know about religion in Ephesus is that the main religion – the biggest Temple, the most famous shrine-- was a female-only cult. The Temple of Artemis (that’s her Greek name; the Romans called her Diana) was a massive structure which dominated the area; and, as befitted worshippers of a female deity, the priests were all women. They ruled the show and kept the men in their place.
Now if you were writing a letter to someone in a small, new religious movement with a base in Ephesus, and wanted to say that because of the gospel of Jesus the old ways of organising male and female roles had to be rethought from top to bottom, with one feature of that being that the women were to be encouraged to study and learn and take a leadership role, you might well want to avoid giving the wrong impression. Was the apostle saying, people might wonder, that women should be trained up so that Christianity would gradually become a cult like that of Artemis, where women did the leading and kept the men in line? That, it seems to me, is what verse 12 is denying. The word I’ve translated ‘try to dictate to them’ is unusual, but seems to have the overtones of ‘being bossy’ or ‘seizing control’. Paul is saying, like Jesus in Luke 10, that women must have the space and leisure to study and learn in their own way, not in order that they may muscle in and take over the leadership as in the Artemis-cult, but so that men and women alike can develop whatever gifts of learning, teaching and leadership God is giving them.

Third and finally, Paul writes in 2:15, "Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty." The reference here is to Genesis 3:16:

To the woman God said,
"I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you."
Are Paul's words based upon the curse or upon the undoing of the curse? Some have read this in the first way-- that the task of women is primarily to bear children and be subordinate to their husbands as a result of the fall. But it can also be read, and I think better, as Paul's belief that the curse of pain in delivering a child and being ruled over by her husband are being undone in Jesus. For Christians, we do not live under the curse and all that comes with it. We have been freed from it. So, I think Paul's words are conceptually more akin to, "Women will be kept safe in their childbearing (the curse notwithstanding) and must remain in faith and love and holiness, with modesty (not conforming to men's images of them).

Even though Jesus has undone the curse of sin, we still live with its effects. I think this is why we see the tension in the New Testament between affirming traditional gender roles and yet moving beyond them. How do believers live as citizens of the Age to Come when This Age is still very much alive and well? It is not always easy to know.

I am not suggesting there are no difficulties with these last three passages that need to be untangled, but when viewed in the context of the New Testament canon, it is obvious they must be seen in light of what is affirmed throughout-- women had an important place in the first decades of the church and participated in its leadership as apostles, disciples, teachers, and evangelists.

In thirty-five years of pastoral ministry, I have become a better pastor because of my female colleagues in ministry; and I rejoice to be a co-worker with them.

Junia is not alone. Thanks be to God!

- ARB

*The main title of this post Junia Is Not Alone is taken from the title of an ebook written by Scot McKnight.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Biblical History is Actually Biblical Story Telling in the Bible


Herodotus (c. 484 BC – c. 425 BC)

As far as I know, the Greek writer Heredotus was the world's first true historian who attempted to arrange history into historical accounts. But when reading Heredotus one finds out very quickly that his historical accounts might not quite add up to what actually happened during or before his time. In fact, we discover that Heredotus is really good at telling the same story in many different ways as audiences listened to his recounts. As he spoke, if he detected interest in one area more than another he would dive into that area to enlarge its script.

This is what made Heredotus a very good story teller. He went with the audience's interests. I would think the ancient biblical stories were told in similar fashion. As stories... not as histories. Why? Because remember, Heredotus in 450 BC was the first to attempt to give historical accounts of history and as you know (or maybe you don't) much of the Old Testament is earlier than 450 BC. And so, it is for us to glean what the biblical story teller is trying to tell us behind the story he is telling.

In reference to the article below, I thank Mr. Enn's for his perspicuity. Well done Peter!

R.E. Slater
February 9, 2019


* * * * * * * * * * * *




A Quick Word About How Genealogies
in the Bible Aren’t “History”

by Peter Enns


If you clicked on this post—what is wrong with you? Step back for a moment and think about it: you clicked on a post about genealogies! Seriously. Go find something to do.

If you’re still here, thanks for hanging around. Just promise me later today you’ll do something for yourself: take a walk outside, chase squirrels, talk to a human being, anything.

Anyway.

When the topic turns to Genesis 1-11, namely whether or not these chapters are “historical,” people will often kindly tolerate me as I go on and on (and on) about how those chapters aren’t really historical accounts but something else. Pick your word: metaphor, symbol, myth, legend, or whatever. Frankly, after you take “history” off the table, it doesn’t matter what you call it.

But sooner or later someone will ask, “But what about the genealogies in chapters 4, 5, 10, and 11? These aren’t stories of talking serpents or magic trees, but a record of names. Surely, this is a clear sign that the author intended to write history, not fiction. ”

Perhaps. And don’t call me Shirley.
The truth is, the appearance of names in a list does not mean we are reading “history.”

