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1 The Jewish Background to the Gospels

(This is a Truro-venue session from the 1997/1998 year of the ‘Exploring the New Testament’ part of the University of Exeter’s Certificate in Theology programme, then called ‘Theology Quest and Questions’.  Things have moved on since then, but most of this material remains ok) 

1        Jesus of Nazareth is not our contemporary.

          He lived a long time ago in a place far away.

          "The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there".  

          It is a perennial temptation to create Jesus in our own image.

2        Wright (p123) uses four questions as a way of exploring the world or world-view of a person or community:  Who am I?  Where am I?  What is wrong?  What is the solution?  We shall use these to explore the world of Jesus of Nazareth.

3        Who am I?

a        Jews and Gentiles

For most Jews the first and fundamental answer would have been simply "I am a Jew".  For them there were two sorts of humans - Jews and the rest.  Jews were those inside the Covenant: gentiles (goyim) those outside.  For them Jewish self-definition and identity was built on this separation.  Belonging via conversion was accepted.

A slight complication was that some Judean Jews did not regard Galilean Jews as true Jews.  The historical reason was that Galilee had not been part of any Jewish kingdom since 734BC (2 Kings 15:29) until Alexander Jannaeus annexed it in 80BC and attempted to Judaise the ethnically mixed population.  Suspicion of Galilean Jews' impure and mixed lineage lingered.  It was also that bit too far away from Jerusalem to be effectively monitored by the Temple authorities who were suspicious both of its religious conservatism and its religious fervour.

Contact with and attitudes towards Gentiles varied.  In Judea it was just possible to avoid them, but in Galilee they formed the majority of the population and normal life meant bumping into them.

b        Jews and Jews

           i/  Men, women and children - Jewish society in Judea and Galilee was patriarchal and androcentric: power lay with men and for men.  Women might be valued and cherished, like any other property which enhanced the status of its owner.  Women and children whose property value fell were seen as a liability.

         ii/  Social groups and "classes" - The basic social structure was the traditional extended family, with authority residing in the elders (ie the old men).  Evidence points to the breakdown of the extended family and transition to the nuclear one, due to the dividing of family farms in a time of expanding population.  There was an underclass of Jewish (and gentile) slaves and of a growing numbers of landless "day-labourers".

The economy in both Judea and Galilee was basically agrarian, but in Judea the Temple occupied a central economic role:

Priests and Levites: the history of priesthood in Israel is complex.  By this time this hereditary office was divided into two orders of clergy, "higher" ("Priests") and lower ("Levites") with perhaps around 20,000 in total (Sanders ch 6).  They staffed the Temple on an annual rota and their work was "a combination of liturgical worship and expert butchery, mostly the latter" (Sanders p79).

The Scribes formed an identifiable "profession", akin to a combination of our legal, administrative and educational ones and centering on interpretation of the Torah.  Many scribes were priests and Levites who had to do something with the rest of their time (Sanders ch 10).  Many of the others were Pharisees.  (Eventually the scribes became the Rabbis, a lay order of interpreters of Torah and, in effect, the leaders of Judaism after the destruction of Jerusalem.  The use of the respectful title "Rabbi" ("My master", "my lord", "Sir") in the Gospels predates this technical use of the term).

        iii/  Language and culture - The eastern Mediterranean countries had been part of the Greek world since 330BC.  M Hengel (The 'Hellenization' of Judea in the First Century after Christ) insists that even Judea was cosmopolitan.  Jews would normally speak Aramaic though many in Judea and most in Galilee would know Greek (which was the lingua franca of Galilee).  Few Jews would know enough Hebrew to follow the Torah readings.

4        Where am I?

a        Galilee and Judea in the history books

The Hasmonean dynasty is in italics, the Herodian in ordinary type.  Prefects became Procurators after AD44.  The political history of this period is tortuous as well as being full of bloody intrigue and atrocity.  It is set out as clearly as anywhere in chapters 7-8 of Ancient Israel, ed H Shanks, SPCK 1989.

b        Galilee and Judea on the map (see the final page of this handout - sorry, you'll need to find a map on the web somewhere ...)

c        Galilee and Judea on the ground

i/  countries and regions

Galilee - 30 miles from east to west and 40 from north to south.  Pop. around 400k of whom a quarter were Jews.  Herod Antipas moved its capital from Sepphoris (4m from Nazareth, pop. 40k) to Tiberias (named in honour of the Emperor and built over a graveyard) in AD26.  Good, easy and rich agricultural land.  See "Galilee" in IDB 2.

Judea - 45 miles by 45.  Mostly poor upland area.  Pop. 200k, half of whom lived in Jerusalem.  The Temple was the principle industry and economic base of the county.  See "Judea" in IDB 2.

Samaria - became part of the Jewish kingdom when captured by John Hyrcanus around 110BC.  A separate Roman province after 63BC.

The Ten Towns (Decapolis) - a federation of Greek cities.  The largest, Scythopolis, is OT's Bethshan.

ii/  villages, towns and cities - According to Josephus there were 204 towns and villages in Galilee (Sanders p180).  Capernaum was the base for Jesus' work (Mk 2:1, Mt 4:13), an important lakeside port on a main road.  Its ruins indicate a settlement spread over a mile.  Neither Sepphoris or Tiberias (Galilee's principal cities) are mentioned in the gospels.

NB  NB  NB    Galilee was not in the backwoods!    NB  NB  NB

5        What is wrong? 

a        The Romans and the ruling Jewish group who supported and represented them.

"Rome generally governed remotely, being content with the collection of tribute and maintenance of stable borders; for the most part it left even these matters in the hands of loyal local rulers and leaders" (E P Sanders - The Historical Figure of Jesus, p18).

There was no traditional "aristocracy" in Judaism.  The groups thus used by the Romans were  the hierarchy of Jerusalem-based High Priests (who were therefore deeply suspect in the eyes of many Jews) plus the newly growing "landowner class".

b        Taxes: Jews in Judea and Galilee were subject to two taxation systems:

a/ the Jewish tithe, of various kinds, as decreed in Torah and which amounted to about 20% of income, and b/ the Roman taxes (land at 1%, crops at 12.5% plus various tolls, tributes and customs dues) amounting to about 15% of income.  Given the way that these were collected - the right to collect was farmed out to the highest bidder - the final demand was often higher still.  This added up to an almost impossible burden.

Roman taxes were unavoidable and anti-Roman sentiment was focused on them and it was accompanied by hatred of their, collaborating Jewish, tax-collectors.  The Temple taxes, however, were "voluntary".  This meant that those Jews who could not afford to pay their full taxes not only brought their own Jewish social system, which was heavily dependent on the tithes, into jeopardy but created internal tensions which threatened the cohesion of the Jewish "social world" (see Borg pp84-6).

c        A conflict of cultures

One of the issues behind the Maccabean War had been "Hellenisation" and those issues were still around.  By which values shall we live?  What does it mean to be a Jew in an international and Greek culture?  How adaptable is Torah?  What is wrong with gymnasia, hippodromes and the rest of Greek culture and its philosophies?  That was still a disputed question among Jews.

d        Remember also all the vagaries of the human condition identified in and addressed by the Old Testament (eg sickness, death, poverty, misfortune, injustice, vice, exploitation, exile, ignorance, greed, famine, crime, violence, slander etc etc)

6        What is the solution?

a        Revolution?  The Jewish Revolt of AD66 was the culmination of much popular agitation:

1. the most elementary form of this was "social banditry".

2. popular messianic movements: eg three occasions of large groups of people following a charismatic leader who they elected as king (4BC - Judas son of Hezekiah and Simon; AD66 Menahem son of Judas the Galilean and 68-70 Simon bar Giora; 132 Bar Kochba)

3. non-violent movements inspired by "Prophets" often leading people into the desert (AD26-36 the "Samaritan"; 45 Theudas; 56 the "Egyptian", 62-69 Jesus son of Hananiah + John the Baptist?) 

4. in 4BC there had been an activist group of Pharisees and other intellectuals led by Judas of Galilee and Saddok (which Josephus termed the "Fourth Philosophy")

5. outbreaks of violence in reaction to specific Roman actions: eg AD6 Judas the Galilean; 7 incidents during the rule of Pilate; 48-52 revolts under Cumanus including a major Passover riot (Wright pp174-6). 

6. the Sicarii, a group of terrorists who emerged in the 50's AD.

What there was not was an organised independence movement called the Zealot party!  Such people did not come into existence as a party until during the Revolt.  (See R A Horsley with J S Hanson, Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs, Harper Row, 1988, especially the conclusion).

b        Religion?

          i/  the Temple and the Festivals/synagogues and Sabbaths/the home.  These were the three foci of the religion of the ordinary Jew:

Even though Jews from Galilee would not get there very often the Temple was important to them.  Worship in the Temple would consist of the regular daily Morning and Evening sacrifices with everything doubled on Sabbaths and New Moons; a constant stream of "private" worshippers and the three great annual Pilgrimage Festivals (Passover/Unleavened Bread, Weeks/Pentecost and Tabernacles/New Year).  See Sanders chs 5 and 8, who estimates that the number in the Temple at a festival could be anywhere between 300k and .5m (p128).

The history of synagogues is unclear.  As meetings for prayer and study they may date back to the exile, but as separate designated buildings they may be later than the time of Jesus.  The "synagogue service" on the Sabbath consisted of Torah reading and prayer, possibly with some comment on the reading.  See Sanders pp198-201. 

Worship was offered daily in the home by saying the Shema', by putting up mezuzoth and by wearing tephillin.  And by observing the commandments, not least those to do with purity, in the spirit of gratitude for the gift of Torah.  See Sanders pp190-7.

         ii/  names and sects and parties (Judaisms):

The Pharisees were a predominantly lay movement primarily located in Judea but spreading into Galilee.  Their aim was to spread "Scriptural holiness" as in the hymn "Fill thou my life".  They were committed to both the Written and the Oral Torah.  Membership was drawn from many parts of society.  There were real differences of opinion among them, eg Hillel and Shammai on divorce.  They came to dominate Judaism after the Fall of Jerusalem.  See Wright pp181-203 and Sanders chapters 18-9.  Josephus gives their number as 6k.

The Sadducees were the "aristocratic" chief priestly families, based in Jerusalem, who controlled the Jewish Council and whose principal interest was in the Temple and its life.  Often this meant supporting and appeasing the Romans, but not inevitably so.  They opposed the modernism of the Pharisees (eg on the question of life after death) and accepted only the Written Torah.  See Wright pp209-213 and Sanders chapter 15.

The Essenes were a sectarian movement who regarded themselves as the True Israel.  They regarded the Jerusalem Temple as corrupt and looked forward to its purging by God, in which they would join.  They expected a messiah, or even two, a king and priest sent from God who would fight a holy war against the Sons of Darkness and with whom they would take up arms.  The community at Qumran is part of this movement, as possibly is John the Baptist, and the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect the views of the movement which was not monochrome.  See Wright pp203-9 and Sanders chapters 16-7.  Josephus gives their number as 4k.

But do not forget that the vast majority of Jews were ordinary Jews who lived out their ancestral faith as best they could or as much as they were inclined.  A few were what the OT calls "fools" (ie those who lived without regard for God" and some were pagans (ie those who worshipped a god other than the God of Israel).  Atheists, in our sense, were rare in that ancient world.  See Wright pp213f and Sanders chapter 8.  Later on the pejorative term 'am ha'arets ("People of the Land") appears in rabbinic literature, a term used in a disparaging way of ordinary Jews who can't manage the full rigour of Pharisaic ways.  There is no evidence that such ordinary Jews were ever regarded as "sinners", a term used for those few who chose to live outside of their ancestral faith.   

       iii/  Apocalyptic, Eschatology and Messianism:

Apocalyptic literature was a feature of Jewish life from the Maccabean War onwards.  It offers a revelation of God's future for the earth or of the present reality of heaven.  Its language is vivid and often bizarre, usually coded in sterotyped images and often presented under the name of an ancient worthy.  The Biblical examples of the genre are Daniel and Revelation.  See Wright pp280-299.

Eschatology is teaching about the future presented in terms of the end (eschaton) of the age, and is one of the popular subjects of apocalyptic literature.  Wright insists that this imagery is misunderstood if it is taken literally and seen as the end of the real world (pp299-338).

"Many Jews looked forward to a new and better age .... The hopes centred on the restoration of the people, the building or purification of the temple and Jerusalem, the defeat or conversion of the Gentiles, and the establishment of purity and righteousness" (Sanders p298).

Messianism, however, is largely a creation of the imagination of Christian scholars (see Sanders pp295-8 and Witherington pp213-8).

"Modern scholarship has made one thing quite clear: there was no single, monolithic and uniform 'messianic expectation' among first-century Jews" (Wright p307)

          iv/  John the Baptist is attested also by Josephus, John stood in the charismatic stream of Judaism (prophecy, visions, voices) and is portrayed in the Gospels in terms reminiscent of Elijah.  His location in the wilderness, his asceticism and his use of purification by water are seen by some as parallels with Qumran: but the differences are greater than the similarities (see Walter Wink, Oxford Companion p373).

          v/  Finally, theology.  Despite considerable pluralism (not least but not only in the Diaspora), it is possible to speak of a common theology and world-view.  This takes the Old Testament story as its base narrative; Yahwistic monotheism as its core credo (as in the Shema' - Deuteronomy 6:4); uses Temple, Land, Covenant and Torah as its key symbols and expresses itself in worship and the study and obedience of Torah as its praxis.  See Wright chapters 8-9 and Sanders chapter 13.

Suggested Reading (in order of accessibility)

B Witherington III, The Jesus Quest, Paternoster1995, chapter 1

M Borg, Jesus: a new vision, SPCK 1993, chapter 5

N T Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, SPCK 1992, part III

E P Sanders, Judaism: Practice & Belief 63BCE-66CE, SCM 1992

R A Horsley with J S Hanson, Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs, Harper Row, 1988

J Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, SCM 1969

J K Riches, The World of Jesus, First-Century Judaism in Crisis, Cambridge 1990

Plus: dip into articles on anything you can think of (eg Judaisms, Nazareth, Tax, Geography, Gentiles, John the Baptist, Scribes, Synagogue, Josephus, Essenes, Apocalyptic, Dead Sea Scrolls, Synagogue, Agriculture, Houses etc etc) in the Oxford Companion to the Bible (edited B M Metzger and M D Coogan) or in The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible (4 volumes plus Supplement = IDB) 

2 The Kingdom of God

(This is a Truro-venue two-session unit from the 1997/1998 year of the ‘Exploring the New Testament’ part of the University of Exeter’s Certificate in Theology programme, then called ‘Theology Quest and Questions’.  Things have moved on since then, but most of this material remains ok) 

Session 1.

1        In the 1960’s Norman Perrin wrote an influential book with the title The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus.  Changing one word gives us the keynote of this session and the next that the “Kingdom of God” is the teaching of Jesus, at least according to the Synoptic Gospels

See Mk 1:15 (cf Mt 4:17, Lk 4:43 and also Acts 1:3)

2        The English phrase “the kingdom of God” is a direct translation of the Greek he basileia tou theou, which is equivalent to the Aramaic malkuth Adonai and a Hebrew one which is very like it.  But be careful, because the English and Greek expressions both denote territory – the land ruled over by a king, the state over which a king reigns – but the Hebrew and Aramaic ones do not (though they do imply some very practical and this-worldly obligations on individuals and on society).  They refer to the fact that the “LORD reigns”/”the LORD is king” rather than the territory over which he reigns.  So “the reign of the Lord” or “God’s kingship” is probably the nearest we can get in English to the sense of the Hebrew and Aramaic expressions.  There is no difference at all in meaning between “Kingdom of God” and Matthew’s “Kingdom of Heaven” – he is simply being respectful

3        Note the frequency of the term in the Gospels: Mt c50, Mk 19, Lk 44 (+ 8 in Acts) and John 4 (though be careful of the conclusions you draw from that relative paucity).  Nowhere does Jesus explain what he means by the term, presumably because he didn’t need to.  He – and John the Baptist who shared the same “Kingdom of God” message according to Mt 3:2 – were addressing their contemporaries in language and theology that was shared and understood

4        Although the Hebrew phrase malekuth Adonai does not appear in the OT, the idea that “the LORD (YHWH or “Yahweh”) is King” does:

He is the true King of Israel, hence the reluctance of Gideon (Jg 8:23) and Samuel (1 Sam 8:4-9) to give the people the human king they demand

He is also the King of Creation, whose power and might are celebrated in the Temple liturgy (Pss 24, 93, 95-99 and see also 74:12ff)

He is the King whose kingdom will eventually come on earth as it is in heaven (Isa 24:21-23, 52:7-10, Zeph 3:14-20, Zech 14:9-21, Dan 2:44, 4:3, 7:27)

5        The “kingdom of God” was used in early Judaism in three identifiably different ways:

i/  to express the hope that God’s sovereignty would be established on earth over Israel and, via Israel, over all the nations (ie God and his people will rule on earth).  This was the “End” (the eschaton – thus the ideas and beliefs about this End are called Eschatology) to which many Jews looked forward and for which most prayed and some fought.  Thus the Kaddish (an early prayer, perhaps first century) says, “May he make his kingdom reign in your lifetime”.  Two good examples from the Testament (or Assumption) of Moses and from the War Scroll of Qumran are quoted in N T Wright (The NT and the People of God, pp304-6) and reproduced in the appendix to these notes.  See also the examples from the Targumim in the appendix 

ii/  to express obedience to the Torah (ie one lives subject to the rule of God’s torah).  The key phrase is “to take the yoke of the kingdom of heaven upon oneself”.  Thus Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai (c 80 CE) contrasted "the yoke of the kingdom of heaven" with “the yoke of flesh and blood”.  This idea is prominent in the later Rabbinic literature and is found also in Mt 11:29-30

iii/  to express the victory of virtue over vice and wisdom over folly experienced by the wise (ie wisdom rules over our unruly passions).  This idea probably originates in Greek culture and is found particularly within the wisdom literature of early Judaism.  See Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-20 (especially vv17-20) and 10:9-14 (especially v10) plus 4 Macc 2 (especially v23)

6        The Synoptic Gospels present us with a Jesus whose teaching is about the reign of God and whose actions are a demonstration or anticipation of it.  There is, of course, debate about the authenticity of much of what these Gospels present as the teaching of Jesus and about the historicity of many of his actions portrayed in them, but that the “Kingdom of God” featured largely in the teaching of the Jesus of History is accepted by all.  What he said about it and what he probably meant by it we shall examine next session, but when we do so we must remember that he did not coin the term and that he did not use it in a vacuum

Suggested Reading (in order of accessibility)

“Kingdom of God” article by Chilton in the Oxford Companion to the Bible and in equivalent one vol Bible Dictionaries or Companions (eg Harpers and Cambridge)

N T Wright, The NT and the People of God, SPCK, 1992, pp284-5, 302-7

B Chilton, Pure Kingdom – Jesus’ vision of God, Eerdmans, 1996

N T Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, SPCK, 1996, ch 6-10 and Appendix p663

Get into the habit of using some of the major reference works in the library.  Thus on this topic you could check the entries for “Kingdom of God” in the following:

Anchor Bible Dictionary (“ABD”, 6 vols, the best there is), vol 4 pp49-69

Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible (“IDB”, Abingdon, 4 vols + Supplementary vol – though the bibliography in these is dated now)

New International Dictionary of NT Theology (“NIDNTT”) – vol 2 pp372-390

Theological Dictionary of the NT (“Kittel” or “TDNT”), though flawed in parts, is the classic but its use of Greek and Hebrew might make it difficult to find your way around.  Worth it if you persevere.  Vol 1 pp564-593

Appendix

The Testament of Moses (commonly known as the Assumption of Moses) is an apocalyptic writing probably to be dated from the time of the Maccabean War (though with some changes made later) which retells the last days of Moses from Deuteronomy 31-34 and includes secret prophecies which Moses communicates to Joshua until the proper time comes to reveal them

Then his kingdom will appear throughout his whole creation

Then the devil will have an end.  Yea, sorrow will be led away with him

Then will be filled the hands of the messenger, who is in the highest place appointed

Yea, he will at once avenge them of their enemies

For the Heavenly One will arise from his kingly throne.  Yea, he will go forth from his holy habitation with indignation and wrath on behalf of his sons and the earth will tremble, even to its ends shall it be shaken.  And the high mountains will be made low.  Yea, they will be shaken, as enclosed valleys they will fall

The sun will not give light.  And in darkness the horns of the moon will flee

Yea, they will be broken in pieces.  It will be turned wholly into blood

Yea, even the circle of the stars will be thrown into disarray

And the sea all the way to the abyss will retire, to the sources of waters which fail

Yea, the rivers will vanish away

For God the Most High will surge forth, the Eternal One alone.  In full view will he come to work vengeance on the nations.  Yea, all their idols will he destroy

Then will you be happy, O Israel!  And you will mount up above the necks and wings of an eagle.  Yea, all things will be fulfilled.  And God will raise you to the heights

Yea, he will fix you firmly in the heaven of the stars in the place of their habitations

And you will behold from on high.  Yea, you will see your enemies on the earth

And, recognising them, you will rejoice.  And you will give thanks.

