Posts
#66: “Hey, Jude” by Brendon Wahlberg
The letter of Jude is one of the four shortest documents in the New Testament. Tucked in next to the book of Revelation, it fills up only one page of the Bible. Yet this little letter contains some very big mysteries. Chief among them are such basic questions as who wrote it, and what enemies is it talking about? These questions perplex scholars to this day. Additionally, although it is very short, Jude is loaded with references to other writings. Some of these references are very obscure and surprising. So let us take these mysteries one at a time, and see if there are any answers.
“And don't you know that it's just you? Hey Jude, you'll do…” -The Beatles
Who is this Jude person anyway? The short answer is, no one is sure, and we probably cannot ever be sure. But there are a few candidates. The first thing to realize is that the name Jude is a translation of the Hebrew name “Ye’hudah”. This name is variously translated in English as Judah, Jude, and Judas. That’s right – the name Jude is the same as the name Judas. The letter of Jude could just as easily be called the letter of Judas. But then people would associate the letter writer with the Judas who betrayed Jesus. For this reason, in some Bible translations, other Judases besides the betrayer are called “Jude” instead.
So who are the candidates? Number one is Judas Iscariot. But of course it probably isn’t him, because he was long dead by the time the letter was written. That was easy, wasn’t it? So, who else is there?
Number two is the Disciple/Apostle Jude, one of the Twelve. When the Gospel of Luke lists the twelve disciples (6:14-16), one of them is named “Judas son of James”. He is carefully differentiated from “Judas Iscariot who became a traitor”. Likewise, the Gospel of John mentions “Judas (not Iscariot)” (14:22). Curiously, when Mark and Matthew list the twelve disciples, they omit Judas and replace him with Thaddaeus (or Lebbaeus). This has made some scholars conclude that Judas son of James and Thaddaeus are really the same person.
So, did one of the twelve apostles write the letter of Jude? Again, the answer is that it is unlikely. The author never claims to be one of the apostles. If he was one of them, he probably would have said so. The author of the letter introduces himself instead as “Jude, a servant [literally, “a slave”] of Jesus Christ and brother of James” (Jude 1). However, the apostle Judas was called the son of James in Luke’s gospel, not the brother of James. Also, later in the letter, the author says, “remember the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, for they said to you…” (Jude 17-18). If the author was an apostle, why would he talk about the apostles as if he was not one of “them”?
Moving on. Who else is there? Number three is perhaps the most likely candidate. Mark 6:3 lists the male siblings in Jesus’ family. “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon…” So, one of Jesus’ brothers was named Jude/Judas. Christian tradition holds that this Jude wrote the Letter of Jude. It is possible that this was the case. Jesus’ brothers, including Jude, became leaders in the early Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem. The most important of these sibling leaders was “James the Just”. He could have been the brother “James” mentioned in Jude 1. If the author was Jude, brother of Jesus, it would make sense that his letter would have been saved. But then, why didn’t the author call himself “brother of Jesus Christ” in the beginning of the letter? Wouldn’t that be at least as important to mention as “brother of James”? Or, was Jude a brother of Jesus who was too humble to mention it, calling himself a slave/servant instead?
Candidate number four is: anyone at all. Some letters were “pseudepigrapha”, meaning that they were written by anonymous authors who used the names of apostles to lend authority to their works. Jude might have been one of those. In the end, without more evidence, we can never know for sure.
“Hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better…” -The Beatles
What bad situation is Jude writing about in his letter? Who are the good people he is writing to? Who are the bad people he is complaining about, and what have they been doing wrong? What can be done about it? The Letter of Jude is rather vague about all of this. In some of Paul’s letters, there are specific details regarding places, events, names, and conflicts between people. These details make it possible to identify dates and historical situations in Paul’s letters. Not so for Jude. Scholars cannot determine when or where Jude wrote. It is hard to decide who he was writing to or exactly who he was attacking.
So, what do we know? Jude seems to be a general letter, meant to be spread around to everyone, encouraging believers to defend their faith and fight against the influence of troublemakers among them. Jude condemns an unspecified group of bad people for their bad behavior. The following verses mention some of the things they were doing. These ungodly intruders have stolen in among the faithful, perverting the grace of God into licentiousness and denying Jesus (4). Jude mentions that they are sexually unnatural and immoral, indulging their lusts (7). Furthermore, these malcontents reject authority and complain all the time (8,16). In their ignorance, they speak slander against the angels (8,10). At the shared thanksgiving meals, the love feasts, these people eat greedily (12). They are insincere flatterers and scoffers (16,18). And they are causing divisions among the godly (19). Who were these people? Some scholars think they may have been Gnostics, that is, if the letter was written at a late date, say, in the early second century. If Jude was written in the mid-first century, then we just do not know.
What does Jude want the faithful to do? He hopes they will fight for the faith (3), pray in the Holy Spirit (20), look forward to eternal life (21), have mercy on those who are wavering (22), and save others from “the fire” (23). As I said, it is all pretty vague. Maybe Jude is describing the kind of behavior that could have arisen in a community which was expecting the end of the world. Some people may have decided that if the end was coming, they could join up with the Christians in order to save themselves, while also cutting loose and living it up with food and sex before Jesus returned.
“So let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin - You're waiting for someone to perform with…” -The Beatles
What are all the references Jude makes to other books? Were you ever handed a small book containing a copy of only the New Testament? Those annoy me, because they are incomplete Bibles. I think that without the Old Testament, the New Testament is impossible to understand. The letter of Jude is a good example of why this is so. Despite its short length, Jude makes many references to Old Testament stories. Jude doesn’t explain the references. He assumes that the reader knows the Hebrew Bible and understands them. I counted at least eight interesting references in Jude. Each one is used to illustrate bad behavior and to show how the bad people are going to be punished. Let’s look at them one by one.
1) Jude 5 mentions “the Lord, who once for all saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.” This is obviously a reference to Exodus 14, the story of the Israelites leaving Egypt.
2) Jude 6 mentions “angels who did not keep their own position, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains in deepest darkness for the judgment of the great Day.” This one is a reference to the story of the fallen angels, which is briefly mentioned in Genesis 6:1-4. It is also a reference to a book which did not make it into the Bible, named “1 Enoch”. We still have the Book of 1 Enoch today, and we know that it was once considered authoritative by many people. Compare Jude 6 (above) to the following: “And to Michael God said, ‘Make known to Semyaza [a fallen angel leader] and the others who are with him, who fornicated with the women […] bind them for seventy generations underneath the rocks of the ground until the day of their judgment…” (1 Enoch 10:11-12). Jude quotes Enoch again later in the letter, as we shall see.
3) Jude 7 mentions “Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities which […] indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust…” This is a reference to Genesis 19, the story of Lot’s escape from the destruction of Sodom.
4) This next reference is a tricky one. Jude 9 is talking about how it is bad to slander others, and to illustrate this, Jude refers to an example of a time when the Archangel Michael refused to sin, avoiding slandering even…Satan himself! “But when the archangel Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses, he did not dare bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’” (Jude 9). The question is, what is this a reference to? The Bible has no story of Satan trying to claim Moses’ body while Michael confronts him. Fortunately, a third century Christian writer named Origen has the answer for us. Origen wrote: “…in the work entitled The Assumption of Moses, a little treatise, of which the Apostle Jude makes mention in his letter, the archangel Michael, when disputing with the devil regarding the body of Moses…” So, you see, Jude was referring to an apocryphal book which is now lost to us.
5,6,7) A single verse, Jude 11, has three references to the Old Testament in it. “Woe to them! For they go the way of Cain, and abandon themselves to Balaam’s error for the sake of gain, and perish in Korah’s rebellion.” This is a lot of references to pack into one sentence! But we can identify them easily enough. Cain is the brother of Abel who responded to God’s disapproval with anger, jealousy, and violence (Genesis 4). Balaam was hired to go and curse God’s people, until an angel stopped him (Numbers 22). Korah was a Levite who led a rebellion against the authority of Moses and Aaron because he wanted to be a Priest but was denied (Numbers 16). Korah was swallowed up by the earth when God judged him.
8) Jude 14-15 is a second reference to 1 Enoch. You can compare the following two passages for yourself:
“It was also about these that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, ‘See, the Lord is coming with tens of thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict everyone of all the deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.’” (Jude 14-15)
“Behold, he will arrive with ten thousand times a thousand of the holy ones in order to execute judgment upon all. He will destroy the wicked ones and rebuke all flesh on account of everything that they have done, that which the sinners and the wicked ones committed against him.” (1 Enoch 1:9)
The fact that Jude makes references to two non-canonical books, namely “1 Enoch” and “The Assumption of Moses”, has always been a problem for some readers and a source of controversy. It is assumed that any book that is in the Bible is inspired by God. It troubles people to think that an inspired letter can refers to apocryphal sources. What does it mean when Jude, an accepted book, quotes a rejected book? Does that confer any portion of authority or canonical status on the book which Jude is quoting? Probably not, but the very idea can be upsetting to some. In the fourth century, when the New Testament canon was being finalized, some people objected to including Jude, precisely because it made those references to things like Enoch.
So there you have it - Jude, a small book containing large mysteries. I am sorry there are few answers to give you. My own amateur scholar opinion is that Jude was a leader in a community that revered angels and complicated angel lore (like their names, types, and ranks). Jude’s letter has several direct and indirect references to angels, in verses 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, and 14. That’s about 30% of the verses! Jude refers to books like Enoch, which tell detailed and elaborate stories about angels. Clearly, Jude was an angel fan. I think Jude’s enemies were fellow Christians who did NOT believe in all the angel lore, but instead scoffed at it, loudly enough to make others begin to doubt it too. Jude said that his enemies had slandered the angels, the glorious ones. Using poetic insults, Jude called his enemies “wandering stars for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever” (13). Wandering stars, known to us as planets, were once thought to be fallen angels. Jude meant that if you disrespect the angels, you deserve the same fate as the fallen angels.
(We’ll just have to finish by playing out the end of that old Beatles song, so that it will be stuck in your head as it is in mine. “Naa, Na Na, Na Na Na Naa, Na Na Na Naa , Hey Jude…”)
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Paul's First Letter
#65: “Paul’s First Letter” by Brendon Wahlberg
The New Testament contains thirteen letters that are traditionally thought to be written by the Apostle Paul. However, scholars generally agree that Paul did not write all of them. For example, the great majority agree that the Pastoral letters, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, were not written by Paul. Instead, later authors probably wrote in his name to give their letters and beliefs more authority. (Hebrews is another letter that Paul probably did not write, and his authorship was in doubt even in ancient times.) Then there are the letters that scholars are evenly divided about. Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians may have been written by Paul, but many scholars are not sure. Scholars agree that seven letters were almost certainly written by Paul. These are 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Philemon. People arrive at this list by analyzing the similar or contrasting style, vocabulary, structure, and religious ideas of each letter while taking into account what is also known about Paul from the Book of Acts and other sources.
If you take this list of seven letters as the ones Paul really wrote, you can then ask, which letter was first? Of course, scholars have a consensus opinion about this, too. It is agreed that 1 Thessalonians is the oldest letter written by Paul that ended up in the New Testament. In fact, scholars agree that 1 Thessalonians in the oldest book in the whole New Testament. This letter was probably written around 51-53CE. Everything else came later – all four Gospels, Acts, Revelation, Paul’s other letters, and the non-Pauline letters – all later.
Think about that for a moment. In 52CE, Jesus’ crucifixion was about twenty-two years in the past. The public could not hear him speak or teach any more. Christianity was spreading around the Mediterranean and winning converts among Gentile nations, but there was no New Testament to read. A new convert in the busy port city of Thessalonica, in Macedonia, in 52CE, would have no Gospel of John, no Letter to the Romans, no Book of Revelation. This convert might well have never seen a Jewish scroll like Isaiah or Psalms either. The convert only knows that a travelling missionary named Paul came through Thessalonica about a year earlier, and started a small congregation among the people of the city, introducing them to a new version of the old Jewish religion, which could now include Gentiles. But maybe there was nothing from Paul that was written down, and the convert had to hear about the new faith through word of mouth. Maybe the convert had friends among the new, small gathering of the “Followers of the Way”, or “Christians” as they were eventually called in far away Antioch. The convert joins them, and around that same time, a letter arrives from the group’s founder Paul, who is writing from down south in Greek Corinth, where he has another congregation.
The letter is important to the group in Thessalonica. It is something they can hold onto, read from, and share. It addresses their fears and confusions and corrects their misconceptions. It tells them how they should be living. When Paul was there among them, he told them to expect the end of the world. The new convert is excited and uncertain about many things. But now there is a letter to reassure him or her. The letter is now the only written document in the city that contains Paul’s teachings about the new faith. The letter, along with the group’s memories of Paul’s verbal teaching, is all they have. One little letter, which only takes up about three pages in a modern Bible, was their whole scripture. No wonder they saved and copied it, so that we still have the text of it today.
Now, imagine that you are this new convert, who has been listening to the group leader read the letter to everyone (Paul commanded in the letter that this should be done (1 Thess 5:27)). This exercise allows us to put ourselves in the place of someone who has only 1 Thessalonians to go on. What does it say inside it? What can you learn about the Way? Once you have heard the letter, what concept of Christianity do you have? If your whole Bible was that one three-page letter, what would you know? What would you believe?
The letter begins with greetings to your small church from Paul and his coworkers, Silvanus and Timothy. Together, they visited your city a year ago. Paul had wanted to return, but could not. So he sent Timothy alone for a brief return visit, to check on whether your group had stayed faithful or fallen apart (3:5). Timothy was reassured by what he saw, and reported back to Paul, and so Paul’s letter is full of relief that things are still okay.
Paul greets you in the name of the God you now share. This is God, the Father of us all (1:3), who loves us and has chosen us (1:4). This God is true and living, unlike the false, nonliving idols you used to venerate. Now you serve this God (1:9). But God is not the only one you should worship. God has a Son (1:10), Jesus Christ (Jesus the anointed), who is also called the Lord (1:1). Jesus died, killed by some Jews in the small Roman Province of Judea (2:15), but God raised him from the dead (1:10). There is also something called the Holy Spirit, which helped Paul and his friends bring his message to your group a year ago, giving their words the power to win converts (1:5). God gives this Holy Spirit to you as well (4:8). Everybody in the group has this Holy Spirit. As a result, your group accepted Paul’s message as the word of God himself (2:13), not as mere human words. Since then, your group has been imitating Paul, his friends, and the Lord, trying to be a good example to others (1:6).
While you serve God, you are to wait for the Lord Jesus to return from Heaven, where he is now, in order to rescue you from God’s wrath that is coming (1:10). Paul has called his message “good news” (1:5), and you agree that being rescued from wrath is good news for you. What do you and your new group mean to these missionaries? Why do Paul and his friends care so much about you? Apparently, your group is their pride and joy (2:19-20). When the Lord returns, the only achievements that will matter to God are works such as converting people like you! Paul calls your group his “brothers” again and again in the letter. You are like family to him.
When Paul visited a year ago, he showed your group how to live properly (4:1). Now, in his letter, he reiterates these guidelines. These are important rules – Paul says they are God’s will (4:3). Rule One (4:3) is: no fornication! This means, control your own body, people (4:4). Don’t be full of lustful passion like your neighbors who do not know God (4:5). Especially do not take sexual advantage of fellow members of the congregation (4:6), because you have all been called together by God to be “Holy”, which seems to mean the same as being pure (4:7). Rule Two (4:9) is: love each other. (Except, see rule number one for certain restrictions.) Rule Three (4:11) is: live quietly, and mind your own business. Rule Four (4:11-12) is: have a job so you can support yourself and not rely on others. You think you can live with these rules. In fact, God seems to be pretty sensible about these things.
Later on in the letter, Paul has some more rules to live by (5:12-22). These things also seem to make sense. Show respect for the leaders of the congregation, for the work they do. Have peace between the members of the group. Tell each other to keep working. Help the weak ones. Don’t ever be evil. If somebody is evil to you, don’t repay them in kind. Instead try to do good to everyone. Always rejoice, give thanks, and pray. This all sounds good. And why should you do all of these things? Because the Lord Jesus is coming back, and when he does, you will need to be blameless (5:23). Paul is satisfied with how well your congregation is doing so far (4:1), but he wants you all to do more and more of the right things. This is all because of what Paul says is coming in the future.
When Jesus returns, it will be like this… Something called an archangel will call out, there will be a sound like the blast of a horn, and Jesus will descend from Heaven. At the same time, your group will be lifted up to meet him in the clouds. After that, you will all be with the Lord forever (4:16-18). Jesus died for you so that you can live with him (5:10). This will be your salvation, because if you are not included, you are in for destruction and wrath from God (5:3,9).
You know that some people in your group have been worrying about exactly when Jesus will return. Also, a few of the oldest people have died during these past few months, and what if that means they won’t be included in this salvation, just because they died a little too early? Paul probably heard about your worries from Timothy, and it is Paul’s goal to “restore whatever is lacking in your faith” (3:10). So now, in the letter, Paul has made sure to address those concerns. Jesus will return, he says, at an unexpected time (5:2). But as long as you keep on track spiritually, you will be ready. The ready person is “awake”, “sober”, a “child of the light and the day”, “faithful”, “loving”, and “hoping”. This is in contrast to those who are “of the night”, “of darkness”, and “drunk” (5:4-10). And as for those who have died, Jesus will be sure to raise them from the dead so that they can be included along with you and the rest of your group (4:14-16). So, there you go. It’s all good…as long as you are good.
