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Hey, Jude

2011-10-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

#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…”)

Paul's First Letter

2011-10-22T06:13:00.001-07:00

#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 forecast calls for not one stone left standing upon another…

2011-10-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

#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.

What Did Gnostics Believe In?

2011-10-22T06:08:00.000-07:00

#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.

Chapter and Verse, for better or worse

2011-05-15T08:43:00.001-07:00

#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.

Childhood in Jesus’ Time

2011-05-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

#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.

How to read the Bible: Parallel lines

2011-05-15T08:40:00.000-07:00

#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?)

Jesus wrote me a letter…

2011-05-15T08:39:00.001-07:00

#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.

Did you get the number of that Beast?

2011-05-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

#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.

What is an apocalypse?

2011-05-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

#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.

What does the Koran say about Jesus?

2011-05-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

#56: “What does the Koran say about Jesus?” by Brendon Wahlberg
The recent news story about a proposed Koran burning made me wonder… should a church be burning a book which contains stories about Jesus? I knew that the Koran included several figures from the Bible, so I began to ask what the Koran actually says about Jesus. Although I have studied the Bible for many years, I approached the topic of the Koran as a beginner, determined to learn if there is any common ground between what the two Holy books say about the central figure of Christianity.
First, a few Koran basics are in order. The Koran (also written as Qur’an) is the scripture of the religion of Islam, and contains the word of God, Allah, as spoken to the prophet Mohammed (also written as Muhammad) by the angel Gabriel. Mohammed was born in 570CE in Mecca. When the prophet was about forty, while he was praying and meditating in a cave, Gabriel began to recite the words to him that would become the Koran (Koran means “recital”). Mohammed wrote the words on paper, bones, leaves, skins, stones, and bark. Sometimes his followers memorized the words. The revelation continued for about twenty years, when Mohammed finally died in Medina in 632CE. About twenty years after his death, his followers began to compile the Koran as a unified written document in order to preserve it.
The purpose of the Koran was both to confirm and to correct the scriptures that had previously been given to the Jews (the Hebrew Bible) and to the Christians (the New Testament). The idea was that the Jews and the Christians had received God’s word but had gone astray. The Jews had corrupted their scripture, and the Christians had erroneously worshipped Jesus as the Son of God. The Koran was meant to bring them all back to the true religion that Abraham had originally followed before either Judaism or Christianity arose. This religion, called Islam, is about absolute submission to the will of God.
The Koran thus contains stories about Jesus that are meant to correct what the New Testament says about him. The Koran itself is divided into 114 chapters called Suras, arranged in order from longest (perhaps thirty pages or so) to shortest (one paragraph). Each Sura has a number and a name, like “The Cow” or “Noah”. There is no chronological order to the book, and as a result, the brief stories about Jesus, and the places where he is mentioned, are scattered throughout the Suras. There is not really a narrative about Jesus’ life like we find in the Gospels. Because we as Christians are used to thinking about Jesus’ life story in some sort of order, I will take what I found in the Koran about Jesus, and arrange it in a more chronological way. (Note: the English translation of the Koran used here was made by N. J. Dawood in 1956.)
One thing to be aware of as you explore the Koran looking for Jesus, is that several of the Koran’s stories are very similar to other stories which can be found in old Apocryphal Christian writings that did not make it into the New Testament, such as the “Proto-Gospel of James” or the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (both of which I have written about in this column.) Western scholars believe that the Koran may have used these writings as sources about Jesus. However, they are somewhat unfamiliar sources to western readers precisely because they were excluded from the Bible. I’ll mention such possible sources as I go along.
The Koran begins the story of Jesus with the birth of his mother Mary (in Sura 3: The Imrans). Mary’s mother dedicates her unborn child to the Lord, and so the child Mary is sent to the Jewish Temple to live under the care of a Priest named Zacharias. Mary is miraculously fed by God. “Whenever Zacharias visited her in the Shrine he found that she had food with her. ‘Mary’, he said, ‘where is this food from?’ ‘ It is from Allah’, she answered.” An angel says to Mary, “Allah has chosen you. He has made you pure and exalted you above all women.” When Mary is older, they cast lots to see which person in the community will take charge of her. Neither the miraculous feeding nor the lottery are details found in the New Testament, but they can be found in the “Proto-Gospel of James”, an apocryphal book that says it is Joseph who takes charge of young Mary. Curiously enough, the Koran does not mention Joseph at all.
The Koran tells of Jesus’ conception in Sura 3 and in Sura 19: Mary. In Sura 19, Mary goes alone to a solitary place in the desert. A spirit-messenger of God tells her that she will be given a “holy son”. Sura 3 elaborates that “The angels said to Mary, ‘Allah bids you rejoice in a Word from him. His name is the Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary.” “’Lord,’ she said, how can I bear a child when no man has touched me?’ He replied, such is the will of Allah. He creates whom he will. When He decrees a thing He need only say: ‘Be’, and it is.” In the words of Sura 3, “Jesus is like Adam in the sight of Allah. He created him of dust and then said to him: ‘Be’, and he was.” Sura 19 concludes that “Thereupon she conceived him, and retired to a far-off place.”
It is important to understand that the Koran’s understanding of Jesus’ origin is similar to the New Testament in some ways, and very different in others. Basically, the Koran agrees that Mary had a virgin birth, but denies that Jesus is the “Son of God”. Sura 19 says, “Those who say: ‘The Lord of Mercy has begotten a son’ preach a monstrous falsehood, at which the very heavens might crack…” The very idea that God could beget a child is impossible in the Koran. God is not physical and can never have a child. Instead, God breathed his spirit into Mary while she stayed a virgin (Sura 21: The Prophets). Sura 112: Unity says, “Allah is One, the Eternal God. He begot none, nor was He begotten. None is equal to him.” Sura 5: The Table says, “Unbelievers are those that say, ‘Allah is the Messiah, the son of Mary’. […] Unbelievers are those that say, Allah is one of three’. There is but one God.” As we will see next, the Koran acknowledges Jesus as an anointed prophet who could do miracles, but denies that he is the Son of God. The idea is that God simply created Jesus, which is of course at odds with basic Christian theology.
Sura 19 continues the story of Mary and Jesus. Alone in the desert, she lies beneath a palm tree and gives birth. (This is of course a rather different birth location than in Bethlehem.) To sustain her, the Lord provides ripe dates that can simply fall down to the exhausted Mary from the high tree, and a brook of water starts to flow at her feet. This story is not found in the New Testament, but a very similar miracle is found in an Apocryphal work called “The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew”, during an account of Mary’s flight to Egypt. In “Pseudo-Matthew”, a very young Jesus makes a palm tree bend down for his exhausted mother, and causes a hidden spring to bubble up. In Sura 19, when Mary returns to civilization with the baby, she is accused of being a whore. To answer her accusers, Mary silently points them towards the cradle with baby Jesus in it. Miraculously, Jesus preaches to them from the cradle, saying, “I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the Gospel and ordained me a prophet. His blessing is upon me wherever I go, and he […] has purged me of vanity and wickedness.” Jesus does not preach from the cradle in the New Testament, but he does so in the very beginning of an Apocryphal work called the “Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior”.
Sura 3 contains a brief account of the adult life of Jesus, in the form of God describing what the baby Jesus will be like when he grows up. The Koran says, God “will instruct him in the Scriptures and in wisdom, in the Torah and in the Gospel, and send him forth as an apostle to the Israelites. He will say: ‘I bring you a sign from your Lord. From clay I will make for you the likeness of a bird. I shall breathe into it, and, by Allah’s leave, it shall become a living bird. By Allah’s leave I shall give sight to the blind man, heal the leper, and raise the dead to life. I shall tell you what to eat and what to store up in your houses. Surely that will be a sign for you, if you are true believers. I come to confirm the Torah that has already been revealed and to make lawful to you some of the things you are forbidden. I bring you a sign from your Lord: therefore fear him and obey me. Allah is my God and your God: therefore serve Him. That is the straight path.’” As strange as it may seem to Christian readers, this small passage is basically most of what the Koran has to say about Jesus’ adult ministry!
There are a few things to understand about the passage we just read. First, notice that Jesus has no power of his own. Every miracle he performs is only by God’s leave. Second, there is the odd mention of a clay bird that comes to life. This miracle is not found in the New Testament, but it is found in an Apocryphal work called the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas”, where young Jesus brings several clay birds to life. Third, notice how the passage maintains a strict monotheism. Allah is Jesus’ God.
The Koran has a few other things to say about Jesus’ adult life. Sura 5 says that God strengthened Jesus with the Holy Spirit, and protected Jesus from the Israelite unbelievers when they called Jesus’ miracles nothing but plain magic. Sura 61: Battle Array is also notable in that it depicts Jesus predicting the prophet Mohammed. “I am sent forth to you by Allah to confirm the Torah already revealed and to give news of an apostle that will come after me whose name is Ahmed.” (Ahmed = Mohammed.)
In the New Testament, Jesus has twelve disciples during his adult life. These are briefly mentioned in the Koran too. Sura 3 says that the disciples help Jesus in the cause of Allah, saying, “We are the helpers of Allah. We believe in Him. Bear witness that we have surrendered ourselves to him. Lord, we believe in your revelations and follow your apostle. Count us among your witnesses.” Sura 5 says that one day, the disciples asked for a sign from God as proof that what Jesus said was true. “Can Allah send down to us from heaven a table spread with food?” God replied, “I am sending one to you. But whoever of you disbelieves hereafter shall be punished as no man has ever been punished.” And that pair of stories is basically all the Koran has to say about Jesus’ disciples.
Now we come to the topic of Jesus’ crucifixion. The Koran differs greatly from the New Testament in this area. Basically, the Koran says that Jesus was not crucified, but was instead lifted up to heaven without dying. Here is the key passage from Sura 4: Women. “They denied the truth and uttered a monstrous falsehood against Mary. They declared: ‘We have put to death the Messiah Jesus the son of Mary, the apostle of Allah.’ They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but they thought they did. [literal translation: he was made to resemble another for them.] Those that disagreed about him were in doubt concerning his death, for what they knew about it was sheer conjecture; they were not sure that they had slain him. Allah lifted him up to His presence.” In other words, according to the Koran, Jesus was not really crucified, and someone else who looked like Jesus was crucified in his place. This idea is, of course, not found in the New Testament, but it is found in one Gnostic Christian work called the “Second Treatise of the Great Seth” (from the Nag Hammadi Library). In “Great Seth”, Jesus looks on, laughing in amusement as someone else is crucified instead, while other onlookers are ignorant of the truth (the Gnostic truth that Jesus was really a spiritual being who could not die).
So, what is the deal with all of these apparent Koran borrowings from Christian Apocrypha? Western scholars say it is just that – borrowing. When the Koran was being compiled, such apocryphal writings were still in circulation along trade routes, in written form or in popular oral traditions. Perhaps the apocryphal Jesus stories were given equal weight with canonical New Testament stories and included in the Koran. A western reader might say that this means parts of the Koran are based on fictional or fanciful sources, because that is how Christians classify their own apocryphal books. But a Muslim would argue the opposite: every word of the Koran is true and from God. If the Koran’s Jesus stories match those in so-called apocryphal writings, then the apocryphal writings must be really true.
The Koran claims that Jesus will have a role to play in the future. One day, the Day of Judgment will arrive (called the Day of Resurrection in Sura 3.) Jesus has been taken away from the unbelievers and lifted up to God until that day comes. On that day, unbelievers will be punished, and God will judge all disputes. Jesus will be a portent of the coming of the hour of doom and a witness against unbelievers.
The Koran makes passing references to Jesus in several places, adding to the final picture. Each time, the Koran has something to say about what Jesus is, or is not. For example, Jesus is not more than a mortal favored by God to be an example to Israel (Sura 43: Ornaments of Gold). Jesus is a descendant of King David who received scripture, wisdom, prophet-hood, and guidance from God (Sura 6: Cattle). Jesus is not someone who ever asked people to worship him and his mother (Sura 5). Jesus is a sign to all men (Sura 21). All of these details are part of the big picture of Jesus in the Koran. What is that big picture? Well, there are certainly many things which Christians must disagree with: Jesus was never crucified? Jesus is not the Son of God? Of course Christians cannot agree with these statements. But we should not be surprised by them. Islam was once a new religion that was in direct competition with Christianity. It was necessary for the Koran to dispute or deny some of the claims of a rival religion as Islam struggled into being. Look at the way early Christianity disputed and denied the claims of Judaism which came before it. I mean, if Islam had come along before Christianity, what would the New Testament have had to say about the Koran’s claims? Yet, the surprising thing is how much common ground can be found about Jesus. Let’s try for a moment to summarize as many points as we can, where the Koran and the New Testament agree about Jesus.
1. Jesus had a virgin birth and a miraculous conception. 2. Jesus and his mother Mary were pure and without sin. 3. God sent the Holy Spirit to help Jesus. 4. Jesus spoke for God as a prophet. 5. Jesus performed miracles such as curing the blind and raising the dead. 6. Jesus affirmed the Torah and brought the Good News, the Gospel “in which there is guidance and light, corroborating that which was revealed before it in the Torah, a guide and an admonition to the righteous” (Sura 5). 7. Jesus had disciples and preached to Israel, where some believed in him and some did not. 8. After his time on Earth was done, Jesus was taken to Heaven to be with God until the Day of Judgment. 9. Jesus was the Messiah.
Of course, there are disagreements too. What do we do with those? The Koran instructs Muslims to try to persuade Christians. “Say: ‘People of the Book, let us come to an agreement that we will worship none but Allah, that we will associate none with him, and that none of us will set up mortals as gods besides him.’ If they refuse, say: ‘Bear witness that we have surrendered ourselves to Allah.’” (Sura 3) That sounds like a path towards “agreeing to disagree.” And that is a good thing. Finding some common ground, combined with a peaceful disagreement, is the recipe for living together in America. Then there is no need for burning anyone’s books! These words from Sura 42: Counsel, are a good sentiment to end with: “We have our own works and you have yours; let there be no argument between us. Allah will bring us all together, for to Him we shall return.”

The Whole Megillah

2011-05-15T08:22:00.001-07:00

#55: “The Whole Megillah” by Brendon Wahlberg
Pop quiz: which book of the Old Testament never once mentions God in it? Need more hints? This book is the only one in the entire Hebrew Bible not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Not even a tiny fragment of it was there. Most scholars think this book is a work of patriotic fiction, not history, because its details disagree with what we know from historical sources. More clues? Martin Luther hated this book, saying of it, “I would it did not exist; for it Judaizes too much, and has in it a great deal of heathenish naughtiness […] it is more worthy than all [the apocryphal books] of being excluded from the Canon.” But despite Luther’s disdain, this book is read out loud every year in a party atmosphere, complete with costumes and noise-makers. Got it yet?
Yes, it’s the Book of Esther. Five points for you. Now, you are probably curious about my title. The word “Megillah” means a rolled scroll. There are five biblical scrolls, or “Megillot”, that are read in synagogues on certain holidays, namely Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. Esther is the most important one, the Megillah, the only one which it is obligatory to hear, read out loud in its entirety, on the holiday of Purim. Anyway, twentieth century Jewish comedians (for example, on “Laugh-In”) took this word and popularized an expression, the “Whole Megillah.” It means a long and boring story, tediously detailed and overly embroidered, long winded and drawn-out, an overextended and overly complicated account, a very involved and unnecessarily lengthy tale…sort of like this sentence, but much longer. Why did this expression make reference to the Megillah, the scroll of Esther? Maybe it was because, when you sit in the Synagogue listening to every word of it, it feels long and drawn-out. Maybe that is why there are noise-makers for the kids to play with…but more on this later.
I chose the title because Esther is the most important Megillah, and also because Esther comes in two versions. One is the original Hebrew version, written around 400BCE, and the other is a newer Greek version, written a few hundred years later. Now, the really interesting thing is, the Greek version is longer. Greek Esther is the same as the Hebrew version, but it has six new chapters added to it. And, while the original Hebrew Esther never mentions God even once, the six new chapters of Greek Esther are jam packed with references to God. What’s the story, here? Which version, in other words, is the “whole” Megillah?
To answer the question, let’s first see what the Hebrew version is all about. The Book of Esther is set in the ancient Persian Empire during the reign of King Ahasuerus (possibly the same person as Xerxes I, 485-464 BCE). The King throws a huge feast in his Palace of Susa, during which he drunkenly commands his wife, Vashti, to appear before his guests and show off her beauty. Vashti refuses, and the King is infuriated. His advisors warn him that her refusal might become widely known and inspire all Persian wives to disobey their husbands (shocking, I know!) He issues an irrevocable decree that Vashti is to be replaced as Queen, as her punishment.
The King orders the collection of all available beautiful young virgins. His favorite will become the new Queen. In Susa, there is a lovely young Jewish woman named Esther. She has lost her parents, and is cared for by her foster father Mordecai. When Esther joins the harem, Mordecai warns her not to reveal that she is Jewish, for as the rest of the book reveals, there was a dangerous level of anti-Semitism aimed at the Jews of the Diaspora in Persia. The King loves Esther more than all the other women, and makes her Queen instead of Vashti.
Mordecai watches over Esther from the Palace gate, and it is there that he overhears a plot to murder the King. He tells Esther, who tells the King, and the plot is foiled. Mordecai’s deeds are written in the royal records. Soon after that, the King happens to elevate a man named Haman (the villain of the story) to high rank. Haman is upset when everyone bows down before him at the Palace gate…except Mordecai. Haman is so angry, that he decides to kill not only Mordecai, but also all of Mordecai’s people, all of the Jews in Persia. The day of the massacre is planned.
Haman then goes to the King to gain his approval for the plan. Deviously, Haman describes a people living among the Persians but apart from them, a people with different laws, who do not obey the King’s laws. He persuades the King that these people, young and old, men, women, and children, should all be killed. Ahasuerus issues an irrevocable decree to do so, on the date chosen by Haman. Learning of the decree, Mordecai begs Esther to go to the King and help her people. She protests, saying that the punishment for approaching Ahasuerus uninvited is death. But finally, she decides to risk it. Fortunately, the King welcomes her, and accepts her invitation to a private banquet, along with Haman, on the following evening.
Meanwhile, Haman continues to fume about Mordecai. His wife suggests that he set up a gallows to hang Mordecai. But the King, unable to sleep, reads about Mordecai in the royal records, realizing that nothing has been done to reward him for foiling the assassination plot. In the morning, Ahasuerus asks Haman what should be done for “the man whom the King wishes to reward.” Of course, Haman thinks the King means him, not Mordecai. Haman suggests that such a person should be given the King’s robe and the King’s horse to ride in public, with a courtier leading the horse and announcing the honor to everyone. Haman is mortified when he is told to go and honor Mordecai in that fashion.
At the private banquet with Esther and Haman, the King offers his Queen anything she wishes. She asks only for the King to spare her life and the lives of her people. The King, not knowing his wife is Jewish, demands to know who would threaten his Queen’s life, and at once, she accuses Haman. The King stands and has to leave the room in his rage, while a stunned Haman throws himself on the Queen and begs Esther for his life. The King returns and interprets this as Haman daring to violate Esther. It is over for Haman. He is hanged on the very gallows he has set up for Mordecai. The exalted position of Haman is given to Mordecai.
But the decree has already gone out to slaughter the Jews in Persia, and it cannot be revoked. Esther and Mordecai are allowed to send out a second decree that when the attack comes, the Jews will be allowed to band together and defend themselves. When the terrible day arrives, the Jews are victorious, killing thousands of armed attackers in all of Persia. A day of anticipated mourning has been turned into a day of celebration and feasting, and Mordecai establishes the holiday of Purim to commemorate it. Purim is still celebrated today, and during the reading of the complete scroll of Esther, children use loud noise-makers to drown out the sound of Haman’s name whenever it is spoken. And that is the whole Megillah. Or is it?
By the time the Book of Esther was a few hundred years old, some Jews were already feeling uncomfortable about the fact that God is never mentioned in it. All of the rest of the Holy Scriptures were all about God. Not Esther – there, the characters save themselves through their own efforts. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek (as the Septuagint), a new version of Esther was written to include in it. An unknown writer decided to revise Esther and correct the problem of God’s absence. A total of six new chapters were written and added to the original. So what do these chapters contain?
A new prologue describes Mordecai having a dream vision like something out of Revelation in the New Testament. Two dragons fight in an apocalyptic landscape, symbolizing the conflict between Mordecai and Haman. The entire people, on the verge of destruction, cry out to God, who brings their salvation in the form of light and water, symbolizing Esther becoming Queen. So right away, the new writer establishes that it is God whose actions save his people. A new epilogue gives the interpretation of the dream, concluding that God saved his people by working signs and great wonders.
Two other new chapters claim to be actual letters, copies of the decrees issued by the King, first to doom the Jews, and later to save them. But the letters add nothing to the story. They are only wordy and redundant explanations of what has already been said. These added sections really do turn the book into more of a “whole Megillah” in the sense that I mentioned earlier. However, there is one interesting detail in the letters. The Hebrew version of Esther calls Haman an “Agagite”, a descendant of the Amalekites, ancient enemies of the Jews. But the new Greek additions call Haman a “Macedonian”, which was not an ancient enemy, but a very current one. At the time of the additions to the book, the Macedonians under Alexander had conquered the Persians and were the newest oppressors of the Jews.
Another new section is added in the middle of the story. Maybe it offended the writer that Esther and Mordecai solved their own problems, seemingly without God’s intervention. So a lengthy prayer section is added, at the point where Mordecai learns of the terrible decree. The prayer of Mordecai recognizes God as all powerful and all knowing. Mordecai says that he did not refuse to bow before Haman out of pride, but because he would not bow before anyone except God. He prays to God to have pity and save his people from their enemies. Those who praise God must not be destroyed, so that they may live to continue praising God. Next, Esther discards all her finery and prays in sackcloth and ashes, recognizing that she has no help but God. She acknowledges that she and her people have sinned by worshipping other gods, and that their punishment is just. She begs God not to let his people be utterly destroyed, but instead to make an example for the world by destroying the wicked enemies of the Jews. She claims to hate her own Queenly grandeur, and swears that she has privately abhorred all pagan sacrifices and hated the bed of the uncircumcised. She reiterates that she is alone and that she has no one to help her but God.
The Greek additions to Esther are certainly in keeping with the themes of other Jewish religious writings of the time. And they certainly do correct the perceived flaw of the book not mentioning God. However, the additions are rather heavy handed and extreme in their contrast to the content and tone of the Hebrew original. And speaking of the Hebrew original, remember that it is the version that has been preserved in Jewish Bibles. Catholics have preserved the longer version of Esther as canonical. Protestants have placed the additions to Esther in the Apocrypha. But the Jews were evidently happy with Esther the way it was originally written, despite the fact that it did not mention God. Why was that?
One traditional interpretation is that, by not mentioning God, the book teaches that God’s face is sometimes hidden from us. At some points in history, God acts out in the open, such as in the book of Exodus. But at other times, God acts in a hidden manner, behind the scenes, as in the book of Esther. Things seem to work out in a providential manner, because God has worked much less obvious miracles that appear to be natural occurrences. Or perhaps the book of Esther tries to tell us that sometimes it really is up to us to save ourselves. Maybe the “whole” Megillah is a mixture of all these ideas. We keep and preserve both versions of the book because both messages are necessary to us. Now that I think about it, there’s an old saying that expresses both ideas together: God helps those who help themselves.