Yea, you will confess your creator                                                                                                                                                 T.Mos 10:1-10

The War Rule is one of the scrolls from the caves of Qumran, probably written towards the end of the first century BCE or the beginning of the first century CE.  It describes the strategy and tactics for the Great War against the Kittim (the Romans?) in which the Sons of Light will triumph over the Sons of Darkness

Then the two divisions of foot-soldiers shall advance and shall station themselves between the two formations.  The first division shall be armed with a spear and a shield, and the second with a shield and a sword, to bring down the slain by the judgement of God, and to bend the enemy formation by the power of God, to pay the reward of their wickedness to all the nations of vanity.  And sovereignty [meluchah, kingship] shall be to the God of Israel, and He shall accomplish mighty deeds by the saints of his people

1 QM 6:4-6 from The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, G Vermes, 1987, p111

The Kaddish Prayer (possibly as early as the first century CE)

Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world that he has created according to his will.  May he establish his Kingdom in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of all the house of Israel, even speedily and at a near time

From the Targumim (the Aramaic paraphrases which were read in the synagogues)

 Some quotes

Bruce Chilton – Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God (SPCK 1996) p ix

The kingdom of God lies at the centre of Jesus’ message both as a fact and as a mystery.  The fact, recognised by everyone from the first disciples to the most sceptical of scholars, is that Jesus preached that the kingdom was at hand.  The mystery, debated perennially both by those inside and outside the Church, concerns what precisely Jesus meant when he spoke of God’s kingdom

Marcus Borg – Jesus: a new vision (SPCK 1993) pp197-8 

One of the characteristic ways Jesus spoke about the power of the Spirit and the life engendered by it was with the richly symbolic phrase “the Kingdom of God”.  As a “linguistic symbol” with its home in the Jewish tradition, the phrase evoked the web of meanings associated with the image of God as “king” 

The image of God’s kingship was one of Israel’s classic ways of speaking about the relationship between the other world and this one.  To speak of God as king was to speak of the “power” of the other world active in this one: at creation, in decisive moments within history (such as the Exodus and return from exile), and at the “end of time.”  The kingship of God also created a kingdom, both in the present and at the end of history.  In the present, the kingdom was made up of those who put themselves under the divine sovereignty, taking upon themselves the “yoke of the kingdom.”  At the end would come the everlasting kingdom of peace and justice, banqueting and joy.  The story of God’s kingship thus related the two worlds of the primordial tradition at the beginning (creation), in history, and at the end (consummation).  It was one of Israel’s ways of telling the story of the Spirit and the Spirit’s relationship to this world

John P Meier – A Marginal Jew (Doubleday 1991) pp174-5

One reason that critics so readily affirm that Jesus did speak in some sense of the kingdom of God (or kingdom of heaven) is that the phrase is found in Mark, Q, special Matthean tradition, special Lucan tradition, and John, with echoes in Paul, despite the fact that “kingdom of God” is not Paul’s preferred way of speaking. (Those who accept the Coptic Gospel of Thomas as another independent source would naturally add it to this list).  At the same time, the phrase is found in various literary genres (e.g., parable, beatitude, prayer, aphorism, miracle story).  Granted this wide sweep of witnesses in different sources and genres, coming largely from the first Christian generation, it becomes extremely difficult to claim that such material is simply the creation of the Church

Session 2 

1        Given that the “Kingdom of God” was the content of Jesus’ teaching and the theme of his actions we must now investigate in what sense he used the term

2        Most scholarly discussion has, until recently, accepted that Jesus used the term in its eschatological (rather than Rabbinic or Wisdom) sense.  There, however, agreement ended.  Much of the debate was polarised on either/or lines:

Either Jesus was talking about something cataclysmic which was to happen in the (fairly immediate?) future whose arrival he was announcing

(The classic statement of this position is by Albert Schweitzer in his epoch-making The Quest of the Historical Jesus of 1906 in which he spoke of  “consistent” or “thoroughgoing” eschatology.  Such a position can be illustrated from Mt 6:10 (= Lk 11:2), Mk 9:1 and Mk 14:25 (=Mt 26:29 = Lk 22:15-16 & 28-30)

Or he was talking about a rule of God which was present here and now and which his actions were demonstrating

(C H Dodd called this “realised eschatology” in his classic book of 1935 The Parables of the Kingdom).  Such a position can be illustrated from Mt 12:28 (=Lk 11:20) and Mt 5:3 & 10)

A widely-adopted mediating position did emerge and a broad consensus was reached by the 1970’s which suggested that Jesus was talking about the rule of God which he was establishing on earth and which would be consummated at some point in the future

(The term used for this is “inaugurated eschatology” as expressed, for example, by R H Fuller in The Mission and Achievement of Jesus, 1954.  This was the position taken by J Jeremias in his influential book The Parables of Jesus published in English in 1972) 

3        Since the 1970’s the consensus has broken down.  N Perrin (recanting the mediating position he had adopted in The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus), T F Glasson and Bruce Chilton began what others have continued.  As Morna Hooker comments - “For (these three) the debate about whether the kingdom is to be understood as present or future is a meaningless one” (A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation p376)

5        No one, however, disputes that the kingdom of God was central to Jesus’ agenda.  There is now a recognition that the sayings about the kingdom are diverse and that Jesus (and his editors) used the phrase with a variety of meanings, not least to confront their contemporaries with the claims of the Living God, King of Heaven and Earth and the reality of his presence in Blessing and Judgement

6        Finally, a theological teaser.  Given that Jesus announced the imminent arrival of the kingdom and even that the cross/resurrection marked its coming in power (Mk 9:1 etc), it is quite obvious that God’s kingdom has not yet come on earth as it is in heaven.  We still await the “consummation” and have quite a few ways of referring to that future event, eg Parousia, Return or Second Coming of Christ and the End of the World.  One is tempted therefore to ask what difference has the coming of Jesus made to the life of the world or to the “Kingdom of God”?  To put it simply, are we in 2000 CE in any different a position than were the saints and sages of ancient Israel in 800 BCE in terms of praying that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven?

Suggested reading (in addition to last week’s suggestions)

See the entries on “Kingdom of God” in:

A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, SCM, 1990, ed Coggins & Houlden 

Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, IVP, 1998 ed Ryken, Wilhoit & Longmann

E P Sanders (who stresses that insufficient attention has been paid to the actions of Jesus in this whole debate) Jesus and Judaism, SCM, 1985, part 2 

G Theissen and A Mertz  The Historical Jesus, SCM, 1998, especially chapter 9

Appendix

Bruce Chilton (Pure Kingdom) argues that Jesus’ use of “Kingdom of God” reflects that of contemporary Judaism and the OT which he suggests can be plotted along five coordinates: 

1        Along the eschatological coordinate (ie the line from present [now] to future [then]):

Lk 11:2-4 esp v2 and the later form in Mt 6:9-15

Mt 10:7 (= Lk 9:2)

Mk 9:1 = Mt 16:28 = Lk 9:27 

This coordinate includes the “when” debated by scholars – thus see the texts in 2 above

2        Along the transcendent coordinate (ie the line from immanence [here] to transcendence [everywhere]):

Mt 12:28 = Lk 11:20

Mt 13:33 = Lk 13:20-21 = Thomas 96

Lk 17:21 (cf Thomas 3: If those who lead you say to you “The kingdom is in heaven”, then the birds of heaven will precede you.  If they say to you, “It is in the sea”, then the fish will precede you.  But the kingdom is inside of you.  And it is outside of you)

3        Along the coordinate of judgement (ie the line from present decision [ethics] to eternal consequences [the judgement]):

Mk 10:23-25 = Mt 19:23-24 = Lk 18:24

Mt 22:1-10 = Lk 14:16-24 = Thomas 64

Plus many Parables of the Kingdom (“Seize the opportunity now!”)

4        Along the coordinate of purity (ie the line from who or what is in [clean] to who or what is out [unclean]): 

Mt 8:11-12 = Lk 13:28-29

Mk 10:15 = Lk 18:17

Mt 22:1-14 = Lk 14:15-24  cf  Mt 20:21 = Mk 10:37

5        Along the coordinate of radiation (ie the line from the centre [Zion] to the circumference [the gentiles]):         

Mk 4:30-32 = Mt 13:31-32 = Lk 13:18-19 = Thomas 20

Mt 11:12 = Lk 16:16

He summarises these Five Coordinates of the Kingdom as follows:

The Eschatological coordinate (Pure Kingdom p66)  Prayer that the kingdom of God should come clearly marks out the kingdom as that which might encounter us in the future.  In that sense, especially because Jesus provided a form of prayer for general use that includes a petition for the kingdom’s coming, the eschatological coordinate of the kingdom is evident and prominent.  At the same time, there is marked and deliberate uncertainty in regard to the time of the kingdom, a reluctance to embrace the precise anticipations of apocalyptic literature.  That uncertainty in regard to timing is balanced with an assurance of the actual, present reality of the kingdom in heaven.  It is announced as so near as effectively to have finished its movement toward us and as being as reliable as the immortal prophets in the heavenly court.  “Q” provides us with the more general statements of the eschatological kingdom, while the Petrine source conveys Jesus’ esoteric assurance to his followers of the kingdom’s reality

The Transcendent coordinate (p73)  The dynamic nature of the kingdom’s transcendence in Jesus’ understanding is demonstrated by his connection (in “Q”) of its arrival to his own exorcisms.  That arrival is far from comprehensive; it is as local and sporadic as the exit of unclean spirits, but the natural tendency of its arrival is that the kingdom will extend everywhere.  The link between the kingdom and Jesus’ activity more generally (that is, not only exorcism) is maintained in a probably authentic saying (82) from Thomas

The transcendence of the kingdom, however, is such that its incursion may not be limited to Jesus’ activity.  Viewed correctly, it is as present as the leaven in bread, and its influence is as naturally extensive as yeast.  As Thomas rightly represents Jesus’ position, the kingdom is within us and outside us, so that Jesus’ activity is to become a matter of general experience.  It is not only that the kingdom is one day to be immanent; it is rather that the kingdom is already immanent and is one day to be comprehensive

The coordinate of Judgement (pp79-80)  Jesus saw the kingdom of God as already present in the experience of those who listened to him.  The eschatological coordinate of his usage insisted that what was final was now certain, just as the transcendent coordinate conceived of the kingdoms as immanent, although occasional.  Both of those aspects of usage implied that the kingdom’s judgement was under way.  In the sayings classed under the coordinate of judgement, entry into the kingdom and acquisition of the kingdom are both cast as current opportunities

Different though the two grounding metaphors may appear to be, both envisage contact between a person and the kingdom at the moment of that person’s committed response.  Along the line of the grounding metaphor of entry, one accepts an invitation, dropping all manner of usual duties;  one wriggles through the needle’s eye.  In both instances, one enters the kingdom, leaving behind both wealth and less daring companions.  Along the line of the grounding metaphor of acquisition, one angles for treasure on the pretext of buying a field; one sells off merchandise for the loveliest pearl.  Either way, one’s wealth is spent, and the joy of possession cannot be shared by those who did not appreciate what was available

The coordinate of judgement is what introduces into Jesus’ sayings a tendency that (ironically) seems lacking in dignity and sometimes even less than moral.  Much as Yohanan ben Zakkai’s king praised servants who did nothing but wait, Jesus’ host wanted fellowship without regard to the status of his guests.  The shedding of wealth is enjoined in the parable of the camel, and yet Jesus commends both a wily speculator who seizes treasure and a merchant who gambles everything on a single pearl.  In every case, one is either squeezing into the kingdom or grasping at it, and breaking ordinary rules in order to do so.  Subversion of conventional morality is inevitable if what is final and transcendent has become available with one’s experience.  That availability then becomes an occasion greater than any other, an opportunity in comparison with which any wealth or any status is only of instrumental worth.  Everything else is there to be disposed of in the attempt to squeeze into the narrow gate (Mt 7:13-14; Lk 13:23-24, from “Q”) or to capitalize on the talents one has been given (Mt 25:14-30; Lk 19:11-27, also from “Q”)

The coordinate of Purity (p90)  Just as baptism has shaped the understanding of the saying that urges us to take the kingdom as a child takes things (Mk 10:15; Lk 18:17), so eucharist has shaped the understanding of the promise of new wine (Mt 26:29; Mk 14:25; Lk 22:16, 18).  In both cases, the meaning of Jesus, promising and anticipating that purity that God requires and enjoys (Mt 8:11-12; Lk 13:28-29), remains recoverable.  His point is not that children have a privileged status or that eucharistic practice should be associated with asceticism, although those meanings were developed in the early Church.  Rather, Jesus insisted on recognition of the purity that derived from within Israel as a matter of the identity of the people of God (Mk 7:14-115).  That was the basis on which – in Jesus’ understanding as in Zechariah’s (Zech 8:7) – God was gathering his people.  The feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was for Jesus the practive of the kingdom as well as the promise of the kingdom

The coordinate of Radiance (p97)  The dynamics of generation and extension were more important to Jesus than whether the kingdom would truly start in Jerusalem and what mix of Jews and righteous non-Jews it would end with.  The indeterminacy that we saw in the parable of the mustard seed is not renounced in Jesus’ puzzling statement about the available kingdom.  Rather, the reason for his indeterminacy becomes plain: Jesus was focused on the dynamics of the kingdom coming in strength to the extent that its location in human terms was secondary.  That made for a tension between Jesus and the institutions of his day that will be explored further in the next chapter

3 Jesus and Politics

(This is a Truro-venue session from the 1997/1998 and 1999-2000 years of the ‘Exploring the New Testament’ part of the University of Exeter’s Certificate in Theology programme, then called ‘Theology Quest and Questions’.  Things have moved on since then, but most of this material remains ok)

1        In the three words of this title only the middle and shortest one is simple.

a/  Which Jesus are we talking about?  There are (at least) three possibilities:

                1  The Jesus who is the central character in the story/stories

                2  The Jesus of History

                3  The Jesus who is our Christ of today's faith

There is without doubt a connection between these three Jesuses - but not a simple equation.  We must confine ourselves to looking at the first two possibilities.

b/  Politics is a slippery word with a range of meanings and usages from the general (the description or evaluation of the structure and organisation of society) to the particular (to do with specific forms of such organisation).  The structure and organisation ("government") of the two societies in which the Jesus of history lived and in which the gospel stories are set are broadly clear (see lecture 1 above).  As is the case that the Jesus of history lived in a fraught political situation.  But as with all historical reconstruction there remains a great deal we do not know.

None of the NT worlds (ie those of its writers, readers and characters) are the same as our worlds.  A good example of this is that some oppositions commonly made in our culture (eg sacred/secular, church/society, religion/politics) did not hold in the Jewish culture of Palestine in the first century of the Common Era.  In that culture, Torah understood the whole of life as a gift from God.  Its 613 commandments are not divided, for instance, into moral and ritual ones and they deal equally with material which for us clearly belongs in different categories (eg I can see at least three different categories in the Ten Commandments alone).  The gift of Torah is gratefully received

                "So shall no part of day or night from sacredness be free,

                but all our life, in every step, be fellowship with Thee."    

This means that the question of Jesus and Politics was a real question to the historical Jesus and to those who first told the stories of Jesus.  There could be no retreat from politics for two reasons: first because daily life was wrapped up in politics and vice versa and second because the will of God was wrapped up in politics and vice versa.

c/  The question of Jesus (whichever one you choose) and contemporary politics is a huge one.  It takes us into areas to do with the role and interpretation of Scripture ("hermeneutics") which go beyond tonight's more confined agenda.  For this reader of the stories of Jesus, however, and for this searcher after the Jesus of History, tonight's investigation cannot but have contemporary relevance.

2        Jesus (the character in the narratives) and Politics

a/       A Reading of Jesus and Politics in Matthew's Gospel

The opening words of the story introduce us to Jesus "Messiah" and "Son of David (the king)" (1:1, 1:6), born to be King of the Jews in royal Bethlehem (2:2, 2:6) though seen as a threat by the reigning king (2:3-18) and permanently exiled (2:19-22).  At his baptism he hears words reminiscent of the old coronation psalm (3:17, Ps 2:7) and in the wilderness he is tempted by a promise of power (4:8-11).  Following John's arrest he withdraws to Galilee and begins a preaching ministry, saying, "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (4:12-17).  He calls two pairs of brothers to follow him (4:18-22).  So begins the life of a famous teacher, preacher and healer (4:23-25).  He teaches his "disciples" and a great crowd "up a mountain" (5-7).  In this key teaching he advocates non-resistance to those who are evil (5:39), doing double what an occupying soldier demands of you (5:41, if that is what it means) and love of enemies (5:44) as well as giving them a prayer which pleads for the coming of God's kingdom and the doing of his will on earth as it is in heaven (6:9-13).  The crowd are astonished by the "authority" of his teaching (7:28-29).  He helps a Roman centurion and marvels at his faith (8:10), demonstrates his power over nature (8:23-27) and over "evil spirits" (8:28-34), calls a tax-collector to be a disciple (9:9) and heals the daughter of a "ruler" (9:18-26).  He completes the number of twelve disciples and sends them out on a mission to heal the sick and proclaim that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (10:1-7) with a strange mention attached about the coming of the "Son of man" (10:23).  They can expect opposition and persecution (10:16-23), not least because their teacher and master "has not come to bring peace on earth but a sword" which splits families (10:34-37) and a "cross" is involved (10:38).  He meets misunderstanding and opposition, not least from the Pharisees, and begins to use parables (13:3ff), many about "the kingdom of heaven".  He comes to the notice of Herod the tetrarch (14:1) and gets out of his way (14:13).  He asks his disciples who he is and Peter confesses that he is "the Christ"; he then talks about the church which will be founded on the Peter rock with the power to "bind and loose" before saying that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer and die (16:21-28) - a saying which ends with another enigmatic reference to the "Son of man", this time about his "coming in his kingdom" (16:28).  He sidesteps a question about the Temple tax (17:24-27) and teaches about true status and greatness (18:1-4).  A new kingdom is coming and the twelve disciples will sit on twelve thrones (19:28) and "the first will be last": but who will sit on the right and left of Jesus' throne in his kingdom is not in his power to give (20:20-23).  He enters Jerusalem as king (21:1-11) and a week of controversy begins.  By what authority does he act (21:23-27)?  What will happen to God's kingdom (21:43)?  Should they pay taxes to Rome (22:15-22)?  What of the future of Jerusalem (23:37-39, 24 passim)?  What will happen when the "Son of man" comes in his kingly glory (25:31-46)?  Jesus prepares himself and his disciples for his death at the Last Supper, and in the Garden tells a disciple that violence is not the way (26:51-56).  He is charged with blasphemy at a hearing before Caiaphas (26:57-66) and makes no real answer before Pilate to a possible charge of insurrection (27:11-14).  Pilate recognises his innocence but hands him over for crucifixion anyway.  He is crucified as "King of the Jews" (27:29 and 37).  The centurion in charge testifies to his innocence (27:54).  Rising from the dead three days later he meets his disciples in Jerusalem before they return to Galilee from whence, having received "all authority" he commissions them for a worldwide mission of discipleship, baptism and teaching, assuring them of his presence "to the close of the age" (28:16-20).