It has been interesting to look at Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians as if it was the only book of the Bible that we had. If indeed this was Paul’s earliest letter, then for some people, that must have been the situation. When you look at the letter from this perspective, you nevertheless see that the basics of Christianity are all there. You can find the trinity, the second coming, the promise of eternal life, ethical instructions about how to live in peace and holiness as a community, and a description of the end times. Our imaginary convert would, in fact, have a pretty good understanding of Christianity from 1 Thessalonians alone!
There isn’t much in there about Jesus, however. The gospels, written later, reveal just how much was remembered about Jesus, his life, and his teachings: quite a lot, in fact. But for Paul, little of that was important enough to include in his letters. Paul seems to have wanted to stick to the bare bones – Jesus was God’s Son who died for all of us so that we might have eternal life. Jesus was raised from the dead by God, and he will return to us from Heaven. In the meantime, God has called us to live according to his will. What more do you need to know?
The New Testament contains thirteen letters that are traditionally thought to be written by the Apostle Paul. However, scholars generally agree that Paul did not write all of them. For example, the great majority agree that the Pastoral letters, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, were not written by Paul. Instead, later authors probably wrote in his name to give their letters and beliefs more authority. (Hebrews is another letter that Paul probably did not write, and his authorship was in doubt even in ancient times.) Then there are the letters that scholars are evenly divided about. Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians may have been written by Paul, but many scholars are not sure. Scholars agree that seven letters were almost certainly written by Paul. These are 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Philemon. People arrive at this list by analyzing the similar or contrasting style, vocabulary, structure, and religious ideas of each letter while taking into account what is also known about Paul from the Book of Acts and other sources.
If you take this list of seven letters as the ones Paul really wrote, you can then ask, which letter was first? Of course, scholars have a consensus opinion about this, too. It is agreed that 1 Thessalonians is the oldest letter written by Paul that ended up in the New Testament. In fact, scholars agree that 1 Thessalonians in the oldest book in the whole New Testament. This letter was probably written around 51-53CE. Everything else came later – all four Gospels, Acts, Revelation, Paul’s other letters, and the non-Pauline letters – all later.
Think about that for a moment. In 52CE, Jesus’ crucifixion was about twenty-two years in the past. The public could not hear him speak or teach any more. Christianity was spreading around the Mediterranean and winning converts among Gentile nations, but there was no New Testament to read. A new convert in the busy port city of Thessalonica, in Macedonia, in 52CE, would have no Gospel of John, no Letter to the Romans, no Book of Revelation. This convert might well have never seen a Jewish scroll like Isaiah or Psalms either. The convert only knows that a travelling missionary named Paul came through Thessalonica about a year earlier, and started a small congregation among the people of the city, introducing them to a new version of the old Jewish religion, which could now include Gentiles. But maybe there was nothing from Paul that was written down, and the convert had to hear about the new faith through word of mouth. Maybe the convert had friends among the new, small gathering of the “Followers of the Way”, or “Christians” as they were eventually called in far away Antioch. The convert joins them, and around that same time, a letter arrives from the group’s founder Paul, who is writing from down south in Greek Corinth, where he has another congregation.
The letter is important to the group in Thessalonica. It is something they can hold onto, read from, and share. It addresses their fears and confusions and corrects their misconceptions. It tells them how they should be living. When Paul was there among them, he told them to expect the end of the world. The new convert is excited and uncertain about many things. But now there is a letter to reassure him or her. The letter is now the only written document in the city that contains Paul’s teachings about the new faith. The letter, along with the group’s memories of Paul’s verbal teaching, is all they have. One little letter, which only takes up about three pages in a modern Bible, was their whole scripture. No wonder they saved and copied it, so that we still have the text of it today.
Now, imagine that you are this new convert, who has been listening to the group leader read the letter to everyone (Paul commanded in the letter that this should be done (1 Thess 5:27)). This exercise allows us to put ourselves in the place of someone who has only 1 Thessalonians to go on. What does it say inside it? What can you learn about the Way? Once you have heard the letter, what concept of Christianity do you have? If your whole Bible was that one three-page letter, what would you know? What would you believe?
The letter begins with greetings to your small church from Paul and his coworkers, Silvanus and Timothy. Together, they visited your city a year ago. Paul had wanted to return, but could not. So he sent Timothy alone for a brief return visit, to check on whether your group had stayed faithful or fallen apart (3:5). Timothy was reassured by what he saw, and reported back to Paul, and so Paul’s letter is full of relief that things are still okay.
Paul greets you in the name of the God you now share. This is God, the Father of us all (1:3), who loves us and has chosen us (1:4). This God is true and living, unlike the false, nonliving idols you used to venerate. Now you serve this God (1:9). But God is not the only one you should worship. God has a Son (1:10), Jesus Christ (Jesus the anointed), who is also called the Lord (1:1). Jesus died, killed by some Jews in the small Roman Province of Judea (2:15), but God raised him from the dead (1:10). There is also something called the Holy Spirit, which helped Paul and his friends bring his message to your group a year ago, giving their words the power to win converts (1:5). God gives this Holy Spirit to you as well (4:8). Everybody in the group has this Holy Spirit. As a result, your group accepted Paul’s message as the word of God himself (2:13), not as mere human words. Since then, your group has been imitating Paul, his friends, and the Lord, trying to be a good example to others (1:6).
While you serve God, you are to wait for the Lord Jesus to return from Heaven, where he is now, in order to rescue you from God’s wrath that is coming (1:10). Paul has called his message “good news” (1:5), and you agree that being rescued from wrath is good news for you. What do you and your new group mean to these missionaries? Why do Paul and his friends care so much about you? Apparently, your group is their pride and joy (2:19-20). When the Lord returns, the only achievements that will matter to God are works such as converting people like you! Paul calls your group his “brothers” again and again in the letter. You are like family to him.
When Paul visited a year ago, he showed your group how to live properly (4:1). Now, in his letter, he reiterates these guidelines. These are important rules – Paul says they are God’s will (4:3). Rule One (4:3) is: no fornication! This means, control your own body, people (4:4). Don’t be full of lustful passion like your neighbors who do not know God (4:5). Especially do not take sexual advantage of fellow members of the congregation (4:6), because you have all been called together by God to be “Holy”, which seems to mean the same as being pure (4:7). Rule Two (4:9) is: love each other. (Except, see rule number one for certain restrictions.) Rule Three (4:11) is: live quietly, and mind your own business. Rule Four (4:11-12) is: have a job so you can support yourself and not rely on others. You think you can live with these rules. In fact, God seems to be pretty sensible about these things.
Later on in the letter, Paul has some more rules to live by (5:12-22). These things also seem to make sense. Show respect for the leaders of the congregation, for the work they do. Have peace between the members of the group. Tell each other to keep working. Help the weak ones. Don’t ever be evil. If somebody is evil to you, don’t repay them in kind. Instead try to do good to everyone. Always rejoice, give thanks, and pray. This all sounds good. And why should you do all of these things? Because the Lord Jesus is coming back, and when he does, you will need to be blameless (5:23). Paul is satisfied with how well your congregation is doing so far (4:1), but he wants you all to do more and more of the right things. This is all because of what Paul says is coming in the future.
When Jesus returns, it will be like this… Something called an archangel will call out, there will be a sound like the blast of a horn, and Jesus will descend from Heaven. At the same time, your group will be lifted up to meet him in the clouds. After that, you will all be with the Lord forever (4:16-18). Jesus died for you so that you can live with him (5:10). This will be your salvation, because if you are not included, you are in for destruction and wrath from God (5:3,9).
You know that some people in your group have been worrying about exactly when Jesus will return. Also, a few of the oldest people have died during these past few months, and what if that means they won’t be included in this salvation, just because they died a little too early? Paul probably heard about your worries from Timothy, and it is Paul’s goal to “restore whatever is lacking in your faith” (3:10). So now, in the letter, Paul has made sure to address those concerns. Jesus will return, he says, at an unexpected time (5:2). But as long as you keep on track spiritually, you will be ready. The ready person is “awake”, “sober”, a “child of the light and the day”, “faithful”, “loving”, and “hoping”. This is in contrast to those who are “of the night”, “of darkness”, and “drunk” (5:4-10). And as for those who have died, Jesus will be sure to raise them from the dead so that they can be included along with you and the rest of your group (4:14-16). So, there you go. It’s all good…as long as you are good.
It has been interesting to look at Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians as if it was the only book of the Bible that we had. If indeed this was Paul’s earliest letter, then for some people, that must have been the situation. When you look at the letter from this perspective, you nevertheless see that the basics of Christianity are all there. You can find the trinity, the second coming, the promise of eternal life, ethical instructions about how to live in peace and holiness as a community, and a description of the end times. Our imaginary convert would, in fact, have a pretty good understanding of Christianity from 1 Thessalonians alone!
There isn’t much in there about Jesus, however. The gospels, written later, reveal just how much was remembered about Jesus, his life, and his teachings: quite a lot, in fact. But for Paul, little of that was important enough to include in his letters. Paul seems to have wanted to stick to the bare bones – Jesus was God’s Son who died for all of us so that we might have eternal life. Jesus was raised from the dead by God, and he will return to us from Heaven. In the meantime, God has called us to live according to his will. What more do you need to know?
The forecast calls for not one stone left standing upon another…
#64: “The forecast calls for not one stone left standing upon another…” by Brendon Wahlberg
“As he came near and saw the city [Jerusalem], he wept over it, saying, […] ‘Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.’” (Luke 19:41-44)
“When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’ […] ‘When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those inside the city must leave it, and those out in the country must not enter it; for these are days of vengeance, as a fulfillment of all that is written. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! For there will be great distress on the earth and wrath against this people; they will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captives among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.” (Luke 21:5-24)
Did Jesus really predict the destruction of the second Jewish Temple? This is an easy question for the faithful to answer. It says he did, in these passages from the Gospel of Luke, and in similar passages in Mark 13 and Matthew 24. Therefore it must be true. A more skeptical scholar might hesitate to answer so readily. There are places in the Bible where prophets seem to predict the future. It is possible that in some cases, what seems to be a prediction was written after the event in question. In other words, if the Gospel of Luke says Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple, then maybe the Gospel was really written after the Temple was destroyed. The author knew what had already happened, reasoned that Jesus must have predicted such a major event, and put the words into Jesus’ mouth.
How do we decide what we think is the truth? Well, there are at least two ways we can look at this. First, we can use our knowledge of history to see how accurate the predictions themselves were. Second, if the predictions were accurate, we can use our knowledge of the New Testament books to look for clues about when they were really written down; either before or after the destruction of the Temple.
What did Jesus say would happen? He said that an enemy army would surround Jerusalem and conquer it. Many people would die, and many would be captured and taken away. Women and their infants and children would not be spared. As for the Temple, it would be torn down stone by stone. The city would be in the hands of the Gentiles for a long time. These were heartbreaking and catastrophic predictions. Jesus himself wept over them. Yet, how accurate did they turn out to be? Very accurate, sadly. In 70CE, about forty years after Jesus spoke, the Romans attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple.
How did these events come to pass? Actually, we know what happened in great detail, thanks to the Jewish historian Josephus. He lived though the events, and wrote them down in his book, The Jewish War, about five years after the destruction of the Temple. Each of the things Jesus predicted may be found in the writings of Josephus. The historian tells us that the Jewish nation revolted against Roman rule, beginning a four year war that ended when the Roman General Titus arrived at Jerusalem with four legions of soldiers. Just as Jesus had said, the Romans surrounded the city, and considered what to do, whether to attack the defensive walls or besiege the city and starve the Jews. Titus decided to strip the land of trees for miles around, and build a wooden wall of his own around the entire city, to prevent any of the Jews from escaping. Jesus had said, your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side.
The effect of the siege was devastating. Inside the city, there was a famine. Entire families began to die, and desperate people turned on each other within the walls. But the Zealot rebels refused to surrender. Josephus blamed the rebels for the suffering that followed; he was ultimately captured, surrendering to the Romans and joining them. Josephus felt that the entire city should have surrendered. How bad did it get in Jerusalem? The following horrible story is recorded in The Jewish War.
A wealthy woman named Mary fled to Jerusalem during the war, and was caught in the city during the siege. What little food she had brought was soon stolen by the guards, and it became impossible to find any more food. Driven mad by hunger, she took her infant son, who was still breastfeeding, and said in despair that there was nothing to preserve him for in a world of war, famine, and rebellion. If they did not die of hunger, they would be killed by the violent Zealots within the city, or enslaved by the Romans. She killed her son, roasted him, and ate one half of him. Then she hid the rest of him until some Zealots, smelling her cooking, threatened to kill her unless she gave them the food she had hidden. When she uncovered her son’s remains, even the Zealots were amazed and horrified, and left her with her prize. The story spread around the city, bringing more despair. Jesus had said, Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days!
Meanwhile, General Titus’ legions built earthwork ramps and eventually gained entry into the city. In the fighting, they took the fortress of Antonia and moved on to the Temple. The Temple was made of white stone, and plated with gold. Battering rams could not penetrate its walls, but there were wooden gates which the soldiers burned. Titus wanted to preserve the huge, beautiful building, but the fires spread out of control, and the Temple burned. The Jews watched in horror. When the fighting was over, Titus walked into the Holy of Holies, the small room that once housed the Ark of the Covenant. To his disappointment, he found only an empty room. When the Temple burned, the gold plating that decorated it, and the gold and silver treasures within, had melted and run in between the cracks in the great stones. Roman soldiers, greedy for this wealth, pried the stones apart and knocked them down to get the precious metals. Titus then ordered the Temple and the whole city to be razed to the ground. Jesus had said, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.
Many people had died during the siege, and of the survivors, the aged and the infirm were killed outright. Some of the tall and beautiful survivors were saved for parading in a triumphal march to Rome. As for the rest, those younger than seventeen were sold as slaves all over the Empire. Those older than seventeen were sent to work in Egyptian mines. Jesus had said, they will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captives among all nations. As for Jerusalem, the city was torn down, including its walls. The Judeans were foolish enough to revolt against Rome again in 132 CE, under their would-be military messiah Bar-Kochba. After that revolt failed, the site where Jerusalem once stood became the location for a newly built Roman city. Jesus had said, and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. Apparently, that time lasted until the modern age, up until the founding of the modern state of Israel.
So now we can clearly see that Jesus’ predictions were remarkably accurate…so accurate that we might wonder if they were written down after the fact, as I explained above. So now we have to examine the issue of when they were written down. Was the Gospel of Luke written before or after 70CE, when the Temple was destroyed? Although scholars cannot be sure, there are several clues that suggest it was before 70CE. Luke’s gospel was actually a two-part work along with the Book of Acts. Luke was written first, then the sequel, Acts. Acts is mostly about the Apostle Paul, but the book concludes with Paul still alive. Paul died as a martyr in 64 or 65 CE, beheaded by the Romans. If Acts was written after 65, it is very unlikely that Luke would have omitted the story of the death of Paul (or the death of Peter in 67CE, for that matter).
Other things that Acts omits are descriptions of the terrible persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor Nero in 64CE, and the murder of James the brother of Jesus in 62CE. Therefore, the Gospel of Luke was probably written just before 62CE, and thus also before 70CE – in other words, before the Temple was destroyed. Jesus’ predictions about the Temple also appear in Mark. Most scholars think Mark was written before Luke in any case. I do not know if this reasoning is airtight, and certainly many scholars disagree with such an early date. This is based on the view that predictive prophecy is impossible. But let us look at the question from another angle. If Luke was writing about the destruction of the Temple after it happened, then why would he only have included the prediction of the destruction? Wouldn’t he also have been sure to write about how Jesus’ prediction came true, as more proof of Jesus’ divinity?
Before we leave this topic, it may be worth looking at one other aspect of it. Jesus made his predictions privately to his disciples. He did not shout a warning to the whole people from a hilltop. That may lead us to question whether it was fair to warn only a few people about something so catastrophic. Perhaps the spreading of the gospels with the predictions in them, a few years before the tragedy, counts as a warning. However, Josephus does record several other signs and warnings that were given, suggesting that God does not destroy without warning. A comet resembling a sword stood over the city for a year. Before the rebellion, on one Passover, a great light shone around the Temple at night, a heifer gave birth to a lamb, a huge brass Temple gate opened all by itself, and a vision of soldiers surrounding cities appeared in the clouds. Four years before the war began, a prophet named Jesus, son of Ananus, walked around Jerusalem day and night, crying out, ‘A voice against Jerusalem and the Holy House and a voice against this whole people! Woe, woe to Jerusalem!’ He was whipped and dismissed as a madman, but he continued his efforts for seven or eight years, until he finally saw happen the doom he had foretold. He was struck and killed by a stone from a Roman siege engine. Josephus’ main point was that God warns us in order to save us from the miseries which we bring upon ourselves. But the people saw some of these signs as good omens, and ignored the rest.
And so, what do you think about our main question? Having looked at all of this carefully, I say that there seems to be enough evidence for us to conclude that Jesus did probably predict the destruction of the Temple, a remarkable prophecy that was full of tragedy, yet very suggestive of Jesus’ divine nature. We can only hope that we ourselves would heed such warnings if we were given them.