As tedious as it may sound, sit down one day and make a side-by-side list of the names (yes, you heard me) in 4:17-26 and 5:1-32. Commentaries and some study Bibles will correctly tell you that these genealogies are parallel (cover the same ground) but are not identical. These are two traditions that the editor of Genesis decided to keep, even though including them side-by-side like this is a blatant assault our modern notions of what history writing is supposed to look like (the nerve).

A second genealogical pair is found in 10:1-32 and 11:10-26. They are less parallel than the first pair, but they do cover some of the same ground and differently. (They also give two different accounts for the spread of humanity after the Flood, but I digress.)

Even Jesus has 2 genealogies that do not square up: Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-28. They are not completely different—they overlap a lot—but they are also significantly different.

Almost as if they did this on purpose. Which they did.

In fact, it’s the differences that help us see the different theological purposes of the Gospel writers.

Without getting longwinded, Matthew’s genealogy, divided into 3 neat segments of 14, goes back to Abraham and portrays Jesus as the king of David’s line who will bring an end to Israel’s exile. Luke’s genealogy overlaps with many of Matthew’s names, but is much longer and connects Jesus back to “Adam, Son of God,” perhaps to present “Jesus, Son of God” as a second Adam. (Note that the next scene in chapter 4 shows Jesus successfully resisting the devil’s temptation, unlike the first Adam’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden.)

I am not saying that genealogies are all automatically fabrications, devoid of any sort of historical memory. I actually think that is not the case. Some no doubt have genuine historical value in our sense of the word, but the degree of historicity in the genealogies is up for discussion on a case by case basis.

My bigger point here, however, is that seeing how genealogies behave takes off the table the common assumption that genealogies place us safely (whew) on historical ground and are indications of the writer’s intention to write history and so we should accept them as such.
But, frankly, we have no earthly idea what ancient writers intended, nor do we know what “historical” would have meant to them.

But whatever the writers were after exactly, the inconvenient presence of parallel genealogies is, ironically for some, biblical proof that their conception of “historical” differs markedly from ours.

Taking a step further back, the parallel genealogies are simply examples of a general pattern in the Bible for writing about the past: the inclusion of more than one version—like the 2 “accounts” of Israel’s monarchy (books of Samuel/kings and the books of Chronicles) and of Jesus’s life (4 Gospels).

The biblical writers were not “historians” writing “accounts” of the past. They were storytellers accessing past tradition to say something about their present. That includes genealogies.

Genealogies in the ancient world were not examples of a plain and simple, just the bare fact, recording of the objective past. They were—like the Bible’s handling of the past in general—creative retellings of the past where the line between history and fiction are blurred and often for us difficult, if not impossible, to discern.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Something to Think About - "Could Moses Write Hebrew?"




Introduction

From time to time I become confronted with the traditionalism of my past to the facts of the world as they actually are. Usually what I have held true is not true at all which then causes me to rethink how this new knowledge may help or hinder my previous perspectives of things I had considered true in my Christian faith.

As Christians, we face these events nearly every day, especially if we are absorbed in knowing more about something we find important to us, such as our faith. It is part of what it means to being "a student of the bible unwilling to be content with a "casual traditionalist" view of bible holding the mindset that what we once had learned in the past was true for all time. Many times this is not true. As example, simple mathematics can be learned but the more we study it the more complex it can become. So too with biblical doctrines, dogmas, and beliefs. It can be simple but it can also be vastly complex. And depending on the theorems and axioms you assume (or establish) so goes the entirety of the formula built upon. Great mathematicians became great because they were unwilling to be content with simple mathematics. And so may the disciples of God as they explore His wisdom, ways, and forms of being in this world.

Long years ago I had begun taking the view that what I was taught and believed true may change as I grew older, as the world grew older, and as academia grew older. For those of us trying to make sense out of the bible we each, in our own way, must adapt and change with every succeeding new year of discovery, knowledge and understanding. When we don't we become effectively "stuck in time" and find ourselves "defending our (sacred) positions" rather than asking how this new knowledge might aid us in our assessments, comportments, responses, and comprehensive apprehensions.


For the Christian - and especially for those like me who have grown up in the pious traditions of fundamentalism (and later, conservative evangelicalism) - I find myself nearly daily confronted with my past. I am haunted by it. It lingers upon me and can weigh me down but for the Spirit of God who delivers, protects, and urges me forward. My choices is whether I should reject new things which come to light, or take them in, reconsidering how this new knowledge might broaden my faith, my idea of God, and witness of His Word. In a large part, Relevancy22 is my journey through the lands of enlightenment as I try to pick my way through the lands of devotional circumspection.