What of this Jesus and politics?  Jesus is recognised as "Son of David" and as the Christ/Messiah.  His mission is not simply a "spiritual" one, but it has a social programme to do with transforming individuals and creating a new community, one with alternative leadership values and one in which all are equally valued, a new Israel in which God's dominion ("the kingdom of heaven") is real and celebrated.  There is nothing in this story, however, of anti-Roman propaganda or of any sort of programme designed to change the political structures of Judea or Galilee.  Even though the Temple and the political/religious structures it supports, of which Jesus clearly disapproves, are to be destroyed, it is by God in God's own time and not by Jesus and his followers!  This is indeed a "strikingly neutralist" picture (James Barr).

b/        A Reading of Jesus and Politics in Mark's Gospel

Mark's story is, as a story, more or less a shorter version of Matthew's with the same plot, the same characterisation and a different ending.  Its only differences, with regard to its portrayal of Jesus and politics, is a derogatory reference to King Herod and his bad influence at 8:14 and its use of kingdom "of God" rather than "of heaven".

c/        A Reading of Jesus and Politics in Luke's Gospel

Luke's story begins very differently.  In angelic announcement Mary is told that her son will be a great and eternal king (1:32-33) and shepherds are told of their Saviour's birth (2:10-12).  Simeon and Anna testify to Israel's "salvation" and "redemption" (2:22-38).  Soon after the beginning of his teaching ministry he goes to Nazareth where he announces his mission programme in terms of the fulfilment of Isaiah 61:1-2, with the result that he is thrown out of town (4:16-30).  After that there are a number of relevant detail differences.  In Luke's list of the twelve "apostles" in 6:12-16 there is no "Simon the Cananaean" as in Matthew and Mark but a "Simon who was called the Zealot".  Luke's riches/poverty contrasts in his "sermon on the plain" (6:17-49) are notably firmer and more literal than Matthew's in his "sermon on the mount".  Numbered among his women supporters is Joanna, wife of Herod's steward (8:3).  In 9:9 Herod the tetrarch himself wishes to see Jesus but by 13:31 it is with the intention of killing him - to which news Jesus gives a defiant reply (13:32).  The Zacchaeus incident in 19:1-10 is truly revolutionary.  In 22:51 he heals the wounded member of the arresting party.  In Luke, Pilate makes even greater effort to avoid condemning Jesus (eg 23:6-12, 20-22) and both the second crucified criminal and the centurion also recognise his innocence (23:41 and 47.  Note also that the criminal also recognises the "other-worldiness" of Jesus' kingdom).  Despite these detail differences, however, and the fact that Luke's ending differs from that of both Matthew and Mark, this story too is recognisably the same story with the same plot and the same characterisation.

d/        A Reading of Jesus and Politics in John's Gospel

John's story reads very differently.  Jesus is much more often in Jerusalem.  His teaching style bears no resemblance to that in the other three stories and its content differs widely too.  Few of the same characters and events appear.  After a prologue John the Baptist bears testimony to Jesus as the "Lamb of God" (1:29), the one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit (1:33) and the "Son of God" (1:33).  Encouraged by John, Andrew speaks of Jesus as "Messiah/Christ" (1:41) and Nathaniel speaks of him as "Rabbi, Son of God and King of Israel" (1:49).  This is picked up again in 6:15 where the crowd acknowledge him as "the prophet" (Moses? Elijah? One of the recent ones - see TQQ 2:1?) and attempt to make him king, an attempt he rejects.    Thus, in none of the signs and discourses, nor in the incident in which Jesus drives the traders out of the Temple (2:13-22), nor in the many references to his conflict with "the Jews" is there any support for a "political" dimension to his words or deeds until the entry into Jerusalem in his final week in 12:12ff.  And then this kingship is explicitly defined as "not of this world" in the dialogue with Pilate in 18:33-40, after which Pilate attempts to release him.  This story contains its author's statement of intentions in 20:30-31.  They are entirely a-political.

Despite differences between the story of Jesus in John and those in the synoptics, the political stance and approach of Jesus in this story is of a piece with that in the others!

3        The Jesus of History and Politics

a/        One fact about the Jesus of History is indisputable.  He was crucified.  And crucifixion was the form of capital punishment for a political, anti-state, offence.  "The most certain fact about the historical Jesus is his execution as a political rebel" (M Borg, Jesus - a new vision, p179).  All the Gospel-writers regard him as innocent of such a charge and exonerate the Romans: but they would, wouldn't they?

There are two broad alternatives to their explanation of why Jesus was crucified.  The first is that he was indeed a revolutionary, of one sort or another, and was legitimately crucified (in Roman eyes anyway) as a convicted terrorist.  But despite the attempt of S G F Brandon (Jesus and the Zealots, 1967) to prove that thesis, there is little historical evidence for it, other than the fact that Jesus was crucified!  The second explanation - much more mundane - is that he was, by design or accident, the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Or to put it another way, a popular Galilean prophet creating the major public nuisance he did in the Jerusalem Temple at the particular time he did was almost certain to get it in the neck (which is, broadly speaking, the conclusion of E P Sanders, M Borg, E Rivkin, E Schweitzer and N T Wright).

b/        Another indisputable fact about the Jesus of History is that a recurrent theme in his teaching was "the kingdom of God/heaven," a concept deeply rooted in the OT ("God is king").  To live under "God's rule" (not "in God's territory") is to do his will and serve his purposes in the here and now.  To look forward to his rule is to share the hope for a new and better future when his will is fully done and his purposes well served by all.  Jesus insisted on the former in expectation of the latter, though without any programme for establishing God's rule in a renewed Israel other than that of inviting all and sundry to see God's rule in terms of its unbounded generosity and to accept this and live accordingly.  This idea comes close to that of Torah itself, and is hardly a political programme in any narrower definition of that term.  See the articles by B D Chilton in the Oxford Companion pp408f and Morna Hooker in the SCM Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, pp374-7.

c/        The views of some major modern figures in the search for the Jesus of History:

Jesus, the itinerant Cynic philosopher (J D Crossan) - Jesus was a Jewish peasant who pursued a Jewish version of the life of a wandering Cynic, living simply and self-sufficiently, independent, speaking his mind, sharing table fellowship with all to show that there are no "brokers" in God's open kingdom of nobodies, who share their goods and offer each other mutual support.  As such his mission was to undermine established norms and create a new community.

Jesus, Man of Spirit (M Borg, G Vermes) - Jesus was a charismatic healer, visionary, mystic and religious reformer.  He rejected the Temple and its definitions of purity for a more radical and inclusive version.  A new world is coming, those old (religious) things will be swept away.

Jesus, the eschatological prophet (E P Sanders) - Jesus was a prophet of Jewish restoration, speaking and acting from God to challenge, renew and restore God's people ready for the dawn of a new age.  The Temple represented all that was wrong with old Israel, and his attack on it (not a cleansing but an assault) was a sign of its impending destruction and subsequent replacement.  He was not, however, a political or revolutionary prophet.

Jesus, the prophet of social change (R A Horsley) - Jesus was a prophet of radical social change, a social revolutionary (though not a terrorist one) speaking and acting from God to subvert the existing social order and create a new one with very different power structures.  E S Fiorenza sees Jesus as sage rather than prophet, but working to this sort of agenda for change.

Jesus, the sage (B Witherington) - Jesus stands in the wisdom tradition of the OT, inviting individuals and communities to walk in wisdom's ways and so find the fulfilment of life which is God's intention for all creation.

Jesus, Jewish Messiah (J P Meier, J D G Dunn, N T Wright) - This more traditional understanding of Jesus sees him as a messiah figure, preaching and in healing action and acted sign anticipating the new kingdom soon to be inaugurated by God and calling all to repentance in the light of its approaching total (religious, political, social) judgement.

(For a good discussion of all these positions see Witherington in the bibliography)

What all of these have in common is a belief that "a purely spiritual interpretation of Jesus' teachings, actions and aims is inadequate" - the phrase is Witherington's (p138).  That is fine, but it is hardly a surprising conclusion to reach.  Jesus was a Jew, steeped in Torah, and along with most other Jews would not understand what was meant by "a purely spiritual interpretation" of faith.  Torah is guidance for life in its oneness and totality.  These different understandings of the Jesus of History and Politics all show him concerned with the real life of his contemporaries, but they range widely along a spectrum from a sitting light to real politic (Sanders, Witherington) to an active, though non-violent, involvement in revolutionary struggle (Horsley).  They all purport to be scholarly and objective investigations, but their variety illustrates two things: first, that Schweitzer's observation on the first "quest" for the historical Jesus can still be made about the third one and second, that "scholars" are "readers" too.

d/        Two different Readings of Jesus and Politics in the Gospels:

        i/  A Feminist Reading - E Schussler Fiorenza in In Memory of Her (SCM 1983) and Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet (Continuum 1994) reads the gospel story in a very different way.  She, a feminist, reads of a Jesus who stands as a sage in the wisdom tradition and who challenges the patriarchal and androcentric structures of his day with a vision of a new reality, one which is without hierarchies and one in which women and men are both liberated from the oppression of inherited gender roles.  Neither this reading nor the "strikingly neutralist" readings offered above see any confrontation between Jesus and the Romans or any major assault by him on political structures at national or local level.  It does however, read these stories in terms of "gender politics" and in so doing sees Jesus as offering a radical critique of the existing cultural oppression into which he was born and opening up a new way of being together in society.

       ii/  A Liberation Reading - Leonardo Boff in Jesus Christ Liberator: a critical christology for our time (SPCK 1980) offers a very different reading.  Written in the midst of Brazil's oppression by a fierce military junta, the title speaks for itself.  As the title suggests it is a study in Christology which looks at Chalcedon etc as well as at the NT writings.  It sees Jesus as one who wanted to bring about the old utopia of the Kingdom of God.  Through his preaching and his actions he aimed for a revolution to create a new order of peace and justice.  He was a liberator, not simply from personal sin but from the sins of society and his was a programme of social and political liberation.  His mission was to create a new and just society.  Against both the narrower confines of a feminist reading and the oppression of a neutralist reading, Boff reads the story of Jesus in terms of a liberator working to overthrow and replace existing organs of state power.

4        Passage for Study - Mark 12:13-17 (= Mt 22:15-22 & Lk 20:19-26)

Why was the question - Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not? - such a crafty one?

Is the answer - Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's and to God the things that are God's - a straight one, or is it skilfully avoiding the question, or what?

In the light of this passage, should the Church get involved with politics or not?

Two quotes to ponder:

Rivkin (pp 20-1, 26-9, 76-8) talks of an accepted Pharisaic doctrine of "two realms":

"Since the trappings of worldly power had no hold over them, the Scribes-Pharisees were willing to make a compact with their rulers, a compact which would accord to each realm its due.  If the political authorities would agree to recognise the right of the Scribes-Pharisees to teach the twofold Law, determine the norms of public manifestations of religion and the liturgical calendar, and preach the good news of eternal life and resurrection, then the Scribes-Pharisees, for their part, would acknowledge the right of the political authorities to impose taxes, raise armies, fight wars, and administer the non-religious areas of economic, social and political life.  In a word, the Scribes-Pharisees enunciated the doctrine of the legitimacy of two realms, the secular and the religious." (pp26-7)

(though this interpretation of the doctrine of the "two realms" should not be accepted uncritically)

V Taylor (Commentary on Mark, Macmillan 1966) says,

"The reply does not mean that the worlds of politics and religion are separate spheres, each with its own governing principles.  Jesus held that the claims of God are all-embracing (cf Mk 12:29f), but he does recognise that obligations due to the State are within the divine order."

5        Bibliography

J Barr  "Politics and the Bible" in Oxford Companion to the Bible  Oxford 1993  pp599-601

L Boff  Jesus Christ Liberator  SPCK 1980

M Borg  Jesus - a new vision  SPCK 1993

M Borg  Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus  Edward Mellen 1984

R Horsley with J S Hanson  Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs  Harper and Row 1988

E Rivkin  What crucified Jesus?  SCM 1984

G Theissen  The Shadow of the Galilean  SCM 1987

Ben Witherington III  The Jesus Quest  Paternoster 1995

N T Wright  Jesus and the Victory of God  SPCK 1997

Look out for two major books:

G Theissen & A Metz  The Historical Jesus - a comprehensive guide  SCM 1998

R E Brown  The Death of the Messiah  Geoffrey Chapman 199?

4 The Son of Man

(This is a Truro-venue session from the 1997/1998 year of the ‘Exploring the New Testament’ part of the University of Exeter’s Certificate in Theology programme, then called ‘Theology Quest and Questions’.  Things have moved on since then, but most of this material remains ok)

1        The data

a/        "Son of Man" (ho huios tou anthropou) sayings:

30 in Matthew: 8:20; 9:6; 10:23; 11:19; 12:8,32,40; 13:37,41; 16:13,27,28; 17:9,12,22; 18:11; 19:28; 20:18,28; 24:27,30 (twice),37,44; 25:13,31; 26:2,24 (twice),45,64 

14 in Mark: 2:10,28; 8:31,38; 9:9,12,31; 10:33, 45; 13:26; 14:21 (twice),41,62 

26 in Luke: 5:24; 6:5,22; 7:34; 9:22,26,44,56,58; 11:30; 12:8,10,40; 17:22,24,26,30; 18:8,31; 19:10; 21:27,36; 22:22,48,69; 24:7 

13 in John: 1:51; 3:13,14; 5:27; 6:27,53,62; 8:28; 9:35; 12:23, 34 (twice) - this is the only place where the phrase is not found on the lips of Jesus - and 13:31.  

There is only one occurrence of the phrase in the rest of the NT:  Acts 7:56.

b/        Stanton (The Gospels and Jesus p227) lists them as Mark 13, "Q" 12, "M" 8, "L" 6 and John 11, which adds up to 50 separate sayings.  Muller (in the Oxford Companion) says there are 56.

c/        "Son of man" (huios anthropou) at Heb 2:6, Reve 1:13 and 14:14 is not quite the same.  This is the way Daniel 7:13 is translated in the Septuagint

d/        Behind the bad Greek (literally "the son of the man") lies an Aramaic expression (bar 'enash - later bar nash) - literally "a son of man" or (bar 'enasha - later bar nasha) - literally "the son of man."  This expression was used as a noun ("a/the man") - as in Daniel 7:13 - and as an indefinite pronoun or a circumlocution (like posh English "one" or "someone").Behind that was a Hebrew expression (ben 'adam) - literally "a/the son of man."  This was used as a noun ("a/the man" or "humanity") - as in Psalms 8:4 and 80:17 - and as a vocative ("O man," "You there!") - as in Ezekiel 2:1 (and throughout the book) and Daniel 8:17.

e/        "Son of Man" is

"The self-designation most often used by Jesus in the Gospels" (Muller p711)

and

"... no one finds it strange and requires an explanation.  All let it pass without being astonished, even the quarrelsome Pharisees ... who were not accustomed to accept something unintelligible"  (Wellhausen, 1899, quoted by Vermes, p161).

2        Is there a problem?  

a/        It has been customary to divide the occurrences of the expression into three classes: a self-reference of Jesus to his present life and ministry, a self-reference to his coming passion and death and a reference either to a Heavenly Son of Man figure other than Jesus or to Jesus in that role.  The debate has centred on whether ancient Judaism envisaged such a figure and, if so, did Jesus speak of himself in that way.

b/        Therefore Stanton (p228) comments  "Readers of the gospels have often echoed the question, 'Who is this Son of Man?'  Why is this phrase found so frequently on the lips of Jesus?  How many of the Son of Man sayings can be traced back to Jesus himself?  If Jesus did use these words what did he mean by them?  Do they provide clearer clues than 'Christ' or 'Son' to his self-understanding?  Not surprisingly, there have been numerous attempts to answer these questions."

c/        Vermes argues that the phrase was used at the time of Jesus as a circumlocution, ie as another way of saying "I/me" and Wright agrees.  Both agree that ancient Judaism had no idea of a Heavenly Son of Man.  They disagree, however, on the overtones which the phrase carries – Vermes thinks they are few but Wright that they are quite heavy.  He sees the phrase as a loaded apocalyptic one - here you need to remember his view that we tend to get apocalyptic wrong – referring to the fulfilment of the national, territorial and Temple-centred expectations of first century Judaism with its “historical understanding of apocalyptic”.

3        The questions

a/        Was "son of man" used at the time of Jesus as a circumlocution, ie as another way of saying "I/me"?

This seems to be the case in the following instances in the synoptic Gospels:

            in triple attestations Mk 2:10 (= Mt 9:6 & Lk 5:24), 2:28 (= Mt 12:8 & Lk 6:5), 8:27 (= Mt 16:13 & Lk 9:18), 9:31 (= Mt 17:22 & Lk 9:44), 10:33 (= Mt 22:18 & Lk 18:31), 10:45 (=Mt 20:28 & Lk 22:27)

            in double attestations Mk 9:9 (= Mt 17:9), 9:12 (= Mt 17:12), 14:41 (= Mt 26:45), Matthew 5:11 (= Lk 6:22), 8:20 (= Lk 9:58), 11:19 (= Lk 7:34), 12:32 (= Lk 12:10), 12:40 (= Lk 11:30)

            in single attestations Mt 26:22, Lk 19:10, 22:48, 24:7.   

So Vermes (pp162-8) followed by Lindars (and many more) answer Yes.

b/        Was "the Son of Man" ever an important title for an eschatological or Messianic figure?

Vermes (pp169-177 especially the helpful recap on pp176-7) insists that "Son of Man" was never, in Aramaic and Jewish usage, a significant title for such a figure.  It may have had some rather limited Messianic associations (deriving from Dan 7:13 and found in 1 Enoch 46-71 and possibly in 2 Esdras 13) but was never an important Messianic title.

Wright suggests that Vermes has considerably understated the case here.  He points out that the following instances in the synoptic Gospels where the phrase is used of the Son of Man “coming down to earth from heaven in great power and glory” would call Daniel 7-8 to mind in anyone who heard them.  He argues that these sayings must be taken seriously as expressions of historical apocalyptic hope.  He points out that:

            there are direct links with Daniel 7 in the triple attestations Mark 13:26 (= Mt 24:30 & Lk 21:27) and 14:62 (= Mt 26:64 & Lk 22:69)

            there are indirect links with Daniel 7 in the triple attestation in Mark 8:38 (= Mt 16:27 & Lk 9:26); in the double attestations in Mt 19:28 (= Lk 22:30), 24:27 (= Lk 17:24), 24:37 (= Lk 17:26) and 24:44 (= Lk 12:40) and in the single attestations in Mt 10:23, 13:37, 13:41, 16:28, 24:30, 25:31 and Lk 12:8, 17:22, 17:30, 18:8, 21:36. 

Compare the similar ideas in John 1:51, 3:13,14, 5:27, 6:62 and Acts 7:56.

It is now widely accepted, however, that the view that "Son of Man" was the title of an apocalyptic, pre-existent, heavenly being about whom Jesus spoke and with whom he later became identified is entirely without foundation.

c/        Do these sayings derive from Jesus or the Early Church?

One possibility is that the Early Church used the phrase, with its Daniel 7:13 overtones, to speak of the exaltation of the risen and ascended Jesus as the enthroned Messiah who had inaugurated the New Age.  On this understanding the sayings in 3b/ were the creation of the early believers ("apocalyptically-minded Galiliean disciples of Jesus") who "eschatologised" his everyday phrase "by means of a midrash based on Daniel 7:13" (Vermes p186).  If this is so, it is yet one more example of the way the first Christians were forced to ransack the OT and Jewish tradition for ways of speaking of their post-Easter experience of Jesus.

The other possibility – emphasised by Wright - is that Jesus could and did use the phrase in this sense, indicating his role and place in God's very much this-worldly future.

4        The answers?

a/        The Jesus of History used the phrase as a circumlocution.  The sayings in 3a/ above have a real claim to "authenticity".  " ... there is no reasonable doubt why Jesus should not have uttered them" (Vermes p182).  The fact that he never explains the phrase indicates that its meaning was commonly understood.

b/        The authenticity of the "eschatological" sayings is more difficult and opinions differ greatly.  Wright argues that the readiness to deny the authenticity of the eschatological sayings, and indeed many other questions of NT eschatology and apocalyptic, is based on the serious misunderstanding of taking "End of the World ... Second Coming ... Parousia" ideas of apocalyptic imagery literally (The NT and the People of God, chapter 10, Jesus and the Victory of God pp513-9).  My own view is that he is probably right and that the enigmatic Mark 9:1 = Matthew 16:28 (and note Matthew's substitution of "Son of Man" for Mark's "Kingdom of God" or vice versa) is a vital clue in the puzzle (and the even more enigmatic Son of Man saying in Matthew 10:23 is somewhat like unto it).

5        Bibliography

G N Stanton    The Gospels and Jesus Oxford 1989  pp227-234

M Muller         "Son of Man" in Oxford Companion to the Bible pp711-3

G Vermes        Jesus the Jew  SCM 1983  pp160-186

N T Wright      The New Testament and the People of God  SPCK 1993  chapter 10

                        Jesus and the Victory of God  SPCK  1998  pp513-519

J D G Dunn     Christology in the Making  SCM 1980  pp65-97

B Lindars        Jesus Son of Man  SPCK 1983

                  "Son of Man" in Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation  SCM 1990  pp639-642

5 Paul on Jesus

(Here are two slightly different Truro-venue sessions, one from the 1997/1998 year and the other from the 1999-2000 year, of the ‘Exploring the New Testament’ part of the University of Exeter’s Certificate in Theology programme, then called ‘Theology Quest and Questions’.  I have no idea why I changed it quite so much the second time round.  I always update and tweak when reusing material, but don’t often rewrite quite as much as in this case.  Things have moved on since then, but most of this material remains ok)

The 1997-1998 version.

1       By this stage of the course you are all familiar with the distinction which has been such a feature of NT studies in this century - the distinction between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith.