Lost in Translations

2010-08-09T14:17:00.001-07:00

#54: “Lost in Translations” by Brendon Wahlberg
We should always be aware that when we read an English Bible, we are reading a translation of the original language. The actual wording may vary, depending on which translation we have before us. It can be eye-opening to choose a passage and compare how it reads in different translations. Some will be very literal, and others will be loose paraphrases in modern English. Even the meaning of the passage can seem to change, depending on the translation. Let’s try a comparison, shall we?
To make this more interesting, let’s choose one of the most difficult-to-understand passages in the entire Bible, Exodus 4:24-26. This is a brief story of how Moses is attacked by God on the way back to Egypt. God is suddenly ready to kill Moses. Only the strange intervention of Moses’ wife saves the life of her family.
Here it is, in the translation we use at Calvin, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). “On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, and touched Moses' feet with it, and said, "Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!" So he let him alone. It was then she said, "A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.”
This is a strange little story, which raises many questions. Scholars have argued over its meaning and proper translation for many years. For example, when Moses’ wife says “bridegroom of blood”, what does she mean? Why did God try to kill Moses? How did Moses’ wife stop it? Why did she touch Moses’ feet with the…ahem…object? Let’s look at some more translations and see if that helps us to understand.
The King James Version (KJV) is the classic of English literature, but some find its language to be too old fashioned: “And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said , Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.” Indeed, to modern ears, the KJV, with “thou art”, may feel like a small step backwards in understanding.
The NRSV and the KJV are fairly literal translations. But there are other translations which (for better or worse) put aside strict faithfulness to the original text in favor of a more readable, contemporary experience. One of these is the New Living Translation (NLT), which has been sold under the title “The Book” (as seen on TV). The NLT has this: “On the journey, when Moses and his family had stopped for the night, the Lord confronted Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah, his wife, took a flint knife and circumcised her son. She threw the foreskin at Moses' feet and said, "What a blood-smeared bridegroom you are to me!" (When she called Moses a "blood-smeared bridegroom," she was referring to the circumcision.) After that, the Lord left him alone.” Reading a paraphrase like the NLT can be easier, as you can see. Sadly, in this case, easier English does not help with our deeper questions.
Let’s look at another paraphrase, and see how other translators handled the mystery. This one is from “The Message” translation (another paraphrase). “On the journey back, as they camped for the night, God met Moses and would have killed him but Zipporah took a flint knife and cut off her son's foreskin, and touched Moses' member with it. She said, "Oh! You're a bridegroom of blood to me!" Then God let him go. She used the phrase "bridegroom of blood" because of the circumcision.” Here is a difference. The other versions have Zipporah tossing the…ahem…object at Moses’ feet. But “The Message” version recognizes that “feet” might be a biblical euphemism for genitals, and has Zipporah touching the…object…to Moses’…item. However, the reason for doing either act is still very murky, and the meaning of “bridegroom of blood” is still elusive.
Curiously, it does not help us very much to go to a Jewish translation; the Jewish Publication Society Bible (JPS) is just as cryptic as most of the rest. “At a night encampment on the way, the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him. So Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when He let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”” A footnote states only that “Meaning of verses 26-26 uncertain.” One might think the JPS version would offer more insight into the Hebrew text.
Here is a translation from the “Contemporary English Version.” Notice how this version’s footnotes (which I inserted) offer two very different versions of some of the verses, in an attempt to make the whole story clearer. “One night while Moses was in camp, the Lord was about to kill him. But Zipporah circumcised her son with a flint knife. She touched his [Either Moses or the boy] legs with the skin she had cut off and said, "My dear son, this blood will protect you." [Or "My dear husband, you are a man of blood" (meaning Moses).] So the Lord did not harm Moses. Then Zipporah said, "Yes, my dear, you are safe because of this circumcision." [Or "you are a man of blood."] But there is quite a difference between saying to her son, “you are safe” and saying to her husband, “you are a man of blood”. Which is correct? It is amazing how ambiguous or uncertain the ancient languages can be for us in the present. Each of these translations may be able to make the English a little clearer, but we are still confused as to what the story actually means, because the translators are not sure. Because it can be hard to recover the meaning of certain ancient words and expressions, sometimes no one is sure.
Yet another interesting translation inserts explanations and clarifications right there in the text. This is the “Amplified Bible” and the words in brackets are added by the translator: “Along the way at a [resting-] place, the Lord met [Moses] and sought to kill him [made him acutely and almost fatally ill]. [Now apparently he had failed to circumcise one of his sons, his wife being opposed to it; but seeing his life in such danger] Zipporah took a flint knife and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it to touch [Moses'] feet, and said, Surely a husband of blood you are to me! When He let [Moses] alone [to recover], Zipporah said, A husband of blood are you because of the circumcision.”
Okay, with that last version, we are far from the familiar NRSV where we started, but we are starting to get down to what some scholars believe is the meaning of the passage. There is no definitive explanation, but we can take a look at a couple of interpretations that make sense. A possible explanation begins with the commandment (in Genesis 17:12-14) to circumcise one’s children. “Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring. Both the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money must be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.’”
As the Amplified Bible version suggests, Moses has failed for some reason to carry out the commandment and circumcise his son Gershom. Was he forgetful, or, as the Amplified Bible suggests, did his wife object and prevent it from happening? It is possible to speculate that Zipporah, who was a Midianite, objected to the operation for cultural or personal reasons. In the passage, God is ready to kill Moses. Is it because of this failure? Moses was the special messenger of God. Perhaps Moses, of all people, could not be allowed to get away with not observing a central commandment of the Covenant. Moses, and maybe also his son, are to be “cut off.” The Amplified Bible version suggests that God afflicted Moses with severe illness. Perhaps for that reason, it was up to his wife to take action when Moses could not. Grabbing a flint knife, Zipporah does what she must in order to save her family. Was she furious and afraid? Did she hurl the results at Moses’ feet in anger, calling him a bloody husband, upset at being forced to do what she did? Was that the meaning of the enigmatic phrase, bridegroom of blood?
There is another possible meaning, say other scholars. Perhaps Zipporah never objected to the circumcision, and it was an oversight that it was never done, or an omission by ignorance. Look at the Contemporary English Version again. There the translation suggests that Moses’ wife took quick and heroic action to protect her son. I found a discussion online by someone named Rabbi Hord, who suggested that the Hebrew which is translated as “bridegroom of blood” (hatan dimim), has roots in an older language called Akkadian (spoken in Midian), where it means “to protect”. If this is true, then perhaps Zipporah never called Moses a Bridegroom of Blood at all, but merely said that she was protecting him with her actions.
So now we have seen some of the different meanings that can result from reading different English Bibles. All of the translations above are, nevertheless, still generally similar to each other. To see just how different a pair of translations can be, take a quick look at the following two translations of Matthew 6:9-13.
KJV: “After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”
The Message: “With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this: Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what's best— as above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You're in charge! You can do anything you want! You're ablaze in beauty! Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Wow.

Canon to the right of them, canon to the left of them…

2010-08-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

#53: “Canon to the right of them, canon to the left of them…” by Brendon Wahlberg
How many books are in the Old Testament? What are their names? What order are they in, and which one comes last? You would think these are easy questions. Just pick up a Bible and look up the answers in the table of contents. Not so fast. It would really depend on where you were standing when you picked up that Bible. Did you grab a Protestant Old Testament or a Catholic one? Or was it a Hebrew Bible (called a Tanakh) from a Synagogue? Take a look at each of these and you’ll find that all of them are different in some way. They include different books, group them differently, divide them differently, and arrange them in different orders. (I won’t even get into the many different Eastern Orthodox Christian Bibles.) Each official list and order of books is canonical for that religion. Let’s take a look at the names of the books in each different kind of Old Testament, and the order in which they appear in modern Bibles.
Hebrew Bible canon
Part 1: Torah - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Part 2: Prophets - Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Book of the 12 lesser Prophets (includes Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi). Part 3: Writings - Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra (includes Nehemiah), Chronicles. (24 books total)
Catholic Old Testament canon
Part 1: Pentateuch - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Part 2: Historical Books - Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, Esther, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees. Part 3: Wisdom Books - Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach. Part 4: Major Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel. Part 5: Minor Prophets - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. (46 books total)
Protestant Old Testament canon
Part 1: Pentateuch - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Part 2: Historical Books - Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. Part 3: Wisdom Books - Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs. Part 4: Major Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel. Part 5: Minor Prophets - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. (39 books total)
How did we get to the present day situation, where we have several different Old Testaments? In other words, why do these Bibles have different content and order? To understand this, you should probably not think of the Old Testament as a single book, with all of the smaller books, like Genesis and Jeremiah, collected between a front and back cover. Instead, picture the Bible the way it began, as a pile of loose scrolls. If you are familiar with the Dead Sea scrolls, then you know that among them were multiple copies of the books of the Old Testament. Each book was generally on its own scroll. Isaiah, for example, was on one large scroll. Some books were combined. For example, traditionally, the twelve minor prophets were collected together on one scroll. Sometimes, books were divided because they were too long for one scroll.
As long as the books of Holy Scripture were a pile of scrolls, it was possible to change their order around, or to add or remove one or two if people disagreed about them. Then, the codex was invented. A codex was a bit like our modern books, with sheets of parchment sown together into pages. The codex became popular during the early centuries of Christianity, and many early Christian collections of scripture were written on a codex instead of a scroll. For example, the four Gospels, or a set of Paul’s letters might be written as a codex. When you have a codex instead of scrolls, you can have a fixed collection of books in a particular order. So now you have to decide what those are going to be.
The first important translation of all of the Old Testament scrolls into Greek was called the Septuagint. Jews around the Greek and Roman world used this translation. In the Christian era, the Septuagint was collected in a large codex. But there wasn’t yet a standard order for the books inside it, and so several different orders were used. There was still an attempt to group the books in a way that made sense. The five books of Moses came first, followed by the poetical books, the historical books, and the prophetical books, but these last three categories were placed in various arrangements. Neither was there any kind of official list of books to include, so sometimes a copy of the Septuagint would include books like 1, 2, 3, or 4 Maccabees, the Psalms of Solomon, or the Epistle of Jeremiah, and sometimes it would not.
Meanwhile, the Jews were busy deciding on a canonical list of scriptures. There were some books that were popular among Jews which were ultimately rejected from their canon. The Jews partly made choices based on when books were written, and whether they were written originally in Hebrew. The later the date of writing, the more likely a book was to be rejected. Greek or Aramaic language books were likely to be dumped. The time of truly inspired writings and real prophecy was considered to be over by the time of those books. But contemporary Christians made different choices. Jewish books including Maccabees, Baruch, Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach, and Judith were kept by Christians instead. That is why they appear in the Catholic Old Testament list above.
But not all Christians have agreed on these books. They have been labeled “The Apocrypha” and “deutero-canonical” (secondary canon), but to Catholics, they are simply part of the Bible. When the Protestants split away from the Catholics, they decided that their Old Testament was going to be different. Protestants discarded the Apocrypha, returning to an Old Testament list which matched the list of Hebrew language books which the Jews used in their Tanakh. So, that explains the three different lists of books shown above. Jews and Protestants use the same pared-down list of books, while Catholics retain a larger collection of books dating far back to the early centuries of Christianity.
What about the order of the books as we have them today? Check the lists above again, and you’ll see one interesting difference. Both Catholic and Protestant Christians place the “prophets” last, while Jews place the “writings” last. Each arrangement has meaning for that particular faith. For Jews, the books are placed in order of importance to the community and holiness. The Torah comes first, for it is considered to be the word of God. God speaks through the prophets, so they come next, and finally there are some inspired, man-made writings that develop the ideas of the Torah and the prophets (although some of these writings, like the Song of Songs, were almost not included).
If you think of the Bible as a book that tells a story, every story has an ending. What is the last book of the Hebrew Bible? How does the story “end”? The final book is Chronicles, a retelling of the history of the Jewish people. At the end of that book, it tells of the end of the Babylonian exile, a high and hopeful moment that renewed God’s promise of the Holy Land. “In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, in fulfillment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia so that he sent a herald throughout all his kingdom and also declared in a written edict: ‘Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him! Let him go up.’” (2 Chronicles 36:22-23)
Alternatively, you have the Christian Old Testament. For Christians, the books are placed in an order that enables the story of Jesus to be told. The Books of Moses come first, for they tell of the fall of man and the giving of the Law. The Historical books reveal the story of the House of David. The Wisdom books begin to foreshadow Jesus, and the Prophets predict him. The ending of the Old Testament is not an ending at all, but merely a pause before the beginning of the New Testament, the continuation of the story.
What is the last book of the Christian Old Testament? How does the story say “to be continued”? The final book is Malachi, which is the last of the twelve minor prophets. At the end of Malachi, it says, “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.” (Malachi 4:5-6) If you look at it a certain way, this passage makes a pretty good transition to the Gospels, because John the Baptist is said to be Elijah, metaphorically.
To each major faith, their Old Testament is THE Old Testament. But when you take a step back, and look at the big picture, there are many more similarities between these canons than differences. There is much more held in common than held apart. The same inspired writings shared by Jews and Christians, and between Christians of different branches, give all of us common ground to believe we are all God’s children.

And the Vision that was planted in my brain, still remains…

2010-08-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

#52: “And the Vision that was planted in my brain, still remains…” by Brendon Wahlberg
It is said that a historian can never judge for sure whether an event like the resurrection actually occurred. The same would be true for judging whether someone really had a vision from God. Long ago, a man named Saul and a man named Constantine each had his own vision of Jesus; these visions changed their lives and altered the history of Christianity. It is commonly believed that (1) these visions really happened, and that (2) they were from God, who was acting in history to bring about his will. Was this true? A historian cannot ever say for sure, but hey, I’m not a historian, so I am free to ask the question. But how can we judge? I suggest that if the vision was real, then it should have really changed the man who saw it. And, if the vision really was from God, acting to affect history, then the result should have been a positive change for Christians in the world.
Let’s consider Saul first, but only briefly. People are already familiar with Saul, and I want to devote more time to Constantine. The book of Acts tells us that Saul was on his way to continue persecuting the followers of Jesus, when suddenly he had a vision. “Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” (Acts 9:1-5)
The historian cannot decide, either way, whether Saul’s vision was real, or if he made it up. But the person of faith can ask whether Saul was truly changed by the experience. The Christian experience is often a transformative one. As we know from reading the New Testament, Saul was absolutely and utterly changed. He made a complete turnaround. He stopped persecuting Jesus’ followers and became one himself. He devoted the rest of his life to travelling around the Mediterranean world, starting new Churches and making new converts. He suffered for his mission. He was beaten and imprisoned, and in the end, he was beheaded for his faith.
The person of faith can also ask whether Saul’s vision was really from God. If it was, then what was God’s plan, his reason for sending the vision? And, did Christians as a whole benefit from that plan? Was there a positive change in Christian history because of Saul’s vision? Actually, although Jesus did not explain his plan directly to Paul in the passage above, he did explain it to a man named Ananias, who explained it to Saul. “[…] for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.’” (Acts 9:15-16)
Knowing this, we can ask whether Saul did indeed bring the Lord’s name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel. And of course, the answer is yes. Because of his vision, Saul acted according to God’s plan. If Christianity had remained solely a Jewish movement in Jerusalem as it was in the beginning, then it probably would have been wiped out when that community and that city was destroyed in the war against Rome. Saul helped to spread Christianity to the Gentiles, avoiding that outcome and changing Christian history in a positive way. Saul also wrote his famous letters which make up a large part of our New Testament two thousand years later. The ideas in those letters have shaped the entire history of Christianity. A person of faith may well conclude that the vision sent to Saul was really from God. It would be hard to argue otherwise.
With the example of Saul’s vision in mind, let’s turn our attention to the Roman Emperor Constantine. Like Saul, Constantine also had a vision of Jesus, a vision that changed Christian history forever. Was this vision real? Was this vision really from God, working in history to fulfill his plan? Again, I suggest we judge by asking whether the vision changed the man himself, and whether the vision brought about a positive change for Christians as a whole.
Constantine was born in the year 272CE, in a time when the Roman Empire was fractured into eastern and western parts, and ruled by two or even three Emperors at once. In 312CE, when he was forty years old, Constantine was a General at the head of an army, fighting his rivals for control of the Empire. That year, at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he had his vision. The contemporary historian Eusebius wrote about it in detail. Constantine was preparing for battle by praying for help, not to the multitude of pagan gods, but to the Christian God his mother Helena worshipped.
Eusebius wrote, “[…] about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle. He said, moreover, that he doubted within himself what the import of this apparition could be. And while he continued to ponder and reason on its meaning, night suddenly came on; then in his sleep the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies.” Eusebius wrote that the sign was “the symbol of the Savior's name, two letters indicating the name of Christ by means of its initial characters, the letter P being intersected by X in its center […] The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of all his armies.” (Life of Constantine Book 1, excerpts from Chapters 28-31)
With God’s sign protecting him, Constantine went on to win his battles; eventually, he became the sole ruler of the entire Roman Empire, east and west. But was the new Emperor’s vision real? Did it transform him as a person, like Saul was transformed? The reason one might doubt whether the vision was real is that Constantine was a politician seeking ultimate power. To unify a divided Empire, he needed religious unity, and maybe the growing popularity of Christianity inspired him to make up a vision and use the Christian religion as a tool for his own ends. On the other hand, ancient sources say that after his vision, Constantine began to believe personally as a Christian. Was his conversion sincere, and how did it change him?
The answers to these questions are ultimately ambiguous. Unlike Saul, who was transformed immediately and totally, Constantine seems to have changed very gradually over time. After his vision, he lived another twenty-five years, and it is fair to say that it took him that whole time to fully convert to Christianity and fully reject paganism. Of course, he was in a rather unusual position. The Roman Emperor was the “Pontifex Maximus”, the high priest of the pantheon of Roman gods. A lot of citizens were still pagan. But here was Constantine, having newly become a Christian who worshipped an exclusive God who would have no other gods before him. At first, pagan gods were still allowed on coins and Constantine kept his Pontifex title. The Emperor was still worshipped as a supernatural being. Early monuments to the Emperor did not mention Christianity. But slowly, he began to verbally attack paganism, calling it untrue, misguided, and outmoded. He stopped participating in pagan sacrifices. Pagan worship was not outlawed, but it was discouraged. Some pagan temples were closed. There were no pagan martyrs, but eventually, some of the people still refusing Christianity were denied positions of power. Later on, some pagan holidays were combined with Christian holidays (like Saturnalia and the birthday of Jesus, which gave us Christmas). The Emperor grew progressively more Christian over his lifetime. He read the inspired writings. He resolved to worship only the God who had appeared to him. But he was only baptized in the year of his death at age sixty-five.
Was Constantine’s vision real? I lean towards saying yes, because it did transform him, even if it was a slow process. Was his vision really from God? To answer this question, we need to take a quick look at the state of Christianity in the Roman Empire before Constantine’s vision in 312CE. It was actually a very bad time for Christians. The Great Persecution under Emperor Diocletian went from 303-311CE. During this time, the Christian religion was outlawed. Christians were stripped of legal rights and commanded to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Christian buildings and homes were destroyed. Christian books were seized and burned. Christians were arrested, tortured, and put to death in gladiatorial games. The prayers of suffering Christians must have risen up to God to bring about a change.
When change came, Roman Christians believed that Constantine’s vision was really from God. If it was, then what was God’s plan, his reason for sending the vision? And, did Christians benefit from that plan? After Constantine’s vision, what changed for Christians as a whole? In fact, an enormous change occurred. A year after the vision, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan (the Edict of Toleration). It said that all citizens could observe the religion that they preferred. It specifically said that Christians had the undeniable right to practice their religion openly and freely, and without molestation. What a change from the previous few years!
Here is a quick rundown of some other changes that occurred after the vision. The Emperor became a generous financial patron of the Christian religion. He paid for building large churches and pilgrimage sites. He rebuilt Jerusalem and built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher there. He made a new capitol city called Constantinople, which had mostly Christian churches and architecture. He made churches tax exempt. Sunday was made an official day of worship and rest. Complete bibles were commissioned and produced. There were Christian advisors in the Emperor’s court.
Christianity had been an endangered, persecuted religion, and it had become an Imperial religion. Was that according to God’s plan? Well, as much as we can ask such questions, we should consider the flip side of all this change. There were some less-than-Godly results as well, namely corruption and hypocrisy. There was the problem that some people who took positions of leadership in the church really wanted them for the power and the money. Furthermore, Constantine wanted political and religious unity in his Empire. So, although he was a patron of Christianity, he was a patron of only one branch of Christianity. Remember, in those times, there were some very different versions of Christianity floating around. There were those, for example, who rejected the entire Old Testament. There were the Gnostics who believed in secret knowledge as a way to salvation. Under Constantine, those different branches of Christianity were ruthlessly squashed as heresy.
The Council of Nicaea was one example of how the Emperor made sure that all his Christian subjects believed the same thing. A disagreement arose over whether Jesus and God the Father were exactly the same or merely similar. Constantine called a huge gathering of Bishops to resolve the question once and for all. Those who still disagreed were punished. The Emperor didn’t create official doctrine, but he did enforce it. Orthodoxy meant unity to him. This was sadly ironic, and a kind of hypocrisy, because before the Emperor’s vision, there was persecution of all Christians, but after the vision, some Christians were persecuted in the name of rooting out heresy. So ask yourself, if Jesus sent the vision in the first place, would Jesus have approved of all these results? In other words, did the same Jesus who told Saul merely to spread the Lord’s name, even if it meant suffering, also tell General Constantine to conquer an Empire in the Lord’s name, while ruling in splendor? It is not an easy question to answer.
It is interesting to consider the nature of the two visions and how both men responded to them. Both visions, you must admit, were rather brief and cryptic. Saul saw only a quick glimpse of Jesus asking: why do you persecute me? Did Saul respond by simply stopping the persecution and minding his own business after that? No, he devoted the rest of his life to spreading the message he had tried to squash. Constantine saw only a quick glimpse of Jesus telling him to use a symbol and win a battle. Did Constantine respond by simply winning his battle, saying thanks God, and never giving Christianity another thought once he was in power? No, he devoted the rest of his life to growing as a Christian and advancing the religion as an official Roman faith. It would seem that a little Jesus goes a long way. A brief and cryptic vision can have a broad and far reaching effect. This implies that a lot of what happens in such cases is that God has a plan, but God only gives a small shove towards that plan. The rest is up to us. Hopefully God chooses his tools well; even very unlikely people like Saul (who arrested Christians) and Constantine (who was a pagan military leader) can indeed change the world for Christians in a positive way. The end result of each vision was that the number of Christians in the world grew. Surely that was part of God’s plan – the growth of the Kingdom of God here on Earth.