Yes, it can be challenging. But when done in a spirit of wonder and Spirit-led investigation can be a clear-eyed projection of just what the biblical faith might become. Mostly, I would like my faith to be as objective as possible to the discoveries being made without being waylaid in its journey by misleading forms of gnosticism (contemporary forms of mysticism comes to mind), unhelpful philosophies (I've lately been choosing Process Philosophy's influence upon Continental Philosophy), or dithering hermeneutics more interested in protecting the faith than projecting the faith. Now whether I understand how to reconcile all these elements or not is another subject for another day though this site here gives testimony of how this might be done as I try to sort through it. For many of my friends they do not wish to think as deeply or allow their faith to be disturbed so thoroughly under the categories of "doubt and uncertainty". For myself, this form of patient investigation and comparative study hopes to obtain a kernel of truth gleaned from the vast history of faith's journey through human history even as it is developing today in its complexity and burgeoning doctrines smashing against one another.

Moses the Lawgiver

Today's subject will be one of those times. Here we have the hallowed traditions of the lawgiver cum prophet Moses writing out God's 10 Commandments to the tribes of Israel - as opposed to very serious questions of whether this event actually occurred or not. Was Moses a real person? Was he visited by God and given a code of conduct to transcribe? Was the totality of this event true or not?

For some of us it must be more true for us to trust the bible than man's speculations. But as I've said on many occasions, the bible is not what we suppose it to be as an ancient collection of oral traditions and legends. Regardless of the historicity of its biblical characters or "actualized" events, in some way the bible is true and testifies to the self-revealing God who tells us what He has done in the past, is doing now in the present, and intends to do in the future. And importantly, how we might respond to His revelation.


If you've had any studies in biblical doctrines this can be a tricky thing to answer as whole doctrinal systems may topple down in our hearts should we admit even one new idea which might destroy the entirety of the structure we had learned, embraced, and believed. But this doesn't have to be the case.

Assuming that God is more real than He is not - which is an important assumption to make, but one I have made in the past, arguing the impossibility of being a true atheist at a philosophical or theological level (cf. Alvin Platinga's discussion on atheism somewhere in this website). As someone committed to the divine faith it behooves us to think rightly about our faith than to force upon it, or even God Himself, constructs which are not true.

Such is the problem of Moses. For myself, whether he is a historical personage or isn't is no matter. Or whether he did or didn't give to Israel God's laws is no matter. Somehow, someone or some group, through some process, came to an idea about God which later became canonized amongst an ancient tribe of peoples living in the lands of Canaan who were going through some kind of sorting out process which brought to them a concept of God which was importantly different from the gods of the peoples they observed around them.

As this body of conviction grew so did their legends, either rightly or wrongly. Which is where we then begin reading in the bible of the many kinds of interpretations Israel and her teachers debated about. This becomes especially noticeable between the "false prophets" and the "true prophets" in the lands of Israel. Each opposing group had an idea of God which impacted how they lived and worshipped. Over time these disagreements divided Israel into two nations.

Israel proper, the older nation with a much greater history of religious worship, eventually came under Assyrian rule and was scattered by defeat and exile (the "ten lost tribes"). Judah, the newer nation, lasted nearly as long as Israel once had, but was also similarly defeated and exiled under the rule of another conquering power, Babylon. When later recomposed as a shell of itself under Ezra and Nehemiah, Judah's holistic idea of canonical law and what it meant to live by it also broke down into a thousand pieces. This then presented to its people as many choices as there were priests. Those early priests who may have first followed the Ezra tradition later, in the absence of any further "divine revelation" during a time of "Intertestmental Silence" birthed as many Hebrew sects as we now have today in the Christian church (... well a few more, I would admit).


This especially came into sharp reveal when Jesus came across the stricter interpretations of the Hebrew religion which later birthed a corrected "Rabbinic form" of the Hebrew faith a hundred years later to offset the corruption which had pervaded it. By doing this Jesus declared to Jewish religious leaders of His day that they had misapprehended and misappropriated God's truth of love and grace for judgment and works. A truth which when denied disassembled into a more "religious code" of conduct and beliefs which said, "If you do this, and believe that, and do these things, than God will approve you." To this Jesus said this kind of faith was false, wholly worthless, and deeply misleading.

At which point Christianity arose on the very last remaining remnants and surviving strands of the Hebraic faith delved from the best traditions of Ezra many years earlier to birth a whole new religion. One bourne not only upon Jesus' teachings but upon His very atonement itself. Now does all this historical movement require that Moses be real or his legacy be true? Does it require that Moses actually transcribed God's 10 Commandment on Mt. Sinai? Or rather, perhaps in some way, God set down a codification of divine faith which was birthed within a small gathering of pious people granted a greater ken of fellowship by the Spirit with Himself and His desires for their lives? In the long view of things I think we must admit that however this ancient faith developed and came to be, it now is, and is as powerful now as when it first formed so many long years ago in yesteryear's deep legacies irrespective of our greater academic and cultural awareness of today. God is real, He is present, and He moves with us towards redeeming our lives and the world we live in.