This is a useful distinction insofar as it reminds us that we cannot simply pick up the gospels and read a plain historical account of Jesus of Nazareth.  The gospels are not like that.  They are written "from faith for faith".  They are written by believers to persuade others to believe.  They are "testimonies" to Jesus - Messiah/Christ, Saviour and Lord.

But the distinction is not helpful if it suggests that there is an unbridged and unbridgeable chasm between the two - that there is no connection between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith, between Jesus of Nazareth and the one whom the early Christians preached as Lord and Saviour.  That position is obviously flawed because there is an inevitable connection and continuity simply because the followers of the one became the preachers of the other.

The distinction between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith is a useful rough rule of thumb, but it also has the drawbacks of such a crude measure.  Bear that in mind, then, as we come to our title - Paul on Jesus.

Note that in this session by "Paul says" I mean, of course, "Paul writes", and of the letters in the NT which bear his name I take Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians and Philemon to be our benchmarks.

2        "Our Lord Jesus Christ"

Paul makes very little use of the name - Jesus.  His preferred style is to use the word Christ.  In the benchmark letters the statistics are:

            28 occurrences of "Jesus" (of which 15 are in the title "the Lord Jesus")

            105 of "Jesus Christ" and 20 of "Christ Jesus"

                        (of which 53 are in the phrase "our Lord Jesus Christ")

            85, or thereabouts, of "the Lord" as a stand-alone title for Jesus/Christ

            169 of "Christ" (of which 26 are in the phrase "in Christ")

Bear in mind that direct references to the remembered words of Jesus, to his character and to events in his life and ministry - apart from his crucifixion and resurrection - are as scarce in Paul's writings as they are in the rest of the NT epistles.

With all this in mind we will focus on four phrases from Paul's writings: "Christ crucified", "Christ is risen", "Jesus is Lord",  and "in Christ".  If the question is asked - Was Paul a radical innovator or a conventional hander-on of tradition? - or even - Was Paul the real founder of Christianity? - it is worth noting that the first three of these at least are expressions of traditions which Paul had "received".

3        We preach "Christ crucified"

a)        1 Cor 1:10-2:5.  Note what is happening in this passage from a letter to a church with problems.  One problem was that the church in Corinth was bitterly divided and those divisions focused on individuals.  Paul writes to counter this divisiveness and to bring this power struggle to an end, and so he reminds the Corinthians of two things: the basic historical and theological truth they all accepted (Christ crucified) and the implications of that truth for their understanding of God, themselves and the Church (God's power is made perfect in weakness).

Note the use of "we" in vv18 and 23 which indicates that Paul is reminding the Corinthians of his and their common understanding and heritage.  He has no need to explain the cross and he says nothing about why Christ died or what his death achieved.  He is, simply, using the cross as their shared symbol.  The mention of "Christ crucified" is enough, he hopes and expects, to break through the divisions and expose their common allegiance.  They are, it seems, now neither Jews who stumble over the cross nor Greeks who laugh at it, but new people for whom the cross is the starting point in their new worldview, value-system and religion.

b)        In his writings Paul often uses the language of sacrifice to talk about the meaning of the death of Jesus.  Sacrifice, both in theory and practice, was a far more complex matter than modern western Christians usually realise, and much theorising on the death of Christ as a sacrifice for sin has been simplistic in the extreme.  There is no denying that Paul often uses sacrificial language to speak of Christ's death: but Sanders points to the scholarly consensus that "the sacrificial interpretation of Jesus' death does not lie at the heart of Paul's thought" about Christ's death (Paul, Oxford Past Masters, pp78f).

Sanders suggests instead that Romans 6:5-11 (with which he compares Romans 14:8f, 7:4-6, 2 Cor 5:14, 1 Thess 5:10 and Gal 1:4) takes us to the heart of Paul's understanding of the death of Christ, which is that Christ's death broke the power of sin, made possible our escape from its bondage and thus created a new way of human living.

c)        "Christ crucified".  What Paul does, though there is neither time nor space to look at how, is to begin from his own experience of being set free by Christ to read and interpret his sacred texts so that they explain not only how a messiah can be crucified but how a crucified messiah is the only sort of messiah that is possible and is the best sort of messiah you could possibly have.

4        Christ is risen

a)        Romans 1:1-7, especially v4.  Most commentators agree that vv3-4 are not Paul's usual style and suggest that here he may be quoting an early understanding of Jesus (and one which is very similar to Acts 2:36).  Note the place of the resurrection here in demonstrating that Jesus is the Son of God and the way that leads into the title Jesus Christ our Lord.

b)        1 Cor 15:1-8, 20-22, 58.  Paul reminds the Corinthians of what he had already shared with them, which was what he had himself received, that Easter is at the heart of the gospel (vv1-2) and of the Christian Faith (v14).  Note:

            the "died", "buried", "raised", "appeared" of vv3-5

            v20 makes a key statement of fact and of interpretation

            The Adamic theology of vv45ff

            Christ is used throughout and Lord appears in the climax in v57

            And note finally the wonderfully mundane last verse of the chapter.  

5        Jesus is Lord

a)        Jesus is Lord appears as a post Easter confession in the gospels (John 20:28, Luke 24:34?) and in Acts (2:36) and is widely regarded as being one of the earliest statements of faith that the Church devised.  Paul is clearly familiar with that usage and draws on it, quoting an ancient hymn which has this as its major theme (Phil 2:5-11 - see below) and citing the confession in Romans 10:9, 1 Cor 12:3 and 8:6.

b)        1 Cor 11:23-32 - the Lord's Supper.  This is one of the few references to events in Jesus' life in the epistles, and we must be grateful to the shambolic Corinthians whose bad behaviour led Paul to pen this earliest reference in the NT to what eventually became known and practiced as the Eucharist.  Note that Jesus is referred to as "the Lord" throughout.  Note also, however, the ambiguity in this: who is the "Lord" referred to in the first occurrence of the word in v23 and in v32?

c)        This ambiguity in 1 Cor 11 highlights a major difficulty.  Paul refers to Jesus as "Lord" frequently: but in his Jewish tradition this term was used for Israel's God.  His divine name (YHWH) was never spoken and in its place they said Adonai in Hebrew, Kyrios in Greek and Mar in Aramaic, all of which equal Lord in English, and in the Greek Bible (the Septuagint) they read Kyrios.  In the light of this, what are we to make of Paul's usage?  By referring to Jesus as Lord, is he making a christological statement about Christ's divinity of which the Nicene Creed is but the logical conclusion?  Or is he making a discipleship statement about the allegiance Christians give to Christ and their commitment to him?  And how does either stand in relation to Jewish custom and theology?

No doubt much of the time his usage is purely conventional and, sadly, we do not know enough about the early Christians to know what the conventions were in this instance.  Neither do we know enough about the conventions of first century Judaism.    Just occasionally Paul seems aware of our concerns: see 1 Cor 8:6 and 12:4.

6        We are "in Christ"

a)        "In Christ" (ev Christo) is a characteristic phrase of Paul's.  Sometimes it is linked with the picture of Christ as a new Adam whose faithfulness through death to resurrection has created a new humanity.  Sometimes it seems to refer to belonging to a new people, a new Israel with Christ as head.  Sometimes it seems to be Paul's way of saying "As a Christian" or "In the Church".  Prizes will be awarded for the best translation of 2 Cor 5:17!

b)        Phil 2:5-11.  Much space was devoted in this lecture two years ago to a discussion of this passage which is generally agreed to be an ancient hymn which Paul is quoting.  The discussion, and it was a very interesting one, was about what sort of christology the hymn is advocating, an incarnational one (R P Martin) or an Adamic one (J D G Dunn).  Fascinating though that is, I think it is irrelevant in a discussion of Paul on Jesus, not only because Paul didn't write the hymn but mainly because he is not quoting the hymn for theological purposes but for ethical ones.

He quotes the hymn as part of an attempt to get the Philippians to behave in a Christian way.  He has used arguments (vv1-4) and now he quotes, introducing the hymn with the words, "Let the same mind be in you as was in Christ Jesus" or, as they can also be translated, "Let the same mind be in you as you have in Christ Jesus".  Using the hymn he cites the example of Christ's humility to encourage the Philippians to be humble too.  Incidentally, he cites the "meekness and gentleness of Christ" in much the same way in an appeal to the Corinthians in 2 Cor 10:1.

7        We have not quoted many texts and have not attempted a systematic review of everything Paul had to say about Jesus/Christ.  That would be a course in itself, even assuming that anything systematic is possible about a writer as prolific and haphazard as St Paul.

We have done enough to show that Paul is a practical theologian.  He works with Scripture, with the tradition of the newly emerging Christian communities and with the raw data of his own experience (Damascus Road + a missionary imperative) and that of those Christian communities.  He is rarely, if ever, systematic.

In this session we have seen, however, just how dependent Paul is on the traditions he has received about Jesus: he quotes a hymn (Phil 2:5-11), he quotes a tradition which had been handed down to him (1 Cor 15:1-7) and he quotes a current sentence (Romans 1:3).  He also quotes what he had "received from the Lord" (1 Cor 11:23-27) and refers to something he expected his readers to know about (2 Cor 10:1).  He also, incidentally, uses that Abba word!

There is no doubt that for Paul "the crucified and risen Christ" is both the primary theological dictum and the primary Christian experience.  It is the crucified and risen Christ to whom he devotes his complete allegiance, to whom he owes a transformed life and about whom he struggles to find the least inadequate words to use.   

The 1999-2000 version.

1        Introduction

When Paul refers to Jesus the statistics in the benchmark letters (Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians and Philemon) are:

            13 occurrences of "Jesus"

15 of "the Lord Jesus"

            105 of "Jesus Christ" and 20 of "Christ Jesus"

                        (of which 53 are in the phrase "our Lord Jesus Christ")

            85, or thereabouts, of "the Lord" as a stand-alone title for Jesus/Christ 

            169 of "Christ" (of which 26 are in the phrase "in Christ")

Bear in mind that direct references to the remembered words of Jesus, to his character and to events in his life and ministry - apart from his crucifixion and resurrection - are as scarce in Paul's writings as they are in the rest of the NT epistles

2        “Christ is risen”

a)        Rom 1:1-7, especially v4.  Most commentators agree that vv3-4 are not Paul's usual style and suggest that here he may be quoting an early understanding of Jesus (and one which is very similar to Acts 2:36).  Note the place of the resurrection here in demonstrating that Jesus is the Son of God and the way that leads into the title Jesus Christ our Lord.

b)        1 Cor 15:1-8, 12-14, 20.  Paul reminds the Corinthians of what he had already shared with them, which was what he had himself received, that Easter is at the heart of the gospel (vv1-2) and of the Christian Faith (v14).  Note:

            the "died", "buried", "raised", "appeared" of vv3-5

            v20 makes a key statement of fact and of interpretation

            The Adamic theology of vv21f and 45ff

            Christ is used throughout and Lord appears in the climax in v57

            And note finally the wonderfully mundane last verse of the chapter

3        "Christ crucified"

a)        1 Cor 1:10-2:5.  Note what is happening in this passage from a letter to a church with problems.  One problem was that the church in Corinth was bitterly divided and those divisions focused on individuals.  Paul writes to counter this divisiveness and to bring this power struggle to an end, and so he reminds the Corinthians of two things: the basic historical and theological truth they all accepted (Christ crucified) and the implications of that truth for their understanding of God, themselves and the Church (God's power is made perfect in weakness)

Note the use of "we" in vv18 and 23 which indicates that Paul is reminding the Corinthians of his and their common understanding and heritage.  He has no need to explain the cross and he says nothing about why Christ died or what his death achieved.  He is, simply, using the cross as their shared symbol.  The mention of "Christ crucified" is enough, he hopes and expects, to break through the divisions and expose their common allegiance.  They are, it seems, now neither Jews who stumble over the cross nor Greeks who laugh at it, but new people for whom the cross is the starting point in their new worldview, value-system and religion

b)        Paul often uses the language of sacrifice to talk about the meaning of the death of Jesus.  Sacrifice, both in theory and practice, was a far more complex matter than modern western Christians usually realise, and much theorising on the death of Christ as a sacrifice for sin has been simplistic in the extreme.  There is no denying that Paul often uses sacrificial language to speak of Christ's death: but Sanders points to the scholarly consensus that "the sacrificial interpretation of Jesus' death does not lie at the heart of Paul's thought" about Christ's death (Paul, Oxford Past Masters, pp78f)

Sanders suggests instead that Rom 6:5-11 (with which he compares 14:8f, 7:4-6, 2 Cor 5:14, 1 Thess 5:10 and Gal 1:4) takes us to the heart of Paul's understanding of the death of Christ, which is that Christ's death broke the power of sin, made possible our escape from its bondage and thus created a new way of human living

4        “Jesus is Lord”

a)        Jesus is Lord appears as a post Easter confession in the gospels (John 20:28, Luke 24:34?) and in Acts (2:36) and is widely regarded as being one of the earliest statements of faith that the Church devised.  Paul is clearly familiar with that usage and draws on it, quoting an ancient hymn which has this as its major theme (Phil 2:5-11 - see below) and citing the confession in Rom 10:9, 1 Cor 12:3 and 8:6

b)        1 Cor 11:23-32 - the Lord's Supper.  This is one of the few references to events in Jesus' life in the epistles, and we must be grateful to the shambolic Corinthians whose bad behaviour led Paul to pen this earliest reference in the NT to what eventually became known and practised as the Eucharist.  Note that Jesus is referred to as "the Lord" throughout.  Note also, however, the ambiguity in this: who is the "Lord" referred to in the first occurrence of the word in v23 and in v32?

c)        This ambiguity in 1 Cor 11 highlights a major difficulty.  Paul refers to Jesus as "Lord" frequently: but in his Jewish tradition this term was used for  Israel 's God.  His divine name (YHWH) was never spoken and in its place they said Adonai in Hebrew, Kyrios in Greek and Mar in Aramaic, all of which equal Lord in English, and in the Greek Bible (the Septuagint) they read Kyrios.  In the light of this, what are we to make of Paul's usage?  By referring to Jesus as Lord, is he making a christological statement about Christ's divinity of which the Nicene Creed is but the logical conclusion?  Or is he making a discipleship statement about the allegiance Christians give to Christ and their commitment to him?  And how does either stand in relation to Jewish custom and theology?

No doubt much of the time his usage is purely conventional and, sadly, we do not know enough about the early Christians to know what the conventions were in this instance.  Neither do we know enough about the conventions of first century Judaism.    Just occasionally Paul seems aware of our concerns: see 1 Cor 8:6 and 12:4

5        "In Christ"

a)        "In Christ" (ev Christo) is a characteristic phrase of Paul's.  Sometimes it is linked with the picture of Christ as a new Adam whose faithfulness through death to resurrection has created a new humanity.  Sometimes it seems to refer to belonging to a new people, a new Israel with Christ as head.  Sometimes it seems to be Paul's way of saying "As a Christian" or "In the Church".  Prizes will be awarded for the best translation of 2 Cor 5:17!

b)        Phil 2:5-11.  This passage is generally agreed to be an ancient hymn which Paul is quoting.  The christology of the hymn is fascinating but Paul does not quote it for theological purposes but for ethical ones

He quotes the hymn as part of an attempt to get the Philippians to behave in a Christian way.  He has used arguments (vv1-4) and now he quotes, introducing the hymn with the words, "Let the same mind be in you as was in Christ Jesus" or, as they can also be translated, "Let the same mind be in you as you have in Christ Jesus".  Using the hymn he cites the example of Christ's humility to encourage the Philippians to be humble too.  Incidentally, he cites the "meekness and gentleness of Christ" in much the same way in an appeal to the Corinthians in 2 Cor 10:1

6        Conclusion

A systematic review of everything Paul had to say about Jesus/Christ would be a course in itself, assuming that anything systematic is possible about a writer as prolific and haphazard as St Paul.  But we have done enough to show that Paul is a practical theologian.  He works with Scripture, with the tradition of the newly emerging Christian communities and with the raw data of his own experience (Damascus Road + a missionary imperative) and that of those Christian communities.  He is rarely, if ever, systematic

In this session we have seen, however, just how dependent Paul is on the traditions he has received about Jesus: he quotes a hymn (Phil 2:5-11), he quotes a tradition which had been handed down to him (1 Cor 15:1-7) and he quotes a current sentence (Romans 1:3).  He also quotes what he had "received from the Lord" (1 Cor 11:23-27) and refers to something he expected his readers to know about (2 Cor 10:1).  He also, incidentally, uses that Abba word!   

There is no doubt that for Paul "the crucified and risen Christ" is both the primary theological dictum and the primary Christian experience.  It is the crucified and risen Christ to whom he devotes his complete allegiance, to whom he owes a transformed life and about whom he struggles to find the least inadequate words to use   

6 Old Testament Introduction – a revision aid  (The title speaks for itself I think) 

RUNNING THROUGH 

the Basics of a Level One Old Testament Course

with apologies to 

Bluffer’s Guides, Revision Packs and Habakkuk 2:2

to be used in conjunction with

John Barton and Julia Bowden (2004), The Original Story, London: DLT

1.1       ‘The Old Testament’ is the title of the first and longest part of the Christian ‘Bible’.  However, different Christian Churches have different Bibles – and I don’t mean different ‘translations – there are dozens of those!

1.2       The two different Bibles most familiar to us in Britain are the ‘Protestant’ one (with an ‘OT’ of 39 books + a ‘New Testament’) and the ‘Roman Catholic’ one (with extra books in its OT and extra chapters in some of the same books).  Roman Catholics call these ‘extra’ books the ‘Deutero-canonical’ books.  Protestants call them ‘the Apocrypha’.

1.3       To make life even more complicated, different Orthodox Churches have OT’s with other books in them.

1.4       Perhaps that means that it’s not really possible to talk about ‘The Bible’ at all, because there is not just one Big Book with that title but several.  Perhaps we should really talk about ‘The Bibles’ instead?

1.5       Likewise we should not talk about the ‘Canon’ of Scripture - ie the official, formal list of approved and authorised books – but about the ‘Canons’ of Scripture instead.

1.6              These facts have serious implications for discussing the ‘authority’ and ‘inspiration’ of the Bible and raise interesting questions about how, from where or from whom, and in whose interests these official lists emerged.

2.1              The ‘Hebrew Bible’ consists of the 39 books of the ‘Protestant Old Testament’, but it puts them in a different order.  It is divided into three unequal parts.

2.2              The first and most important part is called Torah (Genesis – Deuteronomy).  The second, less important part, is called Nevi’im – ‘Prophets’ – (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings / Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve).  The third and least important part is called Ketuvim – ‘Writings’ – (the rest of the books in the ‘Protestant OT’).

2.3              The Hebrew Bible is sometimes called TeNaK, from the opening letters of the three parts, though this can be spelled in a variety of different ways.

2.4              When the Hebrew Bible finally emerged in this shape (or when its Canon was finalised) is not unanimously agreed.  The two main suggestions are around 150 BCE and around 100 CE.

2.5              The Hebrew Bible is an ancient anthology of many different types of religious literature.  Its earliest snippets go back to perhaps 1000 BCE, its latest to around 165 BCE.

2.6              Read Barton & Bowden 1.1 for a general look at these issues.

2.7              We can ask about authors and dates of production of these writings; and sometimes there are answers to these questions and sometimes there are not.  Sometimes the answers help us to read the passage better, sometimes they don’t.

2.8              Asking questions about authors and the origins of the books in the OT is at the root of the Historical Critical Method, the basis of the open academic study of the Bible after it was freed from the dogmatic control of the churches at the Enlightenment to about the mid-1970’s.  A basic idea of the HCM is that the meaning of a passage of Scripture is that which its author intended it to have and which its original readers or hearers would have understood from it.

3.1       All reading – of any kind of writing at all - begins with an act of genre-recognition.  Which is a rather fancy term for something we all do automatically and which causes us no problems with reading matter with which we are familiar.  Unfamiliar reading matter occasionally causes us to stumble.  When we look at any particular Bible book or passage, we need to ask ourselves what is the genre (or category or type) of the material we are reading because unless we recognise the genre of what we are reading we can’t read it sensibly.  Anyone who asks the Tourist Office for directions to Hogwarts School has obviously misread the genre of Harry Potter.  For the different genres in the OT read Barton & Bowden 1.4.

3.2              Read Barton & Bowden 1.2 for an overview of the story

3.3              Israel at its largest was a tiny country (only a bit bigger than Cornwall: 120 miles from north to south and only around 40 miles wide) in the Fertile Crescent from Egypt in the south to Mesopotamia (where Assyria and Babylon were usually vying for overall control) in the north.  Geographically it divides into 3 north-south strips: the Coastal Plain, the Central Highlands, the Jordan rift valley.  There are few low level east-west routes.  Rainfall decreases sharply eastwards.  This background is crucial.  Read Barton & Bowden 1.3 for a quick geography lesson and 4.1 for an overview of its social scene.