Christian Apocrypha: Mary as a Kid

2010-08-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

#51: “Christian Apocrypha: Mary as a Kid” by Brendon Wahlberg
Previously, this column has taken a look at a few ancient Christian writings which did not make it into the New Testament, such as the “Acts of Peter”, the “Shepherd of Hermas”, “The Acts of Paul”, and the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas”. All of these writings were once popular, but when it came to including them in the Christian canon, the Church fathers judged that they were written well after the Apostolic age, and rejected them. But just because something was left out of the New Testament collection, that does not mean it was not a widely read or even a beloved book. This month, we will look at just such a document, the “Protoevangelion of James”, a story of the childhood of Mary, the mother of Jesus. This “proto-gospel” was the beginning of the veneration of Mary, and it inspired artists and the faithful for many centuries.
Although it has had several titles, this story of Mary is often called a “proto-gospel” because the events it described take place mostly before any of the events in the canonical gospels, Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John. And, although the name of James (the Just), the brother of Jesus, is attached to the proto-gospel, it was not written by James. The proto-gospel clearly quotes and builds upon Matthew and Luke, and those two gospels were written after James died in 62CE. The consensus is that the proto-gospel was written in James’ name around 150CE. It was acceptable for religious writings to have the name of a prophet or an apostle attached to them. It was not forgery, but a way to lend the writing a kind of authority in the tradition of the person named. So, although the real James might well have been in a position to know the details of Mary’s youth, the stories found in the proto-gospel are probably fictional, yet still intended to teach essential spiritual lessons to the faithful.
The main point of the proto-gospel is that Mary was chosen by God to be the mother of Jesus because Mary was pure. How pure was she? She was so extraordinarily pure, that not only was she a virgin when she conceived Jesus, she also remained a virgin forever more. To make this point, the proto-gospel has to assert that the brothers and sisters of Jesus, mentioned in the New Testament, were the children of Joseph from a previous marriage, and that Joseph was much older than Mary. It was this teaching that led to the decline of the proto-gospel. The Catholic Church taught instead that James and the others were Jesus’ cousins, and discouraged reading of the proto-gospel.
James begins by introducing the parents of Mary, who are not named in the New Testament. Joachim is a very rich man in Israel who is distressed that he does not have a child. He goes out to the wilderness to fast and pray. His wife Anna also laments her childlessness. The people around her believe that God has cursed her with barrenness. Praying in her garden, she hears an angel say, “You will conceive and give birth, and your child will be talked about all over the world.” And Anna said, “As the Lord God lives, whether I give birth to a boy or a girl, I’ll offer it as a gift to the Lord my God, and it will serve him its whole life.” In other words, Anna’s child will be a ward of the Temple, living and serving there always. Another angel has spoken to Joachim; he returns from the wilderness, and the couple is reunited in joy.
Mary is born nine months later. When the infant Mary is six months old, Anna puts her on the ground to see if she can stand. Mary walks seven steps to her mother’s arms, and Anna picks her up, saying, “…you will never walk on this ground again until I take you into the temple of the Lord.” Mary’s bedroom becomes a pure sanctuary. Nothing unclean is allowed in there – neither unclean food nor defiled people. On her first birthday, Mary is presented at her home to visiting priests from the Temple, who ask God to “look on this child and bless her with the ultimate blessing, one which cannot be surpassed.”
When Mary is two, Joachim suggests that it is time to give her to the Temple, but Anna decides to wait until Mary is three, so that she will be better able to leave her mother and father. At age three, Mary does go to the Temple, where a priest greets her, saying, “In you the Lord will disclose his redemption to the people of Israel during the last days.” Set down on the steps of the altar, Mary happily dances. Her parents leave her there to live, fulfilling their promise to God. Mary is raised near the Holy of Holies, and she is fed by angels.
However, when Mary is twelve and about to begin menstruation, the priests realize that she cannot stay any longer without polluting the sanctuary. God tells the high priest Zechariah to find a ward for Mary among the widowers of Israel. A miraculous sign helps to choose a carpenter named Joseph from the crowd. “Joseph,” the high priest said, “you’ve been chosen by lot to take the virgin of the Lord into your care and protection.” But Joseph objected: “I already have sons and I’m an old man; she’s only a young woman.” The proto-gospel is different from the canonical gospels in making Joseph an old man, a widower, and the ward of Mary instead of her husband. Joseph, afraid of being punished for disobeying God, takes Mary to be protected at his home while he is away building houses.
Mary spends her time spinning thread for a new curtain for the Temple. An angel appears to her at age sixteen, saying, “You’ve found favor in the sight of the Lord of all. You will conceive by means of his word.” Mary asks, “Will I also give birth the way women usually do?” The angel answers, “No, Mary, because the power of God will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, son of the most high.” In this way, the proto-gospel assures the reader that Mary will remain a virgin even after giving birth.
Joseph returns home to find Mary six months pregnant. He believes that someone has violated her and impregnated her. But an angel tells Joseph in a dream that the child is from the Holy Spirit. The scribe Annas reports to the high priest that Joseph is responsible for violating the virgin in his care, and both Mary and Joseph are put on trial. Both claim innocence. So the high priest administers a mysterious test, giving them a ritual drink and sending them to the wilderness. They both pass the test by returning unharmed, proving that they have not sinned.
Joseph and his sons, and Mary, travel to Bethlehem to enroll in a census, and along the way, Mary goes into labor. They find privacy in a nearby cave, where Mary gives birth to Jesus. At the moment of birth, Joseph is amazed to see time and nature standing still. He enlists the aid of a Hebrew midwife from the hill country, who witnesses an intense light in the cave and then sees the infant Jesus. The midwife tells a woman named Salome that a virgin has given birth. Much like “doubting” Thomas, Salome declares that she must insert her finger into Mary in order to believe it. But when she does so, her hand is consumed by flames. Salome begs for forgiveness for her disbelief. An angel tells Salome to pick up Jesus. Salome says, “I’ll worship him because he’s been born to be king of Israel,” and she is healed.
The birth of Jesus in a cave is an interesting departure from the canonical gospels. In the proto-gospel, when astrologers visit Jesus with gifts, they visit him in the cave. The manger (from Luke) only comes into the story when Mary, hearing that Herod is killing infants, hides Jesus in a feeding trough to keep him safe. Some Christian artists in the Middle Ages depicted Jesus being born in a cave, thanks to this non-canonical gospel. Some artists have even combined the accounts of Luke and James by placing the manger inside a cave.
The proto-gospel of James was based on a combination of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but it has its own unique character. This gospel marked the beginning of the veneration of Mary. Mary was chosen by God, this gospel says, because she remained pure throughout her childhood, at home and in the Temple, and pure later on as well. James does not have the Immaculate Conception, but he does have Mary as a perpetual virgin.
The proto-gospel’s focus on purity and virginity may arise out of the religious concerns at the time it was written, in the second century. Sexual self control and chastity were valued by many Christians. Another example of a chaste heroine from that time period is Thecla, from the story of “Paul and Thecla”. But Mary surpasses everyone else in purity.
James may also have been written as part of an ongoing defense of Christianity against the attacks of a second century anti-Christian Roman writer named Celcus. The historian Origen wrote about Celcus’ argument against the virgin birth. According to Origen, Celcus “accuses Him [Jesus] of having “invented his birth from a virgin,” and upbraids Him with being “born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child.” The proto-gospel of James almost seems like it was designed to refute all of those attacks, and to defend Mary.

Christian Apocrypha: Jesus as a Kid

2010-08-09T14:11:00.000-07:00

#50: “Christian Apocrypha: Jesus as a Kid” by Brendon Wahlberg
Previously, this column has taken a look at a few ancient Christian writings which did not make it into the New Testament, such as the “Acts of Peter”, the “Shepherd of Hermas”, and “The Acts of Paul”. This time, we will examine a once-popular gospel that claims to tell all about Jesus as a kid. It is called the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (not to be confused with the very different “Gospel of Thomas”, a controversial collection of Jesus’ sayings) and although it was once widely read and copied into many languages, few people read it today. The portrait of Jesus it contains is simply too hard for modern readers to take seriously. Could you believe a story that presents Jesus as a bratty child who kills neighbor children who annoy him?
If you are familiar with the Gospel of Luke, you know that it depicts the birth of Jesus and a bit of his infancy, and then it skips to Jesus’ twelfth year with this sentence: “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” (Luke 2:40) Around the year 150, an unknown author decided that the brief account in Luke was not enough. Jesus was too important for people not to know more about him. That gap of twelve years had to be filled. Early Christians were hungry for stories about the childhood of Jesus, stories which would show that he was capable of miracles even at a young age. Indeed, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas begins this way:
“I, Thomas the Israelite, make this report to all of you, my brothers among the Gentiles, that you may know the magnificent childhood activities of our Lord Jesus Christ – all that he did after being born in our country.”
Thomas’ first story shows Jesus at five years old on a Sabbath day, playing by a stream, making pools, and purifying the waters in them with a word, perhaps foreshadowing the ritual of baptism. Jesus then takes soft clay and fashions twelve sparrows, but a neighbor complains to Jesus’ father Joseph that the child is violating the Sabbath prohibition against work on that day. Of course, this foreshadows the many arguments which the adult Jesus will have with his fellow Jews over this subject. Joseph chastises his son, but Jesus claps his hands, cries out ‘be gone’ and the clay sparrows come to life and fly away, effectively ending the argument.
It is a reflection of how widespread this story once was, that the miracle of Jesus and the birds made it into chapter five of the Koran. “Then will Allah say: ‘O Jesus the son of Mary! […] Behold! I taught thee the Book and Wisdom, the Law and the Gospel and behold! thou makest out of clay, as it were, the figure of a bird, by My leave, and thou breathest into it and it becometh a bird by My leave…”
A child takes a stick and destroys Jesus’ pools of water. Jesus tells the child that he will be barren and wither away, and immediately it happens. Another child runs by and bumps into Jesus’ shoulder, Jesus tells him that he will go no further, and immediately, the child drops dead. The neighbors are amazed and horrified, and they warn Joseph that he cannot live in the village unless Jesus learns to bless and not to curse, for Jesus is killing the village children. Joseph privately tells Jesus to stop, but Jesus declares that his accusers will be punished, and immediately they go blind. Joseph tries physical punishment, yanking Jesus’ ear, to no avail.
A teacher named Zachaeus promises Joseph to teach Jesus to love, honor, and respect his elders and children his own age, and to teach him to read the Greek alphabet. But Zachaeus is soon frustrated and humbled. Jesus already knows far more than his teacher, and the child lectures the teacher until he is confused and defeated. “Since you do not know the true nature of the Alpha, how can you teach anyone the Beta?” Jesus demands. The teacher gives up, saying, “I beg of you, brother Joseph, take him away. I cannot bear his stern gaze or make sense of a single word. This child is not of this world […] Maybe he was born before the world came into being.” Of course, all this talk of the Alpha, and Jesus being born before the world, clearly reflects the beginning of the Gospel of John.
Jesus laughs and says, “Let the barren bear fruit and let the blind in heart see. I have come from above to curse them and call them to the realm above, just as the one who sent me for your sake commanded.’ When the child stopped speaking, immediately all those who had fallen under his curse were healed. No one dared to anger him from that time on…” Jesus has made his point, and now he reverses the damage he did to the neighbors. Blindness, withering, and death vanish away. Of course, the story of the blind villagers reflects many of the gospel sayings, in which blind people represent those who will not see the gospel truth.
Over the following years, several more healing miracles follow. A child falls from a roof and dies, and Jesus calls him back to life. Jesus next heals a young man’s foot, which had been struck with an axe. Jesus also heals his brother James from a snake bite by breathing on the bite. Jesus touches an infant which had sickened and died, restoring it to life. Some of the villagers begin to want to worship him, saying, “Truly, this child is either God, or an angel of God, for his every word is an accomplished deed.” After yet another raising of the dead, the crowd says, “This child comes from Heaven, for he has saved many souls from death – his entire life he is able to save them.”
At age eight, Jesus sows a single grain of wheat, and harvests one hundred bushels. Then he feeds the wheat to all the poor people. This miracle makes literal some of the agricultural parables of the adult Jesus concerning the great harvest of people in the Kingdom of God. The reader begins to recognize the seeds of the adult Jesus, so to speak.
But Joseph thinks that Jesus still does not know how to read. Joseph tries another teacher, and the result is again a disaster. But the third teacher is wise enough to recognize that Jesus speaks in the Holy Spirit, teaching the Law with great grace and wisdom. This episode leads directly to the ending of the Infancy Gospel, which repeats the same story we find in the Gospel of Luke; at age twelve, Jesus goes to Jerusalem with his parents, gets separated from them, and is finally found teaching the elders in the Temple (Luke 2:46).
The Infancy Gospel was very popular in the Middle Ages, and has influenced much Christian artwork. Translated and copied many times, it comes down to us in a variety of texts with many variations in the details of the story. But of course it is not canonical, and today it is mostly dismissed. Modern readers probably have trouble getting past the image of young Jesus cursing other children to death over minor quarrels. But to be fair, everyone who is cursed or killed in the story is eventually healed or raised back to life. As Jesus grows from age five to age eight, his behavior changes; he is shown to heal many people. He begins to bless and not to curse, just as Joseph and the villagers hoped. The villagers go from fear of him to worship. Is the point here that even the Savior grows and matures? After all, as it says in Luke 2:40, the child grew.
The purpose of such literature is to satisfy the desire to know more about the central figure of a great religion. There are other stories in antiquity like this, in which a famous person is described as a child, and of course in these stories, the famous figure does not act like a child normally would. The point of such stories is precisely that the person was not a normal child at all. How could he have been, when he turned out to be such an amazing adult?
Did the author mean for people to take the Infancy Gospel as a set of true stories? It is hard to say. Beyond an overall sense of humor and exaggeration, much of the content of the Infancy Gospel is, after all, not greatly different from the content of the four accepted Gospels. There are healings and teachings, miracles and enactments of parables. The author apparently tried to make his child Jesus reflect the adult Jesus of the New Testament, in order to teach us something about Jesus. Whether it was “true” was beside the point. Perhaps the best thing we can do with such a story is to let it remain apocryphal while learning the lessons of Christianity which the author wanted to teach to his readers. Jesus was magnificent as an adult and as a child too, the writer teaches us. All his life, even in childhood, Jesus was able to save people. The writer’s Joseph sums it up for us, saying, “I am blessed that God has given me this child.”

Dogs in the Bible

2010-08-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

#49: “Dogs in the Bible” by Brendon Wahlberg
I asked my wife, Toni Schlemmer, what she would like me to write about in a column. Evidently combining two of the things she loves most in life (Church and her Basset Hound Toby), she replied, “How about Dogs in the Bible?” Perhaps she was imagining that there was a story in the Gospel of Luke about Jesus and his faithful Basset who followed him everywhere, hoping that his two dog cookies could be multiplied into enough treats to feed five thousand dogs (which he would nevertheless try to eat all by himself).
The truth is that the Bible is not kind to dogs. Our canine companions are not described as man’s best friend in the good book. I hated to tell Toni this, but dogs were viewed very differently in that long ago time and place. Here are the facts: dogs are mentioned in the Bible approximately forty times, and nearly all of those references are very negative in tone.
A large number of those negative mentions are found in one section of the Hebrew Bible, in the long narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. When David wants to tell King Saul that he, David, is insignificant and lowly, he compares himself to a dead dog (1 Samuel 24:14). When Saul’s grandson abases himself before David, claiming that he is a mere servant who is beneath anyone’s notice, he also compares himself to a dead dog (2 Samuel 9:8). And, when someone curses David and throws stones, David’s supporter calls the attacker a dead dog, and prepares to cut off the man’s head (2 Samuel 16:9). A dead dog is about the most contemptible thing a person can be called.
But when the subject is a live dog, the situation is even worse. In Samuel and Kings, dogs are known as carnivorous scavengers who eat unburied corpses. Dogs are said to eat the followers of the enemy, Jeroboam, who die in the city (1 Kings 14:11). Dogs also eat the body of Jezebel (1 Kings 21:23), and lick up the blood of dead people such as Naboth and Ahab (1 Kings 21:19 and 1 Kings 22:38). Jeremiah 15:3 mentions dogs as destroyers who drag away bodies. The worst fate a man can have is to be eaten by dogs after death.
The references in Psalms are no better. Psalm 59:6 reveals that dogs prowled around the city at night, howling or snarling. A group of evildoers surrounding a person is likened to a pack of such city dogs (Psalm 22:16), for the “power of the dog” is to threaten one with death (Psalm 22:20). So, dogs were dangerous animals, roaming in packs in the night.
How about the eating habits of dogs? Proverbs 26:11 has this disgusting wisdom to impart: “Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly.” Dogs eating their own vomit must have been somewhat common for this to become a proverb. Exodus 22:31 also has dogs eating what is unfit for human consumption, namely the meat of an animal mangled by wild beasts in the field – this meat is to be thrown to the dogs. The eating situation was better for dogs which lived around people, for those dogs had access to table scraps. Although it was wrong to toss the children’s bread to the dogs, a dog could still eat the crumbs that fell from the Master’s table (Matthew 15:26-27).
The name of “dog” was held in very low regard in biblical times. Various types of evil people were readily compared to dogs. “Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.” (Revelation 22:15) “Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!” (Philippians 3:2) “Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.” (Matthew 7:6) “Israel's watchmen are blind, they all lack knowledge; they are all mute dogs, they cannot bark; they lie around and dream, they love to sleep. They are dogs with mighty appetites; they never have enough.” (Isaiah 56:10-11) However, I did say that a few biblical dog references were not negative, and I have saved these for last.
Jesus may not have been followed around by a dog, but Tobias, in the Apocryphal book of Tobit, was. When Tobias sets out on his travels with the angel Raphael, he has a furry companion. “So his son made the preparations for the journey. And his father said to him, "Go with this man; God who dwells in heaven will prosper your way, and may his angel attend you." So they both went out and departed, and the young man's dog was with them.” (Tobit 5:16) The dog is still with them for the return home. “Then Raphael said to Tobias, "Are you not aware, brother, of how you left your father? Let us run ahead of your wife and prepare the house. And take the gall of the fish with you." So they went their way, and the dog went along behind them.” (Tobit 11:2-4) It isn’t much, but at least we are free to imagine a friendly companion more like a modern dog. Another dog reference in the Bible, Job 30:1, reminds us that some dogs worked with people in helpful ways, such as the domesticated dogs that guarded the sheep.
As I said, the Bible is not kind to dogs. But this was an accurate portrait of dogs in those days. The biblical dog was probably similar to the “Canaan Dog” of today, shown in the image. These dogs were typical of “Pariah dogs”, which were socially outcast, living on the fringes of society. These dogs were wild, roaming in packs, yet they could be domesticated and trained to guard sheep or houses. They were not kept as pets. There are still Pariah dogs in modern India which would match the biblical description.

In modern America, we love our Bible, and we love our dogs. It is sad to see that they do not love each other. (Well, dogs may, or may not love the Bible. I don’t know. I never see mine reading his.) But modern dogs are the result of two thousand years of breeding and shaping dogs to be what we want, and to fit into our lives. We love modern dogs because they are not the same animals that existed in biblical times. We love the dogs we have helped to create, and in this, there is a reminder of God’s creative work. God has allowed us to take his creation, the wild dog, the despised outcast scavenger of the Bible, and mold it into man’s best friend, in a huge variety of helpful and loving breeds. We have participated in the ongoing act of creation. God created us and loves us, and so we must love the dogs which we have helped to make the way they are. The unconditional way that dogs love us in return is another obvious lesson for us, teaching us how we must love God in return.