Which also means we should reserve the right to restructure the Christian faith should it stray from the simplicity of its first principles even as Jesus did in His day - especially in light of a fundamental conviction that today's more popular forms of faith are misleading many through the false idea of who God is, what He expects, and who we must be in order to earn His allegiance. These kinds of faith-pictures do not help in apprehending the God of Salvation. From a religious sociological perspective it seems more truthful to say, "There is a God who is influencing His creation in such a way that our redemption - and that of creation - may grow and thrive in the lands of sin and evil in which we daily live."


Conclusion

As a theist - especially a metaphysical and ontologic theist - this makes more sense to me than the oft-times senselessness of preachers preaching a literalized bible out of time, out of sense, and out of mind. If I were to hold to these more traditional ideas than as a thinking Christian I would lose my faith rather than gain back to my faith the richness of its long developmental history gleaned from the sociobiological and evolutionary history of its human species as it adapts to its environment that it might survive. I think this is one reason we see so many leaving the church. Christianity has become outdated to the understanding of the world asking questions the faithful are forbidden to ask. I also think that should we begin answering those questions many would similarly return.

For some of the church it can hold to a mythical bible and be content. In fact, I must allow this, if not even encourage it for those who do not have the same strong faculties of faith others may have. Paul says this is the difference between those who drink milk or eat meat; or those who wish to mature in the faith in ministries and teachings beyond where they could quite naturally stop. But for others of us, we must pull back the withholding curtain of religion to evolve our own God-ward faith lest we become like the Jews of Jesus' day and lose our faith altogether through misunderstanding and false beliefs.

In final analysis, God is all around us. His revelation speaks daily - if not moment by moment - to us. We are not left without the divine witness either of God or His Spirit. In this our hearts and minds and souls rejoice in God's presence even as we are sadden by the oppression of sin or heartlessness of religion. We stand together as a faith legion, and together seek to grasp the simplicity of God's love in the sublimeness of its power. Here is where we stand and on no other bedrock as living testaments to the faiths of our forefathers, to Christ's redemption, and verily, to God's self-revelation. Amen.

R.E. Slater
September 21, 2017

* * * * * * * * * * * *




by Bart Ehrman

As you may have noticed, on a number of occasions I get asked questions that I simply can’t answer. I received one such question this week, about the history of the Hebrew language. Here is how the questioner phrased it:

What is our earliest evidence for Hebrew as a written language? I’ve been to apologetic seminars where they say it’s long been said by atheists that the Hebrew Bible can’t be trusted because the Hebrews didn’t have a written language until well after the stories in the OT would’ve taken place. The evidence that the Hebrews had a written language in close proximity to the Biblical stories is based on pottery evidence and things of that nature. I’m sure these are topics you are very familiar with and I’d appreciate your take.

It’s actually amazing how many topics I’m not familiar with at all! So, not knowing the answer, I asked a colleague of mine who is an expert in Hebrew philology, Joseph Lam (he teaches courses in my department in Hebrew and other Semitic languages, and on the religion, culture, and literature of the Ancient Near East, and in Hebrew Bible; his office is across the hall from mine). I simplified the question to get the heart of it. This is what I said in an email to him.

Joseph,
Someone has asked me the question below. Damn if I know! I don’t need a long exposition, just a basic answer will do (some kind of inscription?)
What is our earliest evidence for Hebrew as a written language?

Here is his very helpful response.

It depends on what you define as Hebrew. We have a number of inscriptions from Palestine in the late 2nd millennium/early 1st millennium BCE (which is when Hebrew mostly likely branched off as a distinct language from the broader “Canaanite” family of languages), but early Hebrew and Canaanite are difficult to distinguish from one another, especially in short inscriptions (sometimes a single word). For a long time the standard answer was the Gezer Calendar from the late 10th century (900’s) BCE, but I now think that text is better described as Phoenician or common Canaanite. Others would say the more recently discovered Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon (11th/10th century), but there are various oddities to that text that make it difficult to classify. There are also a number of short inscriptions from Tel Rehov that have been dated archaeologically to the 10th/9th centuries. The upshot is, there are a number of candidates from the 10th/9th centuries, but certainly by the 8th century we have many more unambiguously “Hebrew” inscriptions.
For more detail, I would recommend to your readers the following online article (and the article to which it responds):
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/what%E2%80%99s-the-oldest-hebrew-inscription/

As a follow-up, I said/asked the following:

Fantastic. Just what I needed. The questioner was not a scholar, but an interested lay person, who was especially interested in the question of whether, if there was a Moses living in say the 13th c BCE, he would have been able to write. Do you have an opinion? (I myself don’t think there *was* a Moses, but still, assuming there was…)

Here is Joseph’s short and very interesting response.