“As he came near and saw the city [Jerusalem], he wept over it, saying, […] ‘Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.’” (Luke 19:41-44)
“When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’ […] ‘When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those inside the city must leave it, and those out in the country must not enter it; for these are days of vengeance, as a fulfillment of all that is written. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! For there will be great distress on the earth and wrath against this people; they will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captives among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.” (Luke 21:5-24)
Did Jesus really predict the destruction of the second Jewish Temple? This is an easy question for the faithful to answer. It says he did, in these passages from the Gospel of Luke, and in similar passages in Mark 13 and Matthew 24. Therefore it must be true. A more skeptical scholar might hesitate to answer so readily. There are places in the Bible where prophets seem to predict the future. It is possible that in some cases, what seems to be a prediction was written after the event in question. In other words, if the Gospel of Luke says Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple, then maybe the Gospel was really written after the Temple was destroyed. The author knew what had already happened, reasoned that Jesus must have predicted such a major event, and put the words into Jesus’ mouth.
How do we decide what we think is the truth? Well, there are at least two ways we can look at this. First, we can use our knowledge of history to see how accurate the predictions themselves were. Second, if the predictions were accurate, we can use our knowledge of the New Testament books to look for clues about when they were really written down; either before or after the destruction of the Temple.
What did Jesus say would happen? He said that an enemy army would surround Jerusalem and conquer it. Many people would die, and many would be captured and taken away. Women and their infants and children would not be spared. As for the Temple, it would be torn down stone by stone. The city would be in the hands of the Gentiles for a long time. These were heartbreaking and catastrophic predictions. Jesus himself wept over them. Yet, how accurate did they turn out to be? Very accurate, sadly. In 70CE, about forty years after Jesus spoke, the Romans attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple.
How did these events come to pass? Actually, we know what happened in great detail, thanks to the Jewish historian Josephus. He lived though the events, and wrote them down in his book, The Jewish War, about five years after the destruction of the Temple. Each of the things Jesus predicted may be found in the writings of Josephus. The historian tells us that the Jewish nation revolted against Roman rule, beginning a four year war that ended when the Roman General Titus arrived at Jerusalem with four legions of soldiers. Just as Jesus had said, the Romans surrounded the city, and considered what to do, whether to attack the defensive walls or besiege the city and starve the Jews. Titus decided to strip the land of trees for miles around, and build a wooden wall of his own around the entire city, to prevent any of the Jews from escaping. Jesus had said, your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side.
The effect of the siege was devastating. Inside the city, there was a famine. Entire families began to die, and desperate people turned on each other within the walls. But the Zealot rebels refused to surrender. Josephus blamed the rebels for the suffering that followed; he was ultimately captured, surrendering to the Romans and joining them. Josephus felt that the entire city should have surrendered. How bad did it get in Jerusalem? The following horrible story is recorded in The Jewish War.
A wealthy woman named Mary fled to Jerusalem during the war, and was caught in the city during the siege. What little food she had brought was soon stolen by the guards, and it became impossible to find any more food. Driven mad by hunger, she took her infant son, who was still breastfeeding, and said in despair that there was nothing to preserve him for in a world of war, famine, and rebellion. If they did not die of hunger, they would be killed by the violent Zealots within the city, or enslaved by the Romans. She killed her son, roasted him, and ate one half of him. Then she hid the rest of him until some Zealots, smelling her cooking, threatened to kill her unless she gave them the food she had hidden. When she uncovered her son’s remains, even the Zealots were amazed and horrified, and left her with her prize. The story spread around the city, bringing more despair. Jesus had said, Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days!
Meanwhile, General Titus’ legions built earthwork ramps and eventually gained entry into the city. In the fighting, they took the fortress of Antonia and moved on to the Temple. The Temple was made of white stone, and plated with gold. Battering rams could not penetrate its walls, but there were wooden gates which the soldiers burned. Titus wanted to preserve the huge, beautiful building, but the fires spread out of control, and the Temple burned. The Jews watched in horror. When the fighting was over, Titus walked into the Holy of Holies, the small room that once housed the Ark of the Covenant. To his disappointment, he found only an empty room. When the Temple burned, the gold plating that decorated it, and the gold and silver treasures within, had melted and run in between the cracks in the great stones. Roman soldiers, greedy for this wealth, pried the stones apart and knocked them down to get the precious metals. Titus then ordered the Temple and the whole city to be razed to the ground. Jesus had said, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.
Many people had died during the siege, and of the survivors, the aged and the infirm were killed outright. Some of the tall and beautiful survivors were saved for parading in a triumphal march to Rome. As for the rest, those younger than seventeen were sold as slaves all over the Empire. Those older than seventeen were sent to work in Egyptian mines. Jesus had said, they will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captives among all nations. As for Jerusalem, the city was torn down, including its walls. The Judeans were foolish enough to revolt against Rome again in 132 CE, under their would-be military messiah Bar-Kochba. After that revolt failed, the site where Jerusalem once stood became the location for a newly built Roman city. Jesus had said, and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. Apparently, that time lasted until the modern age, up until the founding of the modern state of Israel.
So now we can clearly see that Jesus’ predictions were remarkably accurate…so accurate that we might wonder if they were written down after the fact, as I explained above. So now we have to examine the issue of when they were written down. Was the Gospel of Luke written before or after 70CE, when the Temple was destroyed? Although scholars cannot be sure, there are several clues that suggest it was before 70CE. Luke’s gospel was actually a two-part work along with the Book of Acts. Luke was written first, then the sequel, Acts. Acts is mostly about the Apostle Paul, but the book concludes with Paul still alive. Paul died as a martyr in 64 or 65 CE, beheaded by the Romans. If Acts was written after 65, it is very unlikely that Luke would have omitted the story of the death of Paul (or the death of Peter in 67CE, for that matter).
Other things that Acts omits are descriptions of the terrible persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor Nero in 64CE, and the murder of James the brother of Jesus in 62CE. Therefore, the Gospel of Luke was probably written just before 62CE, and thus also before 70CE – in other words, before the Temple was destroyed. Jesus’ predictions about the Temple also appear in Mark. Most scholars think Mark was written before Luke in any case. I do not know if this reasoning is airtight, and certainly many scholars disagree with such an early date. This is based on the view that predictive prophecy is impossible. But let us look at the question from another angle. If Luke was writing about the destruction of the Temple after it happened, then why would he only have included the prediction of the destruction? Wouldn’t he also have been sure to write about how Jesus’ prediction came true, as more proof of Jesus’ divinity?
Before we leave this topic, it may be worth looking at one other aspect of it. Jesus made his predictions privately to his disciples. He did not shout a warning to the whole people from a hilltop. That may lead us to question whether it was fair to warn only a few people about something so catastrophic. Perhaps the spreading of the gospels with the predictions in them, a few years before the tragedy, counts as a warning. However, Josephus does record several other signs and warnings that were given, suggesting that God does not destroy without warning. A comet resembling a sword stood over the city for a year. Before the rebellion, on one Passover, a great light shone around the Temple at night, a heifer gave birth to a lamb, a huge brass Temple gate opened all by itself, and a vision of soldiers surrounding cities appeared in the clouds. Four years before the war began, a prophet named Jesus, son of Ananus, walked around Jerusalem day and night, crying out, ‘A voice against Jerusalem and the Holy House and a voice against this whole people! Woe, woe to Jerusalem!’ He was whipped and dismissed as a madman, but he continued his efforts for seven or eight years, until he finally saw happen the doom he had foretold. He was struck and killed by a stone from a Roman siege engine. Josephus’ main point was that God warns us in order to save us from the miseries which we bring upon ourselves. But the people saw some of these signs as good omens, and ignored the rest.
And so, what do you think about our main question? Having looked at all of this carefully, I say that there seems to be enough evidence for us to conclude that Jesus did probably predict the destruction of the Temple, a remarkable prophecy that was full of tragedy, yet very suggestive of Jesus’ divine nature. We can only hope that we ourselves would heed such warnings if we were given them.
What Did Gnostics Believe In?
#63: “What did Gnostics Believe In?” by Brendon Wahlberg
You hear about the ancient Christian Gnostics every once in a while. For example, you might have read that there is a “Gospel of Thomas” that contains secret sayings of Jesus not found in the canonical gospels, and that this gospel was written by Gnostic Christians. Or, you might have seen a news report about the newly published “Gospel of Judas”, which was also written by Gnostics, and which contains the secret revelation that Judas was a hero who helped Jesus shed his unwanted body. Or, you might have seen or read “The DaVinci Code”, and heard one character (misleadingly) say that there were once many competing Gospels, written by such figures as Philip or Mary Magdalene. You may have learned that these books were also written by Gnostics, and that some claim to contain information kept secret from Jesus’ disciples. “Gnostics” were named for being “knowers” (from the Greek word gnosis, knowledge) of this sort of secret religious information.
If these books ever made you curious enough to actually read one or two of them, you probably experienced a rather rude surprise. Knowing that the Bible is basically readable by the average person, you may have picked up a Gnostic text expecting it to be readable also. Then you found the book to be incomprehensible, a confusing and rambling tract full of alien terms, names, and concepts. How could this be? Aren’t these the writings of a type of early Christians? How can they make so little sense to Christians today?
The reason we can pick up the Bible and understand it is that we have the cultural and religious background and education we need in order to make sense of it. If you knew absolutely nothing about the Bible, if you had never heard of God, Israel, or Jesus, then the Bible would seem like quite a bewildering story. In the same way, the average Bible reader just doesn’t have the background to understand the writings of the Gnostics. Gnostics had their own cosmology, their own view of reality, their own creation story, their own divine figures, and their own vocabulary. They claimed to have secret knowledge that, if you knew it, would free you from this corrupt world and bring you to eternal life. Now think about it: if your group has such valuable secret knowledge, it actually makes sense to have your writings be cryptic and hard to understand. That way, you keep outsiders from readily learning your secrets, and you make insiders have to work to understand the secrets; in working hard to grasp them, the insiders will value the secrets more highly.
In short, to understand anything the Gnostics wrote, you need to have a basic sense of what they believed in. And so the topic this month is a brief summary of Gnostic beliefs. Gnostics 101, if you will. This can serve two purposes. First, if you ever want to try to read some of those Gnostic gospels, this information will help you to make sense of them. They were apparently written with the assumption that the reader already understood the belief system, taking it for granted that the reader already knows about such things as “Barbelo”, “aeons”, “Sophia Pistis”, “Yaldabaoth”, and “demiurge”. Well, once you learn these terms, you too can follow what the Gnostic writers are trying to say (maybe!). Even if you have no such interest, the second purpose of this primer can be to show what a bizarre set of beliefs the Gnostics had, and how alienated from the world they must have felt. You have to admit, they were strange; perhaps today, only the beliefs of the Scientologists can come close to what the Gnostics were once all about.
First, though, we need a little background. For a long time, no one really knew for sure what the Gnostics believed. We didn’t have anything written in their own words, and they had long ago vanished as a religious group, stamped out as heretics by the growing Orthodox Church. In fact, all we knew about them came from the writings of their heresy-hunting enemies in the church, men like Irenaeus who wrote about Gnostic beliefs only in order to ridicule them and denounce them. Imagine for a moment that there were no more copies of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) in the world because long ago, the alternate universe Muslims had stamped out Judaism and Christianity as heresy. All we had were a few writings of scholars trying to prove that these older religions were twisted nonsense. We would only have a biased, fragmentary, and warped view of what those lost groups once believed. And so it was with the Gnostics, until one day in Egypt, in 1945, a cache of fifty-two actual Gnostic writings was found. Known as the Nag Hammadi Library, this buried collection dates back to around 400CE, and contains copies of books written in the second century. It opened our eyes to the actual beliefs of the Gnostics.
Gnostics didn’t all believe in the same myths. There were different groups of Gnostics, who followed different founding leaders, such as Valentinus or Basilides, or who revered different teacher figures, such as Seth or Cain, the sons of Adam, or Thomas the disciple. These groups all had their own writings and followers, and the smaller details of their beliefs were sometimes different. But it is still possible to describe a general Gnostic world view, just as we can describe a general Christian theology today, even though there are many branches of Christianity.
For Gnostics, there was a time and a place before the universe of matter was created. The immortal realm, called the Pleroma, was home to divine figures, including a mother goddess named Barbelo, a father god called the Great One, or the great invisible spirit, and their offspring, Autogenes the Self-Generated. Autogenes populated the realm with other beings called aeons. These aeons paired up and generated other beings. The Pleroma was full of light and wisdom. The creation of our own universe, however, was a cosmic disaster. One of the aeons, named Sophia Pistis, who was supposed to be wisdom itself, did an unwise thing. She wanted to create an offspring on her own, without a partner and without permission of the Great One. The result was a misshapen, deficient, imperfect creature, who came into being outside the Pleroma, and who did not even know about the immortal realm at all. This inferior being, known as a demiurge, was named Yaldabaoth. He stole a part of his mother, a part of her power or substance, leaving her incomplete and outside the Pleroma. Then the demiurge went on to create our universe. He took the stolen part of Sophia and imprisoned it as sparks within living beings in his newly created world.
So ignorant and arrogant was this demiurge that he thought he was the most powerful god in existence. He created beings called Archons and Angels, and also humans, and told them he was the only god. By now you realize what the Christian Gnostics were driving at with this story. They were saying that the God of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh, was really this demiurge. Because Yaldabaoth was corrupt, so was the entire universe he created. All matter was evil, in fact. The universe was full of pain and suffering because of who made it. Really, the only good and pure things in the entire universe were the remaining sparks of Sophia, which were trapped inside some people (but not all people).
The goal of salvation, then, is to allow those sparks to escape the material world, to reunite them, and to return them to the divine realm. That can only happen if select people learn the truth that they have a spark of Sophia inside them. People have to learn the truth about who they are, where they came from, and how to return to where they belong. This truth is the secret knowledge of the Gnostics. And it cannot be learned from the world around us, for that world is inferior and corrupt. No, the truth can only come from the realm of truth. For people to learn the truth, a divine being from the Pleroma must come down and tell it to us. Gnostic Christians believed that the one who did that was Jesus, and that Jesus was really Autogenes the Self-Generated.
At this point, it is important to realize that there were Gnostics who were not Christian at all. Some Gnostic writings have nothing Christian in them. They may have Gnostic ideas like aeons in them, but they do not mention Jesus at all. What does this mean? Well, modern scholars still argue over the origins of the Christian Gnostics. Did they arise within Christianity as a splinter group of Christians who started to believe something very different from the apostolic tradition? Or, were they basically pagan philosophers from outside Christianity who encountered Christianity and adopted Jesus as the knowledge-giving savior they were looking for? There is a strong case to be made for the second view. Some Gnostics adopted Jesus as their savior who gave the secret information they needed. They fit him into their cosmology as the one who could release them from the evil world of matter. And some Gnostics had no need for Jesus.
But adapting the Jesus of existing Christian tradition to a role as a Gnostic savior was problematic. To come down to earth, an aeon had to exist in an evil material body. Why would any aeon do that when the whole idea was to escape the material world? Gnostics had two solutions. Some thought that Jesus’ body was an illusion, and that he was only here as a spirit who looked human. And some thought that he did take on a body long enough to teach the necessary secret knowledge, but that he then shed his body to return to the Pleroma. In the “Gospel of Judas”, Judas helps Jesus to do just that.
Gnostic Christians must have felt that they were special, because only a select few people had a divine spark, and only they could receive this truth. But they also must have felt profoundly separate from the world. They were ascetic in their lifestyle, abstaining from sex, wine, and fine food. Trying to escape the body meant not giving in to its desires. They probably kept to themselves, but it was inevitable that they came under attack anyway, for the effect they had on some mainstream Christians. Gnostics could not be allowed to lure people to their side. They really earned their label of heretics. They rejected God and his creation, denied that Jesus was a real human being, and claimed that it was secret information, not faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, that brought salvation.
You hear about the ancient Christian Gnostics every once in a while. For example, you might have read that there is a “Gospel of Thomas” that contains secret sayings of Jesus not found in the canonical gospels, and that this gospel was written by Gnostic Christians. Or, you might have seen a news report about the newly published “Gospel of Judas”, which was also written by Gnostics, and which contains the secret revelation that Judas was a hero who helped Jesus shed his unwanted body. Or, you might have seen or read “The DaVinci Code”, and heard one character (misleadingly) say that there were once many competing Gospels, written by such figures as Philip or Mary Magdalene. You may have learned that these books were also written by Gnostics, and that some claim to contain information kept secret from Jesus’ disciples. “Gnostics” were named for being “knowers” (from the Greek word gnosis, knowledge) of this sort of secret religious information.
If these books ever made you curious enough to actually read one or two of them, you probably experienced a rather rude surprise. Knowing that the Bible is basically readable by the average person, you may have picked up a Gnostic text expecting it to be readable also. Then you found the book to be incomprehensible, a confusing and rambling tract full of alien terms, names, and concepts. How could this be? Aren’t these the writings of a type of early Christians? How can they make so little sense to Christians today?