The Sign of Jonah

2010-08-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

#48: “The Sign of Jonah” by Brendon Wahlberg
High School readers of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” may have been asked to discuss the Christian symbolism in the book. For example, when the old man carries his boat’s mast on his back, teachers might point out that this is symbolic of Jesus carrying his cross on the way to Golgotha. Actually, looking for Christian symbolism in books is a very old tradition. In fact, it goes back to Jesus himself.
Consider this passage from the Gospel of Matthew. “Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him [Jesus], ‘Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.’ But he answered them, ‘An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was for three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here!” (Matthew 12:38-41)
Readers of the Hebrew Bible know that Jesus is referring to the Book of Jonah. Jonah is a very short book which is grouped with the Prophetic books, although it differs from books like Jeremiah because the story in it is thought to be largely fictional. Jonah reads like a tall tale designed to make an important theological point. The humorous elements of the story entertain us while the message at the end changes the way we think about God. To be fair, even if the story is fictional, Jonah himself may have been a real person. 2 Kings 14:25 mentions him: “He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.”
In the story of Jonah, the prophet is told by God to go to the people of the Assyrian city of Nineveh, and warn them that God is going to destroy them for their sins. Assyria was the greatest enemy of Israel; this would be like telling Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to go and warn the Nazis of Berlin that they were going to be destroyed. Jonah wants them to be destroyed. Instead of obeying, Jonah flees in the opposite direction. But God will not be denied. When Jonah flees by ship, God sends a storm which threatens to sink it. Jonah admits to the crew that their peril is his fault, they toss him overboard, and the sea quiets. Then God sends a large fish that swallows Jonah. He remains in the fish for three days, during which he prays for deliverance from the Lord. The fish spits him out onto the shore, and Jonah is again commanded to go to Nineveh and warn the people there.
Finally, Jonah obeys. To the prophet’s amazement and disgust, upon hearing the warning, all of Nineveh repents and fasts in sackcloth and ashes. God sees this and decides not to destroy them. Even though Jonah had just been delivered from death himself, he cannot stand to see the Assyrians saved. In a terrible mood, Jonah gets upset at the death of a plant that was shading him. God uses this as a teachable moment to reprove the prophet. “But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’” (Jonah 4:9-11)
The main point of the story must have been seen as somewhat controversial when it was written. Prophets of Judah and Israel often spoke about the Lord’s righteous judgment of enemy nations, but here, the final outcome was to save the enemy, because all people are valued by God, even if they are supposedly “the enemy”. This is best expressed in the Apocryphal book “Wisdom of Solomon”: “But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook the sins of men that they may repent. For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.” (Wisdom 11:23-24)
So that is the story of Jonah. Now let us get back to how Jesus used the story in Matthew. The Pharisees demanded a sign to prove Jesus’ claims. Jesus told his unbelieving audience that they were not going to get a sign of the sort they desired. The people of Nineveh were smart enough to repent at the word of the Prophet Jonah. Why won’t the Pharisees believe the word of the Son of Man, someone greater than Jonah? The only sign which was going to come was the “Sign of Jonah”. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days, Jesus was going to be dead for three days, and in the underworld, before being resurrected. In other words, modern readers might say, Jonah in the belly of the fish was a kind of “foreshadowing” of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Ancient interpreters of scripture would say that Jonah was a “type” of Jesus.
This brings us to the study of Typology, the idea that things which were hidden in the Old Testament are revealed and made plain in the New Testament. Who would have thought, holding only the Book of Jonah in his hands, that the fanciful fish portion of the story was a cosmic hint that someday, the Messiah was going to die and be raised back to life after three days? Nevertheless, the Gospel writer Matthew thought so, and so did many ancient interpreters. Typology was a fascinating pastime for them.
Here is another example of Typology from the Book of Numbers. “The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” (Numbers 21:7-9)
Believers in Typology would say that the metal snake on the pole is a “type” of Jesus on the cross. Just as the bronze serpent was held on high, and anyone who looked at it was saved from death, so too, Jesus was nailed to a cross and raised aloft. Those who “looked at” him, or, those who believed in him, were saved from death through forgiveness of sin and the giving of eternal life. And, just as we saw in the “Sign of Jonah” passage from Matthew that begins this article, it is Jesus himself who explains that the thing in question is a type of himself! Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (John 3:12-15) Christ evidently found his own Christian symbolism. Hemingway would have been easy for him.
Many other people and ideas from the Old Testament were thought to be “types” of things in the New Testament. Passover and the Day of Atonement were both thought to prefigure Jesus’ sacrificial death. The near sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac was thought to prefigure the sacrifice of Jesus as well. Beginning with the early church, and becoming popular in the middle ages as well as in post-Reformation Calvinism, Typology flourished until modern times, when it has fallen into disuse and some disrepute (perhaps because some of its adherents got too wild with their theories).
What do you think about the basic idea of Typology? Did God preview the events of Jesus’ life during Old Testament times, ordaining that certain people and events would hint at what was to come? Ultimately, that is for us to guess at and only for God to know. In the meantime, the only sign we get is the one that has already been shown to us, the Sign of Jonah. We are told in words of scripture that Jesus, like Jonah, was returned to life after three days. The Bible we read is like Jonah walking into Nineveh, bringing words of warning that we should believe and repent. What will we do in response to our sign?
Note: This column is number 48 since I began it. That’s four years worth! Thanks for reading!
-Brendon

The Virgin shall conceive

2010-01-09T10:35:00.002-08:00

#47: “The virgin shall conceive” by Brendon Wahlberg
“‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’” (Matthew 1:20-23)
That’s one of the most famous passages in the New Testament. The virgin shall conceive. Generations of Christians have taken this passage to be one of many proofs that the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, predicted the birth of Jesus. But what prophecy was Matthew referring to? When Matthew mentioned “the prophet”, he was talking about Isaiah, and he was quoting Isaiah 7:14. The problem is, Matthew was taking that one line out of context. If we look at the whole passage in which that line appears, we might not think it is so obvious that it refers to Jesus.
However, taking a line out of context like this is a valid and very ancient way of interpreting the Bible. Ancient interpreters like Matthew were Jews who were trying to convince other Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. To Matthew, the writings of Isaiah were already centuries old, and it was impossible to know for sure what the prophet meant or did not mean by his words. There was a whole way of thinking that scripture could be cryptic and have hidden meanings which had to be teased out. Scripture could say one thing and really mean another thing. Scripture was not just an old story of the past – it was a book of lessons which could teach people in the present day what they needed to know. Furthermore, there was a literal way to read scripture, of course, but because scripture was divinely given, there was also a spiritual way to read it. One could take the text at face value, yes, but one could also read it while seeing the details as representative of something else. People and events in the Old Testament were seen by early Christians as representing or foreshadowing people or events in the time of Jesus. It was in this way that Matthew read Isaiah.
But what was the original passage about? Here it is for you to read. After that, we can work through what it means. I’ve added some words in brackets to clarify some meanings. “Then the Lord said to Isaiah, Go out to meet [Judah’s young King] Ahaz, you and your son Shear-jashub, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the Fuller’s Field, and say to him, Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two smoldering stumps of firebrands, because of the fierce anger of [King] Rezin and [his country of] Aram and [King Pekah] the son of Remaliah [who rules Israel in its capital of Samaria]. Because Aram—with Ephraim [Ephriam = Israel] and the son of Remaliah—has plotted evil against you, saying, Let us go up against Judah and cut off Jerusalem and conquer it for ourselves and make the son of Tabeel [our puppet] king in it; therefore thus says the Lord God : It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass. For the head of [or, the capital of] Aram is Damascus, and the head of [or, the king in] Damascus is Rezin. (Within sixty-five years Ephraim will be shattered, no longer a people.) The head of Ephraim [or, the capital of Israel] is Samaria, and the head of [or, the king in] Samaria is the son of Remaliah. If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.
“Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test. Then Isaiah said: ‘Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, [here’s your sign] the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey [the food of royalty] by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good [meaning, old enough to know what is edible and what is not edible]. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.” (Isaiah 7:3-16)
There you have the passage in its NRSV translation. But the exact words which Matthew quoted are not in there. Instead of a virgin there is just a young woman. That’s because Matthew was using the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and that translation gave Matthew the exact “virgin” wording which he quoted in his gospel. From Matthew’s day onwards, people have argued about the correct translation of virgin vs. young woman (Greek “parthenos” vs. Hebrew “almah”), usually for the purpose of debating whether Judaism or Christianity is the “true religion”. That is not what this article is about. Instead I want to illustrate how you can take a passage and read it literally or spiritually, and how different the results can be.
Let’s work through the passage and understand it. The situation behind it was this. There were two Jewish kingdoms, southern Judah and northern Israel. To the northeast lay the mighty military power of Assyria, where modern day Iraq lies. Israel felt threatened by Assyria, and it wanted to make an alliance with its small neighbor country, Aram, in order to become strong enough to defend against Assyria. Israel wanted Judah to join their coalition. This placed Judah’s King Ahaz in a bind. If he joined the coalition, then mighty Assyria could attack and defeat all three of the small countries! If he refused to join, then Israel and Aram would angrily attack Judah and install a puppet king who would cooperate with them. Ahaz heard that Israel and Aram had joined up in this manner, and he became very afraid of them teaming up against him.
It was then that Isaiah spoke to Ahaz on behalf of God. Don’t be afraid of those two countries with their angry but impotent kings (who are like smoldering sticks pulled from the fire - they’re just blowing smoke), said Isaiah. They may be planning to conquer you, but it will not come to pass. You have to stand firm in your faith in God or you’ll fall. Look, said Isaiah, do you need a sign to prove it? The sign is this: a child will be born and named Immanuel (which means God-with-us, because God is with us in this difficult time). Soon, before that child is even old enough to know the difference between what he can eat and not eat, things will be so good and prosperous in Judah that he’ll be eating like a king. And those two countries you’re so worried about? They’ll be gone by then. So don’t be afraid. God is with us, in Jerusalem, and we’ll be safe.
So, what happened next? Aram and Israel did besiege Jerusalem. Ahaz did not listen to Isaiah or place his faith in God. In his fear, he called for help from Assyria. “Then King Rezin of Aram and King Pekah son of Remaliah of Israel came up to wage war on Jerusalem; they besieged Ahaz but could not conquer him. […] Ahaz sent messengers to King Tiglath-pileser of Assyria, saying, ‘I am your servant and your son. Come up, and rescue me from the hand of the king of Aram and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are attacking me.’ Ahaz also took the silver and gold found in the house of the Lord and in the treasures of the king’s house, and sent a present to the king of Assyria. The king of Assyria listened to him; the king of Assyria marched up against Damascus [in Aram], and took it, carrying its people captive to Kir; then he killed Rezin.” (2 Kings 16:5-9) So Ahaz became just a vassal to the Assyrian king.
The literal meaning of the passage would seem to have nothing to do with Jesus. The sign of the child Immanuel was a sign to reassure Ahaz in his near future, not a sign to appear about seven hundred years later, long after Ahaz was dead. The passage does not mention Jesus by name, nor does it describe a miraculous virgin birth (just a young woman, maybe a virgin, maybe not, getting pregnant in the usual way). The main meaning of the passage is that the time until the defeat of Judah’s enemies is very short, so do not fear.
But ancient readers of the Greek version of the scriptures did see the word “virgin”, and they did see the meaning of the name Immanuel, God-with-us. It seemed like enough of a reason to read the passage spiritually instead of literally. To those wise enough to see the cryptic hidden meaning, instead of referring to God-with-us in the Temple, “Immanuel” referred to God-with-us in the person of Christ. The word virgin referred to the virgin birth. The old literal words of the text were given a new meaning. The Old Testament was foreshadowing something about the way Jesus would be born, and about his divine nature.
This whole issue is an old, old debate. And if you think about it, the whole point of saying that Isaiah talked about Jesus’ birth, is to say that God knew about his own plans ahead of time. If you can accept that idea, then a spiritual reading is at least possible. Today there are still several different ways to interpret the Bible text, and many of those ways stand opposed to each other. The Bible is a living document because the people who read and interpret it are ever living and changing. How you read the Bible depends on what you see there and what you bring with you to the experience. Literal or spiritual? Or both? You decide.

Wheel in the Sky Keep on Turning

2010-01-09T10:35:00.001-08:00

#46: “Wheel in the Sky Keep on Turning” by Brendon Wahlberg
When I was growing up in the 1970’s, “Chariots of the Gods” was a popular book. The basic idea of this book was that ancient alien astronauts had visited Earth and influenced mankind in the distant past. Monuments like the pyramids and statues like those on Easter Island were said to be evidence of these visits. Another thing said to contain evidence of ancient aliens was the Bible. Specifically, the visions of the prophet Ezekiel were said to contain a record of a visit from flying saucers and strange alien beings. It amazes me how the Bible can be so wildly misinterpreted sometimes.
Here is the passage which supposedly describes aliens and their spacecraft. “Then I looked, and above the dome that was over the heads of the cherubim there appeared above them something like a sapphire, in form resembling a throne. […] and a cloud filled the inner court. Then the glory of the Lord rose up from the cherub to the threshold of the house; the house was filled with the cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the glory of the Lord. The sound of the wings of the cherubim was heard as far as the outer court, like the voice of God Almightywhen he speaks. […] I looked, and there were four wheels beside the cherubim, one beside each cherub; and the appearance of the wheels was like gleaming beryl. And as for their appearance, the four looked alike, something like a wheel within a wheel. When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved; but in whatever direction the front wheel faced, the others followed without veering as they moved. Their entire body, their rims, their spokes, their wings, and the wheels—the wheels of the four of them - were full of eyes all round. As for the wheels, they were called in my hearing ‘the wheel-work’. Each one had four faces: the first face was that of the cherub, the second face was that of a human being, the third that of a lion, and the fourth that of an eagle.
The cherubim rose up. These were the living creatures that I saw by the river Chebar. When the cherubim moved, the wheels moved beside them; and when the cherubim lifted up their wings to rise up from the earth, the wheels at their side did not veer. When they stopped, the others stopped, and when they rose up, the others rose up with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in them. Then the glory of the Lord went out from the threshold of the house and stopped above the cherubim. The cherubim lifted up their wings and rose up from the earth in my sight as they went out with the wheels beside them. They stopped at the entrance of the east gate of the house of the Lord; and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. These were the living creatures that I saw underneath the God of Israel by the river Chebar; and I knew that they were cherubim.” (Ezekiel 10:1-20)
U.F.O. enthusiasts took this passage to be a description of the wheel shapes of flying saucers, the physics-defying flight capabilities of those ships, and the alien faces of their pilots. Poor Ezekiel had a close encounter, and could only describe it in his primitive terms.
Of course, what is really going on in the passage is something completely different. To put it in a nutshell, God is leaving the defiled Temple in Jerusalem to go into exile with his people in Babylon, traveling on a mobile throne carried by angels, to return only in the future, when Jerusalem and the Temple are restored.
Ezekiel was probably both a Priest of the Temple and a prophet. A few dates will serve to sketch out his prophetic career (as worked out by scholars using clues within the book). In 597 BCE, Jerusalem was captured by Babylon and the first deportations of its people into exile began. Ezekiel’s prophecies began about four years later in 593, in Jerusalem. Six years after that, in 587, the Temple was destroyed, and another wave of deportations began. Ezekiel’s Priestly duties were over, and he went into exile himself. He continued his career as a prophet, comforting the people in exile with visions of future restoration, for another seventeen years.
So, Ezekiel was a prophet of the exile. His message had to help the people cope with the loss of their religious center. Prior to the destruction of the Temple, it was thought that God’s presence dwelled within the Temple, above the Cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant. If the people were taken to Babylon, then they were separated from their God, right?
The passage above, far from being about aliens, is really meant to address this problem. And it does so be proposing that God has a mobile throne which can go anywhere he wants, including to Babylon. In fact, God has already left the Temple even before it gets destroyed, because of the abominations carried out there by people who think God has already deserted them. In Ezekiel 8, God explains why he must leave the Temple. The once Holy place is full of idols being worshipped. Women are weeping to the god Tammuz, and men are bowing down to a sun god.
“He said to me, ‘Mortal, do you see what they are doing, the great abominations that the house of Israel are committing here, to drive me far from my sanctuary? […] So I went in and looked; there, portrayed on the wall all round, were all kinds of creeping things, and loathsome animals, and all the idols of the house of Israel. […] Then he said to me, ‘Mortal, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, each in his room of images? For they say, “The Lord does not see us, the Lord has forsaken the land.” […] Therefore I will act in wrath; my eye will not spare, nor will I have pity; and though they cry in my hearing with a loud voice, I will not listen to them.” (Ezekiel 8:6-18)
Ezekiel describes how God exits via the east gate and leaves Jerusalem behind, his Holy presence unwilling to stay in a defiled place. “Then the cherubim lifted up their wings, with the wheels beside them; and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. And the glory of the Lord ascended from the middle of the city, and stopped on the mountain east of the city. The spirit lifted me up and brought me in a vision by the spirit of God into Chaldea, to the exiles. Then the vision that I had seen left me. And I told the exiles all the things that the Lord had shown me.” (Ezekiel 11:22-25)
Ultimately, Ezekiel offers a vision of hope and restoration. After describing a Temple rebuilt to exacting specifications, he reveals that God will return to the sanctuary, flying in through the same gate from which he left. “Then he brought me to the gate, the gate facing east. And there, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east; the sound was like the sound of mighty waters; and the earth shone with his glory. The vision I saw was like the vision that I had seen when he came to destroy the city, and like the vision that I had seen by the river Chebar; and I fell upon my face. As the glory of the Lord entered the temple by the gate facing east, the spirit lifted me up, and brought me into the inner court; and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.” (Ezekiel 43:1-5)
Far from being an account of a past alien encounter, the vision of Ezekiel is about an encounter with God which is ongoing and forever. “Thus says the Lord God: I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king over them all. Never again shall they be two nations, and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms. They shall never again defile themselves with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions. I will save them from all the apostasies into which they have fallen, and will cleanse them.
Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God. My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall follow my ordinances and be careful to observe my statutes. They shall live in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, in which your ancestors lived; they and their children and their children’s children shall live there forever; and my servant David shall be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will bless them and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary among them for evermore. My dwelling-place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Then the nations shall know that I the Lord sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary is among them for evermore.” (Ezekiel 37:21-28)

Demons 101

2010-01-09T10:34:00.001-08:00

#45: “Demons 101” by Brendon Wahlberg
In the gospel of Mark, we read about Jesus casting out demons from people. “That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons” (Mark 1: 32-33). There are many passages concerning demons in the four gospels, but what do we really know about demons? What are they? Where do they come from? What do they do, and why?
Demons seem to be common in the New Testament. Their existence is taken for granted and is unexplained. Demons, like angels, are not described or defined in any systematic way. All we can find are scraps of information scattered about scripture. All we can do is try to make a coherent picture out of those pieces. We cannot even look to older scriptures for more information; there are no demons in the Old Testament. Some English translations mention “demons” in a few places in the Hebrew Bible, but a more careful translation shows that those passages (such as Deuteronomy 32:16-17) are really talking about idols. Neither Testament gives any particular origin for demons. The Bible can’t tell us where they originally came from or how they came to be. The pagan Greeks thought of demons (they called them daimons) as lesser deities. Perhaps Greek ideas about demons were imported into Jewish theology between the two Testaments, and then altered.
Was a demon merely the same thing as an illness?
It is tempting, in the modern scientific world, to explain the nature of a demon as equivalent to a mental or physical illness, and to say that the people of the first century simply did not understand such things, calling them “demons” out of ignorance. But that is not what the New Testament says. The passage at the beginning of this article is one example of how the Bible distinguishes between sickness and demon-possession (being a “demoniac”). Another is found in Matthew: “So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them.” (Matthew 4:24) Some of the people who came to see Jesus were sick and some had demons. These were two different things, although they could be confused because the presence of a demon could cause disease symptoms in a person (such as convulsions - Mark 9:20).
What is the nature of a demon?
A demon is a spirit (Matthew 8:16) and not a physical being. There are many of them, and more than one can inhabit a person (Luke 8:2, Mark 5:9). It is unclear why they inhabit people, but scripture says they are evil (e.g. Luke 7:21) and unclean, so their reasons are no doubt evil. It may be that they try to exist in places like the desert, but are unable to find rest there, so they inhabit people (Matthew 12:43-44). Some demons are more evil than others (Matthew 12:45). They are said to torment people (Acts 5:16) and indeed, their presence can bring madness (Mark 5:5), muteness (Matthew 9:32), or blindness (Matthew 12:22). A demon can talk through the voice of the possessed person (Luke 4:33-36), and they are intelligent enough to recognize the authority of Jesus and to fear his power to cast them out and back into the abyss (Matthew 8:29-31, Luke 8:31). Demons are said to teach lies to men (1Timothy 4:1) and to be able to tell the future (Acts 16:16). They can have a sort of name, for example, “Legion” (Mark 5:9). And, they did seem to know that their time of being able to possess people had a built-in ending (Matthew 8:29). It is possible that demons were made by Satan and worked for him (Revelation 16:13-14).
If Demons are evil, why did God allow them to possess people in the first century?
I said that there were no demons in the Old Testament. Actually, there is one possible exception in the story of King Saul. “Now the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him. And Saul’s servants said to him, ‘See now, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our lord now command the servants who attend you to look for someone who is skilful in playing the lyre; and when the evil spirit from God is upon you, he will play it, and you will feel better.’” (1 Samuel 16:14-16) In this passage, God sends an evil spirit (possibly a demon?) to torment Saul, possibly to manipulate him into sending for David.
The passage makes some commentators uncomfortable because it is God who sends the evil spirit. Yet, God has power over all things, including evil spirits. If God has power over evil spirits, then God has power over the demons of the New Testament period, and could conceivably prevent them from possessing people in the first place. It’s another example of the question of: why does God allow evil to do its work?
It is possible that there was a divine purpose in allowing demon possession in the first century. The following passages suggest that purpose. Jesus said, “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.” (Matthew 12:28) “The seventy returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!’ He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.’” (Luke 10:17-18)
The various signs and miracles that Jesus performed with God’s power were meant to prove that the Kingdom of God had arrived. Jesus demonstrated his power over many aspects of the world, including disease (curing sickness), the forces of nature (calming a storm), and even death (raising Lazarus). It may be that God allowed demons to possess people so that Jesus could demonstrate his power over the world of evil spirits as well, providing one more important sign of the coming of the Kingdom of God. After that purpose was accomplished, and the Apostolic age had passed, demons were no longer allowed the power they once had, and demon possession became a thing of the past. Certainly, aside from “Exorcist” movies, we see nothing in the modern world to indicate that demons have the power to inhabit people any more.
In the modern age, it is easy to question the entire existence of demons. But if we do, we have to ask ourselves whether we truly respect scripture and the gospel accounts of Jesus. The New Testament assumes that demons are real, and the gospels are clear about Jesus treating demons as real, and dealing with them in a real way. It is hard for me to imagine Jesus merely humoring the superstitions of the people of the time, and pretending to cast out imaginary beings from people while secretly healing their actual mental or physical illnesses. That would not be the behavior of the same Jesus who made such a point of telling us the truth all of the time.
In the end, we must at least keep our minds open and allow for the possibility that demons exist exactly as described in the New Testament. If that is true, then we should also be grateful that our century is so very different from the first century CE, and that we are free from the threat of unclean evil spirits on top of all the many mental illnesses and diseases from which we still do suffer.