3.4       Concentrating on the text in front of us as it is – without asking who wrote it or how it arrived in its final form - is at the heart of the Literary Approach which began to compete with the HCM from the mid-1970’s.  Barton & Bowden 5.4 gives a rather thin introduction to it.

3.5       When we are reading something, we also need to recognise the ‘we’ who is reading it.  Why?  Because we are inevitably reading with spectacles on, the spectacles of our own religious belief, our culture, our interests, our prejudices etc etc.  Good readers are aware of what they bring to the material they are reading.

3.6       Recognising that we all bring different interests to what we read and look for different things from it, is at the heart of the Reader Response movement which joined the scene in the 1980’s.

3.7       Perhaps there is now an emerging consensus which recognises that all three approaches (the Historical Critical Method which focuses on authors, Literary Criticism which focuses on the text and Reader Response Criticism which focuses on the reader) have their place – though it’s still popular in academic circles to be snooty about the first one.

4.1       The Torah is the name for the first part of the Hebrew Bible – which is a narrative beginning with creation in Genesis 1 and taking us to the arrival of the Israelites at the wrong side of the River Jordan at the end of Deuteronomy.  We used to call this part of the Hebrew Bible ‘The Law’, but that word gives the wrong impression.  We could translate it here as ‘The Teaching’, ‘The Guidance’, ‘The Instruction’ or even ‘The Gospel’, but it might be best not to translate it at all.  Most of the five books of the Torah are narrative – the OT does its theology by telling stories.  Read Barton & Bowden 4.6 for a look at these issues.

4.2       The Torah contains toroth (‘laws’ or ‘teachings’ or ‘instructions’) – 613 of them.  These are sometimes called halakoth – rules for living/walking in God’s ways.  The stories which give encouraging examples of people who do this and warning examples of those who don’t are called haggadoth.  Thus Torah – the Big Story – the metanarrative – is made up of halakah (rule) and haggadah (story).

4.3              The word Torah (without the definite article and often with the pronoun referring to God – ‘Your Torah’) is also used as a single-word for the great truth of God’s love and power at the very heart of the Jewish Faith.  Just as Christians talk about ‘The Gospel’ and read the Gospels; so Jews talk about ‘Torah’ and read the Torah.

4.4              Jews see Torah as God’s great gift.  They celebrate Torah and rejoice over it.  Torah is not a burden or a chore.  Jewish faith is not legalism or legalistic.  That is a serious anti-Semitic misconception.  The antidote is to remember Simchat Torah, the end of the liturgical year service where they dance around the synagogue with the Torah scroll, ‘delighting’ in Torah.  Another antidote is to read Ps 119 and remember that the longest psalm of all is a celebration of Torah.

4.5              As much of the Torah is narrative, so is much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible. It is therefore possible to talk about the story line of the Hebrew Bible as a whole.  Each of its three parts has an open ending, inviting us as readers to decide what we will do next.  This says something about the nature of ‘faith’ as those who shaped their story like that understood it.  If we read the total story line of the OT, however, it goes in a straight line and ends up with God’s answer in the NT.  That too says something about the nature of ‘faith’ for those who shaped the story like that.

4.6              The Torah is a composite document, made up of a variety of traditions and finally published maybe during or just after the Exile.  Wellhausen’s famous 19^th century ‘Documentary Hypothesis’ (which said that the Pentateuch – ‘the Five Books’, the usual scholarly name for the Torah – was made up of 4 documents.  These were the ‘J’ narrative which used the name JHVH/YHWH for God; the ‘E’ narrative which spoke of God/Elohim; ‘D’ as in Deuteronomy and ‘P’, the passages which are particularly interested in ‘priestly’ things) has now been replaced by the view that behind the composite Torah lie all kinds of traditions, written and oral.   See Barton & Bowden 5.1 for more on this older criticism, and 5.2 and 5.3 on its more recent offspring. 

4.7              ‘Does the Pentateuch/Torah have a theme?’ might seem a rather obvious sort of question to ask.  But when scholars were pre-occupied with looking at sources it was not often asked.  So in 1978 when Clines asked the question and argued that it does it came as a bit of a surprise to OT scholarship.  We might not all agree that Clines got the theme right, but taking the Torah in its final form is now a quite normal thing to do.

4.8              Clines identified Genesis 12:1-2 as providing the theme of the Pentateuch; which then unfolded as a story of promise and part-fulfilment and part un-fulfilment of that promise.  Arguably the three key theological reference points in that verse form three of the four main themes of the whole OT/Hebrew Bible: Election and the People of God (linked primarily with Abraham), Pilgrimage and the Land (linked with Abraham and Moses) and Liberation and Torah (linked with Moses).  The fourth, not found in the Pentateuch, is Kingship and Messiah (linked with David).  Note the way in which each of these themes are actualised through covenants – binding agreements/contracts properly made. 

5.1              The Shema‘ from Deut 6:4 is Judaism’s basic liturgical affirmation – ‘Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD alone’.  But note the variety of translation possibilities.  Does the Shema‘ say that the LORD is the only God there is?  That idea is called monotheism – belief that there is only one God.  Or that he is the only God for Israel?  That idea is called monolatry or henotheism – belief that only one particular god is to be worshipped.

5.2              The personal name of Israel’s God was probably originally pronounced as Yahweh but from very early on it was not spoken at all.  Instead, when they read this name they said Adonay, ‘Lord’.  Most English Bibles honour that ancient convention, and print the holy name in capitals, usually LORD, but occasionally GOD.  So when we see either of these words written all in capitals we know that the Hebrew here is YHWH – the holy name - sometimes also called the Tetragrammaton (the ‘four letters’).

5.3              The origin of this name is obscure.  Exodus 3:14 and 6:2 say that it was revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush.  It is also used, however, much earlier in the story, eg Eve knew it in Genesis 4:1.  That shows, among other things, that the Torah as we now have it is made up of different strands, sources or traditions which were eventually woven together.

5.4              There is, however, a strong link between the name of the LORD and the Exodus.  Notice how the important introduction to the Ten Commandments describes the LORD as ‘the one who brought Israel out of Egypt’ (Exodus 20:2).

5.5              There is a Rabbinic tradition which says, ‘When we speak of God in his awesome power and splendour we call him God (Elohim); and when we speak of him in his loving kindness we name him LORD (Yahweh)’.

5.6              What is this God – YHWH – the LORD – like?  Memorise Exodus 34:6-7 in the NRSV version which reads it in line with classic Jewish interpretation.  Walter Brueggemann calls this passage ‘Israel’s core credo’.

5.7              Read Barton & Bowden 2.1 for more on this.

6.1              Much of Torah is narrative.  The first half of Prophets is narrative.  There are significant narratives in Writings (The Chronicler’s History, Ruth, Esther, Job?).  Much of this narrative tells the story of the People of Israel and reads like a History of the People of Israel.  But there is a huge controversy about this.  How does the historical narrative of the Bible relate to ‘real’ history?  How does the world of or in the story relate to the world outside the story?  The maximalists argue that the OT tells the story more or less as it really was, making allowance for exaggerations and odd mistakes here and there; though they debate among themselves whether you should put the ‘Real History begins here’ marker at Abraham, Moses or at the Emergence of Israel in Canaan in the 12^th century BCE.  The minimalists argue that you can’t use the OT as data for writing a history of Israel at all, that it is very late storytelling which largely invents the past of which it speaks.  See Barton & Bowden 3.1, 3.2, 3.6 and 4.5 on these controversial issues.

6.2              Remember that History = Fact + Interpretation.  Also that Fact = Event + Interpretation.  Also that history is always told by someone with a point of view to serve a particular purpose.  Also that official histories are usually written by the ‘winners’.

6.3              Memorise these Dates:

                        Abraham – with many question marks around this King Arthur sort of figure – around 1800 BCE

                        Moses and the Exodus – around 1250 

                        David and the United Monarchy – around 1000 

                        Fall of Samaria (capital of the Northern Kingdom – Israel) 722 

                        Fall of Jerusalem (capital of the Southern Kgdm – Judah) 586 

                        Exile in Babylon – 586–538 

                        Maccabean Revolt – 167 

                        Death of Herod the Great – 4 BCE

                        Jewish Revolt – 66 CE and Fall of Jerusalem – 70 CE

                        Bar Cochba revolt and the end – 132 CE

6.4              Broad agreement has been reached that Israel ‘emerged’ (that is the key word) as an identifiable socio-political entity in the Central Highlands of Palestine in the 12^th century BCE.  This emergence was a much more complicated process than the simple pictures of conquest in Joshua and settlement in Judges suggest.  It may well have involved some kind of ‘peasants revolt’ for which a small ‘Moses group may have been a catalyst.

6.5              What then of Moses and the Exodus?  Remember first that the exodus is to the OT and Judaism what the resurrection is to the NT and Christianity – the originating, central, focus, generative, paradigmatic (and any other such words you can think of) event/experience.

6.6              Another parallel with the NT follows.  In NT study a lot of time has been given to differentiating between and analysing the relationship between ‘the Jesus of History’ and ‘the Christ of Faith’.  In a similar way it is appropriate to differentiate between ‘the Exodus of History’ and the ‘Exodus of Faith’.

6.7              A minimalist view would regard the exodus as fiction.  An extreme  maximalist view would regard the Biblical pictures as total fact.  Moderate maximalists would say that something happened and then discuss what it might have been.

6.8              Assuming that something happened, there are many questions which cannot be answered.  It is impossible to identify the Pharaoh concerned.  It is difficult to date the event: two rival datings struggle for supremacy – one dates it earlier (fifteenth century BCE), the other and more popular, later (thirteenth century BCE).  We cannot reconstruct the route from the Biblical references.  And the numbers involved are no doubt exaggerated in typical Biblical fashion.  The reality may well have been a few score of escaping slaves struggling through a windy marsh following a man names Moses!

6.9              Following the emergence of Israel as a nation in Canaan came the establishment of the monarchy with Saul, David and Solomon, before the fracture of the nation into two parts on the death of Solomon in 922 BCE.  Read Barton & Bowden 3.3 for an overview of the beginnings of the monarchy. 

6.10          The narrative of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings is the work of the Deuteronomic Historian, who is more of a theologian/preacher than historical chronicler.  We call him ‘Deuteronomic’ because his viewpoint is found most forcefully in Deuteronomy and seen at its clearest in Deut 30:15-20.  It is the orthodox theology of the OT.  The narrative in ‘the Former Prophets’, as these four books are sometimes called, is a continuous narrative taking the story of Israel from the entry into the Promised Land under Joshua to their exit from it by the Babylonians – 600 years or so of narrated time.  The latter is basically an explanation of how such a terrible thing could happen.  Read Barton & Bowden 3.2 for the Exile and 2.2 for a look at this broad theology. 

7.1              The title of the ‘Former Prophets’ for this narrative reminds us of how much later Israel recognised they owed to the prophets, whose role in the story is to speak for Israel’s true God and to speak against those who would try to make the nations of Israel and Judah walk in other ways.

7.2              But who were the prophets?  What was a prophet?  What is prophecy?   The problem in answering these questions is that ‘prophet’ and ‘prophecy’ are slippery words which have been used over centuries and in different contexts and have developed multiple meanings.  Nowadays we almost invariably assume that prophecy is about predicting the future.

7.3              In the OT prophecy is only very partially about predicting the future.  In OT terms a prophet was God's spokesperson, preacher, messenger, announcer; the one who spoke out in God's name.  He or she declared the will of God to God's people in a particular place and time.  Cf Ex 7:1 where Aaron is called ‘Moses' prophet’ = his spokesman, and the use of the verb ‘prophesy’ in Ezek 37:4-10.  Cf too ‘words of prophecy’ in some modern Charismatic gatherings.

7.4              Prophets came in all shapes and sizes.  What appears to have been important in the prophets in Israel is not their existence, but the particular message they communicated and its effect on the path of the nation's history and its contribution to the national sense of identity at a particularly critical period in that history.  Without Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the unknown prophet responsible for chapters 40-55 of the Book of Isaiah, it is highly unlikely that the people of Israel would have survived as a nation, that Judaism would have developed as a religion, and that we would be discussing the OT at all.

7.5              Read Barton & Bowden 4.2 on the prophets.

7.6              Among the prophets the ‘Eighth Century Prophets’ (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah) have a particular claim to fame.  They were the first prophets whose words were written down and collected into books named after them, though we do not know by whom or when, and how many other words were added to the remembered words of these prophets by their editors and rememberers.  You will still find them occasionally referred to by an old title – the ‘writing prophets’.  We have stories of the deeds of the important prophets who came before them – Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha – but not collections of their words.

7.7              Memorise the following key verses of these prophets, which represent the distinctive kernel of each one’s approach (if I may pick and choose):

Amos 5:24 – Amos is appalled at the injustices he sees in Israel and insists that above all, the LORD is a God of Justice (ie outgoing concern to make everything right for everyone, to establish Shalom) who requires that his people practice social justice.

Hosea 11:1-2 – Hosea is tormented by the religious apostasy of Israel who love the wrong gods.  Yet he is also convinced that the LORD’s love will not let his people go.

Micah 6:8 - Micah is the rural contemporary of Isaiah of Jerusalem, with a message much like Amos.

There is no single verse of Isaiah of Jerusalem (whose words and life are covered in Isaiah 1-39) which encapsulates his many-sided message.  Basic to his stance is his vision of the Holiness of God, who he calls, distinctively, ‘the Holy One of Israel’.  This holiness of God is primarily a moral holiness which looks for moral holiness in God’s people.

7.8              The ‘five questions’ of the Historical Critical Method are still useful (arguably essential) in making sense of the sayings of the prophets.  They are 

                        1. Who said this?  2. When was it said?  3. Why was it said?  4. Where was it said?  Then  5. What does it mean?

7.9       Asking and answering those five questions is a way of getting at Amos, the Man and his Message.  We can also go on to ask who by, when and where these sayings were edited, revised and published, though we might not find too many answers.

7.10     But now these sayings are part of a written text, and so you can also ask literary questions about the anthology, eg about its organisation, theme etc.  Looking at it that was is exploring Amos the Book. 

8.1       Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes look rather different, but they are the OT’s examples of ‘Wisdom literature’.  See the three groups of people - prophets, priests and the wise – referred to in Jere 18:18.  On this literature see Barton & Bowden 4.4.

8.2              ‘Wisdom literature’ comes from two groups: the educated ‘wise men’ of Solomon's court and the popular ‘wise people’ of the villages (eg 2 Sam 14:2, the wise woman of Tekoa).

8.3              The wise look around at the world with open eyes and see what is going on and by observing nature and human affairs draw conclusions about the best way to live, to live in harmony and fullness of life.  The basic conviction of this way of thinking is that wise living leads to fullness of life, whereas folly leads to death, and wise living is based on carefully reflecting on the way the world works.

8.4              God is not left out of this (‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’), but his will and his ways are to be seen in the creation and the life of nature and human beings.  God is ever-present as validating and ensuring the ‘order’ and ‘regularities’ of life: but neither the immediacy of prophetic religion nor the reality of his sacramental presence is prominent in Wisdom thought.

8.5              Israel shared this ‘Wisdom’ approach with other nations.

8.6              Two prominent literary forms in the Wisdom literature are the proverb (as in Prov 10-22:16) and the ‘Instruction’ (as in Prov 1-9).

8.7              Favourite words and ideas are ‘the wise’, ‘wisdom’, ‘understanding’ and ‘the way’, and their opposites ‘folly’, ‘the fool’ and ‘the scorner’.

8.8              Job is a classic of the world's religious literature but it is also an enigma of a book.  What is it about?  The book is long, complex and complicated, but does it have a theme?  Is it about the problem of suffering?  Is it about providence and rewards and punishments?  Is it about the absence of God?  Is it a protest against Deuteronomic orthodoxy or a validation of it?  Are different parts of the book in conflict?  Is it a ‘consciousness-raising exercise’?  See Barton & Bowden 2.5 for an exploration of these complex questions. 

8.9              Job is also a good place to see how OT studies have changed in recent years.  The historical method encouraged us to split the book up into several parts and only to look at the oldest parts.  Now we look at the book as a whole in its final form or its ‘canonical shape’. 

9.1       Quite different again is the second part of Daniel, which is the OT’s best example of apocalyptic literature.  ‘Apocalyptic’ is from the Greek word ‘apocalypse’ (‘revelation’) thus ‘apocalyptic literature’ is literature which reveals the hidden secrets of God.  Other examples are Isa 24-27, Joel 2, Zech 9-14 and Ezek 38-9 (cf Revelation in NT).  A great deal of apocalyptic literature seems to have been produced in the years just before the NT period, and much can be found in the Pseudepigrapha, the best example is probably the Book of Enoch.  Nb apocalypse and apocalyptic have no connection with the word ‘Apocrypha’.

9.2              It is usually thought that apocalyptic grew out of crisis, and so codes and symbols were used to disguise the meaning of the visions from the eyes of those persecuting the faithful, and also the theme of this literature is the reality of the living God who can be trusted to save his people if they remain faithful.  

9.3              The characteristic features of apocalyptic literature include dreams and visions in which the hidden things of God are made clear, much interest in names and numbers, strange beasts and animals, concern for sacred signs, a strong theology of the rewards of faithfulness and the punishment of the wicked, a developed scene of angels and demons, and often a conviction that the end of the old age and the beginning of a new is near (the Eschaton – thus ‘eschatology’ is the theology of ends and new beginnings).  It is often a characteristic of this literature that the revelation is given by an ancient worthy from the past or by an angel (and so is ‘pseudepigraphic’, a writing falsely, though in their terms not immorally, attributed to someone else).  The subject of these visions can vary.  Often the theme is the End of the Old World and the Dawn of the New Age (ie eschatology) but this is not always the case, and another quite different subject is the journey into the highest or innermost heaven to learn the secrets of God.

10.1     When thinking about worship in ancient Israel we need to be particularly aware of the dangers of transferring our own presuppositions and assumptions into the text, eg about weekly worship or about the meaning of such words as priest or sacrifice.  We need also to be aware of the assumption, itself fostered by parts of the OT, that there was ever only one way of worshipping in ancient Israel.

10.2     A brief history of worship in ancient Israel, according to the OT, could be written under the three headings of tents - sanctuaries – Temple.  Read Barton & Bowden 4.3 for an outline of a people at worship.

10.3     A snapshot of worship in the Temple in Jerusalem in the classical period (ie before the Exile) would show:

a      regular ‘public’ worship:

        every day - Morning and Evening Sacrifice (eg Ex 29:38-42)

        Sabbath - same but with doubled quantities

        New Moon - as a Sabb but with different offerings (eg Num 28:11-15)

b      a constant stream of ‘private’ worshippers

c      the great Festivals - Passover (or Unleavened Bread), Weeks (or Pentecost) - Tabernacles (New Year, Day of Atonement etc)

 

A day in the Temple would have been colourful, complex, noisy and smelly!

10.4     The sacrificial rituals of the Temple are very difficult to reconstruct and even more difficult for western Christians to grasp.  Most sacrifices were nothing to do with sin.  Those that were are nothing to do with changing God’s mind (which was always ready to forgive the repentant sinner) and everything to do with allowing his forgiveness to restore relationships all round.  Suffice it to say here that modern Christians turn them on their head!

11.1     ‘OT Ethics’ is a problematic phrase because the OT nowhere gives us a systematic presentation of its value system or of its ethical principles; nowhere is a coherent theory developed.  But a concern that Belief and Behaviour go together runs through the OT.  This is so obvious that it cannot be overlooked.  ‘This is the way!  Walk ye in it!’ (Isa 30:21) could almost stand as the title for the OT.  Read Barton & Bowden 2.4.

11.2     It is possible to see OT ethics as an ethics of response, of gratitude for what God has done, eg Ex 20:2.  The Commandments are God’s advice to those he has already saved!

11.3     But there may be a ‘natural law’ element as well, eg Amos 1-2 and Mic 6:8, with its bold claim, ‘You have been shown, O Mortal, (‘man’, everyman, Adam) what is good, and what the LORD requires of you’.  This too can be called an ethic of grateful response, response to God the creator.  The ethics of the OT rest on the twin foundations of salvation and creation.

11.4     ‘Doing good’ is the principal ethical requirement set out in the OT.

12.1     ‘OT Theology’ is nowadays, after a couple of decades in the doldrums, a topic of lively debate.  Obviously the OT talks much about God, but the question was – Can all its God-talk be systematised and presented in a coherent and unified approach?  And as those who attempted this mammoth task produced such different systems, most onlookers concluded that the answer was No.  However, as such modern attitudes have now given way to the pluriformity of post-modernity, new OT theologies are appearing, organised in very different ways.  Barton & Bowden 2.3 and 2.6 give a bit of an introduction here.