If there was a Moses, raised in the Egyptian court, he probably would have learned to write in Egyptian! The texts of the Pentateuch, whoever wrote them, are NOT in 13th century language; they are in classical 1st millennium Hebrew. Whatever a hypothetical 13th century Moses wrote, whether in Egyptian or Canaanite or something else, that’s NOT what we have preserved in the Pentateuch.

Bart


Friday, March 10, 2017

Pete Enns - Why "Original Author" [Theory] is Overrated




The Bible: Why "Original Author" [Theory] is Overrated
http://www.peteenns.com/the-bible-its-sort-of-like-a-viral-internet-joke-or-why-original-author-is-overrated/

by PeteEnns
[*any edits or emendations mine - r.e. slater]
March 6, 2017
Topical Section: Nature of the Bible32

If you know how Wikipedia works, you have a good idea of how the authorship of biblical books went down: an anonymous text is added to over time, but none of the additions are screaming for individual recognition.

Benjamin Sommer explains the phenomenon this way:

"As Walter Jackson Bate and Harold Bloom have shown, poets since the romantic era [sic] have attempted to cover up the extent to which they are indebted to their predecessors. Ancient and medieval authors, however, saw their writings as valuable only if they contributed to a mighty stream that predated and transcended them. Where a modern author (to borrow language from T. S. Eliot) emphasizes individual talent, the ancients found meaning in tradition. They believed in all sincerity that anything of merit in their writing was the product of insight they culled from earlier authorities and of skills they learned from their masters. (Revelation and Authority, p. 139, my emphasis; see also here and here and here)."

Modern notions of “authorship” value individual talent and creativity. In antiquity, “authors” were valued by being seen as part of a greater whole, as standing in a tradition.

The modern obsession with individual authorship of biblical texts is the very thing that the Old Testament “authors” seem determined to obscure.

Consider the book of Psalms. Over time, David came to be associated with the book as a whole, which included “authoring” psalms that stem from a much later time. Why? Because these later authors and compilers saw themselves not as individual authors, but as purveyors of a tradition.

Likewise, the book of Proverbs is associated with Solomon, but the book as a whole is a compilation of proverbial sayings that span a great length of time.

This same notion can be applied to Isaiah. All but a very few scholars agree that the book of Isaiah, though rooted in the 8th c. BCE, is added to until the postexilic period (late 6th and into the 5th centuries BCE) where it reached the form as we know it. These later authors, however, continued to attribute the book as a whole [to] the 8th century prophet Isaiah—not in an attempt to fool anyone, but because their notion of “[traditional] authorship” demanded it.

And of course, we have the Pentateuch—that diverse collection of laws and narratives that did not reach it’s final form until well after the return from Babylonian exile (539 BCE), though all of it claims to be rooted in the time of Moses.

The “late” authorship of biblical books—which is so central to modern biblical scholarship and yet so problematic, even heretical, to others—makes perfect sense if we adopt ancient notions of “authorship” rather than modern ones.

Adding one’s voice to an ancient tradition without acknowledging it isn’t “lying” or “showing disrespect for God’s word.” It is how ancient authorship works—it is how the truth is told and how one shows respect for the tradition.

Modern assumptions of how authorship “should” work need to be set aside if we want to “take seriously” the biblical text.

Sommer uses a well-known internet joke to explain further how ancient authorship works: “Why God Could Not Get Tenure at a University.” The [email comments he found read like this]:

  • He only has one publication;
  • it has no footnotes;
  • it is in Hebrew;
  • when one experiment went amiss, He tried to cover it up by drowning all the subjects;
  • some doubt He even wrote it Himself.
  • [a fuller Internet list can be found below - res]

A real knee-slapper, of course, but Sommer noticed that none of the forwarded emails contained precisely the same list. Some of the reasons remained constant, but the exact wording was tweaked and the number of reasons given varied. (I might also add that the joke exists with at least one alternate name, “Why God Couldn’t Get a PhD,” or some other variation).

Sommer explains:

"Because anyone who forwards an email can alter the text, various people (whether my friends, or the people who sent them, or some unknown person in the chain before that) had introduced small modifications, additions, and subtractions. Some people must have said to themselves, “It would be even funnier if I rephrase this one a little,” “Here’s a good one I thought of myself,” “I can take a joke as well as the next guy, but this one’s just sacrilegious.” Even though it was clear that people who passed the lists on often intervened in the text, I never saw anyone’s name attached to a list as author, even as partial author. It would have been ridiculous for someone who made a minor alteration to claim that status."

The situation of biblical scribes, mutatis mutandis, was similar. A scribe who added a line, even rephrased a sentence, or combined two texts did not regard himself as the author, and no one person is the “real” author. As a desire to attribute texts to particular authors became more common over time in ancient Israel, scribes connected texts with specicific figure, but putting their own name on texts they were transmitting would have been grossly inappropriate. In such a situation, attribution to a respected symbolic figure from the past was culturally sensible. (p. 141, reformatted, emphasis added)

Wikipedia, emails, and the Internet as a whole are helpful analogies for understanding what the Bible is—a living, moving, dynamic, tradition.