Almost in the New Testament

2010-01-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

#44: “Almost in the New Testament” by Brendon Wahlberg
Recently, an ancient copy of the New Testament was put online for the first time. You can now see every page of the famous Codex Sinaiticus (found on Mt. Sinai), which may have been one of the copies commissioned by the Emperor Constantine in the year 331. This copy shows how the canon of the New Testament was not yet finalized at the time, because although it contains all of the books we are familiar with now, it also contains two books which were later rejected from the final New Testament collection. These books, which were “almost in the New Testament”, were the “Letter of Barnabas” and “The Shepherd of Hermas”. What were these books about? And why were they kicked out of the canon in the end?
“The Shepherd” was a very popular book during the first four centuries of Christianity. It was probably written between 140 and 170CE by a man named Hermas, the brother of Pius, the Bishop of Rome. Many churches regarded it as holy scripture, which explains why it was included in the Codex found on Mt. Sinai. Basically, “The Shepherd” is about an angel who appears to Hermas in the form of a shepherd and shows him five visions, twelve commandments, and ten parables. These revelations are symbolic and hard to understand, so Hermas begs the angel to explain each one. The reader is expected to glean valuable Christian lessons from each explanation. Most of these lessons are about repentance.
The most important of these lessons concerns the question of what happens to baptized people who join the Church and are saved, but later return to a life of sin. “The Shepherd” claims to be a new divine revelation that such people get one, and only one, second chance. In “The Shepherd” (Fourth Commandment Chapter Three) Hermas is talking to the angel, and they have the following conversation.
“And I said, "I heard, sir, some teachers maintain that there is no other repentance than that which takes place, when we descended into the water and received remission of our former sins." He said to me, "That was sound doctrine which you heard; for that is really the case. For he who has received remission of his sins ought not to sin any more, but to live in purity. […] For the Lord, knowing the heart, and foreknowing all things, knew the weakness of men and the manifold wiles of the devil, that he would inflict some evil on the servants of God, and would act wickedly towards them. The Lord, therefore, being merciful, has had mercy on the work of His hand, and has set repentance for them; and He has entrusted to me power over this repentance. And therefore I say to you, that if any one is tempted by the devil, and sins after that great and holy calling in which the Lord has called His people to everlasting life, he has opportunity to repent but once. But if he should sin frequently after this, and then repent, to such a man his repentance will be of no avail…"”
Why did “The Shepherd” get rejected from the final canon? Part of the reason was that it had been written too recently. It did not go back to the Apostolic times. It was known exactly who wrote it, and Hermas was not connected to the Apostles. So, the book was not old enough or authoritative enough. But on top of those reasons, there was a problem with the way the book discussed Jesus. In Parable 9, “The Shepherd” suggests that Jesus was a normal person who became a host for the Holy Spirit. “The holy, pre-existent Spirit, that created every creature, God made to dwell in flesh, which He chose. This flesh, accordingly, in which the Holy Spirit dwelt, was nobly subject to that Spirit, walking religiously and chastely, in no respect defiling the Spirit; and accordingly, after living excellently and purely, and after laboring and co-operating with the Spirit, and having in everything acted vigorously and courageously along with the Holy Spirit, He assumed it as a partner with it. For this conduct of the flesh pleased Him, because it was not defiled on the earth while having the Holy Spirit.” This view of Jesus was rejected by the Church, and that may have banished “The Shepherd” from the canon. But before it was rejected, “The Shepherd” was almost part of the New Testament. It is precisely because it was once so popular that we still have the complete text of this long book.
The other book which was almost in the New Testament, and which can be found in the Codex of Mt. Sinai, is called the “Letter of Barnabas.” We don’t really know who wrote this epistle, but tradition associates it with either Barnabas, the companion of Paul, or someone named Barnabas of Alexandria. It was written around 130CE, for Christian Gentiles to read. The letter takes a very strong anti-Jewish position, and basically, it says that the Jewish understanding of the Old Testament, and the Jewish religion, are completely wrong. The letter says that Judaism is a false religion. Jews have never been part of a Covenant with God. Only Christians have a Covenant with God. Jews have never understood their own scriptures. An evil angel has led Jews to take their scriptures literally, when they were always meant to be taken figuratively. In fact, everything in the Old Testament is a really only a symbolic way to foreshadow the future Jesus.
For example, “Barnabas” says that circumcision was really only a symbol of Jesus on the cross. To make this point, he notes that Abraham circumcised 18 and 300 men in his household. Then Barnabas converts numbers to letters and makes the number 18 into Jesus, and the number 300 into the cross. The point is that the Jews were never supposed to take circumcision literally and actually go and do it, but that the circumcision story was really meant to point to the future event of Jesus’ death.
Likewise, Barnabas says that keeping Kosher was not to be taken literally either. “Now when Moses said, “Eat neither pig, nor eagle, nor hawk, nor crow, nor any fish that is without scales […] it is not God’s commandment that they literally should not eat, but Moses spoke in the spirit. For this reason, then, he mentions the pig: Do not associate, he is saying, with such people – people who are like pigs. That is, people who forget their Lord when they are well off, but when they are in need, they acknowledge the Lord; just as when the pig is feeding it ignores its keeper, but when it is hungry it makes a din.” (Barnabas 10:1-3)
It may be a blessing that “Barnabas” was excluded from the canon. Anti-Semites have used certain New Testament passages to justify their hatred through the ages. The “Letter of Barnabas” would have been the kind of material that they would have loved to use, if it had been ranked with Holy Scripture.
So there you have it, a brief introduction to two books that were almost Scripture. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!'" It might have been that our New Testament was two books longer than it is today. Instead, “The Shepherd” and “Barnabas” were tossed on the discard pile of history. But perhaps such things are part of God’s plan and for the best after all.

What is the 'Song of Songs' about?

2010-01-09T10:31:00.001-08:00

#43: “What is the ‘Song of Songs’ about?” by Brendon Wahlberg
The Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, is a very unusual book in the Bible. It is a collection of erotic love poetry that does not mention God. Consequently, its place in the canon of scripture was questioned by many in antiquity. Yet, the famous first century Rabbi Akiva said in its defense, “the whole of the world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; all the writings are Holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” Akiva’s opinion ensured that the Song of Songs made it onto the final list of accepted Bible books.
The secret of Rabbi Akiva’s great respect for this puzzling book is that he saw it not as erotic love poetry, but as an allegory for the love between God and Israel. For example, where the Song says, “My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts (1:13),” an allegorical interpretation might claim that the two breasts represent the two cherubim atop the Ark of the Covenant and that the bag of perfume represents God’s presence resting between them. Later Christians picked up on this theme and interpreted the book as a description of the love between Christ and the Church.
Others find the allegorical approach to be baseless, and they see only a collection of random love poems that celebrate the natural love between men and women. Including the poems in scripture is an affirmation that such love is a holy part of God’s creation, but there is no deeper meaning to be found in the book. They theorize that the poems were sung at weddings in ancient Israel.
Finally, there are those who see the Song of Songs as a sort of drama, a play with three characters who take turns speaking. When viewed this way, the Song of Songs tells of a young woman in love with a shepherd boy, and the powerful King who covets her beauty and tries to make her part of his harem. This last approach is perhaps the most interesting and meaningful, because we can take some powerful life lessons from a dramatic story, while a random collection of verses has less to offer us.
If the Song of Songs is indeed a story, who are the characters? One is King Solomon, the son of King David. The first line of the book says, “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.” (1:1) This line could mean that the book was written by Solomon, for Solomon, or about Solomon. Perhaps it is about Solomon, for the Song of Songs might be a subtle criticism of the promiscuity of the King, and it is unlikely that Solomon would have criticized himself.
What was there to criticize about Solomon? As the powerful King of Israel, Solomon had 1,000 women in his harem, as described in the following passage. “King Solomon loved many foreign women […] from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the Israelites, ‘You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you; for they will surely incline your heart to follow their gods;’ Solomon clung to these in love. Among his wives were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of his father David.” (1 Kings 11:1-4)
So the problem was that his many wives led Solomon to worship other gods. He should have known better: the Torah specifically forbids the King to have so many wives. “When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me’, you may indeed set over you a king whom the Lord your God will choose. […] And he must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away…” (Deuteronomy 17:14-17) According to the dramatic interpretation of the Song of Songs, despite having so many women, Solomon wants one more, and he only wants her for her looks. Her refusal of his advances and her choice to uphold true love may represent a rebuke to Solomon for his behavior in general. Not only did his promiscuity lead him to other gods, it also offended human ideals of romantic love.
The second character of this drama is a young virgin Shulammite maiden. Solomon wants to add her to his collection, but she is already in love with the third character, a young shepherd boy from her village. The other women in the harem, who are referred to as the “daughters of Jerusalem”, also speak in the story, acting as a sort of chorus.
The following is a summary of the dramatic story of the Song of Songs, along with chapter and verse numbers so you can follow along in your Bible if you wish. One weakness of this interpretation of the book is that it is hard to assign some of the verses to a specific character with real certainty. Some people would say that a particular line was spoken by the King, but some would say it was the maiden. Therefore, take the details with a grain of salt, so to speak. Besides the ambiguity of who is speaking in some parts, there is the difficulty of translation. The Song of Songs is notoriously hard to translate. The meaning of many of the Hebrew phrases is unclear, and many of the individual words are found only in this book, so we sometimes have to guess what they mean.
As the story opens, the young maiden lives in the north of Israel where she works on one of the King’s vineyards as a tenant farmer. Solomon has camped nearby to inspect his grape crops, and he sees the maiden and is taken with her beauty. The maiden is praising her young shepherd boyfriend (1:2-4) when she is summoned into the King’s tent (1:4). Women of the harem welcome her (1:4). We learn that the maiden’s skin is dark from tending grapes in the sun all the time (1:5-6) as she stands there wondering where the shepherd is at that moment (1:7). The harem women begin to tell her to go find him (1:8) when the King enters, reclines on a couch, and starts praising the maiden’s facial beauty and jewelry (1:9-10). The harem promises her even more jewelry (1:11) but the maiden can only stand and talk about her beloved the shepherd (1:12-14).
The King keeps praising the maiden’s beauty (1:15; 2:2) while the maiden steadfastly praises only her true love and talks about the house they’ll share, and how they first saw each other and fell in love (1:16-17; 2:1; 2:3-10). She describes what the shepherd said to her as their love grew (2:11-15). The maiden says (and she repeats it three times in the story) that love should not be rushed – it has to awaken when it is ready (2:7). Therefore what the King is doing is wrong. But Solomon will not release her, and she has to travel back to Jerusalem with him. On the way, she dreams she is in the city, looking in the streets for her beloved. She finds him in the dream, and they escape to her mother’s house (2:16-17; 3:1-5). But it is only a dream.
The King’s grand procession approaches Jerusalem. Solomon rides on a litter, a fancy travelling couch accompanied by many soldiers, and the rest of the harem comes out to greet it (3:6-11). The King is looking forward to another wedding, with the maiden. Many of his wives were princesses - daughters of foreign rulers, married to him to cement political alliances. But the Shulammite maiden was just a poor peasant – she must have been truly beautiful to so powerfully attract Solomon. The King extols her beauty at length, complimenting every part of her individually, discussing her virginity with great interest, and calling her his sister and bride (4:1-15). But the maiden is oblivious to his seduction, imagining the consummation of her love with the shepherd (4:16; 5:1).
In Jerusalem, the maiden dreams that her shepherd has come to find her. This time, the dream is more frightening than the last. The shepherd seems to be there, being intimate with her, but suddenly he vanishes. When she takes to the street looking for him, she dreams she is found and beaten by guards (5:2-7). The maiden wakes up and begs the harem women to tell the shepherd (if they see him) how much she misses him (5:8). The women ask what makes this boy so special (5:9) and of course the maiden tells them in detail (5:10-16). They ask where he has gone (6:1) and the maiden says her love is with his sheep and in his lily gardens (6:2-3). She then speaks words that have become famous in Jewish weddings, words which are sometimes inscribed on wedding rings: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” (6:3)
The King is not finished trying to win her with over-the-top praise of her beauty, calling her perfect and complimenting every part of her body at great length. He lets her know how much he wants to make love to her (6:4-13; 7:1-9). Again, the maiden refuses the King. “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.” (7:10) She speaks passionately to her shepherd as if he was there with her (7:10-13; 8:1-3). Again, she entreats everyone there not to force love, but to let love run its natural course. “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!” (8:4)
With that final refusal, Solomon evidently relents, and we find the maiden returning north, home to her village. Her brothers spot her coming (8:5). She walks up the path, leaning on her beloved shepherd at last. As they walk, the maiden talks about how strong true love is, and how it helped her resist Solomon. “For love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love all the wealth of one’s house, it would be utterly scorned.” (8:6-7) She reassures her concerned brothers that she remains a virgin (8:8-12), and hurries off with her shepherd to be with him alone (8:13-14).
It is impossible to say for sure if this dramatic interpretation of the Song of Songs is correct in general. But viewed in this way, it has important things to say about love and marriage. Love is natural and beautiful, but it cannot be forced to grow. True love is between two people who belong to each other, and has nothing to do with wealth or power. Solomon was wrong to let his desire come between two young people, and for all his flattery, his shallow, superficial attraction could not equal the deep and honest feelings shared by the two peasants.
If this interpretation is correct, then how did this book end up in the Bible in the first place? It is not a grand story of God and mankind, like the Exodus story. Was it included simply because it was a story of Solomon, and, as we know, even critical stories about the Kings of Israel were preserved? We may never know. Even if God is not in the Song of Songs, we are invited to think about God in relation to the book, simply because it is there in the Bible. Whether you look for God’s presence in the symbolism of the poetry, as Rabbi Akiva did, or if you see the story as an example of how God wants us to love each other - with delight and faithfulness - you can take something important from the Song of Songs.

My Old Friend from Antioch

2010-01-09T10:30:00.001-08:00

#42: “My Old Friend from Antioch” by Brendon Wahlberg
I was reading the book of Acts one day, when I came across someone I really identified with. His name was Nicolas of Antioch, and here is his brief appearance in Acts 6:5. “Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, ‘It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait at tables. Therefore, friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word.’ What they said pleased the whole community, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas, a proselyte of Antioch.” (Acts 6:1-5)
“Proselyte” is not a word many people would recognize, and perhaps a more modern translation of Acts 6:5 would help; here is one from the “New Living Translation”, one of those English paraphrases of the Bible: “and Nicolas of Antioch (a Gentile convert to the Jewish faith, who had now become a Christian).” I read this, and I thought, wow, this guy did the same thing I did, except he did it almost two thousand years ago. Like Nicolas, I was also a convert to Judaism who was later baptized as a Christian. I wondered if the road of faith Nicolas traveled was anything like mine.
When I was very young, I attended an old fashioned, small-town, New England Congregational Church, or at least I did until my adopted parents, one a lapsed Catholic and the other an Agnostic, told me I didn’t have to go any more. So, not knowing any better, I stopped going. As a result, I didn’t have any religious identity until I went to college and fell in love with a young Jewish woman. With an empty place in my life waiting to be filled with faith in God, I began to study Judaism. Eventually, I worked with the campus Rabbi and formally studied to become a convert. So Nicolas of Antioch and I were both converts, although today they call it becoming a Jew by Choice.
For me, conversion involved (1) demonstrating to a panel of three Rabbis that I had learned the basics of the faith, (2) a full immersion in water (just like long ago with John the Baptist, except in a small ritual pool inside a building, not in the Jordan River), and (3) a symbolic circumcision – symbolic because when I was a newborn in 1966, they routinely circumcised babies in Boston. As a Proselyte, a Gentile converting to Judaism in the first century CE, Nicolas of Antioch would have undergone something similar. Ancient sources tell us that it was required that a proselyte be circumcised, and that he undergo a proselyte baptism, a water ceremony.
After my conversion, I eventually had a proper Jewish wedding, with the canopy and stepping on the glass, and everything. I truly enjoyed being Jewish, and I continued to study and grow deeper in my faith. Nothing shook me from it, not even when my long-lost birth mother entered my life and turned out to be a Pentecostal, Charismatic, speaking-in-tongues, Holy-Ghost-filled, dancing-in-the-spirit, street preacher who was expecting the end of the world in one year’s time and wanted me to be saved in time for the Rapture. I am sorry to say, she did not present an attractive picture of Christianity. She did not shake my faith. It took the end of my marriage after twelve years and two children to do that.
After my divorce, I was broken-hearted and religiously adrift, feeling distant from God and waiting to see where life would take me. Over the next few years, I was blessed to begin a relationship with a wonderful woman named Toni who was a member of Calvin Presbyterian Church. I am convinced that the Holy Spirit really is present at Calvin. I believe this because when I began to attend there with Toni, it felt like the Holy Spirit began to very gently speak to me, to beckon me to come and join in, for healing and belonging and a new, closer relationship with the same God I once knew. At first I resisted, still confused and trying to work out where I belonged in terms of faith, but one day, I looked around at the kind and welcoming people in the Calvin congregation, and I realized I was the only one keeping myself out, like a person standing out in the cold when the door to the party is wide open and right there in front of him.
And so, I began to study with the Pastor, and he taught me that faith was another word for trust. I learned to trust again, and eventually, I was baptized a Christian at Calvin. (Unlike the babies who are baptized, I was not carried around the room by the Pastor.) I have loved being at Calvin ever since. I have always enjoyed religious studies, and one day I realized that if I was going to study and learn anyway, why not share it in the form of a monthly column in the newsletter? My perspective in knowing both the Jewish and Christian sides of things would make me a good person to write about the Old and New Testaments alike. It would be like a mini-ministry in adult education, my way of serving at Calvin. Service to others is central, after all.
Which brings us back to old Nicolas of Antioch. Do we know what happened in Antioch that made him want to convert to Judaism after growing up as a Gentile (perhaps a Greek pagan of some sort)? Most proselytes were people who encountered Judaism in synagogues in the diaspora and were attracted to that ancient faith. Do we know how and why he later became a Christian? Did he hear the preaching of Peter or another Apostle and decide that the Jewish Messiah had come? We can never know the answers for sure. But we do know that he was a servant at heart.
The passage from Acts concerns the distribution of food to the poor in Jerusalem. As the passage notes, the new and growing Christian community there was made up of two groups: Hebrews (who were Jewish Christians) and Hellenists (who were Greek Christians). They were all equally “disciples” but some of the Greek widows were not getting their share of food. Nicolas was chosen, along with six others, to distribute food daily to the community of the disciples. The twelve Apostles of Jesus were unable to carry out that kind of duty. Instead, their task as given by Jesus was to pray and preach the gospel. But Nicolas’ job was really no less important. Without him, some widows could starve. Those widows had to be fed and healthy before they could hear the good news from the Apostles.
And the Apostles did seem to respect the service Nicolas performed, even if they felt they were too busy to do it. Notice that the Apostles required “men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom” to carry out the food distribution duty. Acts 6:6 tells us that the Apostles prayed and laid their hands on Nicolas and the other six men. Perhaps they were being placed in positions of authority in the infant Jerusalem church, where these seven men would attend to the needs of both the Greek and Hebrew Christians among them. Nicolas was probably a good person to choose because of his mixed background, making him better able to identify with both types of Christians.
I feel a kinship with Nicolas because I imagine that, like me, he felt it was okay to have a religious identity blending Judaism and Christianity, and that he could see that both faiths, usually thought of as separate by most people, were really two sides of the same coin.
How many ways are there to serve others in a church? There are as many different ways as there are different people in the church. This column is my way; what is yours? Whatever it is, thank you for doing it, and may it “please the whole community” like the service of my old friend from Antioch, Nicolas.

Rival Baptisms

2010-01-09T10:19:00.000-08:00

#41: “Rival Baptisms” by Brendon Wahlberg
In Christian tradition, John the Baptist was the revered forerunner to Jesus, sent to help announce Jesus to the world. To Christians, John was certainly secondary in importance and authority to Jesus. But John had followers of his own, disciples to whom John was the important one. To them, John was the great Rabbi who brought forgiveness of sins and was put to death by the authorities. In New Testament times, there were followers of John, and followers of Jesus, and they were probably rivals, at least in the eyes of Jesus’ followers, the ones who wrote the Gospels. The Gospels reveal hints of this rivalry if you look closely enough.
John the Baptist was born of the priestly line, but as an adult, he preached in the wilderness of Judea, dressed like a prophet, and offered a new ritual, baptism. John said that people had to radically repent and be immersed in the waters of the Jordan to be cleansed of their sin in advance of the coming Day of the Lord. Those baptized were redeemed and reborn. This new ritual made the Temple and all its old rituals unnecessary. Men and women flocked to John to participate, and among them was Jesus.
Was Jesus baptized by John? It sounds like a simple question, until you think like a follower of Jesus who feels a rivalry with John’s followers, in the years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, when the Gospels were written. If John baptized Jesus, then John could be considered superior to Jesus in some way. The superior one blesses the inferior one. This idea was not acceptable, and if you look at the Gospels in the order that they were written, you can see how the writers began to deal with it.
Let’s take the Gospel of Mark first. In Mark, there is no question; John baptized Jesus. “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. […] He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” (Mark 1:4-9) Mark was not troubled by John baptizing Jesus, but notice that he has John make a little speech about how he is not worthy to untie Jesus’ sandals (the action of a slave). Mark has to make sure we know that John is the inferior person.
Luke, like Mark, does not mind saying that John baptized Jesus. “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’” (Luke 3:21-22)
But later in his Gospel, Luke makes sure we know that John is just the messenger preparing the way for Jesus. “The disciples of John reported all these things to him. So John summoned two of his disciples and sent them to the Lord to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ When the men had come to him, they said, ‘John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” ’ Jesus had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’ When John’s messengers had gone, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who put on fine clothing and live in luxury are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.” I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.’” (Luke 7:18-28)
Mark and Luke are okay with John baptizing Jesus, but they make sure we know that John is not superior to Jesus. Matthew is a little different. Matthew has a problem with the baptism itself. Matthew’s Gospel has the following exchange between Jesus and John. “Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he consented.” (Matthew 3:13-15) Matthew couldn’t deny that the baptism had happened, but he could portray Jesus and John as saying, in effect, we know how this looks, but it is okay, it is proper to fulfill God’s plan by doing this.
Then we get to the Gospel of John, probably the last one written. This Gospel deals with the baptism in another way – by not even mentioning it. “The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.’ And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’” (John 1:29-34)
The beginning of the Gospel of John is a famous poem about Jesus being the same as God and present at creation. There are two passages that seem to interrupt the flow of it, and these are both about John the Baptist. Both passages make it clear that John was secondary to Jesus. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” (John 1:6-9) “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ’)” (John 1:14-15)
Now we can see how the Gospels dealt with John the Baptist, putting him in his high place of reverence, but not too high. Were there still followers of John in the communities of these Gospel writers? Were there rivals who followed John, still enacting his baptism rite, and did the followers of Jesus feel they had to correct these people, or stop them from attracting more followers who might otherwise have joined the young Church? Were the passages in the Gospels, which we have just examined, ammunition for arguments against such rivals?
The Acts of the Apostles suggests that there were still followers of John in Paul’s time. “While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul passed through the inland regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples. He said to them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?’ They replied, ‘No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.’ Then he said, ‘Into what then were you baptized?’ They answered, ‘Into John’s baptism.’ Paul said, ‘John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus.’ On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.” (Acts 19:1-5) This passage suggests that sometimes the followers of John were absorbed into Christianity.
Another passage in Acts describes a hybrid believer in both John and Jesus who had to be corrected. “Now there came to Ephesus a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria. He was an eloquent man, well-versed in the scriptures. He had been instructed in the Way of the Lord; and he spoke with burning enthusiasm and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue; but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the Way of God to him more accurately.” (Acts 18:24-26)
What was to become of John’s followers? They could not be rivals forever. The Jesus movement continued to grow. Jesus rose from the dead and John did not. The following passage from the Gospel of John attempts to provide the consolation that John the Baptist himself would have been happy with his role and his fate. “Now a discussion about purification arose between John’s disciples and a Jew. They came to John and said to him, ‘Rabbi, the one who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you testified, here he is baptizing, and all are going to him.’ John answered, ‘No one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven. You yourselves are my witnesses that I said, “I am not the Messiah, but I have been sent ahead of him.” He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.’” (John 3:25-30)
Curiously enough, there are still followers of John the Baptist in the world. A religious group called the Mandaeans, perhaps the last surviving Gnostics, still reveres John the Baptist as one of their greatest teachers. And of course, John’s words will always be there to inspire us to repent. “John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.’ And the crowds asked him, ‘What then should we do?’ In reply he said to them, ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.’ Even tax-collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, ‘Teacher, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.’ Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.’” (Luke 3:7-14) What then, should we do?