The reason we can pick up the Bible and understand it is that we have the cultural and religious background and education we need in order to make sense of it. If you knew absolutely nothing about the Bible, if you had never heard of God, Israel, or Jesus, then the Bible would seem like quite a bewildering story. In the same way, the average Bible reader just doesn’t have the background to understand the writings of the Gnostics. Gnostics had their own cosmology, their own view of reality, their own creation story, their own divine figures, and their own vocabulary. They claimed to have secret knowledge that, if you knew it, would free you from this corrupt world and bring you to eternal life. Now think about it: if your group has such valuable secret knowledge, it actually makes sense to have your writings be cryptic and hard to understand. That way, you keep outsiders from readily learning your secrets, and you make insiders have to work to understand the secrets; in working hard to grasp them, the insiders will value the secrets more highly.
In short, to understand anything the Gnostics wrote, you need to have a basic sense of what they believed in. And so the topic this month is a brief summary of Gnostic beliefs. Gnostics 101, if you will. This can serve two purposes. First, if you ever want to try to read some of those Gnostic gospels, this information will help you to make sense of them. They were apparently written with the assumption that the reader already understood the belief system, taking it for granted that the reader already knows about such things as “Barbelo”, “aeons”, “Sophia Pistis”, “Yaldabaoth”, and “demiurge”. Well, once you learn these terms, you too can follow what the Gnostic writers are trying to say (maybe!). Even if you have no such interest, the second purpose of this primer can be to show what a bizarre set of beliefs the Gnostics had, and how alienated from the world they must have felt. You have to admit, they were strange; perhaps today, only the beliefs of the Scientologists can come close to what the Gnostics were once all about.
First, though, we need a little background. For a long time, no one really knew for sure what the Gnostics believed. We didn’t have anything written in their own words, and they had long ago vanished as a religious group, stamped out as heretics by the growing Orthodox Church. In fact, all we knew about them came from the writings of their heresy-hunting enemies in the church, men like Irenaeus who wrote about Gnostic beliefs only in order to ridicule them and denounce them. Imagine for a moment that there were no more copies of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) in the world because long ago, the alternate universe Muslims had stamped out Judaism and Christianity as heresy. All we had were a few writings of scholars trying to prove that these older religions were twisted nonsense. We would only have a biased, fragmentary, and warped view of what those lost groups once believed. And so it was with the Gnostics, until one day in Egypt, in 1945, a cache of fifty-two actual Gnostic writings was found. Known as the Nag Hammadi Library, this buried collection dates back to around 400CE, and contains copies of books written in the second century. It opened our eyes to the actual beliefs of the Gnostics.
Gnostics didn’t all believe in the same myths. There were different groups of Gnostics, who followed different founding leaders, such as Valentinus or Basilides, or who revered different teacher figures, such as Seth or Cain, the sons of Adam, or Thomas the disciple. These groups all had their own writings and followers, and the smaller details of their beliefs were sometimes different. But it is still possible to describe a general Gnostic world view, just as we can describe a general Christian theology today, even though there are many branches of Christianity.
For Gnostics, there was a time and a place before the universe of matter was created. The immortal realm, called the Pleroma, was home to divine figures, including a mother goddess named Barbelo, a father god called the Great One, or the great invisible spirit, and their offspring, Autogenes the Self-Generated. Autogenes populated the realm with other beings called aeons. These aeons paired up and generated other beings. The Pleroma was full of light and wisdom. The creation of our own universe, however, was a cosmic disaster. One of the aeons, named Sophia Pistis, who was supposed to be wisdom itself, did an unwise thing. She wanted to create an offspring on her own, without a partner and without permission of the Great One. The result was a misshapen, deficient, imperfect creature, who came into being outside the Pleroma, and who did not even know about the immortal realm at all. This inferior being, known as a demiurge, was named Yaldabaoth. He stole a part of his mother, a part of her power or substance, leaving her incomplete and outside the Pleroma. Then the demiurge went on to create our universe. He took the stolen part of Sophia and imprisoned it as sparks within living beings in his newly created world.
So ignorant and arrogant was this demiurge that he thought he was the most powerful god in existence. He created beings called Archons and Angels, and also humans, and told them he was the only god. By now you realize what the Christian Gnostics were driving at with this story. They were saying that the God of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh, was really this demiurge. Because Yaldabaoth was corrupt, so was the entire universe he created. All matter was evil, in fact. The universe was full of pain and suffering because of who made it. Really, the only good and pure things in the entire universe were the remaining sparks of Sophia, which were trapped inside some people (but not all people).
The goal of salvation, then, is to allow those sparks to escape the material world, to reunite them, and to return them to the divine realm. That can only happen if select people learn the truth that they have a spark of Sophia inside them. People have to learn the truth about who they are, where they came from, and how to return to where they belong. This truth is the secret knowledge of the Gnostics. And it cannot be learned from the world around us, for that world is inferior and corrupt. No, the truth can only come from the realm of truth. For people to learn the truth, a divine being from the Pleroma must come down and tell it to us. Gnostic Christians believed that the one who did that was Jesus, and that Jesus was really Autogenes the Self-Generated.
At this point, it is important to realize that there were Gnostics who were not Christian at all. Some Gnostic writings have nothing Christian in them. They may have Gnostic ideas like aeons in them, but they do not mention Jesus at all. What does this mean? Well, modern scholars still argue over the origins of the Christian Gnostics. Did they arise within Christianity as a splinter group of Christians who started to believe something very different from the apostolic tradition? Or, were they basically pagan philosophers from outside Christianity who encountered Christianity and adopted Jesus as the knowledge-giving savior they were looking for? There is a strong case to be made for the second view. Some Gnostics adopted Jesus as their savior who gave the secret information they needed. They fit him into their cosmology as the one who could release them from the evil world of matter. And some Gnostics had no need for Jesus.
But adapting the Jesus of existing Christian tradition to a role as a Gnostic savior was problematic. To come down to earth, an aeon had to exist in an evil material body. Why would any aeon do that when the whole idea was to escape the material world? Gnostics had two solutions. Some thought that Jesus’ body was an illusion, and that he was only here as a spirit who looked human. And some thought that he did take on a body long enough to teach the necessary secret knowledge, but that he then shed his body to return to the Pleroma. In the “Gospel of Judas”, Judas helps Jesus to do just that.
Gnostic Christians must have felt that they were special, because only a select few people had a divine spark, and only they could receive this truth. But they also must have felt profoundly separate from the world. They were ascetic in their lifestyle, abstaining from sex, wine, and fine food. Trying to escape the body meant not giving in to its desires. They probably kept to themselves, but it was inevitable that they came under attack anyway, for the effect they had on some mainstream Christians. Gnostics could not be allowed to lure people to their side. They really earned their label of heretics. They rejected God and his creation, denied that Jesus was a real human being, and claimed that it was secret information, not faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, that brought salvation.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Chapter and Verse, for better or worse
#62: “Chapter and Verse, for better or worse” by Brendon Wahlberg
You read the billboard as you speed past it on the highway. The words “John 3:16” are printed on it in enormous letters. It is a very brief, somewhat mysterious message, but of course you know what it means. It is an abbreviation that designates a Bible passage, from the gospel of John, Chapter 3, verse 16. If you didn’t know what that passage was, you could quickly find it by using the chapter and verse numbers. These numbers seem to us to be as much a part of the Bible as the words themselves. They are a convenience that we take for granted, allowing us to find any passage with ease. However, our current chapters and verses are a relatively recent invention. The Bibles of the ancient world did not have them. How, then, did we get our modern Bible chapter and verse numbers? Who added them, and why? And are they entirely a blessing to have?
To make a long story short, the chapter divisions that we use today were added by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, who lived between 1150 and 1228 CE. The verse numbers that we use today were added by a French printer, Robert Estienne, who lived between 1503 and 1559 CE. I’ll have more to say about them in a moment, but first we should look at how the Bible was divided before either of those men came along.
The first section of the Bible to really come together as a large unit was the first five books, the Torah. The Jews of antiquity had a basic need to divide the Torah into sections. Why? Because they had the custom of reading one section a week, out loud on the Sabbath. The 54 sections were planned out so that it would take one year to get through them all. (And an earlier system used 154 sections and took three years to complete.) Divisions in books of the Hebrew Bible appeared on paper as blank spaces or single Hebrew letters, inserted between sections. It was a start, but it was not as convenient as the modern system of having chapters.
Similarly, if you look at an ancient New Testament, you might well find it difficult to find the passage you wanted. The text was written in large letters with no spaces between them, and hardly any punctuation. And of course, no chapter and verse numbers. It looked like something analogous to this (except that it was in Greek):
ANDJUSTASMOSESLIFTEDUPTHESERPENTINTHEWILDERNESSSOMUSTTHESONOFMANBELIFTEDUPTHATWHOEVERBELIEVESINHIMMAYHAVEETERNALLIFEFORGODSOLOVEDTHEWORLDTHATHEGAVEHISONLYSONSOTHATEVERYONEWHOBELIEVESINHIMMAYNOTPERISH
Picture the entire gospel written like this. Now picture trying to find that passage about being born again, which you perhaps wanted to read. Wouldn’t you like some chapter numbers to help you? But no, the Bible was without them for about a millennium.
Enter Archbishop Langton, who is credited with giving us our modern chapter numbers. He was a great church writer, who composed many sermons and treatises. In 1227, a year before he died, he divided the Bible into chapters. In 1244, Langton’s contemporary, Cardinal Hugo, came up with his own chapter system. Hugo’s reason was that he was writing a concordance with his students, and he wanted a fast, easy way to quickly find any particular word in the Bible. But it ended up being the particular chapter numbering of Langton that we use today. However, there were still no modern verse numbers, and there would not be any for about another three hundred years.
Enter Robert Estienne, also known as Robert Stephens. He was a scholar and a famous printer who worked in Paris. A former Catholic, he became a Protestant and printed the entire Bible several times. In 1551, he printed the first Bible that contained the verse numbers which we use today. Legend has it that Estienne jotted down the verse numbers of the Bible while on horseback, on a trip from Paris to Lyons. This story is not taken seriously by historians, who say that he probably wrote down the verses while resting at inns along the road. But if you look at how haphazardly the verse numbers interrupt sentences, you can almost believe that they were placed by a man who was jouncing along on a horse.
And so, thanks to Langton and Estienne, whenever we open a Bible, we can use those convenient chapter and verse numbers to find our place. A scholar can simply refer to, say, Matthew 2:1 as he is writing, in a simple and efficient manner. Nowadays, we say that someone who is familiar with the Bible can quote it, “chapter and verse”. And that huge billboard can simply say on it, John 3:16. But are chapters and verses, as we have them, entirely a good thing? It turns out that the system has some flaws, to be sure.
You have to wonder what rationale was used by either Langton or Estienne when they decided exactly where to place a particular chapter or verse number. It would make sense to put the end of a chapter at a place where there is a natural break in the story, right? And to start a new chapter where a new part of the story begins. But Langton was not very concerned with that. Look at the first two chapters of Genesis. The first chapter ends before the first creation story is quite finished. Chapter 2, verses 1-3, has the conclusion of that story. The second creation account begins with Chapter 2, verse 4. There are many places where the end of a chapter is not the end of a story. But we have had this chapter numbering system for so long now, that we are kind of stuck with it. To help with the problem, some Bibles insert brief headings where a new story section begins, describing the contents of that section, regardless of where any chapter might begin or end.
Likewise, Estienne’s verses seem kind of random as to where they were inserted. Here is a brief passage with the verse numbers kept in it: “13 He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, 14 so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: 15 Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali…” (Matthew 4:13-15) You can see that the verse numbers often fall smack in the middle of a sentence, interrupting it, sometimes more than once.
It can get kind of ridiculous. Here is a passage with the shortest verse in the New Testament, made up of only 12 letters in Greek, in Luke 20:30: “27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28 and asked him a question, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30 then the second 31 and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless.” It was not as if the verses had to be short or anything. Look at Esther 8:9. That single verse is 84 words long in the NRSV translation!
The main problem with the illogical placement of chapter and verse numbers is what it does to readers. These numbers encourage a reader to start or stop reading in an arbitrary place, so that the reader doesn’t get the whole story. This allows many people to take verses out of context, to ignore the surrounding words, and to fail to understand the real meaning of a passage as it fits within the larger book. For a thousand and a half years or so, the Bible had no verse numbers. The verse divisions were made by a Frenchman, not dictated by God. They are not Holy Scripture, in other words.
When you read the Bible, try not to cherry pick verses out of context. Remember that when the words were written, they were not meant to be divided up into those verses in the first place. Always read more than just one small passage. Consider the book as a whole, and discern stories within it regardless of chapter numbers. Read what comes before and what comes after your passage. Use a study Bible and read the annotations that show you how your passage connects to other passages in other books of the Bible. Only then can you begin to really understand what you are reading in the Holy Bible.
You read the billboard as you speed past it on the highway. The words “John 3:16” are printed on it in enormous letters. It is a very brief, somewhat mysterious message, but of course you know what it means. It is an abbreviation that designates a Bible passage, from the gospel of John, Chapter 3, verse 16. If you didn’t know what that passage was, you could quickly find it by using the chapter and verse numbers. These numbers seem to us to be as much a part of the Bible as the words themselves. They are a convenience that we take for granted, allowing us to find any passage with ease. However, our current chapters and verses are a relatively recent invention. The Bibles of the ancient world did not have them. How, then, did we get our modern Bible chapter and verse numbers? Who added them, and why? And are they entirely a blessing to have?
To make a long story short, the chapter divisions that we use today were added by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, who lived between 1150 and 1228 CE. The verse numbers that we use today were added by a French printer, Robert Estienne, who lived between 1503 and 1559 CE. I’ll have more to say about them in a moment, but first we should look at how the Bible was divided before either of those men came along.
The first section of the Bible to really come together as a large unit was the first five books, the Torah. The Jews of antiquity had a basic need to divide the Torah into sections. Why? Because they had the custom of reading one section a week, out loud on the Sabbath. The 54 sections were planned out so that it would take one year to get through them all. (And an earlier system used 154 sections and took three years to complete.) Divisions in books of the Hebrew Bible appeared on paper as blank spaces or single Hebrew letters, inserted between sections. It was a start, but it was not as convenient as the modern system of having chapters.
Similarly, if you look at an ancient New Testament, you might well find it difficult to find the passage you wanted. The text was written in large letters with no spaces between them, and hardly any punctuation. And of course, no chapter and verse numbers. It looked like something analogous to this (except that it was in Greek):
ANDJUSTASMOSESLIFTEDUPTHESERPENTINTHEWILDERNESSSOMUSTTHESONOFMANBELIFTEDUPTHATWHOEVERBELIEVESINHIMMAYHAVEETERNALLIFEFORGODSOLOVEDTHEWORLDTHATHEGAVEHISONLYSONSOTHATEVERYONEWHOBELIEVESINHIMMAYNOTPERISH
Picture the entire gospel written like this. Now picture trying to find that passage about being born again, which you perhaps wanted to read. Wouldn’t you like some chapter numbers to help you? But no, the Bible was without them for about a millennium.
Enter Archbishop Langton, who is credited with giving us our modern chapter numbers. He was a great church writer, who composed many sermons and treatises. In 1227, a year before he died, he divided the Bible into chapters. In 1244, Langton’s contemporary, Cardinal Hugo, came up with his own chapter system. Hugo’s reason was that he was writing a concordance with his students, and he wanted a fast, easy way to quickly find any particular word in the Bible. But it ended up being the particular chapter numbering of Langton that we use today. However, there were still no modern verse numbers, and there would not be any for about another three hundred years.
Enter Robert Estienne, also known as Robert Stephens. He was a scholar and a famous printer who worked in Paris. A former Catholic, he became a Protestant and printed the entire Bible several times. In 1551, he printed the first Bible that contained the verse numbers which we use today. Legend has it that Estienne jotted down the verse numbers of the Bible while on horseback, on a trip from Paris to Lyons. This story is not taken seriously by historians, who say that he probably wrote down the verses while resting at inns along the road. But if you look at how haphazardly the verse numbers interrupt sentences, you can almost believe that they were placed by a man who was jouncing along on a horse.
And so, thanks to Langton and Estienne, whenever we open a Bible, we can use those convenient chapter and verse numbers to find our place. A scholar can simply refer to, say, Matthew 2:1 as he is writing, in a simple and efficient manner. Nowadays, we say that someone who is familiar with the Bible can quote it, “chapter and verse”. And that huge billboard can simply say on it, John 3:16. But are chapters and verses, as we have them, entirely a good thing? It turns out that the system has some flaws, to be sure.
You have to wonder what rationale was used by either Langton or Estienne when they decided exactly where to place a particular chapter or verse number. It would make sense to put the end of a chapter at a place where there is a natural break in the story, right? And to start a new chapter where a new part of the story begins. But Langton was not very concerned with that. Look at the first two chapters of Genesis. The first chapter ends before the first creation story is quite finished. Chapter 2, verses 1-3, has the conclusion of that story. The second creation account begins with Chapter 2, verse 4. There are many places where the end of a chapter is not the end of a story. But we have had this chapter numbering system for so long now, that we are kind of stuck with it. To help with the problem, some Bibles insert brief headings where a new story section begins, describing the contents of that section, regardless of where any chapter might begin or end.
Likewise, Estienne’s verses seem kind of random as to where they were inserted. Here is a brief passage with the verse numbers kept in it: “13 He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, 14 so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: 15 Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali…” (Matthew 4:13-15) You can see that the verse numbers often fall smack in the middle of a sentence, interrupting it, sometimes more than once.