12.2     Memorise Ps 103 – it’s the OT’s own compendium of all that matters most in its theology.

13.1     To finish off, read the rest of Barton & Bowden, ie 3.4 and 3.5.

7 The Contents Page of the Old Testament

The Slavonic Bible also has a 3 Esdras (and the numberings of the Esdras books varies confusingly across the canons) and the Orthodox canon puts some of the LXX books into an appendix, as does the Vulgate - but don't let it worry you

The first column was the 'Bible' of Jesus and the fourth was the 'Bible' of St Paul

Notice the divisions in the HB, the different number of books in the list in column 3 and the different order of the books in column 1.  The 'Protestant Bible (OT)' contains only the books of the HB, but it puts them in the order of the Roman Catholic OT

Is it an important question to ask who decided what should be included, and why there are different orders?  Does it matter?  What difference does the order make? 

8 The four creation ‘pictures’ in the Old Testament

Contrary to much popular misunderstanding there are neither two, nor one, but four Creation ‘pictures’, ‘parables’ or threads in the Old Testament:

• Designer World: Gen. 1.1—2.4a. This, the so-called ‘P’ account, is the majestic and familiar picture in which God speaks creation into being in an ordered seven-day plan.   

• Gardeners’ World: Gen. 2.4b—3.24. This equally familiar, horticultural, picture focuses on the ambiguities and alienations of life in the real world.

• Chaoskampf  (‘Conflict/War with Chaos’): Pss. 74.12–17; 89.5–18 and Isa. 51.9–11 (see also Job 7.12; 26.12; 38.8–11). Here are snippets of that older and wider ancient Near Eastern creation myth of the King of Creation's battle with the Chaos Monster.  

• Wisdom’s Playground: Prov. 8.22–31 and Job 28.20–28 (see also chapters 38—41). This picture shows the role of ‘Wisdom’ in creation, and includes careful observation of the realities of nature and human experience. 

All these feature in one way or another in the creation hymn, Ps. 104.

These creation threads can also be seen elsewhere in the Old Testament:

• the Wisdom literature generally. Note the reference to ‘Creator’ in Eccles. 12.1.
• in Isaiah of Babylon, especially Isa. 40.12–26 and the word ‘Creator’ at 40.28 and 43.15.
• in Psalms, e.g. Pss. 8, 19, 24, 29, 33, 93, 95, 96, 98, 136 and 148.
• in the ancient hymn quoted by Amos in 4.13, 5.8–9 and 9.5–6.

9 Yahweh and his Consort?

Or  “Out, damned women!  Out, I say”    Or  The exclusion of Asherah/Astarte?

The OT (like the NT) is, of course, a book written, edited and published by the ‘winners’, in this case the Deuteronomists, the preachers and teachers of Yahwism.  Theirs are the views which constitute the orthodox theology of the OT and which are portrayed as the Faith and theology of Ancient Israel.  It is natural and inevitable, therefore, that any other views of God which may have been held by ancient Israelites and which did not conform to the views of the Deuteronomists are described by them as ‘heresy’ or ‘apostasy’.  It is also possible that views they found totally unacceptable are written out of the story completely.

In the Bible God - the LORD/YHWH/Yahweh - is portrayed as one and The One, one in himself and one alone, the only, unique and ‘jealous’ God who will share his divine status with no other.  This is Yahwistic orthodoxy.  The classic statement of this is in the Shema‘ of Deut 6:4 and the chapters of Deutero-Isaiah fill it out, poetically and polemically.

Even the OT itself, however, admits that this classic theology was not arrived at without a struggle.  A constant thread in its narrative story-line and a constant feature in the preaching of its prophets is that the Israelites themselves were greatly attracted by and to the gods and culture of their neighbours in the ancient Near East.  A good example of this is the stories of the conflict between the prophet Elijah and Queen Jezebel in 1 Kings 17ff.  The other two heroes in this struggle, according to the Deuteronomic Historians/Storytellers, were the reforming kings Hezekiah and Josiah who around 720 BCE (see 2 Kg 18:1-8) and 620 BCE (see 2 Kg 22-23) respectively purged the nation and the national shrines of the gods and liturgical paraphernalia of what the Deuteronomists portray as this alien culture.

Two other Biblical books or passages are especially helpful in enabling us to see something more of this alternative religion and theology.  Hosea is particularly strong in his condemnation of the worship of Baal (‘Lord’, especially Lord of Storm, Rain and, therefore, Harvest – hence the strong polemic in 2:8) in the Northern Kingdom, Israel, in the mid-8^th century BCE and is rich in allusions to what such worship involved.  Jere 44:15-19, addressed to refugees in Egypt, reveals that they, especially the women, have an alternative explanation to Jeremiah’s about why Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 597/586.  It was because they had been forced (by Josiah) to stop their sacrifices to ‘the Queen of Heaven’.

Archaeological discoveries have enabled us to see something more of what might have been involved in all this.  Discoveries at Elephantine, a fourth century BCE military fort on the Nile at Aswan garrisoned by Jewish mercenaries and equipped with its own Jewish temple, reveal that a goddess (Anat-Yaho or Anat-Bethel) was worshipped there alongside Yahweh.  Discoveries at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud in the Sinai and Khirbet el-Qom near Hebron have found likely references to ‘Yahweh and his Asherah’.  Discoveries of ‘Asherah (or Astarte) figurines’ have been made at a number of ‘Israelite’ sites including a particularly splendid one at the ninth century site at Tel Rehov near Bethshan.  These small fertility figurines of a woman with large breasts have long been known in ‘Canaanite’ sites.

There are two complicating factors here.  The first is that there are two goddesses with similar names in the Canaanite pantheon: Asherah and Astarte.  Asherah is the Canaanite mother goddess, chief consort of the High God El, head of the pantheon.  Astarte (or Ashtart, the Canaanite version of the Assyrian Ishtar – ‘queen of heaven’) is the goddess of fertility, love and war, the consort of Baal, the god of storm and fertility.  The two, however, appear to be conflated at times in the OT and this might be due in part to a strong historical possibility that the worship of the senior one gave way to that of the junior due to Assyrian influence from the 8^th century on.

The second complicating factor is that the OT contains a linguistic confusion or possibly a deliberate obfuscation in its references to asherah and astarte.  Asherah is a feminine singular word which is usually given a masculine plural asherim but at Judges 3:7 has a feminine one asheroth.  The word denotes both the goddess and the wooden cult object which was her symbol.  AV translates it as ‘(sacred) grove/s’ everywhere but newer translations are more accurate, eg NRSV has ‘sacred pole/s’ (the older suggestion that the word refers to a sacred living tree is no longer widely held) in some places and the name of the goddess in others.  Ashtoreth (AV) /Astarte (NRSV), appears correctly as the goddess of the Sidonians, worshipped by Solomon in 1 Kg 11:5.  The plural of the word (ashtaroth) occurs in other places, but its translation varies: eg in Jg 2:13 AV has Ashtaroth and NJB has ‘Astartes’, apparently referring to the consort of Baal: but NRSV has ‘the Astartes’,  NIV ‘the Ashtoreths’ and REB and NJPS ‘the ashtaroth’.  The same singular/plural dynamics occur with the word Baal, sometimes the god of that name is intended and at others ‘the baals’ obviously means ‘all those Canaanite false gods’.

The simple bottom line is that the words refer to two goddesses and a sacred pole, all of which evoked the disapproval of the Deuteronomists.  Incidentally, they also disapproved of the sacred pillar or stone (the massebah) which was equally misused – as they saw it - in the worship of Yahweh.

We do not know the precise rituals or theology associated with the worship of Asherah and/or Astarte in the privacy of an Israelite home, just as we know little about the teraphim which first feature in the story of Jacob and his wives (Gen 31:19).  Nor is it clear how they were worshipped in the public domain, for example, how the sacred poles (and sacred stones) actually featured.  We can say little more than that they, along with Baal and the ‘Bulls’ erected by Jeroboam at Dan and Bethel (1 Kg 12:28-30) belonged to some kind of ‘Nature Religion’ and that fertility rites were part (probably a small part) of the package.

It is also clear that, if we take a maximalist view of the history of ancient Israel (ie that the way the OT tells the story is broadly true), part of the Deuteronomist’s project was the ‘greening’ of Yahweh.  If Yahweh was to be promoted or seen as the One True God, then this desert god of battles (Hab 3, Isa 63:1), covenant love (Ex 34:6-7) and liberation (Ex 20:2) – the God of Redemption - had to be shown to possess the necessary agricultural credentials and to have the power to sustain the lives of settled farmers in a rich, rural economy (Gen 1-3, Pss 24:1 and 104, Ho 2:8-15 etc) – ie to be the God of Creation and Redemption.  On a minimalist view it is rather more complicated.

Perhaps, therefore, we should be careful of making judgements on limited evidence about what it was in all of this that the Deuteronomists objected to and why they argued and worked as passionately as they did for the kind of monotheism which they eventually achieved.  A socio-cultural history of Israelite origins and of its ongoing life is as elusive as any other kind, but the socio-political aspects of the issue between the prophet Elijah and Queen Jezebel in the Deuteronomic story should not be too lightly dismissed.  The minimalists would say that major life-style choices were indeed at issue in this story about a titanic clash of ideologies, and whether they are right or wrong about anything else, they are reading with the grain of the narrative when they say that.

Reading

‘Asherah’ in ABD 1 pp483-487 and ‘Ashtoreth’ in ABD 1 pp491-494 - both by John Day

R Albertz, A History of Isr. Religion in the OT Period, SCM 1994, vol 1, pp85-87, 194, 211

R S Hess, Israelite Religions, Baker/Apollos 2007 – very important book

M Sturgis, It Ain’t Necessarily So, Headline, 2001, ch 6 (a lively ‘minimalist’ viewpoint)

10 Names for God in the Old Testament

1. ʾĕlôhîm is the Hebrew word translated as ‘God’, ‘god’ or ‘gods’ in the Old Testament. It is the plural form of ʾēl, the usual semitic word for a god and the name of the Canaanite High God, El. Despite its plural form it can be used of a singular god, as it is of Chemosh, the god of Moab in 1 Kings 11.33 and of the God of Israel throughout the Old Testament.

2. Variations on ʾĕlôhîm include:

ʾel šaddai‘ (El Shaddai) which is usually translated as ‘God Almighty’ as in Ex. 6.3.

’el ʿelyôn (El Elyon) which is usually translated as ‘God Most High’. Often this name just appears as ʿelyôn, ‘the Most High’ as in Ps. 82.6.

’elohê ’abraham, the God of Abraham (… Isaac, … Jacob etc.).

’elohê ṣĕbāʾôt, God of Hosts (though NIV and TNIV usually translate this as ‘God Almighty’) – see below.

ʾĕlāh – the Aramaic word for God used in Ezra 5-7 and Dan. 2-6.

ʾĕlôah – This form is particularly common in Job where it occurs 43 times out of the total of 58 occurrences in the Old Testament.

3. šaddai‘ (Shaddai), ‘The Almighty’, again particularly common in Job.

4. YHWH – LORD. This is the name which is not to be spoken. It was disclosed to Moses at the Burning Bush with a riddle about its meaning (Ex. 3.13-15) and again in 6.2-3, although in another tradition it has been used since Gen. 2.4.

5. Variations on YHWH include:

yhwh ṣĕbāʾôt – LORD of Hosts (but usually ‘the LORD Almighty’ in NIV and

TNIV). The ‘Hosts’ in the title might be the ‘Heavenly Host’ of sun, moon and stars and so on – in which case this title is firmly putting them in their place as subordinate to YHWH (they are gods in their own right in some ancient Near Eastern systems). Or they might be the ‘Heavenly Host’ of angels and archangels and ‘all the company of heaven’, including the lesser gods of Pss. 82 and 58.1. Or they might be the armies of Israel. The meaning is uncertain. What is not in question, however, is that this ancient title should be reproduced in translation as accurately as possible, even if it means refusing to translate it at all as NJB opts to do. NIV and TNIV are misleading when they translate ʾel šaddai‘ and yhwh/’elohê-ṣĕbāʾôt in the same way as ‘God Almighty’.

yāh – LORD, especially common in Psalms, e.g. hallĕlû – yāh.

6. ʾădônay – ‘(my) Lord/lord’, a common term of respect (wife for husband, servant for master, subject for king) also sometimes used in address to God, as in Ps. 51.15.

7. ʾĕlôhîm and YHWH are occasionally used in combination, e.g. in the second creation parable in Gen. 2-3, ʾĕlôhîm YHWH, ‘the LORD God’.

8. ʾădônay and YHWH together is common in Ezekiel but is also found in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos and occasionally elsewhere - ʾădônay YHWH – ‘the Lord GOD’.

9. More complex combinations are also found occasionally, e.g. Amos 9.5 ʾădônay yhwh ṣĕbāʾôt – ‘the Lord GOD of Hosts’ and Psalm 89.8 yhwh ’elohê-ṣĕbāʾôt  – ‘the LORD God of Hosts’. 

11 Psalm 24

What speakers and actions can you identify in the psalm?

1 Behind Ps. 24 (1)  SBD’s ‘liturgical reconstruction’ 

Inside the Temple

Worship Leader:                     The earth is the LORD’S and all that is in it

Temple Choir:                         the world, and those who live in it

Worship Leader:                     for he has founded it on the seas

Temple Choir:                         and established it on the rivers

 

At the foot of the Temple mount

Procession Leader:                  Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? 

Procession Choir:                    And who shall stand in his holy place?

Procession Leader:                  Those who have clean hands and pure hearts

Procession Choir:                    Who do not lift up their souls to what is false and do not swear deceitfully

Procession Leader:                  They will receive blessing from the LORD

Procession Choir:                    and vindication from the God of their salvation

Procession Leader:                  Such is the company of those who seek him

Procession Choir:                    who seek the face of the God of Jacob

 

The procession moves to the Temple gate and the Procession Leader strikes the gate with his rod

Procession Leader:                            Lift up your heads, O Gates!

Procession Choir:                              And be lifted up, O ancient doors!

Procession Leader and Choir:            that the King of glory may come in

Doorkeeper (from inside):                  Who is the King of glory?

Procession Leader:                            The LORD, strong and mighty

Procession Choir:                              the LORD, mighty in battle

 

The Procession Leader strikes the door for a second time

Procession Leader:                             Lift up your heads, O Gates!

Procession Choir:                               And be lifted up, O ancient doors!

Procession Leader and Choir:             that the King of glory may come in

Doorkeeper (from inside):                   Who is the King of glory?

Procession Leader and Choir:             The LORD of hosts

Doorkeeper, opening the doors:          He is the king of glory.

The doors are opened and the procession enters the Temple, preceded by a group of liturgical dancers with banners, and everyone sings,

                        ‘We will enter his gates with thanksgiving in our hearts,

                        we will enter his courts with praise …’ 

The Dramatised Bible (1997, Marshall Pickering) is more sober and gives the psalm a cast of three solo voices (Leader, Enquirer and Director) and a chorus of ‘All’.

2  Behind Ps. 24 (2)  the possibilities

There is no doubt that Ps. 24 opens a window onto some kind of liturgy involving a procession.  The problem is, however, that although this psalm is clearly one giving ‘words for worship’ it comes without any rubrics. There is nothing to tell us

• the occasion on which this psalm is to be used;

• which actions are to accompany it or which it is to accompany;

• how ‘the King of glory’ is represented in this liturgy

• how many and whose voices are involved. 

Another good example of this common puzzle of words without rubrics in the Book of Psalms is those psalms in which there is a sudden change of tone.  EG, if you want to puzzle this out at home:  read Ps. 69.22-33 and think about what happened, do you think, between verses 29 and 30?

Was there

• a big liturgical moment, like a sacrifice?

• did someone preach a sermon?

• did a prophet give an oracle?

• did someone offer a testimony of some kind?

• did a priest pronounce a blessing?

• was there a piece of liturgical drama? 

• was there a musical interlude?

• was there a time of prayer? 

Sadly, we can only speculate.

3  Looking closely at Ps. 24

In NRSV we can see a number of literary features:

• it has a title, printed in italics;

• a Hebrew word appears twice in italics;

• it is divided into three sections (vv.1–2, 3–6, 7–10); 

• in some verses the second line almost repeats the first. 

So this lively psalm also opens other windows,

• one onto issues of tradition (the title),
• another onto literary issues 
• of translation (the untranslated Hebrew word) 
• and Hebrew poetry (the divisions and the repetitions). 
• There is also the question of the relationship between the first section (vv. 1–2) and the other two, for there seems to be no obvious one. 

And there is more. Ps. 24 speaks about God: 

• naming him as YHWH 

• and giving four other names or titles: ‘the God of (their) salvation’, which we could translate as ‘the Saviour God’; ‘the God of Jacob’; ‘the King of glory’, which we could translate as ‘the Glorious King’, and ‘YHWH of hosts’. 

• It teaches that this God ‘created the world’ and blesses people; 

• that he has ‘saved’ a particular group of people and will ‘come in’ to their temple; 

• that he is ‘holy’ as well as ‘glorious’ and a great warrior. 

It also teaches what this God expects of his worshippers.

4  Conclusion

In Ps. 24 we glimpse something of

• what was believed and taught in the Second Temple period in Temple circles,

• what sacred stories were told by Temple preachers,

• what was thought about right and wrong by Temple prophets, and 

• what ‘religious experiences’ were offered by Temple worship and Temple spirituality. 

That, however, is not all, because the inclusion of this psalm in the canon of the Hebrew Bible gives all this an official status. Because Psalms is an ‘authorised’ or ‘canonical’ text its anonymous voices raised in praise or protest now speak in the name of the community; its images and metaphors now receive official sanction; its religious, moral and theological understandings are now ‘torah’, i.e. teaching, guidance and instruction, to be learned and lived, as the introduction to this official anthology (Ps. 1) makes clear.

Reading psalms requires that we are alert to all of these possibilities.

12 Old Testament Timeline

But remember that there are big issues about the historicity of some of this (like where you insert the ‘Real History Begins Here’ marker).  

13 Exodus 34 – the ‘Core Creed' of the OT

Many commentators call these verses a "formula" or a "confessional formula", for it seems to be something of a mini-creed which crops up in various places in the Old Testament and which echoes in many more.  Walter Brueggemann calls it “Israel’s core credo” in his magnificent Theology of the OT, Fortress, 1997.  It also appears in one of the psalms of the Qumran Community (see the end of this chapter).  The wording varies slightly from place to place.  Exodus 34:6-7 is probably the oldest of them.  The others are Numbers 14:18, Psalms 86:15, 103:8, 111:4 and 145:8, Joel 2:13, Jonah 4:2, Nahum 1:3, Nehemiah 9:17 (compare v31) and 2 Chronicles 30:9.  These verses come from different strands of Old Testament literature and thought, and from writings which are, as far as we can tell, from very different periods and ages.  We can probably conclude from this that this mini-creed said something important about God which was believed by most Israelites.  We can surmise that if an Israelite from Old Testament times was asked, What is your God like? then the chances are that he or she would have pointed to the exodus and said, "That is what he is like, a God who sets us free."  If they were pressed further it looks as if they might well go on to say, "The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love."  In fact the two go together.  Exodus 34:6-7 is set in the exodus story and in most of the eleven places where this mini-creed is found there is a reference to the exodus nearby.  This verse seems to be very near to the heart of what they understood about their God.

Exodus 34 is another version of the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt Sinai after they had escaped from Egypt.  According to the story, when Moses had got down from meeting God on the top of Mt Sinai the first time, he found that the people had melted down their gold jewelry and were worshipping a Golden Calf.  He had pleaded with God to forgive them, but then set about punishing them himself.  In Exodus 34 Moses is back on the top of Mt Sinai again, and is given two new tablets of stone with God's law written on them to replace the original ones which he had thrown in sorrow or in anger at the people's folly.  Then we read,

The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name, "The LORD."  The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed,

          "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious,

                slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,

            keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,

            forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty,

            but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children,

                            and the children's children to the third and fourth generation."

Apart from its rather obscure introduction - who is doing the proclaiming and to whom? - and one crucial other place, this is a straightforward passage to translate.  What is given above is from the NRSV and I have put the difficulty in italics.  The Hebrew simply says "for thousands" and NRSV (and GNB) follow the traditional Jewish understanding of the passage to mean "for thousands of generations".  All the rest stay with the original wording.

An interesting question therefore is, which is the best translation here and at Exodus 20:6 where the same words and translations are also found?  The letter or what Jewish tradition believes to be the spirit?  Is Deuteronomy 7:9-11 a parallel?