A Curtain Torn in Two

2009-05-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

#40: “A Curtain Torn In Two” by Brendon Wahlberg

At the moment of Jesus’ death on a cross, a strange and miraculous event occurs. A large curtain in the Jerusalem Temple is suddenly torn down the middle. This event is mentioned in all three of the synoptic gospels. “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” (Mark 15:37-38) “Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” (Matthew 27:50-51) “It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land* until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed;* and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last.” (Luke 23:44-46)

What was this torn curtain, and why was its tearing such a significant event? The entrance to the innermost room of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, which once contained the Ark of the Covenant, was covered by a very large and thick curtain. This covering is described in Exodus. “You shall make a curtain of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen; it shall be made with cherubim skillfully worked into it. You shall hang it on four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold, which have hooks of gold and rest on four bases of silver. You shall hang the curtain under the clasps, and bring the Ark of the Covenant * inside, within the curtain; and the curtain shall separate for you the holy place from the most holy. You shall put the mercy-seat* on the ark of the covenant * in the most holy place.” (Exodus 26:31-34)
Only the High Priest was allowed to enter beyond the curtain, and then only once a year on the Day of Atonement. Beyond the curtain was the actual presence of God, and the High Priest had to take various precautions to avoid seeing God and dying as a result. The High Priest came with blood to offer for the forgiveness of the sins of the entire people, as described in Leviticus. “Tell your brother Aaron not to come just at any time into the sanctuary inside the curtain before the mercy-seat* that is upon the ark, or he will die; for I appear in the cloud upon the mercy-seat.* [...] He shall slaughter the goat of the sin-offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the curtain, and do with its blood as he did with the blood of the bull, sprinkling it upon the mercy-seat* and before the mercy-seat.* Thus he shall make atonement for the sanctuary, because of the uncleanness of the people of Israel, and because of their transgressions, all their sins...” (Leviticus 16:2-16)
The gospel writers recorded the tearing of the curtain as a literal and symbolic event happening at the moment of Jesus’ death. Jesus died, and as a direct result, the curtain tore. There are several meanings to be understood from this.
Christians understand Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of all sin, an event analogous to the sacrifice of blood offered by the High Priest once a year. Unlike the High Priest’s sacrifice, which had to be repeated every year, Jesus’ sacrifice was once and for all. After Jesus, the yearly sacrifice was no longer needed. The curtain tore because the sacrificial system had come to an end.
The curtain was a partition separating Man from God, and access to God through the curtain was extremely limited. But Jesus’ death opened a way for people to come directly to God, to know God and be forgiven, without a Priestly intermediary. Jesus’ death atoned for sin, making us right before God, allowing us to come before God and not die. The curtain tore because the barrier between God and man was removed. Because the huge curtain was torn from top to bottom, the symbolic implication is that God did the tearing.
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews discussed the meaning of the torn curtain at length, giving us a full understanding of what it means for us. “Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” (Hebrews 10:19-25) Entering beyond the torn curtain is just the beginning. This privilege must bring changes in our lives befitting our new status.
“Thus it was necessary for the sketches of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves need better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.” (Hebrews 9:23-28) The torn curtain is not the end of the story, either. We are promised that our savior’s work is not finished.
“We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered, having become a high priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedek.” (Hebrews 6:19-20)

Meet the Paraclete

2009-05-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

#39: “Meet the Paraclete” by Brendon Wahlberg

The Gospel of John, in chapters 14-16, contains the only formal teaching about the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. These passages are part of Jesus’ farewell speech, and in them, he teaches his disciples about the Paraclete, a term for the Holy Spirit that is unique to John’s writings. The word Paraclete (Greek: parakletos) means “one called alongside”. It has been translated variously as advocate, counselor, and comforter. The Paraclete is in fact the Holy Spirit, the presence of God who will remain with the disciples after Jesus has ascended. These passages give us a rare insight into the nature of the third person of the Trinity. Here they are in order:

“‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate [Paraclete], to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” (John 14:15-17)

“‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (14:25-26)

“‘When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.” (15:26)

“But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them. The Work of the S ‘I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, “Where are you going?” But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (16:4-15)

What can we learn about the Holy Spirit from these passages? The word Paraclete belongs to the language of law courts, and means our defender in court, our advocate. Notice that Jesus says he is sending “another” advocate. This is because both Jesus and the Holy Spirit are our advocates. The Holy Spirit is to continue in Jesus’ role on Earth while Jesus takes up the role in Heaven, as seen in John’s first letter. “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate [paraclete] with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2:1)

What else can these passages teach us? The Paraclete is an advocate. In court, an advocate stands opposed to an adversary. You may remember that the word for devil, “diabolos”, means the opposite of an advocate, an accuser. The accuser’s role is described in Revelation. “Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, ‘Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.” (Revelation 12:10) So, the Holy Spirit’s purpose is opposite to that of Satan. One function of our advocate is to turn the attack against Satan by accusing the accuser. The Paraclete condemns Satan, the “ruler of this world,” in judgment. The Paraclete also works to bring people to Christ, by arguing that they sin by not believing in Christ, and testifying to the world about the righteousness of those who do believe.
Sorrow Will Turn into Joy

These passages say that the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, is the Spirit of truth. Sent by God in Jesus’ name, the Spirit teaches everything that Jesus did not teach while living among us, and reminds us of everything Jesus taught when he was among us. The Spirit also declares the future. So, the Paraclete is a teacher of all truth, past, present and future. We are further defended against Satan by learning the truth about God. Furthermore, the telling of this truth glorifies Jesus Christ. The New Testament scriptures themselves accomplish many of these same goals in the world. Both scripture and the Paraclete teach us about what Jesus did among us, and glorify him. No wonder it is said that scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit. Together they do the same work.

Finally, these passages reassure us that the presence of the Holy Spirit is with us and within us, forever, even if it is unseen and unknown by many in the world. Paul has further teaching about the Spirit and its gifts. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:7-13)

That's Where That Saying Came From!

2009-05-07T14:42:00.000-07:00

#38: “That’s where that saying came from!” by Brendon Wahlberg

Many of our common phrases and sayings actually came from the Bible. Sometimes, the original form and context of a saying is surprising. Here are some famous sayings and the Bible passages they came from (All passages are from the NRSV translation).

Money is the root of all evil. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” (1 Timothy 6:10)

There’s nothing new under the sun. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” (Matthew 7:15)

You reap what you sow. “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.” (Galatians 6:7-8)

Pride goes before a fall. “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18)

I made it by the skin of my teeth. “My bones cling to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.” (Job 19:20)

Two sayings in one passage: (A) Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. (B) It is a sign of the times. “He answered them, ‘When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.” (Matthew 16:2-3)

It’s just a drop in the bucket. “Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.” (Isaiah 40:15)

He’s a man after my own heart. “The Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever, but now your kingdom will not continue; the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart; and the Lord has appointed him to be ruler over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.” (1 Samuel 13:13-14)

A leopard can’t change his spots. “Can Cushites change their skin or leopards their spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil.” (Jeremiah 13:23)

Eat, drink, and be merry! “So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 8:15)

Fight the good fight. “Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” (1 Timothy 6:12)

Out of the mouths of babes. “Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.” (Psalms 8:2)

It was a labor of love. “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 1:2-3)

There’s no rest for the wicked. “But the wicked are like the tossing sea that cannot keep still; its waters toss up mire and mud. There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.” (Isaiah 57:20-21)

I can see the handwriting on the wall. “Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace, next to the lampstand. The king was watching the hand as it wrote.” (Daniel 5:5)

It’s like the blind leading the blind. “Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)

Keep on the straight and narrow. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14)

He’s like a law unto himself. “When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves.” (Romans 2:14)

He followed the letter of the law. “Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Corinthians 3:5-6)

He’s the apple of my eye. “For thus said the Lord of hosts (after his glory sent me) regarding the nations that plundered you: Truly, one who touches you touches the apple of my eye. See now, I am going to raise my hand against them, and they shall become plunder for their own slaves.” (Zechariah 2:8-9)

I’m at my wit’s end. “They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their calamity; they reeled and staggered like drunkards, and were at their wits’ end.” (Psalm 107:26-27)

It happened in the twinkling of an eye. “We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52)

I don’t suffer fools gladly. “What I am saying in regards to this boastful confidence, I am saying not with the Lord’s authority, but as a fool; since many boast according to human standards, I will also boast. For you gladly put up with fools, being wise yourselves!” (2 Corinthians 11:17-19)

An eye for an eye. “If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” (Exodus 21:23-25)

Put your house in order. “The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz came to him, and said to him, ‘Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover.’” (2 Kings 20:1)

The truth shall set you free. “Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Joshua Anointed

2009-05-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

#37: “Joshua Anointed” by Brendon Wahlberg

The name Jesus Christ is so familiar to us that we might sometimes forget that “Christ” is not a last name, but a title. We know that the name “Jesus” may be translated as “Joshua”, and that even gives us the correct impression that Jesus had a common name in his day. But the Greek-derived word “Christ” sounds more exotic. Christ is a translation of the Hebrew word “Messiah”, which means “Anointed.” So, Jesus Christ is Joshua Anointed. Despite Jesus/Joshua being a common name, “Anointed” was a title with great significance. It was the “Anointed” which set Jesus apart.

During key moments of the Gospel of Matthew, two very different people call Jesus “the Christ.” “He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’” (16:15-16) “Then the high priest said to him, ‘I put you under oath before the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.’” (26:63) One person, Peter, calls Jesus the Christ because he joyfully believes it is true. The other, the high priest Caiaphas, is angry and fearful that it might be true. Notice that for both people, the title of Christ goes along with being the Son of God. So we have two titles to understand, “Anointed”, and “Son of God.” What do they mean, and how are they tied together? The obvious place to look and see from where these titles come is the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament scriptures that were holy to both Peter and the high priest.

Anointing is smearing or rubbing a person or an object with precious scented oil. A person or object is anointed in order to show that it is dedicated to God. Good examples of this are found in Exodus. “The Lord spoke to Moses: Take the finest spices: of liquid myrrh [...] of sweet-smelling cinnamon [...] of aromatic cane [...] cassia [...] and a hin of olive oil; and you shall make of these a sacred anointing-oil blended as by the perfumer; it shall be a holy anointing-oil. With it you shall anoint the tent of meeting and the ark of the covenant, and the table and all its utensils, and the lampstand and its utensils, and the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt-offering with all its utensils, and the basin with its stand; you shall consecrate them, so that they may be most holy; whatever touches them will become holy. You shall anoint Aaron and his sons, and consecrate them, in order that they may serve me as priests.” (30:22-30)

“You shall bring Aaron and his sons to the entrance of the tent of meeting, and wash them with water. Then you shall take the vestments, and put on Aaron the tunic and the robe of the ephod, and the ephod, and the breastpiece, and gird him with the decorated band of the ephod; and you shall set the turban on his head, and put the holy diadem on the turban. You shall take the anointing-oil, and pour it on his head and anoint him.” (29:4-7) Perhaps in these passages, we can see part of what upset the high priest Caiaphas in Matthew. The high priest Aaron of old was anointed. If common people were giving Jesus the title “Anointed”, would they see him as the true high priest of Israel instead of Caiaphas?

There was much more for Caiaphas to worry about. Besides the high priest, another important anointed person in scripture was the true King of Israel. A good example of this is found in 1 Kings. “There the priest Zadok took the horn of oil from the tent and anointed Solomon. Then they blew the trumpet, and all the people said, ‘Long live King Solomon!’ And all the people went up following him, playing on pipes and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth quaked at their noise.” (1:39-40) From the very beginning of Kingship in Israel, the King was anointed with oil. Samuel the prophet anointed Saul and David. Anointing, instead of crowning, was the ceremony by which a King took office. The oil was a symbol of the King’s relationship with God. The King was given the title of “The Lord’s Anointed.” As applied to King David and the House of David, the word Anointed basically meant King.

So Caiaphas was also afraid that the people calling Jesus “Anointed” might follow him as a King of Israel, of the house of David. This was sure to cause great trouble with the Roman authorities, and the high priest worked to keep the Romans pacified, in order to protect the vulnerable Jewish people.

Caiaphas called Jesus Anointed and Son of God. Did this mean that Caiaphas had heard of the strange manner of Jesus’ birth? Was Caiaphas thinking about the Christian concept of the “only begotten Son of God”? Or, did “Son of God” mean something else to him? Notice that he called Jesus Anointed and Son of God as if they meant the same thing. Most likely, to him, they did. We read in 2 Samuel that the Kings of the house of David were adopted as “Sons of God”. “Moreover, the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. [...] your throne shall be established for ever. In accordance with all these words and with all this vision, Nathan spoke to David.” (2 Samuel 7:11-17)

“Then you spoke in a vision to your faithful one, and said: ‘I have set the crown on one who is mighty, I have exalted one chosen from the people. I have found my servant David; with my holy oil I have anointed him; [...] He shall cry to me, “You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation!” (Psalm 89:19-26) If we look at the two passages above without seeing them as prophecies about Jesus, but instead seeing them as Caiaphas might, we can see how the high priest would think of an Anointed King and a Son of God as the same thing. The Anointed King of Israel was also an adopted Son of God, according to the scriptures. So, of course Caiaphas was upset. If the people were going to follow Jesus as a figure like that, then Jesus deeply threatened the religious and political status quo the high priest protected.

As fearful as the title “Anointed” was for Caiaphas, it was hopeful for Peter. When Peter called Jesus the Anointed, the Son of God, he was expressing the Jewish hope for a savior. Although the title of Anointed was held by kings and priests of old, by Peter’s time, there were no more kings in Israel, and even the high priest was no longer anointed, but invested instead. The anointed leaders were gone, but the need for them remained. Over time, the words and ideas - King, Anointed, Son of God - were associated with a hoped-for future savior who would deliver the people from their suffering.

It is ironic that, despite Jesus being called the Anointed, he was never ceremonially anointed with oil as King David was. And yet, for David, the anointing with oil was the moment when the King received God’s Holy Spirit. Christians believe instead that Jesus was anointed directly with the Holy Spirit; no oil was needed. “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” (Matthew 3:16-17) “That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” (Acts 10:37-38) Oil or no oil, Jesus was still all of the things an “Anointed one” had meant in the past: High Priest, true King, and Son of God.

#36 Hallelujah and Amen

2009-05-07T14:37:00.000-07:00

#36: “Hallelujah and Amen!” by Brendon Wahlberg

The Bible is so much a part of our culture that some biblical Hebrew words have entered into our English language. We say them all the time, sometimes without fully knowing what they mean. Hallelujah and Amen are two good examples. There is a rich history behind both of these words, and if we are going to use them so often, we might as well know better what we are saying, right?

Hallelujah! We shout it in church, we use it in song, and we say it when great things happen. What does this ancient word mean? Hallelujah is really a transliteration of two Hebrew words, which means that the sounds of the original words are simply written out in English, and are not actually translated. A good example of a transliteration is the word “Hanukkah/Chanuka/Hanaka, etc.” The reason there are so many spellings is that this is a non-English word sounded out and written like it sounds. For the same reason, Hallelujah might be spelled Alleluia. Transliteration of the word Hallelujah goes all the way back to Greek and Latin versions of the Bible.

Hallelujah is really a phrase made up of two words, Hallelu and Jah. The first part of the word, Hallelu, is a request to the congregation to joyously praise, and the second part, Jah (or, Yah), is a short form of Yahweh, the biblical name of God. So, translated, Hallelujah means “Praise the Lord, all you people!” In the Hebrew Bible, the word Hallelujah is only found in the book of Psalms, where it is used in 16 of the 150 Psalms. As the Psalms were meant to be sung, it is fitting that we use Hallelujah in song today, just as they did long ago. Psalms 146-150 are known as the “Hallelujah Psalms.” They were meant for use in joyful public worship. In each one of these Psalms, the word Hallelujah begins and ends the Psalm.

“Praise the Lord [Hallelu Yah]! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty firmament! Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness! Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with clanging cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Praise the Lord [Hallelu Yah]!” (Psalm 150)

In the New Testament, Hallelujah appears only in the book of Revelation (19:1-6), again as an introduction to praising God. “After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying, ‘Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power to our God, for his judgments are true and just; he has judged the great whore who corrupted the earth with her fornication, and he has avenged on her the blood of his servants.’ Once more they said, ‘Hallelujah! The smoke goes up from her for ever and ever.’ And the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshipped God who is seated on the throne, saying ‘Amen. Hallelujah!’ And from the throne came a voice saying, ‘Praise our God, all you his servants, and all who fear him, small and great.’ Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunder-peals, crying out, ‘Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.” Despite this limited usage in the actual Bible, Hallelujah has become a household word, used by Christians everywhere to praise God.

Amen! Amen is another transliterated Hebrew word found in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. We use it today as an expression of agreement, as in “Amen to that”, and in worship, it is the almost automatic ending of a spoken prayer or a hymn. But how was Amen used originally? It may be translated in several ways, including “so be it”, “truly”, “certainly”, “may it be so”, “let it happen”, and “verily.”

Amen appears in many places in the Hebrew Bible. Here are examples of Jeremiah using Amen to say “so be it.” “So shall you be my people, and I will be your God, that I may perform the oath that I swore to your ancestors, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as at this day. Then I answered, ‘So be it [Amen], Lord.’” (Jeremiah 11:4-5) “and the prophet Jeremiah said, ‘Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied.” (Jeremiah 28:6)

Amen was also used in the Psalms as a liturgical response, appearing along with Hallelujah. “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. And let all the people say, ‘Amen.’ Praise the Lord [Hallelu Yah]! (Psalm 106:48) The book of Psalms is divided into five parts, and the ending of each part is marked by an Amen, or even a double Amen, as in “Amen and Amen.” (Psalm 41:13)

Early Christians adopted the use of Amen as a confirmatory response to a prayer, as shown by these passages. “I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. Otherwise, if you say a blessing with the spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say the ‘Amen’ to your thanksgiving, since the outsider does not know what you are saying?” (1 Corinthians 14:15-16) “[...] to bring about the obedience of faith - to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory for ever! Amen.” (Romans 16:26-27) According to the writer Justin Martyr (150 CE), second century Christians said Amen to the blessing after the Eucharist.

Besides those kinds of liturgical usage, Amen also has a special place in the words of Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus uses Amen in an exclusive and unusual way: not to close a prayer, but as an introduction to his next words, which is meant to emphasize the importance, authority, and truth of what he is about to say. Here are two examples. In one, Jesus even uses a double Amen! (Note that the word Amen has been translated as “truly” in the NRSV.) “For truly [Amen] I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:18) “And he said to him, ‘Very truly [Amen, Amen], I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’” (John 1:51)

Finally, Amen can be an aspect of God. Amen is the embodiment of truth and faithfulness associated with God – this is used to powerful effect in the words of Isaiah, when he calls God the “God of Amen.” “Then whoever invokes a blessing in the land shall bless by the God of faithfulness [of Amen], and whoever takes an oath in the land shall swear by the God of faithfulness [of Amen]” (Isaiah 65:16). And in Revelation 3:14, Jesus is called “the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation.” Paul says of Jesus, “For in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’ For this reason it is through him that we say the ‘Amen’, to the glory of God.” (2 Corinthians 1:20) Therefore it is fitting that the New Testament itself ends with the word Amen. “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.” (Revelation 22:20-21)

The Martyred Bishop

2008-11-21T10:38:00.000-08:00

One of the most fascinating and famous early Christian martyrs was the Bishop of Antioch, Ignatius. When he died in a Roman arena in the year 107 CE, savaged by wild beasts, he was about 70 years old. Born just after Jesus’ crucifixion, Ignatius had served Christ all his life, and he went willingly to his death, seeing in it the culmination of all his service. As amazing as it seems to us today, Ignatius actually longed for his violent death. To him, it was a chance to be a sacrifice to God, and to truly earn the name, “Christian.” Who was this compelling figure, whose final goal was to get to God, no matter the cost?

Ignatius was a man known to us today as one of the “Apostolic Church Fathers”, a group that includes other first century Bishops like Clement and Polycarp. These men were appointed by the Apostles themselves, forming a succession of authority to continue to lead the church. The writings of these men tell us about the early churches in and Asia Minor, including the Church of Antioch in Syria, where followers of Jesus were first called Christians.Ignatius was the second Bishop of Antioch, chosen by the Apostle Peter. His job as a Bishop was to lead church prayers, celebrate the Eucharist, conduct baptisms, give spiritual counsel, preside over marriages, and preach sermons.He had the devoted help of the Deacons and Presbyters working under him.He was a learned, faithful, humble, and selfless man. So why did he have to die – who would want to kill a man like that?

The Emperor Trajan, that’s who. Ruling Rome from the year 98 to 117 CE, Trajan was paranoid about secret societies that might plot to take power away from him. In his fear, he banned all clubs and political associations.That included gatherings of Christians, who seemed suspicious because they met in their homes behind closed doors, claimed to worship a different “King”, were accused of eating “flesh and blood”, and were growing in number alarmingly fast. Trajan was the first Emperor to make capital punishment of Christians an official policy.We know about his policies from a pair of letters written between Trajan and Pliny, the governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor. The two letters tell us a lot about what dangers Christians faced, and reveal why Bishop Ignatius had to die.

Pliny lived in an Empire where the citizens were required to worship the Roman Emperor and the Roman gods at the official temples, using the established religious rites. He was unsure of how to deal with the troublesome Christians in his region. Pliny saw the Christian “superstition” spreading rapidly and endangering Roman religion, culture, and society. How should Christians be investigated and punished? Under what circumstances should they be executed? What should he do if someone was anonymously accused of being a Christian? In trying to work out the details of the policy by himself, Pliny had tortured and executed a few Christians, but he was in doubt about the exact procedures to follow. So he wrote to Trajan for clarification.

Trajan wrote back, and told Pliny to follow a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell...but if they do tell, then kill them!’ policy. Officially, if a person was proven to be a Christian, then the punishment was death. But anonymous accusations were not to be allowed. Christians were not to be actively sought out. Furthermore, even if a person was accused of being a Christian, they had a chance to obtain pardon through repentance. Specifically, if the accused person publically worshipped and sacrificed to the Roman gods, then they could escape the death penalty. But some Christians were unable to deny Jesus in that way. Death was preferable. One such person who strongly preferred death was Bishop Ignatius.

We know the story of Ignatius from seven letters he wrote while on his way to die. We also have a document called “The Martyrdom of Ignatius” which was supposedly written by two people who accompanied him on his final journey and witnessed his execution. The “Martyrdom” tells how Ignatius had guided the church of Antioch through the earlier persecutions of the Emperor Domitian, and how he was glad the persecution had ceased. But part of Ignatius still wished he could become a martyr, because by dying that way, he would perfect his discipleship to Christ, and become as intimately close to the Lord as it was possible to be.When Trajan threatened Christians with death, as described above, Ignatius saw his chance to attain his goal.

It happened that Trajan was staying in Antioch while on a campaign against the Parthians. It is not clear from the source material whether Ignatius was accused and arrested or if he turned himself in. In any case, Ignatius came willingly before the Emperor, where he testified that he was a Christian who carried the spirit of Jesus within him. Under the law, Ignatius was a proven Christian, by his own admission. Trajan sentenced him to be bound and taken by soldiers to Rome, where he would be devoured by beasts for the gratification of the people. Ignatius actually cried out with joy, saying, I thank thee, O Lord, that Thou hast vouchsafed to honor me with a perfect love towards Thee, and hast made me to be bound with iron chains, like Thy Apostle Paul.