It can get kind of ridiculous. Here is a passage with the shortest verse in the New Testament, made up of only 12 letters in Greek, in Luke 20:30: “27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28 and asked him a question, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30 then the second 31 and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless.” It was not as if the verses had to be short or anything. Look at Esther 8:9. That single verse is 84 words long in the NRSV translation!
The main problem with the illogical placement of chapter and verse numbers is what it does to readers. These numbers encourage a reader to start or stop reading in an arbitrary place, so that the reader doesn’t get the whole story. This allows many people to take verses out of context, to ignore the surrounding words, and to fail to understand the real meaning of a passage as it fits within the larger book. For a thousand and a half years or so, the Bible had no verse numbers. The verse divisions were made by a Frenchman, not dictated by God. They are not Holy Scripture, in other words.
When you read the Bible, try not to cherry pick verses out of context. Remember that when the words were written, they were not meant to be divided up into those verses in the first place. Always read more than just one small passage. Consider the book as a whole, and discern stories within it regardless of chapter numbers. Read what comes before and what comes after your passage. Use a study Bible and read the annotations that show you how your passage connects to other passages in other books of the Bible. Only then can you begin to really understand what you are reading in the Holy Bible.
Childhood in Jesus’ Time
#61: “Childhood in Jesus’ Time” by Brendon Wahlberg
“People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.” (Mark 10:13-16)
You might wonder, as you read this passage, just who were the little children of Jesus’ day and age? What were they like? How did they live? What did they do (when they weren’t getting blessed by Jesus)? What was childhood like in New Testament times? Let’s go back in time and see what we can learn. Imagine, if you will, that you are a child living two thousand years ago in Galilee…
First things first – you are born. Chances are that you popped out of your mother while she was sitting in a birthing chair, surrounded by female relatives, and helped by a midwife. You were wrapped up right away in linen strips called swaddling clothes, but you didn’t formally get your name until you were eight days old. Are you a boy? Good for you – you will have higher status, and more freedom and privileges. If you are a girl, don’t feel bad – you will be equally loved and cherished. It’s just a patriarchal society, that’s all, and it won’t be changing anytime soon. Plus, as a girl, you avoided a painful circumcision. Still, boys are preferred because when a daughter gets married, she moves away and an asset to the family is lost. A son remains a part of the family forever.
Rejoice! You are a new child! And you are important. The whole reason for marriage is to fulfill the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Your mother’s main goal in life was to have you. Well, not just you. You probably have around six other brothers and sisters. And that’s not all. You are part of an extended family living in one household. You may be living with cousins, uncles, aunts, sisters-in-law, and grandparents, in addition to your siblings and parents. Why such a large family? Everyone agrees that more kids are better. When all those kids grow up, they are a great asset. A larger family can better fight off an attack. More children are more workers in the field or with the herds. Finally, when your parents are old, you and your siblings can take care of them.
So now you are an infant. Like a modern child, you have to deal with potty training and diaper changing. Actually, you might not have diapers. Those are a lot of work to wash. Your mother might carry a small clay pot for you instead. You are going to be breast fed until you are about three years old. You have simple toys, like a rattle or a clay horse, to play with. You practically never leave your mother’s side. She provides you with a kind of preschool until you are three, teaching you the basics of life until you are weaned and potty trained.
When you are finally out of diapers, what will you wear? Your clothes will be plain. They will be made of simply woven wool or cotton. You’ll have either no underwear, or a loincloth. Your inner garment will be a tunic, fitting closely at your neck and reaching to your ankles. Your belt, or girdle, holds it in at the waist. Your outer garment, or mantle, will be a warm cloak. Your sandals will be simple pieces of hide, tied with thongs or cords. It’s not fancy, but it is what everyone is wearing. And I mean everyone.
Look around. Where do you live? What is your house like? Well, it looks like your family isn’t rich. Your house is built from bricks made out of baked clay and straw. Inside, there is just one room! The floor is made of beaten clay – your mother is always sweeping it. One side of the room is a raised platform, which your family uses for eating and sleeping. The lower area is for the animals. They sleep in the house too. You might have a cow, a goat, a donkey, a sheep, a chicken, or even a dog. Your favorite pet while you are growing up, though, is a little lamb.
It is dimly lit inside your small house. There is just one window, which is basically a hole in the wall, covered by a lattice. But less light getting in means it stays cooler. At night, the only light is provided by an oil lamp set high on a lamp stand. There is very little furniture, too. Your family has a couple of stools. You sleep on a simple mat. Your central heating system is a brazier in which a fire can be lit. With space at a premium, your family has a little set of stairs going up the outside of your house to the roof. The roof is a good place to relax or sleep when it is too hot in the house. People like to talk to their neighbors from their rooftops. But inside, the roof leaks during the rainy season. The animal smells are sometimes too much, and there might be vermin in the walls. It is no wonder you spend more time outside your house. Your mother cooks outside, and tends her small garden there.
Your neighbor is wealthier. They have a few rooms in their house, built around a central courtyard with a protective wall. That allows them the luxury of having their animals sleep outside. Plus they have their own cistern to store water. Your mother brings it from the town well every day. But you must not covet your neighbor’s house. You know that, because if you are a boy, you have already started your religious education.
At age three, your father started to teach you about your religion and your heritage. Your father teaches you about the Torah. You are learning some psalms, some scripture passages, and some simple prayers. Your everyday life is part of your education. Religious festivals and the weekly Sabbath are endless opportunities for stories, questions, and answers. You are soaking up the history of your people on days like Passover. You get all of this education right in the family setting. But your small town also has a synagogue, and in a few years, when you are seven, you will spend some time there, learning from a teacher about subjects like Jewish history and law, and basic math. You might learn how to read and write, but sometimes those skills are best left to the professional scribes. In an agricultural society, you may not need to read and write much.
If you are a boy, your life has to be balanced between religious and work training. You have to have a trade or an occupation. From an early age, in fact, your family put you to work. At first, it was small jobs to keep you busy and to make yourself useful. You gathered wood for the home fire and brought water from the well. You tended the sheep or the goats, taking them to pasture and watching over them. Now that you are older, you have to go with your father to the field, or to his workshop, and watch him working. You will help him more and more as you get older, because eventually, you will master your father’s trade. It will probably be your job as an adult.
Now, if you are a girl, you don’t have to study all of that religious information. So, how are you going to use all your time? Your mother has some ideas. Her job is to prepare you to be a housewife. There are many things to do at home. There is cooking, and keeping the cook fires burning. There is bringing water from the well. There is doing laundry in the river. There is sewing, grinding flour, baking, spinning, weaving, gardening, feeding and changing the infants, and cleaning the house. A woman’s work is never done! (Is it too late to go back and be born a boy instead? It is your imagination, so sure, knock yourself out.) But remember, you are living in an extended family. Aunts, sisters, grandmothers, and sisters-in-law all help and support each other in the same house.
Are you tired from all of that work? Do you need some playtime? Of course you do. Times have not changed so much. Toys and games were part of childhood too. Children played board games like checkers and backgammon. They had playthings like dolls, dollhouses, puppets, and pull-toys. They played with leather balls and marbles. There were no team sports, but children played catch and held footraces. Boys wrestled, and practiced shooting slingshots. Juggling and hopscotch were popular. And of course, made-up games and storytelling were great pastimes.
Are you hungry now? I’ll bet you are. Your family has only two meals per day. The first one is a light breakfast or a small lunch, perhaps eaten on the way to work. The main meal of the day is an early dinner. The evening meal is an occasion for the whole family. The food isn’t fancy, but it is good for you. Wheat and barley are used for flour, bread, and cakes, baked fresh every two days. For vegetables, you have might have beans, peas, cucumbers, onions, or radishes. There are eggs from the chickens. There could be figs, grapes, raisins, olives, or melons. Milk, yogurt, and cheese come from goats. There is usually fish, of course. There is no candy, but sweets can be made from honey. Your family doesn’t drink much plain water, as it stands around for a long time and is not very good to drink. Instead, they wash everything down with watered wine. All of the food is heavily seasoned, with onions or garlic, salt, mustard, mint, or dill. You don’t eat meat very often. Animals are too valuable to kill for their meat. However, sometimes there is a religious sacrifice which provides a rare meal with meat in it, such as lamb.
I’ll be honest. Your childhood is going to be short. If you were a twenty-first century child, you would have the years between 13 and 18 as an extended childhood called adolescence. But you are living in Jesus’ time. You get no adolescence. By age 13, you are considered an adult. A boy who turns 13 is a man. He can be a member of the synagogue and participate in the services. He can sign contracts and testify in court. He can even get married. Childhood is fleeting, and soon you are an adult who fully participates in the life of the family.
And so we return to the present. Now we know more about what childhood was like in the time of Jesus. Now we know what the little children were like, who came to Jesus to be blessed. In modern times, when we picture those children with Jesus, we might be thinking of the children of today…perhaps a cute little kindergartener. For today’s children, childhood lasts longer, and so, perhaps, does the innocence and trust that makes children proverbially well suited for the Kingdom of God. The children of Jesus’ time were more like little adults, moving quickly into lives of hardship and responsibility. Interestingly, if you look at the same story of Jesus and the Children, but in the Gospel of Luke instead of Mark, there is a small difference in the wording. Instead of Mark’s “People were bringing little children to him”, Luke says, “People were bringing even infants to him” (Luke 18:15-17). I wonder…given what childhood was really like in Jesus’ time, maybe it really was the infants, more so than the older children, who were the best illustration of innocence and readiness for entering the Kingdom.
“People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.” (Mark 10:13-16)
You might wonder, as you read this passage, just who were the little children of Jesus’ day and age? What were they like? How did they live? What did they do (when they weren’t getting blessed by Jesus)? What was childhood like in New Testament times? Let’s go back in time and see what we can learn. Imagine, if you will, that you are a child living two thousand years ago in Galilee…
First things first – you are born. Chances are that you popped out of your mother while she was sitting in a birthing chair, surrounded by female relatives, and helped by a midwife. You were wrapped up right away in linen strips called swaddling clothes, but you didn’t formally get your name until you were eight days old. Are you a boy? Good for you – you will have higher status, and more freedom and privileges. If you are a girl, don’t feel bad – you will be equally loved and cherished. It’s just a patriarchal society, that’s all, and it won’t be changing anytime soon. Plus, as a girl, you avoided a painful circumcision. Still, boys are preferred because when a daughter gets married, she moves away and an asset to the family is lost. A son remains a part of the family forever.
Rejoice! You are a new child! And you are important. The whole reason for marriage is to fulfill the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Your mother’s main goal in life was to have you. Well, not just you. You probably have around six other brothers and sisters. And that’s not all. You are part of an extended family living in one household. You may be living with cousins, uncles, aunts, sisters-in-law, and grandparents, in addition to your siblings and parents. Why such a large family? Everyone agrees that more kids are better. When all those kids grow up, they are a great asset. A larger family can better fight off an attack. More children are more workers in the field or with the herds. Finally, when your parents are old, you and your siblings can take care of them.
So now you are an infant. Like a modern child, you have to deal with potty training and diaper changing. Actually, you might not have diapers. Those are a lot of work to wash. Your mother might carry a small clay pot for you instead. You are going to be breast fed until you are about three years old. You have simple toys, like a rattle or a clay horse, to play with. You practically never leave your mother’s side. She provides you with a kind of preschool until you are three, teaching you the basics of life until you are weaned and potty trained.
When you are finally out of diapers, what will you wear? Your clothes will be plain. They will be made of simply woven wool or cotton. You’ll have either no underwear, or a loincloth. Your inner garment will be a tunic, fitting closely at your neck and reaching to your ankles. Your belt, or girdle, holds it in at the waist. Your outer garment, or mantle, will be a warm cloak. Your sandals will be simple pieces of hide, tied with thongs or cords. It’s not fancy, but it is what everyone is wearing. And I mean everyone.
Look around. Where do you live? What is your house like? Well, it looks like your family isn’t rich. Your house is built from bricks made out of baked clay and straw. Inside, there is just one room! The floor is made of beaten clay – your mother is always sweeping it. One side of the room is a raised platform, which your family uses for eating and sleeping. The lower area is for the animals. They sleep in the house too. You might have a cow, a goat, a donkey, a sheep, a chicken, or even a dog. Your favorite pet while you are growing up, though, is a little lamb.
It is dimly lit inside your small house. There is just one window, which is basically a hole in the wall, covered by a lattice. But less light getting in means it stays cooler. At night, the only light is provided by an oil lamp set high on a lamp stand. There is very little furniture, too. Your family has a couple of stools. You sleep on a simple mat. Your central heating system is a brazier in which a fire can be lit. With space at a premium, your family has a little set of stairs going up the outside of your house to the roof. The roof is a good place to relax or sleep when it is too hot in the house. People like to talk to their neighbors from their rooftops. But inside, the roof leaks during the rainy season. The animal smells are sometimes too much, and there might be vermin in the walls. It is no wonder you spend more time outside your house. Your mother cooks outside, and tends her small garden there.
Your neighbor is wealthier. They have a few rooms in their house, built around a central courtyard with a protective wall. That allows them the luxury of having their animals sleep outside. Plus they have their own cistern to store water. Your mother brings it from the town well every day. But you must not covet your neighbor’s house. You know that, because if you are a boy, you have already started your religious education.
At age three, your father started to teach you about your religion and your heritage. Your father teaches you about the Torah. You are learning some psalms, some scripture passages, and some simple prayers. Your everyday life is part of your education. Religious festivals and the weekly Sabbath are endless opportunities for stories, questions, and answers. You are soaking up the history of your people on days like Passover. You get all of this education right in the family setting. But your small town also has a synagogue, and in a few years, when you are seven, you will spend some time there, learning from a teacher about subjects like Jewish history and law, and basic math. You might learn how to read and write, but sometimes those skills are best left to the professional scribes. In an agricultural society, you may not need to read and write much.
If you are a boy, your life has to be balanced between religious and work training. You have to have a trade or an occupation. From an early age, in fact, your family put you to work. At first, it was small jobs to keep you busy and to make yourself useful. You gathered wood for the home fire and brought water from the well. You tended the sheep or the goats, taking them to pasture and watching over them. Now that you are older, you have to go with your father to the field, or to his workshop, and watch him working. You will help him more and more as you get older, because eventually, you will master your father’s trade. It will probably be your job as an adult.
Now, if you are a girl, you don’t have to study all of that religious information. So, how are you going to use all your time? Your mother has some ideas. Her job is to prepare you to be a housewife. There are many things to do at home. There is cooking, and keeping the cook fires burning. There is bringing water from the well. There is doing laundry in the river. There is sewing, grinding flour, baking, spinning, weaving, gardening, feeding and changing the infants, and cleaning the house. A woman’s work is never done! (Is it too late to go back and be born a boy instead? It is your imagination, so sure, knock yourself out.) But remember, you are living in an extended family. Aunts, sisters, grandmothers, and sisters-in-law all help and support each other in the same house.
Are you tired from all of that work? Do you need some playtime? Of course you do. Times have not changed so much. Toys and games were part of childhood too. Children played board games like checkers and backgammon. They had playthings like dolls, dollhouses, puppets, and pull-toys. They played with leather balls and marbles. There were no team sports, but children played catch and held footraces. Boys wrestled, and practiced shooting slingshots. Juggling and hopscotch were popular. And of course, made-up games and storytelling were great pastimes.
Are you hungry now? I’ll bet you are. Your family has only two meals per day. The first one is a light breakfast or a small lunch, perhaps eaten on the way to work. The main meal of the day is an early dinner. The evening meal is an occasion for the whole family. The food isn’t fancy, but it is good for you. Wheat and barley are used for flour, bread, and cakes, baked fresh every two days. For vegetables, you have might have beans, peas, cucumbers, onions, or radishes. There are eggs from the chickens. There could be figs, grapes, raisins, olives, or melons. Milk, yogurt, and cheese come from goats. There is usually fish, of course. There is no candy, but sweets can be made from honey. Your family doesn’t drink much plain water, as it stands around for a long time and is not very good to drink. Instead, they wash everything down with watered wine. All of the food is heavily seasoned, with onions or garlic, salt, mustard, mint, or dill. You don’t eat meat very often. Animals are too valuable to kill for their meat. However, sometimes there is a religious sacrifice which provides a rare meal with meat in it, such as lamb.
I’ll be honest. Your childhood is going to be short. If you were a twenty-first century child, you would have the years between 13 and 18 as an extended childhood called adolescence. But you are living in Jesus’ time. You get no adolescence. By age 13, you are considered an adult. A boy who turns 13 is a man. He can be a member of the synagogue and participate in the services. He can sign contracts and testify in court. He can even get married. Childhood is fleeting, and soon you are an adult who fully participates in the life of the family.
And so we return to the present. Now we know more about what childhood was like in the time of Jesus. Now we know what the little children were like, who came to Jesus to be blessed. In modern times, when we picture those children with Jesus, we might be thinking of the children of today…perhaps a cute little kindergartener. For today’s children, childhood lasts longer, and so, perhaps, does the innocence and trust that makes children proverbially well suited for the Kingdom of God. The children of Jesus’ time were more like little adults, moving quickly into lives of hardship and responsibility. Interestingly, if you look at the same story of Jesus and the Children, but in the Gospel of Luke instead of Mark, there is a small difference in the wording. Instead of Mark’s “People were bringing little children to him”, Luke says, “People were bringing even infants to him” (Luke 18:15-17). I wonder…given what childhood was really like in Jesus’ time, maybe it really was the infants, more so than the older children, who were the best illustration of innocence and readiness for entering the Kingdom.