God's loving goodness is the first thing mentioned about him in this ancient mini-creed, but when we read on these ideas are soon eclipsed by what follows.  A God who "visits the iniquity of the parents on the children and the children's children down to the third and fourth generation" is not a God we warm to.  Here all our stereotypes about the nasty God of the Old Testament come into play.  But we should note carefully that this old saying in Exodus 34:6 puts God's "anger" in perspective, especially in the NRSV and GNB translations based on the traditional Jewish interpretation.  His punishment might last for three or four generations, but his "blessing" lasts for a thousand generations!  (Again see Ex 20:6).  The same point is made in a slightly different way in Ps 30:5,

                                "For his anger is but for a moment: his favour is for a lifetime.

                                Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning".

In Ex. 34:6 (repeated almost verbatim in Pss 86:15 and 103:8) we have one of the most beautiful verses in the Old Testament, asserting that, "The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love".

Three of these words are "ordinary language", commonplace, daily life sorts of words, but "steadfast love" is one of the Old Testament's great theological and ethical technical terms.  "Steadfast love" translates the wonderfully warm and rich Hebrew word "hesed".  The great wealth of meaning in this evocative word can be seen from the variety of ways it has been translated into English over the years: "mercy", "kindness", "loving-kindness", "steadfast love", "covenant devotion", "loyalty", "tenderness", "faithful love", "constant love" or just that overworked but basic, "love".  There is a lot to be said for the NRSV's phrase, "steadfast love", for this captures an important aspect of God's love in the Old Testament where his love is often seen in terms of his covenant with Israel.  God calls Israel to be his people, and pledges his loyalty and love to them in the covenant with Moses on Mt Sinai (Exodus 20-24, Deuteronomy 5).  In response the people are obliged to honour God and obey him in all that they do.  The Old Testament story tells of God's reliability, he keeps his promises and honours his covenant.  His love is reliable, and this reliability is what is emphasised in the phrase used by NRSV, "steadfast love".  NEB tries to put this across with "constant love" and NJB with "faithful love".  GNB is hot on the reliability aspect with its "keeps his promises" but fails completely to make mention of the other aspect.  In Psalm 103 the psalmist wants to honour, thank and praise God because he has experienced for himself the same continually faithful and loyal kindness, care and love which God has consistently shown towards the people of Israel.  He testifies that God's feelings towards us are both lovingly warm and consistently reliable: unfortunately, as much of the Old Testament so frequently complains, ours towards him are often neither.

"Slow to anger" is ambiguous, as can be seen in the different translations offered.  It is one thing to take the words literally and say that God is "slow to anger" but it is not quite the same to say that he is "long-suffering" or "patient" as we would say in more modern English.  If we choose to say that God is patient, then we need to remember that there are limits to his patience.  If we prefer to say that he is "slow to anger", then we need to note that he does get angry eventually.  The reference here to God's anger is important.  For all of his love and care expressed in the other words in this verse, God can become angry.  Psalm 103:9 may be helpful here:

                "He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger for ever".

This verse fills out the meaning of the third phrase in Psalm 103:8 that God is "slow to anger", "slow to become angry" or "long-suffering".  In the first line the psalmist uses a word from the law court which means to "have a controversy with" someone or to "have a complaint against" them.  "Accuse" is used by the NRSV, REB and NIV, and is much better than the "chide" of the older versions.  Mowvley puts it plainly in his commentary, "He does not prosecute his case against us for ever."  In the second line there is a verb for "guarding" or "keeping watch" but no noun to say what is kept watch on or over.  All the translations agree that the verb is talking about God holding on to or maintaining his anger, and to "keep his anger" means to harbour or nurse it, to remain angry or to let this anger grow.  It is just possible that the line should be translated as "nor will he keep us prisoner for ever", which makes a good parallel to the first line.  If the traditional translation is kept both lines stress the fact that God does not accuse people or remain angry for long.  The psalmist has no doubt that God gets angry with his people, but at this point in his psalm he wants to emphasise the "not always" and the "not for ever".  We tend to notice the references to God's anger, but that is not the main point that is being made.  In my view NJB gives a poor translation of this verse, but it does get this emphasis right,

                                "His indignation does not last for ever, nor his resentment remain for all time".

God's anger is real, but he is "slow" to get angry, and his anger does not last long.

This is not, however, the impression that many Christians have of the God of the Old Testament.  Neither do they normally think of that God as a God of love, as he is so warmly spoken of in Psalm 103:8.  The prevalent idea of the God of the Old Testament among Christians is that he is, at best, a remote and powerful creator, and at worst a stern and forbidding lawgiver, who can be violent if not cruel.  He is a God to be "feared" (as in Psalm 103:11, 13 and 17) and who makes rigorous demands upon his people (as in Psalm 103:18 and 20-21).  There is certainly some truth in this picture of the God of Old Testament: but what Christians are not so quick to notice is that much of this picture can be found in the New Testament as well.  It is simply not true to think that the Old Testament talks about a God of anger while the New Testament talks about a God of love.  It is not right to put a divide between the Testaments like that, for both contain some very harsh pictures of God, and both talk about a God of love.  It is not as if the Old Testament presents a nasty God and the New Testament presents a nice one.  Both can picture God in ways that we find attractive, and both can picture him in ways we find frightening and disturbing.

Pictures of God's anger in the Old Testament must include the Flood in Genesis 6-8, where God decides to wipe all living things off the face of the earth and start again with Noah and the creatures in the Ark because everything had got so bad.  In the stories of the exodus we shudder at the ten plagues inflicted on the Egyptians, and then at the ways God punishes the Israelites in the desert, not only for worshipping the Golden Calf but for other much less serious reasons as well.  Later on there is the way that he lets his tribes be attacked or invaded because he is angry at them, and ultimately that he lets the Assyrians destroy the Northern kingdom and the Babylonians the Southern one a hundred and fifty years later.  There are also examples of God's anger at particular individuals.  Perhaps the one that sums up all my misgivings best is the story of God's anger at poor Uzzah, who was only trying to help.  After he had captured Jerusalem and as part of his plan to make it into his capital city, King David decided to bring the ark of God into the city.  The ark was being carried on a new cart pulled by oxen,

"When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen shook it.  The anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God.  David was angry because the LORD had burst forth with an outburst upon Uzzah..."     (2 Samuel 6:6-8)

At least David comes out of this story with some credit.  God gets angry at people, but in the Old Testament there is also no shortage of people who get angry at him, and who say so, sometimes expressing their anger in worship as we can see in some of the psalms (eg Psalms 44, 74, 13, 109).

The New Testament equivalent of the story of Uzzah might be the statement in Hebrews 10:31, that "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God".

Both the story of Uzzah and this verse from Hebrews speak a strange language to most of us today.  They seem to belong to a world very different from ours, and almost speak of magic and the occult.  For them the sacred world is full of mystery and even terror.  God is to be approached only through the proper channels, by the proper people in the proper ways, and anyone else who comes unprotected into the presence of the power and force of God is greatly at risk.  Much of modern Christianity and Judaism has, rightly or wrongly, lost this sense of God as terrifying power and frightening mystery, and of this aspect of God's anger.  But what must not be lost, at any cost, is the other sense of God's anger at evil and at human sin.  This is the "anger" in question in Psalm 103.  This is also what the "visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children" in Exodus 20:6 and 34:7 is about.  This is what many versions of the New Testament know as the "wrath of God", or as some modern ones sometimes call it, his "anger" or his "retribution".

The Old Testament is fully aware of shadow sides of human life, one of which is human "iniquity".  It is fully aware of how damaging such "iniquity", "sin" or "wickedness" can be, and it does not think that it is something to be treated lightly or dismissed easily.  The Old Testament prophets insisted that sin, in all of its chameleon colours, makes God "angry", because it fouls up his creation and spoils life for its victims.  Where there should be love there is hatred, despair where hope should be, darkness where light should be and where there should be joy there is sadness.  There is also injury, and so doubt has become inevitable, as St Francis points out in his famous prayer.  In the face of all this it would be a very poor God indeed who did not get angry.  Anyone who looks at the misery of so many people and so much of our planet and feels neither pain nor rage can hardly be human, and a God who was not angry at the cause of these things would be less than human.  The God of the Bible is angry because he sees what has happened to his creation and feels for the victims of the injustices of the powerful, for "he has made nothing in vain and loves all that he has made" (from the Burial Service).  Only a heartless and unloving God would not get angry.  Just as good parents can get angry when they see their child hurting themselves and hurting others, so God's anger is, in fact, a sign of his love.

However, he is "slow to anger", or patient with sinful people.  He does not nurse his anger, or let it go on and on.  God's anger is a sign that he takes sin and evil seriously, hating their devastating effects on human life and the life of the world.  It is not however, his last or greatest word, for that lies with his love which seeks to put all things right and to which Exodus 34:5-9 so beautifully testifies.

Note

Number 16 in the psalms found in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran

                "I know, O Lord, that Thou art merciful and compassionate,

                long-suffering and rich in grace and truth, pardoning transgression and sin.

                Thou repentest of evil against them that love Thee, and keep Thy commandments,

                that return to thee with faith and wholeness of heart..."

                                                from The Dead Sea Scrolls in English by G Vermes, JSOT Press, 1987, p204

14 Genesis 1 (NRSV), scripted for group reading

NARRATOR:  In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said,

GOD:  ‘Let there be light’

NARRATOR:  and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. 

CHORUS:  And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

NARRATOR:  And God said, 

GOD:  ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ 

NARRATOR:  So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome.  And it was so. God called the dome Sky. 

CHORUS:  And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. 

NARRATOR:  And God said,

GOD:  ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ 

NARRATOR:  And it was so.  God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.  And God saw that it was good. Then God said,

GOD:  ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ 

NARRATOR:  And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it.  And God saw that it was good. 

CHORUS:  And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. 

NARRATOR:  And God said, 

GOD:  ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ 

NARRATOR:  And it was so.  God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.  God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.  And God saw that it was good. 

CHORUS:  And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. 

NARRATOR:  And God said, 

GOD:  ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.’ 

NARRATOR:  So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind.  And God saw that it was good.  God blessed them, saying, 

GOD:  ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ 

CHORUS:  And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

NARRATOR:  And God said, 

GOD:  ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ 

NARRATOR:  And it was so.  God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind.  And God saw that it was good.  Then God said, 

GOD:  ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ 

NARRATOR: So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.  God blessed them, and God said to them, 

GOD:  ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’.  

NARRATOR:  God said, 

GOD:  ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ 

NARRATOR:  And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. 

CHORUS:  And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. 

NARRATOR:  Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude.  And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.  So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.  These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

15 So does the OT have anything to offer to a contemporary spirituality?

1  Intro

We must begin by recognising the both/and of the fact that the OT is both an ancient and alien anthology of religious literature and a text which the Church has recognised as contemporary (= canonised).  Need to hold on to both of these – eg Joshua’s ethnic cleansing both needs to be accepted for what it was and its contemporary lesson learned, ie that the false god of militant consumerism is not to be worshipped!  NB the Zionist contemporisation that Canaanites = Palestinians and therefore …. is not the way to do it!

2  Spirituality in OT

‘Spirituality’ is a modern word and its meaning is prone to vagueness.  Marie McCarthy’s definition is probably as good as we can get: ‘Spirituality is a fundamental component of our human beingness, rooted in the natural desires, longings and hungers of the human heart.  It is concerned with the deepest desires of the human heart for meaning, purpose and connection, with the deep life lived intentionally in reference to something larger than oneself’(‘Spirituality in a Postmodern Era’ in The Blackwell Reader in Pastoral and Practical Theology, ed. Woodward and Pattison, Blackwell, 2000, p196).  She describes six marks of ‘authentic spirituality’ (McCarthy pp.199-201), and we can explore the spirituality of the OT by using her markers.

The first is contemplative awareness, a discipline which involves ‘deep listening’ marked by ‘waiting, attending and presence’, particularly nurtured in the practice of silence.

            OT speaks of a God who wants to communicate

            We hear by      reading the narrative of Torah

                                    listening to the prophets

                                    waiting on God in worship (Pss)

                                    observing the creator in the creation (Wisdom)

            Also many OT stories of consequences of not listening

The second is effective action in the world, which ‘works towards the healing of the world and the wellbeing of all creation’.  

            We see that in Gen 1 and imago dei and it is heard throughout the prophets

            The Mosaic creed of ‘belief and behaviour go together’

The third is community because spirituality is not an ‘isolated, privatised, individual affair’.

            See the OT passim, and its necessary antidote to post-Enlightenment individualism

The fourth is a disposition of openness, especially an openness to the new and unexpected, an openness to a future that would be different and a willingness to risk.

            OT full of journeys, cf Gen 12 and Theme of Pentateuch, also DI and Return

The fifth is non-dualistic thinking and acting, in which life is integrated in a capacity to hold opposites together and to form a new synthesis, of contemplation and action, of private and public, individual and social.

            See ‘belief and behaviour go together’ above

Also Gen 2 with its ‘living soul’ and not body/soul division

Also God is light/dark together

Also ‘even though I walk through valley of shadow’

Also ‘anger’ as sign of kindness in ‘core credo’

The last is discernment, and McCarthy’s paragraph can be quoted in full,

‘A final mark of authentic spiritualities is that they generally offer a set of guidelines and practices for discerning the path we are being called to follow.  They invite us to put our lives in dialogue with the tradition through prayer, reflection, meditation, individual and group guidance, and other practices.  They encourage attentive listening and awareness of how we are being called and where we are being led.  In this sense authentic spiritualities are marked by a sense of obedience to something or someone larger than and beyond oneself.  In the process of discernment one looks for certain signs such as a sense of inner and outer freedom, an awareness of the connectedness and interrelation of all creation, a rootedness in tradition coupled with openness to the new, and a sense of deep, inner peace (McCarthy p201).’

Exactly what OT is about – discernment is openness to Torah

3          Conc

The theology underpinning all this is of

            God as creator

            God as redeemer who calls his redeemed people to redeem the world

            God of love as per ‘core credo’ 

16 The ‘Real History’ game

(I use this as an opening exercise in the class looking at ‘history’ in the OT.  It opens up all the questions, not only about the existence of some of these characters, but also about what we mean by ‘history’ and the way that the OT does ‘historiography’)

First, go through this list and put a tick beside each name that you think was a real person in real history

St Paul

Jesus

Ezra

Daniel

Jeremiah

Isaiah

Jezebel

Elijah

Solomon

David

Ruth

Moses

Joseph

Abraham

Noah

Enoch

Eve

Then draw a line across the page where you would put your ‘Real History Begins Here’ marker 

 

17 Temple Worship in Ancient Israel

1          On this topic, as on most, we need to be aware of the dangers of transferring our own presuppositions/assumptions into the Bible, eg about practices (like weekly worship) or about the meaning of words (like priest or sacrifice itself). We need also to be aware of the assumption, itself fostered by parts of the OT, that there was ever only one way of worshipping in ancient Israel

2          A snapshot of worship in the Temple in Jerusalem in the classical period (ie before the Exile) would show: 

a  daily ‘public’ worship:        Morning and Evening Sacrifice (eg Ex 29:38-42)

                                              Sabbath day - same but with doubled quantities

                                              New Moon - as Sab but with different offerings (eg Num 28:11-15)

b  a constant stream of ‘private’ worshippers

c  the great Festivals - Passover (or Unleavened Bread), Weeks (or Pentecost) and Tabernacles (New Year, Day of Atonement etc)

Bibliography:  The classic textbooks on worship in ancient Israel are Worship in Ancient Israel by H H Rowley (SPCK 1967) and Worship in Israel by H-J Kraus (Oxford 1966).  A magisterial study by R Albertz appeared in two volumes in 1994, A History of Israelite Religion in the OT Period (SCM).  There is useful material also in R de Vaux, Ancient Israel, part 4, and the standard Dictionaries like ABD and IDB and the two recent Companions from Oxford and Cambridge

3          Squeamish modern westerners should not try to imagine the scene in the Temple, especially at a major celebration.  It would have been noisy, smelly and gruesome.  And that is our problem.  Animal sacrifice belongs to a different world to that of the modern (or even postmodern) west and most ethnic and cultural westerners regard the practice as barbaric.  For this reason alone it is incredibly difficult for us to enter into the mindset of ancient Israel and understand the theology involved.  When you add to this the complexities of the sacrificial system itself plus the immense difficulties in reconstructing it from the texts about it, the task is almost impossible

4          The basic thing to grasp is that sacrifice was the normal way of worship in the Temple, cf the mass in the Roman Catholic Church  For the Roman Catholic the Mass is the normal form of worship - to worship is to say mass and to say mass is to worship.  In the Temple to worship was to sacrifice and to sacrifice was to worship.  All worship was expressed through sacrifice and therefore there were different sacrifices for different acts of worship

5          If we Christians think about sacrifice at all it is either as a metaphor or in connection with the death of Christ.  Then, apart from its metaphorical use, we tend to associate it with two things: blood and sin.  We assume that all sacrifice involved blood and that all sacrifice was to do with sin: but neither was actually the case.  There were sacrifices which did not involve animals, like the ‘grain offerings’ or the offerings of incense; and the sacrifices which they offered in such great abundance at the Dedication of the Temple in 1 Kings 8:44-66, for example, were all sacrifices of praise.  None of those sacrifices were for ‘sin’, presumably because that celebration was neither the time nor the place for ‘sacrifices for sin’

6          The details of the different sacrifices are not recoverable from the descriptions of sacrifice or the instructions for them given mainly in Leviticus, and the fact that different Bible translations give them different titles just makes a complex situation even more confusing.  Neither is the reasoning behind the details recoverable.  We just don't know, for example, why fat was to be treated as it was!

7          The ‘sacrifice of well-being’ (NRSV, NJPS) was the sacrifice in which part of the animal was burned on the altar, part was given to the priests and the rest taken away by the worshipper and used for a feast.  The different names for this one in our translations are ‘peace offerings’ (AV cf RSV), ‘communion sacrifices’ (NJB), ‘fellowship offerings’ (NIV) and ‘shared-offerings’ (REB).  AV's ‘peace offerings’ means ‘peace with each other’ for this type of sacrifice has nothing to do with ‘making peace’ with God.  The words like ‘communion’, ‘fellowship’ and ‘shared’ in the other versions are all attempts to convey the sense of fellowship and community involved in sharing this special meal together.  See Lev 3.  The rule about burning the fat is found in verses 16b-17

8          The ‘burnt offering’ (‘whole-offering’ in REB) was the sacrifice in which the whole animal, after it had been skinned, was burned on the altar.  There were so many of these on the occasion of the Dedication of the Temple (even allowing for the usual Biblical exaggeration of numbers) that the altar of burnt offerings in the main courtyard was inadequate and the floor of the courtyard had to be consecrated and used instead.  This was the ‘standard’ form of sacrifice, offered night and morning daily in the Temple.  See Ex 29:38-42 and Lev 1

9          ‘Grain offerings’ of corn and olive oil, sometimes in the form of cakes, could be offered separately but were often used with other sacrifices.  They were completely burned.  See Lev 2

10        In the sacrifices which were specifically designed to deal with sin (the ‘sin offering’ – the hattath – and the ‘guilt offering’ – the asham – though the difference between the two is very hard to define) none of the meat was eaten by the worshippers.  Crucial to understanding these sacrifices for sin is, first, to see them as the gifts of God by which sin and guilt can be dealt with, ie forgiven and removed and, second, to understand them as liturgical acts in which people can express their repentance and then ‘know and feel their sins forgiven’.  There is no sense at all, in the OT understanding of sacrifice, that they are acts which plead for God to change his mind and have mercy when he really intends something else.  That is a completely upside down way of thinking of sacrifice and of God, though a prevalent one.  God always wants the best for people and wants them to be made whole whenever their lives have become disordered, and that is nowhere more simply or more beautifully put than in the marvellous words of Ps 103:10-14.  Thus in these sacrifices for sin the one offering the sacrifices lays his hands on his sacrifice as a sign of his repentance and then sees its blood smeared on the altar by the priest in the equivalent of our hearing the declaration of absolution or forgiveness.  Thus Heb 9:22 is precisely and accurately true, though its meaning is the opposite to the one usually given to it by Christians!  See Lev 4:1-4, 6:24-30 and 7:1-10

Bibliography:

De Vaux, Ancient Israel, chapters 10-13

G Ashby, Sacrifice, SCM, 1988

F J Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ, Xpress Reprints, 1994

I Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice, DLT, 1995

J Moses, The Sacrifice of God, Canterbury, 1992

 

18 Developing Ideas about God in the OT    

Or ‘The History of ‘God’ in the OT    Or ‘Who is like the Lord our God? (Ps 113:5)    Or ‘The First Commandment’ (Ex 20:2-3 = Deut 5:6-7)

1          The Bible was written, edited and published in a ‘world of many faiths.’  The OT has a variety of perspectives on the local ‘other faiths’ which it knew, and it is generally agreed that ancient Israel’s perspective(s) on ‘other faiths’ and the nature of its own God or gods developed from polytheism to monotheism via a recognizable intermediate position, but that it is impossible to plot the stages of this development and mistaken to think that this was either a co-ordinated or a smooth process.