Next, Ignatius had to make the long journey to Rome, escorted over land and sea by ten soldiers. On the way, he met with many fellow Christians, who came to see him where he stopped.The Bishop gave out many words of encouragement and listened to the problems of the church representatives.Then, just as Paul once did, Ignatius wrote letters to those churches to guide them.We have seven letters from him in all, six to churches and one to the Bishop Polycarp.

To our modern way of thinking, it seems strange and a bit awe-inspiring that a person would actively seek martyrdom. What goes through the mind of a person like that? The letters of Ignatius give us an intimate understanding in his own words.He wrote about dying as “going through the pangs of being born.” He wrote, “Let me imitate the Passion of my God”, and “Let me be fodder for wild beasts – that is how I can get to God. I am God’s wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ.” “Then I shall be a real disciple of Jesus Christ when the world sees my body no more. Pray Christ for me that by these means I may become God’s sacrifice.”

I am going to lose my life (not that it’s worth much) for the cross,” Ignatius wrote. “I am ever so eager to be a martyr, but I do not know if I deserve to be.” “I need your love if I am going to deserve the fate I long for, and not prove a ‘castaway’.” “These chains – my spiritual pearls! Through them I want to rise from the dead by your prayers.” “...if we do not willingly die in union with his Passion, we do not have his life in us.” “I hope, indeed, by your prayers, to have the good fortune to fight with wild beasts in Rome, so that by doing this I can be a real Disciple.”

Ignatius’ one fear was that once he got to Rome, his friends would try to rescue him at the last moment. In a letter sent on ahead to Rome, he begged them not to interfere with his death. “The Prince of this world wants to kidnap me and pervert my Godly purpose. None of you then, who will be there, must abet him. Rather be on my side – that is, on God’s. Do not talk Jesus Christ and set your heart on the world. Harbor no envy. If, when I arrive, I make a different plea, pay no attention to me. Rather heed what I am now writing to you. For though alive, it is with a passion for death that I am writing to you. My desire has been crucified and there burns in me no passion for material things. There is living water in me, which speaks and says inside me, ‘Come to the Father’. I take no delight in corruptible food or the dainties of this life. What I want is God’s bread, which is the flesh of Christ, who came from David’s line; and for drink I want his blood: an immortal love feast indeed!”

As extreme as these words may sound, Ignatius was in fact living out the Christian idea of the imitation of Christ to its fullest. “Then he [Jesus] said to them all, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.>What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?” (Luke 9:23-25) And, Ignatius sounds a lot like Paul, who wrote: “I want to know Christand the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal;but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” (Philippians 3:10-12) Ignatius’ thoughts are very much in keeping with the gospels and letters that he read and preached about to his church.

The “Martyrdom of Ignatius” document says that when Ignatius finally arrived in Rome, he and his guards were met by a crowd of Christians, who were joyful to meet the great Bishop but also afraid that he was being put to death. Ignatius silenced their protests, and prayed for continued love between the brethren and an end to persecutions. Then he was taken quickly into the amphitheater and thrown to the beasts. The writers, his companions, gathered his bones afterwards and brought them back to Antioch. In a dream, the companions saw a vision of Ignatius standing by the Lord. This told them that the martyred Bishop had finally completed his course and reached his goal.

Christian Apocrypha: Peter versus Simon Magus

2008-11-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

The Old Testament has its Apocrypha, books that were important and popular, but did not make it into the canonical Bible, such as the “Books of the Maccabees” and “Judith”. The New Testament has its Apocrypha as well, books which were so popular and so often copied in the early days of Christianity that they survive to this day, even though they did not make it into the Bible. Although they could not compare with inspired scripture like the Gospels, these books were written to teach Christian ideas and to entertain readers at the same time. One of these books, the “Acts of Peter”, is a direct sequel to a story found in the Acts of the Apostles, the encounter between Peter and Simon the Magician.

Simon was an infamous sorcerer from the Samaritan town of Gitta. Acts 8:4-24 describes how Simon met with Peter in Samaria and tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit. “Now a certain man named Simon had previously practiced magic in the city and amazed the people of Samaria, saying that he was someone great. All of them, from the least to the greatest, listened to him eagerly, saying, ‘This man is the power of God that is called Great.’ And they listened eagerly to him because for a long time he had amazed them with his magic. But when they believed Philip, who was proclaiming the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. Even Simon himself believed. After being baptized, he stayed constantly with Philip and was amazed when he saw the signs and great miracles that took place.

“Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, ‘Give me also this power so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’ But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness.’ Simon answered, ‘Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may happen to me.’”

Simon’s act gave rise to the term “Simony”, which means the crime of paying money in exchange for holy authority or a position in the church. After he is rebuked for his crime, Simon is not mentioned again in the New Testament. But his story was not over. Early Christian writers condemned him as the founder of a second century group of Gnostics, heretics who claimed that only complex secret knowledge brought salvation. Simon’s followers claimed that he was the power of the true God in human form. Their belief system was in direct conflict and competition with the spread of early Christianity in the Roman Empire. In fighting for the hearts and minds of the people, Christian writers saw the need to attack the heresy where it began, with the magician Simon. The story of Simon in Acts is unfinished; Simon is rebuffed but not defeated. And so the apocryphal book, the “Acts of Peter” was written to continue the story and show its readers the final defeat and death of Simon Magus.

The “Acts of Peter” was written between 150 and 200 CE, to denounce and discredit the founder of the rival Gnostics. It tells of a public miracle contest between Peter and Simon Magus. The story begins when Simon miraculously flies through the air into Rome. There, he works more wonders and begins to preach that he, not Jesus, is the Messiah and the power of God. Simon is so convincing that large groups of the Christian faithful begin to worship him instead, and leaders like Paul are not there to stop them. This is an emergency; it seems the power of Satan is working through Simon to cause all the simple and weak believers in Rome to fall.

God sends a vision to Peter, summoning him to go to Rome to fight Simon. Upon his arrival, Peter speaks to a large crowd of the brethren, and warns them that Satan is tricking them into leaving their faith. The people repent, but the danger of Simon remains, and they ask Peter to remove the threat once and for all. The magician is staying at the house of a senator whom he has converted, so Peter takes the crowd to his door. From this point on, the story becomes a duel of miracles between Simon and Peter. The contest is reminiscent of the duel between Moses and Aaron, and Pharaoh’s sorcerers (Exodus 7:8-13), in that Simon ultimately shows that he has some powers, but he cannot match or resist the power of God.

Peter’s first miracle is to give a dog the power of speech. Peter sends the dog in to tell Simon to come out. Simon instructs the dog to tell Peter he is not there. The dog curses Simon and exits to tell Peter that it is time for “a great contest with the enemy of Christ and his servants, and many that have been deceived by him shalt thou turn unto the faith; wherefore thou shalt receive from God the reward of thy work. And when the dog had said this he fell down at the apostle Peter's feet and gave up the ghost. And when the great multitude saw with amazement the dog speaking, they began then, some to throw themselves down at Peter's feet, and some said: Show us another sign, that we may believe in thee as the minister of the living God, for Simon also did many signs in our presence and therefore did we follow him.”
Peter’s second miracle is to bring a dead fish back to life and set it swimming for all to see. Restored to his faith by these signs, the senator has Simon beaten and thrown out of his house. Simon comes to Peter’s residence and calls him out, saying, “Lo, here am I, Simon: come thou down, Peter, and I will convict thee that thou hast believed on a man which is a Jew and a carpenter's son.” Peter sends down a woman and her nursing baby. In this third miracle, the baby curses Simon with an adult voice, announcing that Peter will meet him in the Roman forum on the Sabbath, there to decide the contest.

At night, Jesus appears to Peter and says, “Already is much people of the brotherhood returned through me and through the signs which thou hast wrought in my name. But thou shalt have a contest of the faith upon the sabbath that cometh, and many more of the Gentiles and of the Jews shall be converted in my name unto me who was reproached and mocked and spat upon. For I will be present with thee when thou askest for signs and wonders, and thou shalt convert many: but thou shalt have Simon opposing thee by the works of his father; yet all his works shall be shown to be charms and contrivances of sorcery.”

When the Sabbath arrives, such a large crowd gathers, that people are charged for their seats. Christian brethren and Roman pagans alike fill the forum. Even senators and prefects are in attendance. The crowd demands that Peter and Simon each give proof of their claims so that the people may choose who to believe. Peter promises proof, and mocks Simon for his attempts to buy the power of the Holy Spirit, as described in Acts. Simon then mocks Jesus as a mere man who lived and died. The Roman prefect then issues the first challenge for both men. He calls one of his servants and commands that Simon should kill the slave, and that Peter should bring him back to life. Simon speaks a word, and the man dies. Peter says God is not to be tempted or proved, but that God will love and hear those that are worthy. At Peter’s prayer, the man is brought back to life.

For the second challenge, the mother of a dead senator brings her son’s body to the forum. Peter shouts, “Ye men of Rome, let there now be a just judgment betwixt me and Simon; and judge ye whether of us two believeth in the living God, he or I. Let him raise up the body that lieth here, and believe in him as the angel of God. But if he be not able, and I call upon my God and restore the son alive unto his mother, then believe ye that this man is a sorcerer and a deceiver”. Simon retorts, “Ye men of Rome, if ye behold the dead man arise, will ye cast Peter out of the city? And all the people said: We will not only cast him out, but on the very instant will we burn him with fire.”

Simon proceeds to trick the crowd, by moving the dead body like a puppet. Peter, threatened with burning, reveals the deception to the onlookers: the man is still dead. Peter then genuinely brings the senator back to life. When the crowd threatens to burn Simon instead, Peter reminds them to love their enemies. Simon is spared so that he might repent, but a few days later, the defeated magician proclaims that everyone has been deceived by Peter. Simon Magus announces that he will fly up to God his father. Amazingly, he begins to fly over Rome. Peter calls out to Jesus to make Simon fall, not to die, but to fail in converting any more people. Simon plummets, breaks his leg, and is finally abandoned by the Romans, who believe in Peter henceforth. Later, however, he dies during surgery.

So ends this apocryphal tale. The Gnostic followers of Simon eventually fell to the advance of Catholic Christianity, just as Simon fell before Peter. Rome, after several centuries, surrendered to Peter’s faith. This book may once have influenced the outcome of that struggle, but that victory did not come quickly enough for the apostle. Another section of the “Acts of Peter” gives the earliest known description of Peter’s death – he was crucified upside down in Rome. The “Acts of Peter”, with its whimsical miracles, like a talking dog and baby, was never destined to stand alongside canonical, inspired scripture. But it does entertain while teaching that it is important to help fellow Christian believers along when others try to lead them astray. In this story, Peter is an outstanding servant of God when he answers God’s call to go and speak the truth in answer to the lies of a deceiver, trusting in God to work through him and bring both new and fallen believers to the faith.

A Prophet's Sidekick

2008-11-21T10:34:00.002-08:00

The sidekick: Batman had his Robin, Lone Ranger had his Tonto, Don Quixote had his Sancho, and the Prophet Jeremiah had his ... Baruch? Indeed, the great prophet whose words are recorded in the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations had help - a friend, follower, and scribe all rolled into one. Jeremiah was called by God as a boy to warn Jerusalem that because the people of Judah had worshipped other gods, Babylon was going to conquer them, unless they repented. The people did not listen or repent, and eventually, Jeremiah was called to tell Judah that there was no longer any way to avoid the invasion of Judah by Babylon, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the Babylonian exile. Finally, Jeremiah was called to promise the eventual restoration of the people to their land.

It was a fateful time in which to live. In Jeremiah’s lifetime, the good King Josiah instituted religious reforms based on the rediscovered book of Deuteronomy, but his three sons (Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, and Jeconiah), who were kings after him, disregarded those reforms and refused to heed the prophecies of Jeremiah. Zedekiah, the king who came after the sons of Josiah, was to be the last king of Judah. Jeremiah warned the last king not to rebel against Babylon, but Zedekiah made an alliance with Egypt anyway. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon besieged Jerusalem and conquered it, taking Zedekiah away in chains and destroying the city. Jeremiah’s prophecies had come to pass. It was a national disaster for Judah. Is it any wonder that the people wanted to “shoot the messenger”?

Jeremiah’s message was deeply unpopular, and there were times when he was imprisoned, or when his life was in danger. Some wanted to destroy his words. The prophet needed help to face such opposition, and he had it in the form of a scribe, named in our English Bible: Baruch. Baruch’s actual name was “Berekhyahu”, which means “Blessed of God”. He was the son of Neriyahu, (in English: Neriah, meaning “God is my Lamp”) and the brother of Seriah, the chamberlain of King Zedekiah. Baruch came from a distinguished family, and was himself a very learned man.

The first duty of Baruch was to write down the words spoken by the prophet. “In the fourth year of King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord: Take a scroll and write on it all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel and Judah and all the nations, from the day I spoke to you, from the days of Josiah until today. It may be that when the house of Judah hears of all the disasters that I intend to do to them, all of them may turn from their evil ways, so that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin. Then Jeremiah called Baruch son of Neriah, and Baruch wrote on a scroll at Jeremiah’s dictation all the words of the Lord that he had spoken to him.” (Jer 36:1-4)

Baruch’s role went beyond merely writing, however. Circumstances arose which demonstrated the value of Jeremiah’s sidekick. Jeremiah felt threatened by King Jehoiakim. Even when it was too dangerous for the prophet to come out of hiding and speak in the Temple, it was still God’s command that the people hear the message. So it fell to Baruch to temporarily fulfill the role of Jeremiah himself. “And Jeremiah ordered Baruch, saying, ‘I am prevented from entering the house of the Lord; so you go yourself, and on a fast day in the hearing of the people in the Lord’s house you shall read the words of the Lord from the scroll that you have written at my dictation. You shall read them also in the hearing of all the people of Judah who come up from their towns. It may be that their plea will come before the Lord, and that all of them will turn from their evil ways, for great is the anger and wrath that the Lord has pronounced against this people.’ And Baruch son of Neriah did all that the prophet Jeremiah ordered him about reading from the scroll the words of the Lord in the Lord’s house.” (Jer 36:5-8)

When the king’s officials heard Baruch reading the scroll, they were alarmed at the prophecy. Telling Baruch to hide and avoid arrest, they brought the scroll before the king. But the king showed his contempt for the prophecy by cutting it into pieces and burning them. “Now, after the king had burned the scroll with the words that Baruch wrote at Jeremiah’s dictation, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: Take another scroll and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which King Jehoiakim of Judah has burned. And concerning King Jehoiakim of Judah you shall say: [...] his dead body shall be cast out to the heat by day and the frost by night. And I will punish him and his offspring and his servants for their iniquity; I will bring on them, and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and on the people of Judah, all the disasters with which I have threatened them—but they would not listen. Then Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to the secretary Baruch son of Neriah, who wrote on it at Jeremiah’s dictation all the words of the scroll that King Jehoiakim of Judah had burned in the fire; and many similar words were added to them.” (Jer 36:27-32)

So Baruch wrote down and spoke in public the words of the prophet. It was almost like he was a prophet himself. What did he feel and think about himself and his role? Did he want more credit or fame? Did he want to be a prophet himself? Jeremiah chapter 45 suggests that perhaps he did “seek great things” for himself. So too did Sancho seek greatness for himself as a reward for faithful service to the great Don Quixote. Perhaps it is a natural feeling for a sidekick to have. But God’s direct reply to Baruch was bleak. “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, to you, O Baruch: [...] I am going to break down what I have built, and pluck up what I have planted—that is, the whole land. And you, do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them; for I am going to bring disaster upon all flesh, says the Lord; but I will give you your life as a prize of war in every place to which you may go.’” (Jer 45:1-5) In a time when the whole country was to be destroyed, there was no “greatness” in being a prophet. Merely staying alive was the best reward Baruch could be given in such a terrible time.

Perhaps it is thanks to Baruch, the scribe, secretary, and editor, that we have the book of Jeremiah today. He is considered to be one of the writers who contributed to the Bible. His fame is such that, in the Catholic version of the Bible, the Apocryphal book “1 Baruch” is traditionally attributed to him and included in the Old Testament. He may not have felt appreciated in his own lifetime, but he now has the respect he deserved back then. Given his fame, it was understandably exciting when actual physical evidence of his life was found by archaeologists in Jerusalem.

A bulla is a small round clay seal, which is placed on a rolled-up scroll and stamped with the name of the writer of the scroll. A collection of these bullae were found in Jerusalem in a house burned during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. The fire burned the scrolls but baked the clay seals and preserved them. Among the seals was one stamped with the name, “Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe”, or, Baruch son of Neriah as it is written in the English Bible. It is quite possible that this is the very seal used by Baruch himself. Other seals, found with the Baruch seal, bear the names of people mentioned in the book of Jeremiah, including King Jehoiakim’s son, Jerahmeel (Jer 36:26), the King’s secretary Elishama (Jer 35:12), and the King’s scribe Gemariah (Jer 36:10). These other seals make it even more likely that the Baruch bulla is really that of Jeremiah’s scribe. A second Baruch bulla has also been found. Taken together, the seals are physical evidence of the historical truth contained in the Bible.

Christian Apocrypha: The Story of Paul and Thecla

2008-11-21T10:34:00.001-08:00

The Old Testament has its Apocrypha, books that were important and popular, but did not make it into the canonical Bible, such as the “Books of the Maccabees” and “Judith”. The New Testament has its Apocrypha as well, books which were so popular and so often copied in the early days of Christianity that they survive to this day, even though they did not make it into the Bible. Although they could not compare with inspired scripture like the Gospels, these books were written to teach Christian ideas and to entertain readers at the same time. One such book is the “Acts of Paul”, a collection of stories about the Apostle Paul. The Acts of Paul, like the “Acts of Peter” and other apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, were meant to satisfy the need for more stories about the Apostles. The “Acts of Paul” contains the famous story of the greatest of virgin martyrs, a young woman named Thecla. She was a model for female ascetics through the centuries, and she was made into a Saint. Her story can inspire women today as they take on leadership roles in a once male-dominated church.

“Paul and Thecla” was written in the second century by a presbyter (church elder) in Asia Minor, the region where Paul started several churches during his missionary journeys. Paul had been dead for a century when the story was written, but his collected letters continued to guide the church. The story begins as Paul travels from Antioch to Iconium (both in modern Turkey), on his first missionary journey. In the Bible, Acts 13 explains that Paul preached to the Gentiles and the Jews in Antioch, making many converts, but others were angered by his preaching and forced him to flee to Iconium.

In “Paul and Thecla”, we get a rare physical description of Paul, which has influenced artists for centuries. We read, “And he saw Paul coming, a man small of stature, with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked, full of friendliness, for now he appeared like a man, and now he had the face of an angel.”

Paul goes to stay at the house of Onesiphorus, where he begins to preach the word of God concerning the resurrection of Jesus and the importance of abstinence from sex. Paul wrote about abstinence in 1 Corinthians 7:8-9, saying, “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” So the author of “Paul and Thecla” is possibly being authentic when he has Paul say, “Blessed are they who have kept the flesh pure, for they shall become a temple of God,” and “Blessed are the bodies of virgins, for they shall be well pleasing to God, and shall not lose the reward of their purity.” Originally, when Paul was writing 1 Corinthians, he expected that the end of the world was soon to come. It was therefore less important to get married because one should instead be preparing for the heavenly bridegroom, Christ. But among some Christians who interpreted Paul’s legacy, the ascetic movement continued even after that sense of eschatological expectation faded, hence the teaching about abstinence in “Paul and Thecla”.

Enter the virgin Thecla, a young Greek woman who sits below a window and listens to Paul preach day and night. Although she is engaged to a young man named Thamyris, she becomes fascinated by the virgin life Paul is preaching, and she does not get up, even to eat or drink. Her mother and Thamyris are unable to move her, and she no longer wants to be married. Paul’s preaching that people should stay sexually pure in order to have eternal life is very upsetting to Thamyris and the local young men. But why did it appeal to Thecla? In early Christianity, the virgin life could, in a way, empower women. In a married household, the man was in charge and the role of a woman was strictly defined and centered on child bearing. Perhaps Thecla saw a way to be free of all that.

The angry Thamyris has Paul dragged before the governor and accused of teaching women not to marry. Paul is then jailed, but Thecla will not be parted from him. She bribes her way into the prison where she sits at Paul’s feet and continues to hear about God’s plan for salvation. When Paul is returned to the governor to face trial, Thecla continues to hold fast to him, until her enraged mother calls for Thecla to be burned alive as a lesson to any other women who may have approved of Paul’s message. Paul is scourged and driven from the city while a pyre is lit for Thecla, who bravely faces her death. Due to a miraculous intervention by God, a huge rainstorm quenches the flames and saves her.

The outcast Thecla goes in search of Paul, who has taken refuge in a roadside tomb. She finds Paul praying for her survival, and they are reunited. Thecla cuts her hair short and agrees to follow Paul, but he does not baptize her as she asks, telling her to be patient. Paul and Thecla travel to Antioch, but when they arrive, an influential young nobleman named Alexander falls in love with her. He publically tries to force himself on her, and she fights free, tearing his robe and knocking off his crown. In his humiliation at being laughed at by onlookers, he has her brought before the governor and accused of assaulting a nobleman, and she is unjustly sentenced to be thrown to the wild beasts in an arena. The local women are horrified at this evil judgment. Paul is nowhere to be found, so Queen Tryphaena, who is related to Caesar, agrees to keep custody of Thecla until her sentence is carried out. Tryphaena comes to love Thecla like her deceased daughter. The day of the arena games comes, and the Queen watches anxiously as Thecla faces the lions and bears. Another miracle occurs - a lioness sacrifices herself for Thecla, defending her by killing the other animals, while the local women gasp and cry out.

Thecla spots a pool of water, and decides to baptize herself in it before she dies, in the name of Jesus Christ. The angry Alexander has even more beasts thrown at her. Women in the crowd throw perfumed flowers that effectively put the animals to sleep. Then, Alexander has Thecla tied between two raging bulls, hoping to see her torn apart, but a heavenly fire burns the ropes. Finally, the watching Queen is overcome and collapses, while her handmaidens call out that they think she is dead. She has really only fainted, but suddenly Alexander and the governor become afraid of what her relative, Caesar, might do. Tryphaena’s death at the games could make Caesar attack Antioch. The games are abruptly halted. (If this was the Queen’s ploy, it was a clever one.) The governor demands to know who Thecla is, and what she has about her to protect her from the beasts. “She answered, ‘I am a handmaid of the living God. As to what I have about me, I have believed in him in whom God is well pleased, his Son. For his sake not one of the beasts touched me. For he alone is the goal of salvation and the foundation of immortal life.’”

Thecla is released to the crowd of women, and proceeds to teach the gospel to the newly believing Queen and her household. But Thecla yearns for Paul again, and goes to seek him where he is preaching in Myra. There she reveals to Paul that she has stayed a virgin, and that she has baptized herself. Paul is astonished to see her, and commands her to go and teach the word of God, using the gold given to her by the Queen to help the poor. So Thecla returns to Iconium, where she finds her former fiancé dead. After offering her mother the gospel, Thecla travels to Seleucia, a city in Mesopotamia, where she founds and lives in a cave convent and baptizes, heals, and teaches the word of God to many people for the next seventy-two years.