How to read the Bible: Parallel lines
#60: “How to read the Bible: Parallel lines” by Brendon Wahlberg
The Bible is full of poetry. Just look at Psalms and Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and large sections of the prophets. But ancient Hebrew poetry is different from what we might think of as poetry today. Understanding the differences can help us to read the Bible better than we already do. For example, we might think that in a traditional poem, two paired lines have the same number of syllables, and that those lines end in words that rhyme. That’s not the case with Hebrew poetry. In the Bible, Hebrew poets didn’t care about numbers of syllables, and they didn’t usually rhyme words. Instead, they rhymed ideas. What I mean is, rhyming two words can give you, say, cake and bake. Rhyming two ideas can give you, say, cake and dessert, instead.
The rhyming of ideas is one of the most basic and important features of Hebrew poetry, and it is found everywhere in the Bible. Scholars call it “Parallelism”, and they have identified several different kinds of parallelism in the Bible. If we go over those different kinds, and look at an example of each, we will have a much better understanding of how the poetry in the Bible was written, and what it means.
1. The second line repeats the same idea of the first line, but says it in words that are a bit different, to emphasize the idea. Here’s an example from Psalm 114, where the psalmist says that nature was so impressed by the exodus that it trembled and reacted in fear and awe.
“The sea looked and fled;
Jordan turned back.
The mountains skipped like rams
The hills like young sheep.”
You can see that in each pair of lines, the second line says the same thing as the first line, just using different wording. Don’t get too caught up in the details, worrying about why one line says mountains and the other says hills, or about how the river Jordan is not a sea. Rhyme the thoughts in your head instead. You know about synonymous words. Think of these as synonymous lines of poetry. Mountains and hills (or the Jordan and the sea) are supposed to be the “same” thing here.
2. The second line contrasts the idea of the first line, or is the opposite of it, to make you think about the two different things together. There is a lot of this in Proverbs, where contrasting thoughts rhyme in the next line, often using the word “but” in between. Here’s an example from Proverbs 10.
“A wise child makes a glad father,
But a foolish child is a mother’s grief.
Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit,
But righteousness delivers from death.”
You can see that in each pair of lines, the second line is in direct contrast to the first. This time, maybe you do want to get caught up in the details. See how lack of true profit and delivery from death are contrasted, but also how treasure and righteousness are compared. You might think about how physical treasure could lead to wickedness, or how righteousness is a treasure of a different kind.
3. The second line adds a thought to the first line, completing it. Or the two lines have a cause and effect relationship. From Psalm 23:
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil;
For you are with me; your rod and your staff – they comfort me.”
You can see that the second line completes the thought of the first line. And, there is cause and effect. God is with the psalmist, therefore he fears no evil.
Sometimes the adding of thoughts is done over several lines, with each line adding one more idea, building to a climax. It is like a staircase where each additional line is like another step up to the top.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside still waters;
He restores me soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.”
You can see how the first line claims that the psalmist shall not want for anything. Each line after that adds more explanations of why that is so: “He” does this, “He” does that. It all builds to the climactic idea that it is all for the sake of God’s name.
Scholars who study Hebrew poetry have identified many other categories, but those three are enough for our purposes. I want to use the rest of our time to look at what happens when someone does not understand the basics of Hebrew poetry and parallelism. Let’s look at a passage from the prophet Zechariah, 9:9. This is some classic Hebrew poetry.
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9)
Check out the last two lines. That’s a good example of the first category I mentioned above. The idea of the first line is repeated in the second line, using wording that is a little bit different, to emphasize the thought. Line 1: The king is so humble that he is riding on a donkey. Line 2: I’m not kidding, he is really riding on a young donkey!
This part of Zechariah was understood by the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark and Luke, to refer to the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It was as if Zechariah was foretelling how Jesus would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, like a humble King. But two of these three gospel writers understood Hebrew poetry and parallelism, and the third did not. Read the following three passages and see if you can tell which one didn’t really understand. It’s not hard to tell.
“When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, “Why are you doing this?” just say this, “The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.” ’ They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it.” (Mark 11:1-7)
“When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, “Why are you untying it?” just say this: “The Lord needs it.” ’ So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’ They said, ‘The Lord needs it.’ Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it.” (Luke 19:29-35)
“When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, “The Lord needs them.” And he will send them immediately.’ This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, ‘Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’ The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.” (Matthew 21:1-7)
You said Matthew, right? Unlike Mark and Luke, Matthew reports that Jesus asked for two animals to be brought, a younger donkey and an older one, and that somehow Jesus sat on both of them. Did he balance very carefully? Did the two animals have to keep very close together the whole time?
What seems to have happened here is that Matthew understood Jesus’ entry to the city, riding a donkey, to be a fulfillment of the prophecy. He quoted Zechariah, but he did not seem to have understood parallelism. Zechariah did not mean that there were two animals, a donkey and a colt. He meant that there was one animal; a donkey is also the foal of a donkey, of course. But let us not blame Matthew so quickly. It is possible that Matthew also looked at a Greek translation of Zechariah, called the Septuagint. From what I could find online, the Septuagint has this wording:
“Behold, your King comes to you;
Just and saving is he;
Gentle and mounted on a beast of burden
And a young colt.”
Our goal when we read the Bible is always to truly understand it. Understanding these basic ideas about how Hebrew poetry is written, will help us to understand the Bible better, and to understand God’s word to us.
This column celebrates sixty months of “Did You Know”…that’s five years! (How many dog years is that, though?)
The Bible is full of poetry. Just look at Psalms and Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and large sections of the prophets. But ancient Hebrew poetry is different from what we might think of as poetry today. Understanding the differences can help us to read the Bible better than we already do. For example, we might think that in a traditional poem, two paired lines have the same number of syllables, and that those lines end in words that rhyme. That’s not the case with Hebrew poetry. In the Bible, Hebrew poets didn’t care about numbers of syllables, and they didn’t usually rhyme words. Instead, they rhymed ideas. What I mean is, rhyming two words can give you, say, cake and bake. Rhyming two ideas can give you, say, cake and dessert, instead.
The rhyming of ideas is one of the most basic and important features of Hebrew poetry, and it is found everywhere in the Bible. Scholars call it “Parallelism”, and they have identified several different kinds of parallelism in the Bible. If we go over those different kinds, and look at an example of each, we will have a much better understanding of how the poetry in the Bible was written, and what it means.
1. The second line repeats the same idea of the first line, but says it in words that are a bit different, to emphasize the idea. Here’s an example from Psalm 114, where the psalmist says that nature was so impressed by the exodus that it trembled and reacted in fear and awe.
“The sea looked and fled;
Jordan turned back.
The mountains skipped like rams
The hills like young sheep.”
You can see that in each pair of lines, the second line says the same thing as the first line, just using different wording. Don’t get too caught up in the details, worrying about why one line says mountains and the other says hills, or about how the river Jordan is not a sea. Rhyme the thoughts in your head instead. You know about synonymous words. Think of these as synonymous lines of poetry. Mountains and hills (or the Jordan and the sea) are supposed to be the “same” thing here.
2. The second line contrasts the idea of the first line, or is the opposite of it, to make you think about the two different things together. There is a lot of this in Proverbs, where contrasting thoughts rhyme in the next line, often using the word “but” in between. Here’s an example from Proverbs 10.
“A wise child makes a glad father,
But a foolish child is a mother’s grief.
Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit,
But righteousness delivers from death.”
You can see that in each pair of lines, the second line is in direct contrast to the first. This time, maybe you do want to get caught up in the details. See how lack of true profit and delivery from death are contrasted, but also how treasure and righteousness are compared. You might think about how physical treasure could lead to wickedness, or how righteousness is a treasure of a different kind.
3. The second line adds a thought to the first line, completing it. Or the two lines have a cause and effect relationship. From Psalm 23:
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil;
For you are with me; your rod and your staff – they comfort me.”
You can see that the second line completes the thought of the first line. And, there is cause and effect. God is with the psalmist, therefore he fears no evil.
Sometimes the adding of thoughts is done over several lines, with each line adding one more idea, building to a climax. It is like a staircase where each additional line is like another step up to the top.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside still waters;
He restores me soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.”
You can see how the first line claims that the psalmist shall not want for anything. Each line after that adds more explanations of why that is so: “He” does this, “He” does that. It all builds to the climactic idea that it is all for the sake of God’s name.
Scholars who study Hebrew poetry have identified many other categories, but those three are enough for our purposes. I want to use the rest of our time to look at what happens when someone does not understand the basics of Hebrew poetry and parallelism. Let’s look at a passage from the prophet Zechariah, 9:9. This is some classic Hebrew poetry.
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9)
Check out the last two lines. That’s a good example of the first category I mentioned above. The idea of the first line is repeated in the second line, using wording that is a little bit different, to emphasize the thought. Line 1: The king is so humble that he is riding on a donkey. Line 2: I’m not kidding, he is really riding on a young donkey!
This part of Zechariah was understood by the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark and Luke, to refer to the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It was as if Zechariah was foretelling how Jesus would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, like a humble King. But two of these three gospel writers understood Hebrew poetry and parallelism, and the third did not. Read the following three passages and see if you can tell which one didn’t really understand. It’s not hard to tell.
“When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, “Why are you doing this?” just say this, “The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.” ’ They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it.” (Mark 11:1-7)
“When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, “Why are you untying it?” just say this: “The Lord needs it.” ’ So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’ They said, ‘The Lord needs it.’ Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it.” (Luke 19:29-35)
“When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, “The Lord needs them.” And he will send them immediately.’ This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, ‘Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’ The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.” (Matthew 21:1-7)
You said Matthew, right? Unlike Mark and Luke, Matthew reports that Jesus asked for two animals to be brought, a younger donkey and an older one, and that somehow Jesus sat on both of them. Did he balance very carefully? Did the two animals have to keep very close together the whole time?
What seems to have happened here is that Matthew understood Jesus’ entry to the city, riding a donkey, to be a fulfillment of the prophecy. He quoted Zechariah, but he did not seem to have understood parallelism. Zechariah did not mean that there were two animals, a donkey and a colt. He meant that there was one animal; a donkey is also the foal of a donkey, of course. But let us not blame Matthew so quickly. It is possible that Matthew also looked at a Greek translation of Zechariah, called the Septuagint. From what I could find online, the Septuagint has this wording:
“Behold, your King comes to you;
Just and saving is he;
Gentle and mounted on a beast of burden
And a young colt.”
Our goal when we read the Bible is always to truly understand it. Understanding these basic ideas about how Hebrew poetry is written, will help us to understand the Bible better, and to understand God’s word to us.
This column celebrates sixty months of “Did You Know”…that’s five years! (How many dog years is that, though?)
Jesus wrote me a letter…
#59: “Jesus wrote me a letter…” by Brendon Wahlberg
“Give me a ticket for an aeroplane, Ain't got time to take a fast train, Lonely days are gone, I'ma goin' home, Jesus just wrote me a letter. Well he wrote me a letter, Told me he couldn't live without me no more, Listen mister can't you see I gotta get back to my Jesus once more, anyway…”
Oh, sorry, I do get carried away sometimes. Those are just some lyrics by Wayne Carson Thompson, from a song “The Letter”, with just a few changes for fun. I added Jesus in there because of this month’s topic. Did you know that there is an old Christian legend that Jesus once wrote a letter to a King, and that it was saved for posterity? Really: if you look at the Christian Apocrypha, you’ll find the story of how King Abgar V of Edessa wrote a letter to Jesus, and Jesus wrote back. This is remarkable because as far as we know, Jesus did not leave anything behind that he personally wrote. Jesus left so few actual traces on this earth that the scanty historical record allows some extreme skeptics to even question whether Jesus actually existed, or whether the gospel writers made him up! So an actual letter claiming to be written by Jesus would be a big deal indeed.
But I won’t string you along. Although many people in the time of early Roman Christianity and the Middle ages believed in this letter wholeheartedly, today we know it to be inauthentic. Today we merely call it the “Legend of Christ and Abgar.” The story goes like this…
Edessa was a city in Mespotamia (now modern Turkey). Around the year 200CE, King Abgar IX and the royal family of Edessa converted to Christianity. But no one is sure how long before that Christianity came to Edessa, and how it got there. The famous historian of the early church, Eusebius, thought he had the answer. While writing his book, “History of the Church” around 325CE, Eusebius collected and preserved every document and scrap of information he could find about the beginnings of Christianity. We are grateful to him for quoting and including so many things that would otherwise be lost now. But he was extremely enthusiastic about his faith, and it seems he could be taken in by a fake set of letters (which he found in the Records Office at Edessa and translated from Syriac), simply because it was so exciting to him to have letters to and from Jesus among his source documents.
In Book 1 of his history, Eusebius says that because of Jesus’ power to cure diseases, the Lord became famous far and wide, excitedly talked about in foreign lands very remote from Judea. One day, the King of Mesopotamia, Abgar, who was dying of an incurable disease, heard Jesus mentioned continually as a miraculous healer. Abgar sent the following letter by carrier to Jesus.
“Abgar Uchama the Toparch to Jesus, who has appeared as a gracious savior in the region of Jerusalem – greeting. I have heard about you and the cures you perform without drugs or herbs. If report is true, you make the blind see again and the lame walk about; you cleanse lepers, expel unclean spirits and demons, cure those suffering from chronic and painful diseases, and raise the dead. When I heard all this about you, I concluded that one of two things must be true – either you are God and came down from Heaven to do these things, or you are God’s Son doing them. Accordingly I am writing to beg you to come to me, whatever the inconvenience, and cure the disorder from which I suffer. I may add that I understand the Jews are treating you with contempt and desire to injure you: my city is very small, but highly esteemed, adequate for both of us.”
Jesus sent Abgar the following reply: “Happy are you who believed in me without having seen me! For it is written of me that those who have seen me will not believe in me, and that those who have not seen will believe and live. As to your request that I should come to you, I must complete all that I was sent to do here, and on completing it must at once be taken up to the One who sent me. When I have been taken up I will send you one of my disciples to cure your disorder and bring life to you and those with you.”
Now, during his ministry, Jesus had chosen about seventy disciples to carry his word for him. (Luke 10:1) After Jesus was taken up to Heaven, one of the seventy, named Thaddeus, was chosen to fulfill Jesus’ promise to Abgar. Thaddeus went to Edessa, armed with the power to cure diseases. Thaddeus told Abgar that “in proportion to your belief shall the prayers of your heart be granted.” Laying hands on the King, Thaddeus instantly cured him. Then Thaddeus preached the gospel to all the people of Edessa.
Eusebius wasn’t the only writer to report these events. Another document, the “Teaching of Addai (Thaddeus)”, written around 400CE, retells the legend and elaborates on it. This was about 75 years after Eusebius, remember, so it is understandable that the legend would have grown in the telling. In the new version, another line is added to the end of Jesus’ letter. It reads as follows: “And your city shall be blessed forever, and the enemy shall never overcome it.” This addition made the people of Edessa believe for a long time that they were protected by God from any conquerors…until finally they were conquered during the crusades.
Another new addition to the legend was the story of how the courier, who went back and forth between Jesus and Abgar, happened to be a painter. He had been asked to paint a portrait of Jesus, which then became the very first Icon of the Lord. But the legend did not stop growing there. Eventually, it was said that the portrait of Jesus was not painted by a person, but instead that Jesus had pressed a cloth to his face and transferred his image to it. This Icon, which brings to mind the more famous Shroud of Turin, vanished during the crusades.
Okay, so how do we know that the letter of Jesus to Abgar is inauthentic? The text of the letter seems to be taken from a couple of places in the gospels. In fact, the letter to Abgar actually quotes a harmony of the gospels (known as the “Diatessaron”), written by a second century Christian named Tatian. What is a harmony of the gospels? It is well known that among the four gospels, there are many small differences. A harmony is when all four gospels are combined into one and revised so that those differences are erased. Tatian’s harmony was written until around 175CE, so a letter from Jesus, written around 30CE, should not be quoting that gospel harmony.
So what really happened? I suppose that the Christianity came to Edessa, and that someone invented the legend in order to make Edessa more special. Possibly Abgar IX, converting in 200CE, inspired a story about the earlier Abgar V, and the letters were created as proof, sometime between 175CE (writing of the “Diatessaron”) and 325CE (Eusebius quotes the letters). The letters became very popular as a legend, which grew until it was retold and expanded around 400CE (writing of “Teaching of Addai”). The letters were copied and translated many times, used in liturgies, written on talismans and amulets, and even carved on stone and metal. Abgar was made a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
What is the moral of our story, besides the obvious lesson about gullible historians? Well, I think there is something deeper to be understood here. The letter to Abgar says: “Happy are you who believed in me without having seen me! For it is written of me that those who have seen me will not believe in me, and that those who have not seen will believe and live.” If you think about it, every Christian alive today is like Abgar. We are born, we grow up, and how do we learn anything about Jesus? We can’t go to Judea and see Jesus, even if we have time to take a fast train. We can’t even write him a letter. We have come onto the scene two thousand years too late. All we have that we can see is a book of ancient writings and what our parents and teachers tell us. Our only choice is to believe in him without having seen him. Whether or not the letter of Jesus was authentic, which is doubtful, it still has an important message to impart to us – happy are we, blessed are we, who have believed in Jesus without having seen him. Ours is the gift of life through him.