2          Israel ’s earliest understandings of God are lost in history, but there is little reason to doubt that these understandings were anything other than polytheistic.  One possible way of describing this stage in ancient Israel’s theological development would be to say that it thought that ‘YHWH was one god among many’, and that is a perfectly reasonable way of locating Israel’s god in relation to the gods of Edom, Moab, Syria and the rest.  The danger in putting it like this, however, is that it suggests that from the earliest time there was only one god worshipped in ancient Israel .  That is, of course, how the story is told in the OT, but it is widely held that other gods were worshipped by ancient Israelites alongside YHWH and that evidence for this is found in the OT itself.  There, it is suggested, the names of some of these other gods remain as alternative names for YHWH, for example ‘the God of Abraham’ etc, ‘the Fear of Isaac’ (Gen 31:42), ‘God of Bethel’, El Elyon (‘God Most High’) and El Shaddai’ (traditionally ‘God Almighty’).  It is also argued that the names and existence of others have been systematically written out of that text by a variety of stratagems, principally here Asherah, the ‘Queen of Heaven’, YHWH’s consort (Jere 44).  This evidence is supplemented by that from archaeology where belief in a consort for YHWH at the Jewish temple at Elephantine on the River Nile has long been known and more recent discoveries at Kuntillet Ajrud have given another example of the same idea.  We are therefore left to imagine a possible plethora of gods or manifestations of God in Israel, identified with different people and places, with such theology being by no means confined to the earliest period.

See the note on ‘Yahweh and his Consort’

3          The ‘interim position’ is usually called ‘monolatry’ (the worship of only one god) or ‘henotheism’ (from the Greek terms for ‘one’ and ‘god’) – though it should be clear by now that any talk of ‘stages’ in this development is quite problematic.  This approach can be understood to say that ‘YHWH is Israel’s own and only God who demands its exclusive obedience’.  A classic story establishing this point is Joshua’s covenant-making ceremony at Shechem (Josh 24).  It is almost certain that the classic texts of the Shema‘ (Deut 6:4) and the First Commandment (Ex 20:2f, Deut 5:6f) express this viewpoint – see the discussion of this below.  A glance at the footnotes will show the variety of translations possible for the enigmatic ‘YHWH ’elohenu YHWH ’ehad’, literally ‘YHWH our God YHWH one’ of the Shema’.  Later Jewish interpretation understood this as a powerful statement of God’s oneness in himself, in contradistinction to Christian trinitarianism, but such an understanding obviously cannot be the original one.  There are two suggestions for the original meaning, one which suggests that it means that YHWH is the only Lord there is, and the other which suggests that YHWH is to be the one and only Lord in Israel.  The latter is more strongly supported and is reflected in the monolatrous view of NRSV’s ‘The LORD is our God, the LORD alone’.  The question of who will be  Israel’s God forms the story line in the Elijah cycle of narratives in 1-2 Kings.  This is the reason for the prophet’s contest as YHWH’s champion against Baal and his prophets which results in a climax of sorts on the summit of Mt Carmel when the people acclaim YHWH in the words ‘YHWH indeed is God, YHWH indeed is God’ (1 Kings 18:39).  More is at stake here than the purity of Israel’s worship or theology, although that might not be noticed from reading Hosea who majors on this aspect of the struggle.  The question of who will be Israel’s only God has an ethical dimension, as seen clearly in the subsequent episode of Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21.  If Queen Jezebel and her god, Baal, succeed here, the story goes, then Israel’s traditions of social justice and equality are finished for the ideology, world view and social system associated with Baal are alien to those of YHWH.  Pss 81:9-10 and 100:3 and Ex 34:14 are other good examples of this view.

4          The final position is that of monotheism (there is only one God) as expressed in the ‘the LORD is God, there is no other’ of Deut 4:35-39.  This final position is presented most clearly and dogmatically in Deutero-Isaiah with its repeated insistence on YHWH as the only God (Isa 40:25, 41:4, 42:5-9, 43:8-13, 44:6ff, 44:24, 45:5ff, 45:18f, 46:9 etc) and its scorn of all other so-called gods as idols (eg Isa 40:18-20, 41:6ff, 41:21-24, 44:9-20).

5          However, Deutero-Isaiah’s is not the only form of monotheism in the OT.  There is a less radical strand which considers YHWH to be the only True God or the Supreme God (eg Ex 15:11, Pss 86:8, 95:3 and 97:6-9) and which finds places for other divine beings in his Heavenly Council (Ps 82), even if traces of Deutero-Isaiah’s scorn come into its references to them from time to time (eg Pss 96:4-5, 97:7, 135).  We cannot do more than mention the controversial and difficult Deut 32:8 here, which speaks of Israel’s God as the ‘Most High’ (El Elyon) and identifies the gods of the other nations as his underlings of some kind, at least according to NRSV.  The evidence is compelling that the original Hebrew text said something like this, but the authoritative Hebrew text seems to have been censored into unintelligibility at this point, in conformity with the kind of theology found in Deutero-Isaiah.  And something similar has happened at Deut 32:43 which in NRSV calls upon ‘all you gods’ to praise YHWH.

6          Regardless of historical questions, however, including the accuracy or otherwise of this perceived ‘development’, or even the difference between the various expressions of monotheism discernible in its pages, the OT in its final form has a single and powerful agenda on this issue, which is to insist on Israel’s total and sole allegiance to its covenant God, YHWH, as expressed classically in the First Commandment,

            ‘I am the LORD your God … you shall have no other gods before me’

(NRSV – in which a footnote gives ‘besides’ as an alternative to ‘before’)

            ‘I the LORD am your God … You shall have no other gods besides Me)

            (NJPS/Tanakh – oddly (carelessly?) ‘besides’ in Exodus but ‘beside’ in Deuteronomy) 

6.1       The first commandment proper, ‘you shall have no other gods before or besides me’, is introduced by the formula which serves also to introduce the whole Decalogue, that the one who gives this teaching is YHWH, Israel’s saviour God who in his grace has already delivered them from slavery and is leading them into freedom.  The commandments, therefore, are not rules to be kept in the hope of securing God’s blessing, but good advice to be followed so that the newly given freedom can continue to be enjoyed – that is the essence of torah.  YHWH’s action in freeing the slaves renews his covenants with Abraham (Gen 15 and 17) and sets the stage for his new covenant with Israel mediated through Moses (Ex 24).  It also establishes his claim to the exclusive loyalty of Israel, that he alone will be their God and they alone will be his people (Ex 19:4-6, 29:45f).

6.2       The commandment proper is that Israel shall have no other god.  This is not a denial of the existence of other gods, but a ruling that Israel shall not worship any other god, and the second commandment follows it to say that Israel shall not worship any kind of representation of any god or even possibly of YHWH himself either.  ‘Before me’ or ‘beside me’ are the variant translations of the literal ‘to my face’ (ie ‘in my presence’) and reflect two different nuances which some have seen in that phrase, understanding it to rule out the worship of any other god in preference to the worship of YHWH or alongside that worship.  Whether such distinctions need to be read in the verse is an open question, and whether they are sufficiently different in meaning to merit distinction in a footnote I personally doubt.  There is no doubt whatever about the plain meaning of the text, which is to exclude other gods from Israel’s spirituality.  Ex 20:5 adds a strong passionate element to this instruction as YHWH exposes himself as a ‘jealous’ God who will tolerate no rival.

6.3       Issues of the dating of the Decalogue remain unresolved, as do those of the provenance and importance of the idea of covenant in which the Decalogue is embedded.  There is no question, however, about the fundamental meaning of the first commandment nor that it expresses a monolatrous rather than a strict Deutero-Isaianic monotheistic theology.

6.4       It is a matter of fact that the strict monotheism of Deutero-Isaiah won the day in Judaism and Christianity, even to the extent of censoring some OT texts, as we have seen, and has become normative in the understanding of both church and synagogue.  The idea of YHWH presiding over a Council of lesser gods, as in Ps 82, reads very strangely in both religions, although it might be argued that this idea has in fact been transmuted into the much more acceptable picture of God on his Heavenly Throne surrounded by such heavenly beings as cherubim, angels and archangels.  (One wonders what difference it might make in our discussion of the status and nature of Other Faiths if this older understanding was to be revived and the stricter monotheism of Deutero-Isaiah, which goes far beyond such classical texts as the First Commandment and probably the Shema’, was to be demoted from its position of pre-eminence?  The Heavenly Council picture is, after all, much more common in the OT than the other).

6.5       In the Heavenly Court pictures, the supremacy of YHWH as ‘most high’ among the gods or as king of the gods is powerfully asserted.  We noted that in the preamble to the Decalogue YHWH’s saving role is highlighted, and this is expanded as the second commandment is unpacked using ideas which are found in the ‘core credo’ (Ex 34:6-7 etc).

7          Ps 82 pictures God sitting in judgement on the lesser gods gathered before him.  The simple basis of the Most High’s judgement against the other gods is that they have failed to uphold and deliver social justice (mishpat).  This strange psalm suggests that all gods and the religious systems which promote them might be measured against two yardsticks: do they make it possible for their worshippers to experience the transcendent as hesed and do they encourage them to practice their humanity by doing mishpat?

Follow-up Reading:

‘God - OT’ or similar entries in the classic Dictionaries

Gerstenberger ES (2002) Theologies in the OT, London: Continuum

Mettinger T (1988) In Search of God, Philadelphia: Fortress

19 Exegesis and how to go about it 

An ‘exegesis’ is simply an explanation of a Bible passage.  

It will normally consist of 5 or 6 parts:  

1. An introductory sentence (or at most two or three short sentences) which describes the passage and sets it in its literary and, if necessary, historical contexts (e.g. ‘Psalm 65.9–13 is …’).

2. A sentence which summarizes or explains the passage (e.g. ‘It …’ or ‘In it …’).

3. If your exegesis is of a whole psalm or a complex passage you might need a sentence on its structure, and you might do the following two parts on a section by section basis.

4. The main part of an exegesis is the explanation of any difficult words, phrases or ideas it contains. If there are few or none of these, take that as an indication that the passage has been chosen because of the following.

5. An explanation of the key themes or ideas it contains. How much space you devote to this depends on how much was taken in doing part 4. 

6. A short concluding paragraph which points out the place of the passage and its ideas in the Old Testament.   

A good way to go about it is:  

1. Look up the passage in NRSV and as many other translations as possible and compare their readings.

2. Make your own notes on the 5 (or 6) points above.

3. Only then turn to the commentaries, Bible dictionaries and handbooks to see what they say about the key words, phrases or ideas which you have already identified and tried to puzzle out for yourself.

4. Write up your notes.

5. Add a Bibliography at the end which includes the Bible translations you have used as well as the commentaries and any dictionary or handbook entries.  

Bibliography  

Evans, R. (1999), Using the Bible, London : DLT

Fee, G. D. and Stuart, D. (new ed. 2003), How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, Grand Rapids : Zondervan

Gorman, M. J. (revd. ed. 2008), Elements of Biblical Exegesis, London : Hendrickson

Hayes, J. H. and Holladay, C. R. (2007 3^rd ed.), Biblical Exegesis: A Beginner’s Handbook, Louisville : WJK

Stuart, D. (2002 3^rd revd. ed.), Old Testament Exegesis, Louisville : WJK  

20 Sample Exegesis Isaiah 6.1-8

Using the exegesis template used on the Certificate course (‘Exegesis and how to go about it’), an exegesis of Isa 6.1-8 might look something like this:  

Isaiah 6.1-8 is usually understood as the first part of the vision in which Isaiah of Jerusalem is called to be a prophet (Barton: 31), though whether it really is autobiographical or not is open to question (Coggins: 443).  The call narratives in Jeremiah and Ezekiel are both found in the first chapter of those books, so why Isaiah’s call narrative should be found in chapter 6 rather than chapter 1 is a bit of a mystery (Clements: 70ff; Stacey: 41).  It might be that this vision or ‘theophany’ recounts something more like a re-commissioning or a renewal of his ministry as a prophet than his initial call to be a prophet (Sawyer: 66f).  The vision is set in the Temple in Jerusalem ‘in the year that King Uzziah died’, which is 742 or 736 BCE depending on which chronology of ancient Israel is preferred.  Nothing more is said about the occasion of the vision.  In it Isaiah sees the Heavenly Court presided over by the transcendent and holy God and responds to God’s appeal for a messenger to go for him.  The passage recounts the vision in the first person and gives no biographical details of Isaiah at all.  

There are a number of difficult words, phrases and ideas which need to be noted in this passage:  

In verses 3 and 5 God is referred to as ‘the LORD of hosts’ (NRSV and AV) and in other versions as ‘Lord of Hosts’ (REB, NJPS), ‘Yahweh Sabaoth’ (NJB) and ‘the LORD Almighty’ (NIV and GNB).  This title is probably intended to honour him as the King of the Heavenly Hosts, the heavenly beings who surround his throne, though it is possible that the ‘Hosts’ in question might be the stars or the armies of Israel (Anderson: 151).  For some reason NIV and GNB substitute another title, which is confusingly similar to the utterly different title ‘God Almighty’ or ‘Mighty God’ (El Shaddai‘).  According to Stacey this title is very common in Isaiah 1-39 and ‘signifies great, mysterious and irresistible power’ (Stacey: xxvii).     

The ‘LORD of Hosts’ is seated on a throne with six-winged seraphs or seraphim (though AV gives these creatures both English and Hebrew plurals and calls them seraphims) in attendance (verse 2).  These ‘flaming creatures’ (GNB) and heavenly beings are mentioned only here in the Old Testament, and seem akin to the more frequently mentioned cherubim, who feature, for example, in Ezekiel’s call vision in Ezekiel 1.  Though members of the Heavenly Court they ‘cover their faces’ in the presence of God; while their third pair of wings probably cover their genitals or their ‘nakedness’ (REB simply says ‘bodies’) rather than their feet (Clements: 74; Coggins: 443; Sawyer: 68; Stacey: 43).  Their powerful voices announce God’s holiness and glory so loudly that the ‘pivots on the thresholds’ (NRSV) shake.  The translations differ on this architectural feature of the Temple – ‘doorposts and thresholds’ (NIV), ‘threshold’ (REB), ‘doorposts’ (NJB, NJPS cf AV), ‘foundation of the Temple’ (GNB), and the footnote in NJPS explains simply that the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain.  

The seraphs’ chorus, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ – repeated three times for emphasis (NRSV footnote) - focuses on God’s holiness and celebrates it (verse 3).  The basic meaning of the word ‘holy’ is ‘separate, distinct, unique’ (Stacey: xxviii) or ‘set apart’ as only God is set apart (Smith and Harrelson: 387).  To call God ‘holy’ is to acknowledge both his power and majesty, on the one hand, and his love and purity on the other.  In both of these God is unique, wholly separate from anything else in creation (Wainwright: 286).  Reginald Heber captures this perfectly in these lines from his famous hymn,  

‘Only Thou art holy, there is none beside Thee,

Perfect in power, in love and purity’.

The second half of that chorus parallels God’s holiness with his ‘glory’, the parallelism indicating that ‘glory’ means much the same thing as ‘holiness’ but adding that this almighty power of God fills and energises the whole earth.  It is ‘[God’s] immanence to the world’ (Sabourin: 254).  As such, the seraphs shout, it is visible to all.  

Isaiah’s reaction to this awe-inspiring vision, tremendous noise and smell of smoke and incense, but especially to seeing God himself, is not simply fear and terror, though it includes that for ‘no one shall see [God] and live’ (Ex 33:20).  It is also one of feeling ‘unclean’ (verse 5).  This is an important Old Testament concept which has few modern western equivalents.  It includes a sense of guilt and sinfulness (as we see in verse 7) but has other dimensions as well.  It has a stronger sense of ‘ritual impurity’ than of moral failure, of a taboo broken than of commandments not kept, of ‘pollution’ rather than transgression (Barton: 110; Setel: 633f; Stacey: 44).   

The key themes of this passage are those of the Heavenly Council/Court and the experience of the transcendent captured in the famous phrase coined by Rudolph Otto, ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’.  

The vision opens with the scene of God seated on a throne (verse 1) and then Isaiah names God as ‘the King’ (verse 5).  This metaphor seems to have been part of the special theology of Jerusalem and the liturgy of the Temple , as we see in the Enthronement Psalms (Pss 93, 96, 97, 99).  The picture of God as King surrounded by his Heavenly Council or Court is found at Ps 82, Job 1-2 and 1 Kings 22:19, as well as explaining the strange ‘us’ in Genesis 1:26 clearly paralleled with verse 8b here.  Amongst others Sawyer (Sawyer: 67) and Herbert (Herbert: 58) point out the contrast in this passage between the transcient rule of Judah’s kings like Uzziah and the eternal rule of the Heavenly King.  

God’s throne is said to be ‘high and lofty’ (verse 1), words which begin to fill out the sense of the transcendent in this vision.  The magnificent Temple in Jerusalem merely contains the hem of the royal cloak.  The references to movement, noise and smell strengthen the visual image.  So does Isaiah’s reaction.  The passage describes an experience of the transcendent otherness of God, and it is an awesome experience.  Rudolph Otto made much of this passage in his famous book about religious experience, The Idea of the Holy, published in 1923 (Wainwright: 286).  Otto claims that an important type of religious experience is that of being gripped by ‘awe’ and the sense almost of being frightened which comes with it.  He invents a now famous Latin phrase for it – mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  Mysterium is ‘mystery’, something just beyond us, different, other than us, outside our normal experience, but intriguing, a secret waiting to be known, full of life and power.  Tremendum is ‘tremendous’, the first of the two adjectives qualifying that ‘Mystery’ and pointing up its power, strength, awesomeness, depth and intensity.  Fascinans is ‘fascinating’ but in a fuller sense than simply being intriguing and attractive.  This is ‘fascinated’ as a rabbit transfixed in the stare of a stoat is ‘fascinated’, it’s in a dangerous place yet it can’t break off and run because it is somehow attracted to the very thing which is terrorising it.  Add all that together, Otto suggests, and what you have is the religious experience of encountering the Holy, or the ‘Wholly Other’, or the ‘Numinous’, which is another word he coins for it.  It is an experience of ‘awe’.  Its effect is that we are ‘awe-struck’.  Isaiah 6 is one of Otto’s prime examples of the experience in the Bible.

The passage ends with Isaiah’s response to what he has overheard.  He offers himself as God’s ‘messenger’ (verse 8) which is the central idea of what a prophet is and does in the Old Testament; ‘the issue is one of sending a messenger on a special assignment’ (Barton and Bowden: 176; Childs: 56).  Isaiah has been terrified, ashamed and burnt clean, now he is to ‘go and say’ (verse 9).   

Bibliography  

Bibles used: NRSV, AV, NJPS, NJB, NIV, GNB.  

Anderson B W ‘Hosts, Host of Heaven’ in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible vol 2 and ‘Lord of Hosts’ in vol 3

Barton J (1995) Isaiah 1-39, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press (Old Testament Guides)

Barton J and Bowden J (2004) The Original Story, London : DLT

Bright J, ‘Isaiah – 1’ in Black M & Rowley H H (1962), Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, London: Nelson

Burke D G ‘Seraph, Seraphim’ in Metzger B M & Coogan M D (1993) The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Oxford : OUP

Childs B S (2001) Isaiah, Louisville : Westminster John Knox (Old Testament Library)

Clements R E (1980) Isaiah 1-39, Grand Rapids : Eerdmans (New Century Bible Commentary)

Coggins R, ‘Isaiah’ in Barton J & Muddiman J (2000), The Oxford Bible Commentary, Oxford : OUP

Herbert A S (1973) Isaiah 1-39, Cambridge : CUP ( Cambridge Bible Commentary)

Sabourin L ‘Glory of God’ in Metzger B M & Coogan M D (1993) The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Oxford: OUP

Sawyer J F A (1984) Isaiah – vol 1, Edinburgh : St Andrew Press (Daily Study Bible)

Setel D O ‘Purity/Ritual’ in Metzger B M & Coogan M D (1993) The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Oxford : OUP

Smith W T and Harrelson W J ‘Holiness’ in Grant F C and Rowley H H (1963) Hastings Dictionary of the Bible (Revised Edition), Edinburgh: T & T Clark

Stacey D (1993) Isaiah 1-39, London : Epworth (Epworth Commentary)

Wainwright G ‘Holiness’ in Metzger B M & Coogan M D (1993) The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Oxford: OUP

Wikipedia: articles on ‘Rudolph Otto’ and ‘Numinous’

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