The “word of God written,” as some describe the Bible, is itself complex and dynamic, a back-and-forth between respect for tradition and the need to continue transforming it. That much seems crystal clear to me.

The question we need to be asking, however, is as it has always been for Christians:

  • does reading the Bible faithfully mean continuing that “transformative” trajectory, or shutting it down?
  • Does the biblical “canon” function as a closed book of rules or as a [more open] model for a necessarily continuing theological process?

I think these are viable questions raised by paying attention to the Bible itself—both within the Old Testament and in how the New Testament authors appropriate it.

- PE


* * * * * * * * * * *




Why God Didn't Get Tenure

Dear Mr. Dean,

At your request, the Tenure Evaluation Committee has once more re-evaluated Mr. God's application. [But] we regret to inform you that after careful analysis the Committee unanimously resolved to uphold the original recommendation. We repeat below the reasons that led us to this decision --- including several points which, in a misguided attempt to preserve academic decorum and the Candidate's reputation, we had chosen to omit from the original report.
  1. He had only one major publication.
  2. It wasn't written in English.
  3. It wasn't published in a referred journal,
  4. ... it has no references,
  5. ... it lacks a review of previous work,
  6. ... and does not even mention alternative approaches to the problem.
  7. Its many sweeping claims were not backed by formal proofs.
  8. There is evidence that some parts of the text were plagiarized.
  9. Some even doubt that He wrote it Himself.
  10. He performed His chief experiment only once, with no control experiments.
  11. It is still not clear whether His experiment succeeded at all.
  12. Some of His acts caused extensive environmental damage and major property loss.
  13. He neglected to keep a lab notebook.
  14. He did not provide any error analysis or confidence intervals.
  15. He did not use standard metric units.
  16. His description of the experiment omitted essential details.
  17. He cheated by deleting any subjects whose behavior did not fit His model.
  18. The scientific community had a hard time replicating His results.
  19. He encouraged, and apparently enjoyed, the pointless cruel sacrifice of animals.
  20. He experimented with human subjects without Ethics Board's approval.
  21. He was idle for many years, and only started working one week before the deadline.
  22. He did not get any government or industrial support for His project.
  23. In fact, he has never written a single grant proposal.
  24. He never served on any committees, and never attended a faculty meeting.
  25. He was never awarded a doctoral degree, not even an honorary one.
  26. He would not tolerate criticism or discordant opinions.
  27. His difficult personality has prevented effective collaboration with His peers.
  28. He had His first two grad students expelled, for sheer professional jealously.
  29. Since that incident, He couldn't or wouldn't recruit any new grad students.
  30. His research lab has been deserted and inactive for ages.
  31. Throughout His entire career, He taught only one course...
  32. ... whose syllabus can be reduced to ten trivial rules-of-thumb.
  33. In fact, after the first lecture He hardly showed up in class.
  34. There are reports that He once sent His Son to teach the class.
  35. His lectures were lots of high-sounding talk with little technical substance.
  36. His practical demos were often too dangerous to students.
  37. Students were forced to use His own textbook, which is quite old and lacks exercises.
  38. Most students felt that His grading was too harsh and unfair.
  39. He was a slow grader and often wouldn't give students any feedback until it was too late.
  40. He insisted on using only pass/fail grades instead of the standard A-F system.
  41. He would not grade on a curve, and once He flunked all of His students but one ...
  42. ... to whom He had previously revealed the exam's content.
  43. He didn't keep a homepage and didn't read His email.
  44. His office hours were infrequent and were often held in inconvenient locations.
  45. He violated the honor system by being omnipresent even during examinations.
  46. He made some rude and demeaning remarks about students who failed His tests.
  47. He used obsolete teaching methods, such as peer pressure and guilt manipulation.
  48. He even resorted to physical punishment.
  49. His controversial views on race and sex could have harmed the university's image.
  50. He showed some creativity once, it's true; but what has He done since then?
Respectfully yours,

(original signed by TEC Chairman)
Last edited on 2004-01-06 16:29:04 by stolfi






Saturday, July 9, 2016

God's Word Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow




Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)