“Give me a ticket for an aeroplane, Ain't got time to take a fast train, Lonely days are gone, I'ma goin' home, Jesus just wrote me a letter. Well he wrote me a letter, Told me he couldn't live without me no more, Listen mister can't you see I gotta get back to my Jesus once more, anyway…”
Oh, sorry, I do get carried away sometimes. Those are just some lyrics by Wayne Carson Thompson, from a song “The Letter”, with just a few changes for fun. I added Jesus in there because of this month’s topic. Did you know that there is an old Christian legend that Jesus once wrote a letter to a King, and that it was saved for posterity? Really: if you look at the Christian Apocrypha, you’ll find the story of how King Abgar V of Edessa wrote a letter to Jesus, and Jesus wrote back. This is remarkable because as far as we know, Jesus did not leave anything behind that he personally wrote. Jesus left so few actual traces on this earth that the scanty historical record allows some extreme skeptics to even question whether Jesus actually existed, or whether the gospel writers made him up! So an actual letter claiming to be written by Jesus would be a big deal indeed.
But I won’t string you along. Although many people in the time of early Roman Christianity and the Middle ages believed in this letter wholeheartedly, today we know it to be inauthentic. Today we merely call it the “Legend of Christ and Abgar.” The story goes like this…
Edessa was a city in Mespotamia (now modern Turkey). Around the year 200CE, King Abgar IX and the royal family of Edessa converted to Christianity. But no one is sure how long before that Christianity came to Edessa, and how it got there. The famous historian of the early church, Eusebius, thought he had the answer. While writing his book, “History of the Church” around 325CE, Eusebius collected and preserved every document and scrap of information he could find about the beginnings of Christianity. We are grateful to him for quoting and including so many things that would otherwise be lost now. But he was extremely enthusiastic about his faith, and it seems he could be taken in by a fake set of letters (which he found in the Records Office at Edessa and translated from Syriac), simply because it was so exciting to him to have letters to and from Jesus among his source documents.
In Book 1 of his history, Eusebius says that because of Jesus’ power to cure diseases, the Lord became famous far and wide, excitedly talked about in foreign lands very remote from Judea. One day, the King of Mesopotamia, Abgar, who was dying of an incurable disease, heard Jesus mentioned continually as a miraculous healer. Abgar sent the following letter by carrier to Jesus.
“Abgar Uchama the Toparch to Jesus, who has appeared as a gracious savior in the region of Jerusalem – greeting. I have heard about you and the cures you perform without drugs or herbs. If report is true, you make the blind see again and the lame walk about; you cleanse lepers, expel unclean spirits and demons, cure those suffering from chronic and painful diseases, and raise the dead. When I heard all this about you, I concluded that one of two things must be true – either you are God and came down from Heaven to do these things, or you are God’s Son doing them. Accordingly I am writing to beg you to come to me, whatever the inconvenience, and cure the disorder from which I suffer. I may add that I understand the Jews are treating you with contempt and desire to injure you: my city is very small, but highly esteemed, adequate for both of us.”
Jesus sent Abgar the following reply: “Happy are you who believed in me without having seen me! For it is written of me that those who have seen me will not believe in me, and that those who have not seen will believe and live. As to your request that I should come to you, I must complete all that I was sent to do here, and on completing it must at once be taken up to the One who sent me. When I have been taken up I will send you one of my disciples to cure your disorder and bring life to you and those with you.”
Now, during his ministry, Jesus had chosen about seventy disciples to carry his word for him. (Luke 10:1) After Jesus was taken up to Heaven, one of the seventy, named Thaddeus, was chosen to fulfill Jesus’ promise to Abgar. Thaddeus went to Edessa, armed with the power to cure diseases. Thaddeus told Abgar that “in proportion to your belief shall the prayers of your heart be granted.” Laying hands on the King, Thaddeus instantly cured him. Then Thaddeus preached the gospel to all the people of Edessa.
Eusebius wasn’t the only writer to report these events. Another document, the “Teaching of Addai (Thaddeus)”, written around 400CE, retells the legend and elaborates on it. This was about 75 years after Eusebius, remember, so it is understandable that the legend would have grown in the telling. In the new version, another line is added to the end of Jesus’ letter. It reads as follows: “And your city shall be blessed forever, and the enemy shall never overcome it.” This addition made the people of Edessa believe for a long time that they were protected by God from any conquerors…until finally they were conquered during the crusades.
Another new addition to the legend was the story of how the courier, who went back and forth between Jesus and Abgar, happened to be a painter. He had been asked to paint a portrait of Jesus, which then became the very first Icon of the Lord. But the legend did not stop growing there. Eventually, it was said that the portrait of Jesus was not painted by a person, but instead that Jesus had pressed a cloth to his face and transferred his image to it. This Icon, which brings to mind the more famous Shroud of Turin, vanished during the crusades.
Okay, so how do we know that the letter of Jesus to Abgar is inauthentic? The text of the letter seems to be taken from a couple of places in the gospels. In fact, the letter to Abgar actually quotes a harmony of the gospels (known as the “Diatessaron”), written by a second century Christian named Tatian. What is a harmony of the gospels? It is well known that among the four gospels, there are many small differences. A harmony is when all four gospels are combined into one and revised so that those differences are erased. Tatian’s harmony was written until around 175CE, so a letter from Jesus, written around 30CE, should not be quoting that gospel harmony.
So what really happened? I suppose that the Christianity came to Edessa, and that someone invented the legend in order to make Edessa more special. Possibly Abgar IX, converting in 200CE, inspired a story about the earlier Abgar V, and the letters were created as proof, sometime between 175CE (writing of the “Diatessaron”) and 325CE (Eusebius quotes the letters). The letters became very popular as a legend, which grew until it was retold and expanded around 400CE (writing of “Teaching of Addai”). The letters were copied and translated many times, used in liturgies, written on talismans and amulets, and even carved on stone and metal. Abgar was made a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
What is the moral of our story, besides the obvious lesson about gullible historians? Well, I think there is something deeper to be understood here. The letter to Abgar says: “Happy are you who believed in me without having seen me! For it is written of me that those who have seen me will not believe in me, and that those who have not seen will believe and live.” If you think about it, every Christian alive today is like Abgar. We are born, we grow up, and how do we learn anything about Jesus? We can’t go to Judea and see Jesus, even if we have time to take a fast train. We can’t even write him a letter. We have come onto the scene two thousand years too late. All we have that we can see is a book of ancient writings and what our parents and teachers tell us. Our only choice is to believe in him without having seen him. Whether or not the letter of Jesus was authentic, which is doubtful, it still has an important message to impart to us – happy are we, blessed are we, who have believed in Jesus without having seen him. Ours is the gift of life through him.
Did you get the number of that Beast?
#58: “Did you get the number of that Beast?” by Brendon Wahlberg
Last time, we talked about apocalypses in general, learning about which features are shared by all apocalyptic writings. This month, I thought it might be interesting to consider one of the most famous details from the most famous of apocalypses: the “Number of the Beast” from the Revelation of John.
“And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads; and on its horns were ten diadems, and on its heads were blasphemous names.” (Revelation 13:1) “Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed. It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all; and by the signs that it is allowed to perform on behalf of the beast, it deceives the inhabitants of earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived; and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” (Revelation 13:11-18)
This is a typical apocalyptic passage, full of symbolism and weird visions. But what makes this passage so famous is that cryptic number of the beast. 666 has entered into modern popular culture, inspiring everything from the name of an Iron Maiden album to a literal number mark on the head of horror movie character “Damien” in The Omen. Damien’s “666” birthmark in the movie is a good example of how the number of the beast has been misinterpreted in rather silly ways. But if 666 is not a birthmark on the son of the devil, what is the real meaning of the number, and how does one figure it out?
Apocalyptic writings were meant to reassure the faithful that although they were suffering, God was soon to intervene in history and bring about the defeat of the enemies of God’s people. For John of Patmos, the writer of Revelation, the enemy was Rome, and God’s people were the followers of Jesus. But to reassure the faithful, copies of John’s book had to be passed around. And if the enemy found a copy, then it was probably unwise for that copy to contain unambiguous and treasonous denunciations of the Roman Emperor. Instead, the book was better off describing Rome’s evil in symbolic terms, terms that the Christian reader would understand, but which a Roman official or soldier might not.
That’s why the passage above says, “This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number…” The wise, the ones with understanding, were the suffering Christian readers who needed the message the most. But the symbolism allowed the writer to stop just short of openly attacking Rome in writing. For example, in Revelation 17, the city of Rome itself is described in symbolic terms as “a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads…” Furthermore, it says that “on her forehead was written a name, a mystery: ‘Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations.’” The book goes on to say again that the symbolism has to be understood correctly by the faithful. “‘This calls for a mind that has wisdom: the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated…” The Roman capital stood on seven hills. Babylon was a great city which had historically caused great suffering for Israel, as described in scripture, and Rome was doing the same thing in John’s time, so it follows that this passage is really talking about Rome.
If the passage about the mystery of Babylon was supposed to be easy to interpret, then what about the number of the beast? John says that 666 is the number of a person, and that it should be “calculated”. What does that mean? Although this sounds confusing, it is probably a reference to “Gematria,” the practice of assigning numerical values to letters of the alphabet. This has been done with the Hebrew language since antiquity. There are several systems which have been used. One of them, the Mispar Gadol, is shown in the following chart.
Aleph 1 Yod 10 Qoph 100
Beth 2 Kaph 20 Resh 200
Gimel 3 Lamed 30 Shin 300
Daleth 4 Mem 40 Tav 400
He 5 Nun 50
Vav 6 Samech 60
Zayin 7 Ayin 70
Heth 8 Pe 80
Teth 9 Tsadi 90
As you can see, if each letter has a number value, then a person’s name can be turned into a number, by adding up the values of each letter. And likewise, a number can be turned into a name, by figuring out which letters add up to the total number. It is easy to calculate a number from a name, but hard to come up with just one name from a number! When you think about it, there are so many names that could add up to the same number. But John expected his readers to guess which name had letters with values that added up to 666. It was harder than it looked! Maybe that is why John also gave several other clues to the identity of the person who was such a beast to the Christians. The reader could use the other clues to guess who it was, and then check their math with gematria, just to be sure. But a Roman reading the apocalypse would be left scratching his head.
The most widely held theory is that 666 refers to the infamous Emperor Nero Caesar (54-68CE). After a huge fire in Rome, Nero blamed Christians and persecuted and tortured Jesus’ followers. Peter and Paul died under Nero. How does Nero’s name fit with the 666 puzzle? I checked good old Wikipedia to see how it added up. Here’s what they had to say: The Greek spelling, "Nerōn Kaisar", transliterates into Hebrew as "נרון קסר" or nrwn qsr. Adding the corresponding values yields 666, as shown (remember, Hebrew is written from right to left):
Resh (ר) Samech (ס) Qoph (ק) Nun (נ) Vav (ו) Resh (ר) Nun (נ)
200 60 100 50 6 200 50 = 666
So far, so good, right? However, not all ancient copies of Revelation have the number 666 in them. Remember, we don’t have any original manuscripts of any book of the Bible. We have a large number of later copies, and among these copies, there are some differences. A good study Bible will note where these ancient manuscripts differ. In short, a minority of texts has the number 616 instead of 666. Can Nero still be the beast if the number is 616? Maybe. It turns out that in Hebrew, the final “n” in “Neron” is optional. It could have been written as Nero or Neron, either way. And if you take away the value of a “nun” (see the chart above), you get 666 – 50 = 616. Voila. Nero can fit both numbers.
But if Nero was the beast of Revelation, how does the passage fit with what we know about Nero from history? As the passage says, Nero Caesar used the power and authority of Rome to force people to worship the Emperor as a living god and “cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.” The passage also says that the beast “was wounded by the sword and yet lived”. It is unclear whether this can refer to Nero. Nero really died by the sword, committing suicide when faced with assassination. Of course, even though the villain Nero died, there were other Emperors who came after him. Most scholars think that Revelation was written around 95CE, after Nero died. That would date the book to the reign of Emperor Domitian, another infamous Emperor who persecuted Christians. Maybe Domitian was the beast, or maybe both Nero and Domitian were sort of combined and together represented by the beast. That is to say, Nero was the infamous, archetypical agent of Satan, and Domitian was his latest incarnation when John of Patmos was writing. And naturally, if you work at it, you can fit the name and titles of Domitian to the number 666 using Gematria.
The puzzles included in apocalypses sometimes cannot be solved for sure. It is that ambiguity that tempts people into taking the number of the beast and applying it to whoever is hated in the present day. But that may be a waste of effort. The ambiguity was not an invitation for us to guess “who is the beast” in our own time, but instead it was a way for the original author to avoid putting something in writing that could get him or others killed. An apocalypse was not meant to be a prediction of who would be an evil person in the distant future. It was meant to reassure the people reading it that, in their own time, the oppressors who threatened them were going to be defeated. Now, things may not have worked out exactly according to John’s vision, but consider this: a few hundred years later, Rome became a Christian Empire. The Lamb was victorious.
Last time, we talked about apocalypses in general, learning about which features are shared by all apocalyptic writings. This month, I thought it might be interesting to consider one of the most famous details from the most famous of apocalypses: the “Number of the Beast” from the Revelation of John.
“And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads; and on its horns were ten diadems, and on its heads were blasphemous names.” (Revelation 13:1) “Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed. It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all; and by the signs that it is allowed to perform on behalf of the beast, it deceives the inhabitants of earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived; and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” (Revelation 13:11-18)
This is a typical apocalyptic passage, full of symbolism and weird visions. But what makes this passage so famous is that cryptic number of the beast. 666 has entered into modern popular culture, inspiring everything from the name of an Iron Maiden album to a literal number mark on the head of horror movie character “Damien” in The Omen. Damien’s “666” birthmark in the movie is a good example of how the number of the beast has been misinterpreted in rather silly ways. But if 666 is not a birthmark on the son of the devil, what is the real meaning of the number, and how does one figure it out?
Apocalyptic writings were meant to reassure the faithful that although they were suffering, God was soon to intervene in history and bring about the defeat of the enemies of God’s people. For John of Patmos, the writer of Revelation, the enemy was Rome, and God’s people were the followers of Jesus. But to reassure the faithful, copies of John’s book had to be passed around. And if the enemy found a copy, then it was probably unwise for that copy to contain unambiguous and treasonous denunciations of the Roman Emperor. Instead, the book was better off describing Rome’s evil in symbolic terms, terms that the Christian reader would understand, but which a Roman official or soldier might not.
That’s why the passage above says, “This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number…” The wise, the ones with understanding, were the suffering Christian readers who needed the message the most. But the symbolism allowed the writer to stop just short of openly attacking Rome in writing. For example, in Revelation 17, the city of Rome itself is described in symbolic terms as “a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads…” Furthermore, it says that “on her forehead was written a name, a mystery: ‘Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations.’” The book goes on to say again that the symbolism has to be understood correctly by the faithful. “‘This calls for a mind that has wisdom: the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated…” The Roman capital stood on seven hills. Babylon was a great city which had historically caused great suffering for Israel, as described in scripture, and Rome was doing the same thing in John’s time, so it follows that this passage is really talking about Rome.
If the passage about the mystery of Babylon was supposed to be easy to interpret, then what about the number of the beast? John says that 666 is the number of a person, and that it should be “calculated”. What does that mean? Although this sounds confusing, it is probably a reference to “Gematria,” the practice of assigning numerical values to letters of the alphabet. This has been done with the Hebrew language since antiquity. There are several systems which have been used. One of them, the Mispar Gadol, is shown in the following chart.
Aleph 1 Yod 10 Qoph 100
Beth 2 Kaph 20 Resh 200
Gimel 3 Lamed 30 Shin 300
Daleth 4 Mem 40 Tav 400
He 5 Nun 50
Vav 6 Samech 60
Zayin 7 Ayin 70
Heth 8 Pe 80
Teth 9 Tsadi 90
As you can see, if each letter has a number value, then a person’s name can be turned into a number, by adding up the values of each letter. And likewise, a number can be turned into a name, by figuring out which letters add up to the total number. It is easy to calculate a number from a name, but hard to come up with just one name from a number! When you think about it, there are so many names that could add up to the same number. But John expected his readers to guess which name had letters with values that added up to 666. It was harder than it looked! Maybe that is why John also gave several other clues to the identity of the person who was such a beast to the Christians. The reader could use the other clues to guess who it was, and then check their math with gematria, just to be sure. But a Roman reading the apocalypse would be left scratching his head.