TELESCOPING
“Telescoping" is the fallacy of projecting our modern ideas back upon ancient texts. Jesus' teachings of radical universal love can be very hard to hear when the modern church projects itself upon his words. We must constantly remind ourselves that, when Jesus spoke of the “word," the Bible was not yet compiled. When he asked people to follow him, there was no institutional church to join. When he asked people to "believe in him,” he was standing right in front of them. There were no creeds yet written, so if we spoke to Jesus about the atonement or the trinity, it is entirely possible that he would have no idea what we are talking about. - Jim Rigby
--- 
In cognitive psychology, the telescoping effect (or telescoping bias) refers to the temporal displacement of an event whereby people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are and distant events as being more recent than they are. The former is known as backward telescoping or time expansion, and the latter as is known as forward telescoping. Three years is approximately the time frame in which events switch from being displaced backwards in time to forwards in time, with events occurring three years in the past being equally likely to be reported with forward telescoping bias as with backward telescoping bias. Although telescoping occurs in both the forward and backward directions, in general the effect is to increase the number of events reported too recently. This net effect in the forward direction is because of forces that impair memory, such as lack of salience, also impair time perception. Telescoping leads to an over reporting of the frequency of events.[3] This over reporting is because participants include events beyond the period, either events that are too recent for the target time period (backward telescoping) or events that are too old for the target time period (forward telescoping). - Wikipedia
---

A Timeline of Early to Medieval Alphabets

From my friend Rance Darity comes this gentle reminder what "telescoping" means when post-Jesus institutions interpret Jesus' gospel. What theologians like Sanders, Dunn, and Wright have been reminding us these past 30 years (sic, the New Perspective of Paul directing the church to rediscover the Jewishness of the bible). That to read any of the New Testament, including the "Jewish" gospels, must be read within their own contextual existential communities of Jewishness.

I say existential because by that time the world was bathed in Hellenism and Roman ideology. So even back then the studied Jewish scribe and Pharisee struggled mightily to explain God and their faith as it was encapsulated within a post-Second Temple Reconstructive era (515 BCE) some 450 to 600 years earlier according to their Jewish traditions. Remember too that Pharisaism developed around 135 CE from the more ancient scribal traditions under Ezra and Nehemiah 635 years earlier. That Pharisasm was the ancient precursor to Rabbinic Judaism later established 100 hundred years after Jesus's death which has evolved into the various Jewish Orthodox traditions of today (so it was roughly 500 years in the making if you count the Intertestamental Period between the Old and New Testaments as canonical variants developed within their scribal camps). Overall, these groups were interested in preserving God's Word which they knew as the Tanakh, which was the Jewish canonical collection of Hebrew texts we know as the Old Testament today.

And then into this mix came the Sadducees who were all too willing to mix the Tanakh's Torah teachings with the popular philosophies of their day (a process known as Hellenization) while jettisoning some of the favored Torah teachings of old Judaism from the Hebrew Bible, along with the Prophets (Nevi'im), and Writings (Ketuv'im). In essence then, the Pharisees and their scribes were attempting to honor the old Jewish Scriptures against the incursion of newer non-Jewish ideas and radical redactionism. And yet, having done a yeoman's job in protecting the Bible they were most curiously Jesus's worst enemies who Himself was the living Bible! Talk about your paradoxes, ironies, and riddles!

A Medieval Version of the Septuagint (the Hebrew OT written in Koine Greek
during the 3rd and 2nd BCE era under King Ptolemy)

Then came a competing bible begun under Egpytian King Ptolemy from Alexandria comparable to what King James of England did in the early 1600s later known as the King James Bible. Unlike James the Ptolemy's commissioned the creation of the Septuagint during the 3rd to 2nd Century BCE, and to be written from the old Hebrew Canon (using the Masoretic tradition from the 7th and 10th Centuries BCE) into Koine Greek - which  was the common language everyone spoke and understood throughout Egypt, eastern Africa, and the Middle East. In time, since people could only read Greek, even the Jews of the New Testament era of Jesus' day would prefer the Septuagint over their own Jewish bible. They could read it and understand it and it was this bible which Jesus and His disciples preached out of. Later on this same undertaking was again made when St. Jerome was commissioned  by Pope Damasus I in 382 CE to update the Septuagint into a Latinized Version of the bible known as the Latin(Catholic) Vulgate. Being a wise old man, and contemporary to St. Augustine, Jerome used not only the Septuagint but also the Masoretic text of the Hebrew bible to recapture what may have been lost through the centuries in translation and transmission. Having done this job the Catholic Church of the Roman Empire could distribute its pages to its priests throughout the ancient world that all Latin-speaking people might know and understand God's good news in Christ.

The  Vulgate of Clementine. Prologue of St. John
(the Hebrew OT written in Latin by Jerome c.382 AD)

But if one goes even further back into time before the restored Second Temple era (constructed in 515 BCE to be later destroyed by Rome in 70 CE 585 years later), back into the time of old Israel and Judah themselves, back into the time of the tribes of Israel before they were a kingdom, and even further back into the time of Moses and Abraham, then God's revelation of Himself had changed and synthesized greatly down through these eras. So it was no small task for the scribes of Ezra's day to recapture and attempt to encapsulate Israel's profound history over 1500+ years of oral tradition with the God who loved and led them unto salvation by works of redemption throughout their turbulent eras.

One of Many Interpretive Designs of the Biblical Canon

So that by the first century of the Christian Era (CE) - into this theological soup of parsing, reparsing, and interpretive synthesis - comes Jesus, who speaks the "word" of God come to Israel after so many long years of "divine silence" (...but not really. God was always there bespeaking Himself to His children). But especially into the stage of human travail and mis-allocation of God's words by His children to sharpen-up and re-form the points of discussion of what God had been saying all these many long years since Adam's day. But this time God spoke through Himself (aka Jesus) without interpreter. And He spoke directly into the Jewish society of His children having lost their way in too many words and ideas about divinity, holiness, sin, and the afterlife.

Now this is not unlike the church today whereby we do this same task of the scribe and the Pharisee by attempting to historically discover God's Word and traditions when redacting the Christian Canon into our own era's travails and mis-allocations. And to speak it plainly without losing its way within out extra-biblical influences (unless those influences conform with biblical theology) as the Sadduccees once did. And to contemporize the preaching of God's good news buy placing it in the common language and understanding of our times (English, predominantly). Even as Jesus and His disciples did when reading from the Greek Septuagint rather than from the Jewish text which would have been gibberish to their listeners. Why? Because their audience could read, write, and speak in Koine Greek - even as their Jewish leadres and neighbors did who had long ago forgotten their mother language of Judaism through centuries of war and dissettlement. Again, we see the painstaking guidance and leadership of God to carefully maintain the pith, the center, of His revelation to man. And what is this teaching God wants us to know? Read on...

The many variants of Redaction to Interpreting the Bible
both in its meaning, transmission, adjudication, and relevancy

So then how does one interpret the Bible? And which Bible does one interpret? A Bible that is literal or a Bible that is a living paraphrase? In point of fact the Septuagint was all of this. And then there is the problem of redaction - how does one interpret the Bible we have? And finally there is the problem of examining our own needs-and-wants placed upon both bible and God which may be more scribal and Pharisaical in doing the hard of being faithful to the various traditions of the OT (and now the NT whose essence is distilled in the Gospels of Jesus). But even so, each era must have its "Jesus-like" moments of clarity (and human clarions) which removes man's words from God's words to hear afresh God's call to love and to act in love. That the gospel of God in the OT and the gospel of God in the NT demonstrated through His life and death is no more, nor no less, than to love one another when boiled down to its essence. And when you think about it it really isn't that hard is it? Bible interpretation has much less to do with what we believe, our Creeds and our doctrines, then how our beliefs affect our actions towards others. There's the nub of it. With James, Paul says faith without works is dead, ineffectual, unlively, a dung pile. But with it, each of our dung piles - our compost piles - may become composted gardens of resurrection enriching and nourishing all who look upon God's faithfulness and beauty.


So what is the work of God in our world today? It is no different than His work over the many long centuries of time. It is to renew our fellowship both in Himself and with one another that a spiritual healing might cleanse our benighted lands so full of turmoil and darkness. To repent of our divisive and discriminating inequities and injustices that prevent us from sitting at a table of fellowship with one another. To worry less about being "biblical" and more about being "unrighteous." To seize the days of opportunity we have now that we might build a new society of men and women focusing on the majors, the knowns, the necessaries rather than the minors, the preferentials, and ideologicals. To do the best work as we can like the scribes and Pharisees to preserve as pure a sense of God within our communities but to let go of these efforts if they should miss the simple and sublime beauty that God is love and offers this love of peace and binding to broken hearts everywhere crucified upon the pangs of sin and death.


And lastly, like God's words to Abraham, to Moses, to the prophets and kings of Israel's long history , these words are no different then Jesus and the apostles words to us now. Yes, culturally Gods words must be worked out in all of its existential variations by society, tribe, and geographic region, no less than we must always do when doing the hard work of redacting our understanding of the divine. But as a gentle reminder to us God bespoke His ancient word to ancient peoples again and again and again until finally He spoke them through Himself we know as as our Savior-God Jesus. To show to us who He is, and what it means to be in fellowship with the Creator of life, who redeems His creation from all its hard burdens of freedom gifted from the moment of our birth unto the twilight years of our grave and into the midnight sun of eternity with Him as our Lord, Shepherd, and Friend. Amen and amen.

R.E. Slater
July 9, 2015

A Word of Admonition

To not forget to "gyroscope" in the days of "telescoping."
To remember at all times our bearings, headings, and drift.

- res








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TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE -
ITS TREES, HERITAGE, ARRANGEMENT, OUTLINE

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A Timeline of Textual Transmissions



Textual Transmission of the Hebrew Canon


Textual Transmission of the Jewish Old Testament


Textual Transmission of the Christian New Testament


OT Canonical Arrangement


Comparison Timeline of OT Eras to one another


Comparison Outline of NT Canonical Arrangement to one another