The most widely held theory is that 666 refers to the infamous Emperor Nero Caesar (54-68CE). After a huge fire in Rome, Nero blamed Christians and persecuted and tortured Jesus’ followers. Peter and Paul died under Nero. How does Nero’s name fit with the 666 puzzle? I checked good old Wikipedia to see how it added up. Here’s what they had to say: The Greek spelling, "Nerōn Kaisar", transliterates into Hebrew as "נרון קסר" or nrwn qsr. Adding the corresponding values yields 666, as shown (remember, Hebrew is written from right to left):
Resh (ר) Samech (ס) Qoph (ק) Nun (נ) Vav (ו) Resh (ר) Nun (נ)
200 60 100 50 6 200 50 = 666
So far, so good, right? However, not all ancient copies of Revelation have the number 666 in them. Remember, we don’t have any original manuscripts of any book of the Bible. We have a large number of later copies, and among these copies, there are some differences. A good study Bible will note where these ancient manuscripts differ. In short, a minority of texts has the number 616 instead of 666. Can Nero still be the beast if the number is 616? Maybe. It turns out that in Hebrew, the final “n” in “Neron” is optional. It could have been written as Nero or Neron, either way. And if you take away the value of a “nun” (see the chart above), you get 666 – 50 = 616. Voila. Nero can fit both numbers.
But if Nero was the beast of Revelation, how does the passage fit with what we know about Nero from history? As the passage says, Nero Caesar used the power and authority of Rome to force people to worship the Emperor as a living god and “cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.” The passage also says that the beast “was wounded by the sword and yet lived”. It is unclear whether this can refer to Nero. Nero really died by the sword, committing suicide when faced with assassination. Of course, even though the villain Nero died, there were other Emperors who came after him. Most scholars think that Revelation was written around 95CE, after Nero died. That would date the book to the reign of Emperor Domitian, another infamous Emperor who persecuted Christians. Maybe Domitian was the beast, or maybe both Nero and Domitian were sort of combined and together represented by the beast. That is to say, Nero was the infamous, archetypical agent of Satan, and Domitian was his latest incarnation when John of Patmos was writing. And naturally, if you work at it, you can fit the name and titles of Domitian to the number 666 using Gematria.
The puzzles included in apocalypses sometimes cannot be solved for sure. It is that ambiguity that tempts people into taking the number of the beast and applying it to whoever is hated in the present day. But that may be a waste of effort. The ambiguity was not an invitation for us to guess “who is the beast” in our own time, but instead it was a way for the original author to avoid putting something in writing that could get him or others killed. An apocalypse was not meant to be a prediction of who would be an evil person in the distant future. It was meant to reassure the people reading it that, in their own time, the oppressors who threatened them were going to be defeated. Now, things may not have worked out exactly according to John’s vision, but consider this: a few hundred years later, Rome became a Christian Empire. The Lamb was victorious.
What is an apocalypse?
#57: “What is an apocalypse?” by Brendon Wahlberg
When people hear the word Apocalypse, they may think of a science fiction disaster that destroys the world, like in the film series “The Terminator”. But the word also refers to a type of book that can be found in the Bible. An “apocalypse” (in Greek, apokalupsis) is a “revelation” or “disclosure” of what is hidden. The two examples of this kind of book in our Bible are “Daniel” and (of course) the final book in the New Testament, “Revelation”. But among the books written in Bible times, there are many more apocalypses than those two. I have a collection of them in one of my books, which contains 25 different Old Testament period apocalypses and apocalyptic testaments. A collection of Christian writings contains 3 more. That is enough to allow scholars to decide what each of these books has in common. It’s a real genre, in other words, and there is a list of features shared by apocalypses. Let’s learn what they are.
1. Anonymity/Pseudonymity. My collection of apocalypses is contained in a book called “The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha”. My wife once saw it and asked me why I was reading about false pigs. She’s so funny! But really it means that these books have it in common that they were written by anonymous people using a fake name. So, they may have a title which mentions a famous person, like “Apocalypse of Abraham”, or “Apocalypse of Enoch”, but they were not really written by Abraham or Enoch. No one now knows who actually wrote them.
What are the possible reasons for saying your book was written by, say, Ezra or Adam? Using a pseudonym could have lent a kind of authority to the book, which it would not otherwise have had. A famous author who was revered in tradition would make people want to read it. Plus, the things which are revealed in an apocalypse are amazing secrets of heaven, hell, and the future. These secrets would not be revealed to just anyone; isn’t it more believable that they would be told to someone like Moses or Elijah, than to Joe from Judea?
Maybe the only apocalypse that isn’t pseudonymous is the New Testament Book of Revelation. It was probably really written by someone named John, although we are not sure which John that is.
2. Good vs. Evil – guess who wins? Why were apocalypses written in the first place? Maybe they were a response to suffering. Trying to explain why there is suffering for God’s people is an important theme in the Bible. If there is a God, why do we still suffer? As time went by, biblical writers proposed various answers to this question, but when the old answers stopped making sense, new answers were needed. For example, in the Torah, it is supposed that God’s people suffer because they break their half of the Covenant. The Prophetic books also assume that the people have broken the Covenant, and that their suffering is a punishment. Thus, the Babylonian exile could be explained.
But there is also a message of hope in the Prophets that once the people return to God and mend their ways, the suffering should end. For a while, when the exile ended, that seemed to be true. But what are God’s people to think when they DO return to God and mend their ways, and despite everything, they are still dominated by foreign empires (the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans)? Where is God’s justice now? Is God causing the present suffering? The answer had to be: no. Therefore there had to be evil in the world opposing God and bringing suffering to God’s people. Could the suffering be forever? No – it had to end at some point, and God had to be victorious. From this, we get the apocalyptic literary genre.
An apocalypse takes a dualistic view of the world, pitting good against evil, and God against Satan. On God’s side are the angels. Satan has his demons. On the side of evil are the forces of sin and death. The timeline of the apocalyptic view is also dualistic, revealing that now things are bad, but in the future, it will all be fixed. People suffer because for now, the world is controlled by evil forces. But one day, God will intervene in the world and defeat evil. Everything opposed to God will be destroyed at that time, and God’s people will be restored. So the genre is very black and white, good and evil, now and later: a pervasive dualism.
3. A grim outlook. Despite the future victory of God, the state of the present is rather grim in an apocalypse. And if you think things are bad now, think again. An apocalypse usually claims that things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. People are not in control of how bad it will get. God has relinquished control of the world to evil for the present time. The suffering will only get more intense.
4. The end is near. On the other hand, despite all the suffering, the redemptive end will come soon. The triumph of God is imminent. The reader of an apocalypse had to hold on for just a little while longer. “The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20)
5. Weird symbolism, but an Angel explains it all. One strange feature of most apocalypses is that the revealing of hidden truths is done through visions which are hard to understand. One famous example is in Revelations 13, in which Rome and one of the Emperors are symbolized by bizarre beasts. The book does not simply say that Rome is the enemy. Perhaps that would not be cryptic enough. To this day, it is still uncertain which Emperor is symbolically meant by the “number of the beast” (Rev 13:18), although Nero and Domitian are good candidates.
The main character of the book may even get a guided tour of Heaven or Hell, and learn the deepest secrets of how the universe is set up. But the information is not typically for mortal men to know. The visions confuse both the reader and the character who is having the visions. But often the main character is accompanied by an angel who proceeds to explain everything so that we can understand it.
6. Future past. Another feature of an apocalypse was using the past to “predict the future.” Here, too, using a pseudonym made sense. If you are describing the past in order to seem like you are predicting the future, it makes sense to claim that the book was written by someone in the distant past, for whom your own past events would be future events. For example, suppose your book claims to be written by Moses. Moses first “predicts” some things that have already happened, like the Babylonian exile. But as the text goes on, Moses begins to predict things that happened very recently. These things, the reader recognizes. Finally, the book predicts things that clearly have not yet happened. Because the past events were correctly predicted, the reader may place his trust in the future predictions too.
A good example of this is found in Daniel. Daniel is supposedly written during the Babylonian exile (597 BCE), but really it was written during the time of the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus (167BCE). From the actual vantage point of his present day, Daniel “predicts” several past empires that have dominated the people of Israel since the Babylonian exile. Then he mentions recent atrocities, such as Antiochus placing a pagan statue in the Temple. When Daniel finally begins to predict what will happen to the enemies of Israel in what was then the real future, his readers would have better believed that he knew what was coming.
7. Motivational speakers. The main point of an apocalypse might have been to comfort the reader. In the face of suffering, you had to have a reason for staying true to your faith. You still had to have hope. Maybe the details of the future which are revealed in each book are less important than the call to not give up. The use of a famous pseudonym in the title might also be comforting, in the sense that the reader’s present day troubles were foreseen and predicted by famous figures from scripture. This might give a sense that history is unfolding like it should, and that everything is not out of control.
The apocalyptic genre is an important one to understand. Basically, the ideas found in Jewish apocalyptic writings gave rise to Christianity and the New Testament. Although there is only one major apocalypse found in the New Testament, the Gospels and the writings of Paul are full of apocalyptic thinking. Jesus himself had a basic message that was partly apocalyptic. Jesus and Paul both said that the end of history was coming soon, and that there would be signs and worse suffering before the end. But soon, God and the Son of Man were going to triumph completely.
We have already mentioned how the Prophets were unable to explain the continued suffering of God’s people even after it seemed like they had returned to God and repented. And we have seen that the apocalypse was a new way to explain that suffering. But what happened when the apocalyptic viewpoint was no longer a way to explain suffering? Because, if you think about it for a moment, there is a built-in flaw. An apocalypse says that in time, and soon, there will be a great change for the better. But what about when a long time passes and there is no change, or things just get worse? The end-times events in Revelation were supposed to occur soon, and now it is 2,000 years later.
I know some people simply say that the predictions have yet to come true, but that is just a way to avoid the real issue. Another approach is basically what Christianity has done. While the dualism of an apocalypse was now-later, eventually that was replaced with a new dualism: Earth-Heaven. When the predicted end to suffering does not come as time goes on (and on and on), but the basic truth remains that it must somehow still come, then we come to think it must come in Heaven. The old dualism was, in a way, horizontal, in time here on Earth, from “now” to “later”, but then it became sort of vertical, from “down here” to “up there”. Despite our suffering on Earth here and now, there will be peace and justice in the afterlife there in Heaven. This is an answer to the question of suffering that, finally, cannot be disproven in this lifetime.
When people hear the word Apocalypse, they may think of a science fiction disaster that destroys the world, like in the film series “The Terminator”. But the word also refers to a type of book that can be found in the Bible. An “apocalypse” (in Greek, apokalupsis) is a “revelation” or “disclosure” of what is hidden. The two examples of this kind of book in our Bible are “Daniel” and (of course) the final book in the New Testament, “Revelation”. But among the books written in Bible times, there are many more apocalypses than those two. I have a collection of them in one of my books, which contains 25 different Old Testament period apocalypses and apocalyptic testaments. A collection of Christian writings contains 3 more. That is enough to allow scholars to decide what each of these books has in common. It’s a real genre, in other words, and there is a list of features shared by apocalypses. Let’s learn what they are.
1. Anonymity/Pseudonymity. My collection of apocalypses is contained in a book called “The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha”. My wife once saw it and asked me why I was reading about false pigs. She’s so funny! But really it means that these books have it in common that they were written by anonymous people using a fake name. So, they may have a title which mentions a famous person, like “Apocalypse of Abraham”, or “Apocalypse of Enoch”, but they were not really written by Abraham or Enoch. No one now knows who actually wrote them.
What are the possible reasons for saying your book was written by, say, Ezra or Adam? Using a pseudonym could have lent a kind of authority to the book, which it would not otherwise have had. A famous author who was revered in tradition would make people want to read it. Plus, the things which are revealed in an apocalypse are amazing secrets of heaven, hell, and the future. These secrets would not be revealed to just anyone; isn’t it more believable that they would be told to someone like Moses or Elijah, than to Joe from Judea?
Maybe the only apocalypse that isn’t pseudonymous is the New Testament Book of Revelation. It was probably really written by someone named John, although we are not sure which John that is.
2. Good vs. Evil – guess who wins? Why were apocalypses written in the first place? Maybe they were a response to suffering. Trying to explain why there is suffering for God’s people is an important theme in the Bible. If there is a God, why do we still suffer? As time went by, biblical writers proposed various answers to this question, but when the old answers stopped making sense, new answers were needed. For example, in the Torah, it is supposed that God’s people suffer because they break their half of the Covenant. The Prophetic books also assume that the people have broken the Covenant, and that their suffering is a punishment. Thus, the Babylonian exile could be explained.
But there is also a message of hope in the Prophets that once the people return to God and mend their ways, the suffering should end. For a while, when the exile ended, that seemed to be true. But what are God’s people to think when they DO return to God and mend their ways, and despite everything, they are still dominated by foreign empires (the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans)? Where is God’s justice now? Is God causing the present suffering? The answer had to be: no. Therefore there had to be evil in the world opposing God and bringing suffering to God’s people. Could the suffering be forever? No – it had to end at some point, and God had to be victorious. From this, we get the apocalyptic literary genre.
An apocalypse takes a dualistic view of the world, pitting good against evil, and God against Satan. On God’s side are the angels. Satan has his demons. On the side of evil are the forces of sin and death. The timeline of the apocalyptic view is also dualistic, revealing that now things are bad, but in the future, it will all be fixed. People suffer because for now, the world is controlled by evil forces. But one day, God will intervene in the world and defeat evil. Everything opposed to God will be destroyed at that time, and God’s people will be restored. So the genre is very black and white, good and evil, now and later: a pervasive dualism.
3. A grim outlook. Despite the future victory of God, the state of the present is rather grim in an apocalypse. And if you think things are bad now, think again. An apocalypse usually claims that things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. People are not in control of how bad it will get. God has relinquished control of the world to evil for the present time. The suffering will only get more intense.
4. The end is near. On the other hand, despite all the suffering, the redemptive end will come soon. The triumph of God is imminent. The reader of an apocalypse had to hold on for just a little while longer. “The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20)
5. Weird symbolism, but an Angel explains it all. One strange feature of most apocalypses is that the revealing of hidden truths is done through visions which are hard to understand. One famous example is in Revelations 13, in which Rome and one of the Emperors are symbolized by bizarre beasts. The book does not simply say that Rome is the enemy. Perhaps that would not be cryptic enough. To this day, it is still uncertain which Emperor is symbolically meant by the “number of the beast” (Rev 13:18), although Nero and Domitian are good candidates.
The main character of the book may even get a guided tour of Heaven or Hell, and learn the deepest secrets of how the universe is set up. But the information is not typically for mortal men to know. The visions confuse both the reader and the character who is having the visions. But often the main character is accompanied by an angel who proceeds to explain everything so that we can understand it.
6. Future past. Another feature of an apocalypse was using the past to “predict the future.” Here, too, using a pseudonym made sense. If you are describing the past in order to seem like you are predicting the future, it makes sense to claim that the book was written by someone in the distant past, for whom your own past events would be future events. For example, suppose your book claims to be written by Moses. Moses first “predicts” some things that have already happened, like the Babylonian exile. But as the text goes on, Moses begins to predict things that happened very recently. These things, the reader recognizes. Finally, the book predicts things that clearly have not yet happened. Because the past events were correctly predicted, the reader may place his trust in the future predictions too.
A good example of this is found in Daniel. Daniel is supposedly written during the Babylonian exile (597 BCE), but really it was written during the time of the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus (167BCE). From the actual vantage point of his present day, Daniel “predicts” several past empires that have dominated the people of Israel since the Babylonian exile. Then he mentions recent atrocities, such as Antiochus placing a pagan statue in the Temple. When Daniel finally begins to predict what will happen to the enemies of Israel in what was then the real future, his readers would have better believed that he knew what was coming.
7. Motivational speakers. The main point of an apocalypse might have been to comfort the reader. In the face of suffering, you had to have a reason for staying true to your faith. You still had to have hope. Maybe the details of the future which are revealed in each book are less important than the call to not give up. The use of a famous pseudonym in the title might also be comforting, in the sense that the reader’s present day troubles were foreseen and predicted by famous figures from scripture. This might give a sense that history is unfolding like it should, and that everything is not out of control.
The apocalyptic genre is an important one to understand. Basically, the ideas found in Jewish apocalyptic writings gave rise to Christianity and the New Testament. Although there is only one major apocalypse found in the New Testament, the Gospels and the writings of Paul are full of apocalyptic thinking. Jesus himself had a basic message that was partly apocalyptic. Jesus and Paul both said that the end of history was coming soon, and that there would be signs and worse suffering before the end. But soon, God and the Son of Man were going to triumph completely.
We have already mentioned how the Prophets were unable to explain the continued suffering of God’s people even after it seemed like they had returned to God and repented. And we have seen that the apocalypse was a new way to explain that suffering. But what happened when the apocalyptic viewpoint was no longer a way to explain suffering? Because, if you think about it for a moment, there is a built-in flaw. An apocalypse says that in time, and soon, there will be a great change for the better. But what about when a long time passes and there is no change, or things just get worse? The end-times events in Revelation were supposed to occur soon, and now it is 2,000 years later.
I know some people simply say that the predictions have yet to come true, but that is just a way to avoid the real issue. Another approach is basically what Christianity has done. While the dualism of an apocalypse was now-later, eventually that was replaced with a new dualism: Earth-Heaven. When the predicted end to suffering does not come as time goes on (and on and on), but the basic truth remains that it must somehow still come, then we come to think it must come in Heaven. The old dualism was, in a way, horizontal, in time here on Earth, from “now” to “later”, but then it became sort of vertical, from “down here” to “up there”. Despite our suffering on Earth here and now, there will be peace and justice in the afterlife there in Heaven. This is an answer to the question of suffering that, finally, cannot be disproven in this lifetime.
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