Apocryphal works like “Paul and Thecla” are not on the level of Holy Scripture, but they do reflect teachings and concerns of the time in which they were written, and so they can teach us what was important to early Christians. Certainly the sufferings Thecla faced were historical. Depending on which Roman Emperor was in power during a given decade, and what policies he had towards Christians, there were many periods during the centuries before Constantine when Christians were thrown to wild beasts, burned, crucified, or tortured to death in public arenas. They were executed for refusing to worship pagan gods. Of course, they did not experience the miraculous interventions that saved Thecla. But perhaps “Paul and Thecla” was written during a period of persecution, and was meant to give courage to people who were going to face martyrdom.

Was there a real Thecla? Various Church fathers mention “Thekla” and list her as one who faced martyrdom by fire and beasts, and Seleucia was later known as the city of the holy virgin Thecla. There really was a Tryphaena, first cousin once removed to the Emperor Claudius (41-54CE). It is probable that the real story of Thecla (whatever it was) was romanticized and embellished by the second century presbyter who wrote “Paul and Thecla”. That presbyter wrote a very popular story which was widely copied and translated, but unfortunately, the church objected strongly to some elements in it. The author was punished by being expelled from the church. What the patriarchal church leaders of the second century could not tolerate even in fiction was a woman evangelist baptizing and preaching. Only men were allowed to baptize and preach. Fortunately the story of “Paul and Thecla” has survived to modern times, and now many churches ordain women. This very old feminist story was evidently written before its time.

A Closer Look at Two of Jesus' Healing Miracles

2008-11-21T10:33:00.001-08:00

Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’ (Mark 7:31-37)

They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, ‘Can you see anything?’ And the man looked up and said, ‘I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.’ Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Then he sent him away to his home, saying, ‘Do not even go into the village.’ (Mark 8:22-26)

The two passages above are examples of the familiar healing miracles of the Gospel of Mark. What new things can we learn from them? More than you might guess. These brief stories appear to be simple, but if we take a closer look at the details, we can find a wealth of information in them.

For instance, the people who get healed are a deaf-mute and a blind man. What is the significance of that? It turns out that the types of people who are cured here are part of a prophecy about the Messianic age, found in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah said: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” (Isaiah 35:5-6) Jesus’ healing of these particular people is in fulfillment of prophecy. Matthew’s Gospel sums up this fulfillment in the following passage: “After Jesus had left that place, he passed along the Sea of Galilee, and he went up the mountain, where he sat down. Great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others. They put them at his feet, and he cured them, so that the crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.” (Matthew 1529-31)

Another curious detail is the use of Jesus’ saliva to heal in both passages. Why did he use his own saliva? If you read the rest of the Gospel, you can see that it apparently wasn’t strictly necessary for the healing. Jesus heals all the other people in the Gospel without using any saliva at all. In Mark 10:46-52, for example, Jesus heals another blind man without laying hands on him at all, let alone using any spittle. “They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Jesus stood still and said, ‘Call him here.’ And they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take heart; get up, he is calling you.’ So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well.’ Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.”

So why was the saliva mentioned in our first two passages? In Jesus’ time, saliva was considered by physicians to be a medicinal substance, useful in the treatment of eye diseases. Amusingly, the Talmud says that the saliva of the firstborn son of a father, in particular, has these curative properties. Jesus may not have needed to use saliva, but he may have known that the people he was healing believed it to be medicinal. The act of applying saliva may have strengthened the belief, and helped the faith, of the two men so that they would be cured. After all, faith is an essential part of Jesus’ healing miracles. “Go, your faith has made you well,” says Jesus to the other blind man. Perhaps the other man’s faith did not need any help.

Did Jesus use a magic word when he said Ephphatha? Accounts of so-called wonder-workers which were written after the time of Jesus, mention that lengthy and elaborate incantations in magic languages were used to accomplish miracles such as exorcisms. Jesus really cannot be compared to those people. He never used magic or spells. All he did by looking to Heaven and saying “Ephphatha” was simply to ask God to open up the man’s closed senses. It was God the Father who was doing the healings in the Gospel, working through Jesus. Ephphatha is actually just a word in Jesus’ language, Aramaic, translated for Greek language readers.

In both of our passages, Jesus performs a healing in private, away from the village, away from the crowds, then asks the people who were healed not to talk about it. As the following Gospel passage from Matthew shows, Jesus often asked for secrecy from those he healed. “Many crowds followed him, and he cured all of them, and he ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah: ‘Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory. And in his name the Gentiles will hope.’ (Matthew 12:15-21)

Apparently, Jesus asked for secrecy because he did not want to be “known”, to be famous, or infamous as the case may be, for his healing miracles. Being too well known could bring trouble from the authorities, or crowds that were too large. Of course people did talk, and crowds and trouble came just as expected. The Isaiah prophecy mentioned above suggests that Jesus also wanted as much secrecy as he could get in order to delay the full and open proclamation of his true nature until he had fulfilled his mission, died, and returned.

The main point of the healings for the Gospel reader to understand is that they are signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. The following passage from Luke’s Gospel shows that healing the blind was a sign of the Kingdom. “When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” (Luke 4:16-21)

Healing miracles were visible signs that the Kingdom was at hand. They were also evidence that the personal claims of Jesus were true. When the healings happened, they restored sight and hearing to a few people long ago. As Gospel stories, they can have a continuing effect on people in the present day. Gospel readers past and present can easily see the symbolism in the healings in our passages. Men gained sight, speech, and hearing. Likewise, people who have faith in the Gospel accounts and in Jesus can also have their eyes, voices, and ears opened to see, speak, and hear the truth of God’s word. Our eyes may be opened to the truth in stages, just like the blind man’s sight was restored in part at first, then completely. God is willing to lay hands on us for as many times as it takes.

Josephus, Jesus, and Christian Interpolations

2008-11-21T10:30:00.001-08:00

Josephus was a Jewish historian who wrote a history book called “Antiquities of the Jews” around the year 94CE. Born just a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion, Josephus was in a position to record information about Jesus’ life that would provide independent confirmation of the gospel story and satisfy skeptics through the ages. Did he write about Jesus? The answer is, maybe. Antiquities of the Jews contains one of the most controversial passages of the ancient world. Josephus was a Jew, not a Christian, and a Church Historian named Eusebius later wrote of Josephus that he did not believe Jesus was the Messiah. However, in Antiquities Book 18, Chapter 3, we find this passage about Jesus:

“Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.”

This passage is controversial for many reasons. It does not seem to fit well with what comes before and after it in the text; in chapter 3 there are two lengthy tragic stories about Jewish rebellions which were violently put down, then this wondrous and very brief Jesus account, and then another lengthy tragedy about Jews banished from Rome. It would be strange for Josephus, a very partisan Jew, to write something so obviously Christian. Josephus barely mentions Jesus elsewhere in his huge book, and then only when mentioning Jesus’ brother James’ death. Many people doubt that we have this passage as Josephus originally wrote it. Some say this is an example of a Christian interpolation.

What is an interpolation? Ancient books were copied by hand. An interpolation would be if the copyist decided to make a little change, by taking out or adding something, perhaps in order to make the passage fit better with Christian beliefs. Then we in modern times would have only the changed version, and not the original to compare it to. But sometimes you can still tell without the original because the insertion was clumsy and does not seem to fit.

Two good examples of interpolation are in the book called Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (written 150-100BCE). This Jewish work, which was left out of the Bible, tells of how Jacob, on his deathbed, talks to each of his sons in turn and gives them prophesies about the future. In the copies of this work we have today, there is evidence of interpolation. Somebody decided to rewrite a few of those prophesies to fit better with Christian beliefs. We know because we have the original version too, as copied by somebody else before the changes were made.

The first example is from Testament of Joseph 19:1-11. Jacob says, “Listen, my children, concerning the dream that I saw […]” The first paragraph below is the original, followed by the changed one. I put some obvious interpolations in italics.

1. (Original) And I saw in the midst of the horns a certain virgin wearing a multicolored stole; from her came forth a lamb. Rushing from the left were all sorts of wild animals and reptiles, and the lamb conquered them. Because of him the bull rejoiced and the cow and the stags were also glad with them. These things must take place in their appropriate time. And you, my children, honor Levi and Judah, because from them shall arise the salvation of Israel.

2. (Interpolation) And I saw that a virgin was born from Judah, wearing a linen stole; and from her was born a spotless lamb. At his left was something like a lion, and all the wild animals rushed against him, but the lamb conquered them, and destroyed them, trampling them underfoot. And the angels and mankind and all the earth rejoiced over him. These things will take place in the last days. You therefore, my children, keep the Lord’s commandments; honor Levi and Judah, because from their seed will arise the Lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world, and will save all the nations, as well as Israel.

See how elements were changed, removed, or added? The second example is from Testament of Benjamin 3:7-8. “He [Jacob] embraced him and kept kissing him for two hours, saying,

1. (Original) In you will be fulfilled the heavenly prophecy which says that the spotless one will be defiled by lawless men and the sinless one will die for the sake of impious men.

2. (Interpolation) Through you will be fulfilled the heavenly prophecy concerning the Lamb of God, the Savior of the world, because the unspotted one will be betrayed by lawless men, and the sinless one will die for impious men by the blood of the covenant for the salvation of the gentiles and of Israel and the destruction of Beliar and his servants.

Now you know how interpolation works. The Jesus passage from Josephus might be an interpolation too. In 1971, a new discovery was published which supports this idea. It was a different Arabic version of the Jesus passage from historian Agapius' Book of the Title, a history of the world from its beginning until 942 A.D. Agapius was a tenth-century Christian Arab bishop who actually quoted Josephus’ Jesus passage, and it was different from the one you read above. Here it is:

“Similarly Josephus, the Hebrew. For he says in the treatises that he has written on the governance of the Jews: 'At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. His conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from the Jews and other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon their loyalty to him. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the Prophets have recounted wonders.”

If you compare the two, you can see that the second one might be the original passage, or closer to it. It is more neutral, and less obviously Christian in its beliefs. It reads more like the writing of a skeptical Jewish historian who is being fair and leaving the possibilities of other beliefs as open questions. You can almost imagine a copyist looking at it, being offended by the doubtful tone of it, and making changes, such as insisting Jesus was the Messiah for sure, that he was more than a man, and that he appeared to the disciples after his death for sure.

The Jesus passage from Josephus is a mystery that may never be solved. Did Josephus write it as is, testifying to Jesus as the Messiah? Was the whole passage stuck in by somebody else? Did a copyist alter what was originally there? There are many opinions. This is all just of academic interest in terms of Christian faith. In short, it does not matter to faith whether Josephus or any other independent historian wrote about Jesus at all. We have the gospels and that is enough for faith. It still would have been nice to point to non-biblical writings which “prove” the gospels are correct. This particular writing by Josephus, although famous, sadly proves nothing, and about its origin, the world may never know.

The Cross and the Fish

2008-11-21T10:23:00.000-08:00

Two religious symbols are very popular with modern Christians. We wear a cross on necklaces, and we put a simple fish icon on bumper stickers. How did these symbols come to be used in the first place, back in the early centuries of the Christian era? What did they mean to the first Christians?

The fish symbol, which dates from around the year 100CE, is made of two simple curved lines. But five greek letters were often added to it, as shown above. They make up the greek word for “fish”, which is Ichthus. Early Christians saw a special meaning in these letters. Each one stood for a word that described Jesus.

The use of these letters may have arisen after Emperor Domitian (81-96CE) called himself Son of God (Theou Yios) and had this inscribed on coins. It was up to Christians to deny the divinity of the Roman ruler and uphold the divinity of their Lord.

The fish symbol (without the letters) was already in use for thousands of years before Christians adopted it. It was used to represent the Mother Goddess in many cultures. But it made complete sense for followers of Jesus to adapt it to their purposes, because the gospels are simply full of fish. In Matthew 4:18-19, an example leaps out of the water at us: “As he [Jesus] walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’” So the fish symbol was right for Christians because several of Jesus’ Disciples were fishermen. The act of spreading the gospel and finding new believers was compared to fishing for people.

Matthew 13:47-48 continues the analogy. “‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.” John 21:4-6 promises that with the guidance of the resurrected Jesus, the catch of people into the Kingdom will be a huge one. “Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, ‘Children, you have no fish, have you?’ They answered him, ‘No.’ He said to them, ‘Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.’ So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish.” Indeed, could the gospel writer have ever imagined two billion Christians in the year 2001?

Another reason the fish symbol is appropriate is that fish live in water, and Christians have a well known sacrament involving water. One early church leader, Tertullian, wrote about baptism, saying “we, little fishes, after the example of our Ichthus, Jesus Christ, are born in water.”

Prior to the year 313, when religious toleration was declared in the Roman Empire, Christians were sometimes severely persecuted. During the worst times, they had to hold their meetings in secret. It is believed that they used the fish symbol to mark the location of a gathering. Another tradition holds that they used the symbol to identify each other. If one person drew one curved line in the dirt, the other could show they were Christian by completing the fish with another line.

The symbol of the cross, like the fish, is ancient. Before Christians adopted it, it was used to represent fire, the sun, life, and many other concepts, in many cultures. But in the Roman Empire, the cross had only one meaning – an instrument of execution by crucifixion. From that point of view, it may seem odd to wear a cross around your neck. It is like wearing a little electric chair or a noose. But to early Christians, the cross symbol was holy, and for obvious reasons. Jesus’ death upon a cross sanctified the symbol. In Galatians 6:14-15, Paul says, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!” Instead of a symbol of death, the cross became a symbol of new life.

By the year 100, the cross, alongside the fish, was a main Christian symbol, but it mainly took the form of a gesture. Christians made the sign of the cross on their foreheads before taking any important action, as a sign against the power of demons. They swore by the power of the cross and were known as devotees of the cross. Misunderstanding Pagans accused Christians of actually worshipping the cross, so Christians did not openly use the cross symbol on physical objects like monuments during times of persecution. Instead, a substitute such as an anchor symbol was used. Another substitute was a monogram for the name of Christ, such as Chi-Ro, the first two letters of the word Christ in greek.

The Roman Emperor Constantine helped make the cross symbol an accepted and openly used icon in art. In the year 312CE, during a campaign against his rival Maxentius, Constantine reportedly saw a cross symbol in the sky, along with the words “In this, conquer.” In Constantine’s dream, Jesus supposedly told him to place the symbol on his standards. Subsequently he was victorious. In 326CE, Constantine’s mother supposedly found the wooden pieces of the actual cross near Jerusalem. When Christianity became an official religion in Rome, the cross was openly used in art and on monuments, from then on up to the present day, when church goers commonly wear a cross around their necks and decorate their homes, graves, and churches with crosses.

Symbols are an important part of any worship. Christian symbols like the cross and the fish were indeed borrowed from older cultures, but invested with new meaning. The fish was perhaps the most important symbol to early Christians, but the cross eclipsed it in the fourth century. But in modern times, the fish has made a comeback, proving the enduring nature of symbols. We do not worship symbols, of course, but they are needed to express Christian ideas in simple ways that appeal to all people.

Angels 101

2008-11-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

Information about angels is scattered throughout the Bible - angels are mentioned hundreds of times. However, an organized description of what angels are all about is never given to us. The Bible is more concerned with telling us what angels do, instead of what they are. Putting together what information we have, drawing small details from prophets and gospels, we can assemble the basic facts about these mysterious heavenly beings.

1. Where does the word “angel” come from? In Hebrew, the word for a messenger is “mal’ak”. This word is used to describe those whom God sends to do his will, whether they are human or heavenly. In the Greek translation, the word “aggelos” was used instead. Then, in Latin, the heavenly type of messengers were called “angelus”. From that we get our word “angel”. So, angels are named for one thing they do – act as messengers for God. There are too many examples of this activity to mention; everyone will recall the visit of the angel Gabriel as a messenger to Mary (Luke 1:26-38).

2. What do angels look like? Biblical descriptions of angels are often vague. In the passage of Luke just mentioned, Gabriel is not described. Popular culture, left to its own devices, sometimes portrays them as cute flying babies or white robed women with bird wings. In the Bible, angels may appear as normal human men (Genesis 18:2; 19:1,5; Acts 1:10; Luke 24:4) without wings. In most passages featuring angels, wings are not mentioned at all. A few passages do describe them with wings and the ability to fly swiftly (Isaiah 6:2,6; Daniel 9:21). In any case, angels are basically unlike humans. They are beings of spirit (Hebrews 1:14), so it is no wonder they can have different appearances and forms. As spirits, they do not die (Luke 20:36).

3. Are there different kinds of angels? The Bible mentions a few different types. Archangels are leaders among angels. One named Michael is mentioned in Jude 1:9. Others assumed to be Archangels are named Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel (the last two are named in the Apocrypha). Seraphs, or Seraphim, are fiery angels mentioned in Isaiah 6, attending the Lord on his throne. They are described as having six wings, and they call out the familiar words, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts.” Cherubs, or Cherubim, are animal-human hybrids mentioned in Ezekiel 1 and 10. They are described as having four wings and four faces, and they support a dome, above which is the throne of the Lord. Images of the Cherubs adorned the Ark of the Covenant. Revelation 4:6-9 describes angels quite similar to those of Isaiah and Ezekiel. Finally, some of Paul’s writings (Ephesians 1:21; Colossians 1:16) suggest to Catholics that there are even more ranks of different kinds of angels, known as Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Dominations, and Thrones.

4. What do angels do for God and humans? The roles of angels are as diverse as their physical descriptions. The Cherubim and the Seraphim worship and praise God constantly. But many angels seem to work to help mankind. Angels often bring people information and reveal the meaning or significance of it, as when an angel told Daniel about future rulers (Daniel 10). They might be sent to protect people from harm, as when Daniel was saved from lions (Daniel 6:22). Angels may be sent to answer prayers, as when Peter’s congregation prayed for his release from prison and an angel came to free him (Acts 12:5-7). They can appear to offer instructions to people, as when an angel told Joseph what to do about Mary (Matthew 1:20). Angels can come to people to provide things they need, as when an angel brought food to a despairing Elijah (1 Kings 19:5-8). Angels ministered to Jesus during his earthly life (Matthew 4:11; Luke 22:43). There are many, many more references to the work of angels in the Bible. Overall, angels are ministering agents who help to bring us God’s providence and redemption.

5. Who were the Fallen angels? The Bible indicates that angels are holy (Luke 9:26), but warns that they are not to be worshipped (Colossians 2:18; Revelation 19:10), with good reason. In fact, like us, angels are God’s creations, however awe-inspiring they might be. Like us, they can sin and fall. One book written between the Testaments takes the very brief story of Genesis 6:1-4 and expands on it, revealing a story of angels who were tempted by human women. The “Book of the Watchers” in 1 Enoch explains that “the watchers” (angels) came down to Earth to choose human wives and have children. They revealed forbidden magical knowledge to humans and also impregnated them. Their offspring were murderous giants who ate people and destroyed everything around them. All this sin and chaos was part of the reason God decided to send a flood to cleanse the Earth of the children of the angels. The rebellious angels were then imprisoned in chains and darkness as punishment (2 Peter 2:4; Jude 1:6). As stories of fallen angels developed over time, various other reasons were given for their fall. Besides the lust described in Enoch, pride was given as another cause. The angel Lucifer wanted to raise his throne to the same level as God’s, and so Lucifer was cast out of Heaven. A third reason is found in the book “Life of Adam and Eve”. There, the Devil is described as unwilling to bow down before man, refusing to worship mankind as made in the image of God. He and all those who also refused were cast out of Heaven.

Angels are an integral part of the biblical story, but ultimately, we cannot get a detailed or comprehensive description of them from the Bible. Beyond the basics, the study of angels has fascinated many people, and writings outside the Bible reflect this interest. One can explore other writings to learn about the names of angels, their organization in Heaven, their powers, and all sorts of mystical information. But perhaps all we really need to know about them is that they are on our side. In Hebrews 1:14, it says, “Are not all angels spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”

Sheol and Gehenna: The Afterlife before Jesus

2008-11-21T10:20:00.002-08:00

In modern times, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is assumed that after we die, there is an individual judgment, and a soul is sent to either Heaven or Hell. But in Bible times, this was not so. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament reveal a different set of beliefs, in which souls went to the shadowy realm of Sheol or the fires of Gehenna.

What was the nature of Sheol? Scattered Bible passages give us details, piecing together a description of the underworld. Sheol was the dark domain of the dead, and it was located beneath the Earth (Numbers 16:30). To go there was to go “down” to it (Job 7:9) and it was known as the “Pit” (Psalm 16:10). It was personified as having a mouth and a hungry belly, which was never satisfied (Proverbs 30:15-16; Jonah 2:2; Isaiah 5:14).

After death, everyone went to Sheol, and that meant everyone, period. Ezekiel 32:18-32 describes how people from every nation went there, from Egypt to Assyria. Even the mighty Pharaoh of Egypt went there, along with other kings and princes. The circumcised Israelites went there with the uncircumcised foreigners. Soldiers went there with those they killed. Job 3:17-19 says, “There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters.”

Ecclesiastes 9:10 describes Sheol as a place of ghostly shades who can do nothing anymore. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.” In Sheol, souls do not remember God or praise him (Psalm 6:5; 30:9), although God’s presence still exists there (Psalm 139:7-8). God has the power to deliver souls from Sheol (Psalm 86:13), to spare someone from going there at all (Acts 2:27-31), or to lift someone to Heaven instead (like Enoch or Elijah).

When the Bible was translated into Greek, Sheol was translated as “Hades” (e.g. in Matthew 11:23), because it was so similar to the Greek myth of the underworld. In Hellenistic times, Sheol took on some of the characteristics of Hades, such as having a being named “Hades” who ruled over it. Furthermore, Hades was thought to have different sections such as a paradise for the virtuous and a place of punishment for the wicked. By the second century BCE, this idea was also incorporated into Sheol. Sheol was divided into two parts, a place where the virtuous rested in peace until judgment and resurrection, and a place of torment for the wicked.

The virtuous went to a comfortable part of Sheol called the “Bosom of Abraham” where they waited with the Patriarch. Jesus referred to this place in one of his parables (Luke 16:22-26). “The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” But Abraham said, “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”

As for the place of torment, it was called Gehenna. The name comes from a valley near Jerusalem where children were burned as a sacrifice to Canaanite gods such as Baal or Molech. It was called the valley of the son of Hinnom – “Ge (ben) Hinnom”, which became “Gehenna” (Jeremiah 7:31, 19:2-6, 32:35; 2 Kings 23:10; 2 Chronicles 28:3). Even after that abominable practice of child sacrifice was halted, bodies of executed criminals were thrown there, along with animal carcasses and refuse to be burned. Thus the name was fitting to give to the place of torment in Sheol. In the Bible, Gehenna is usually translated as “Hell”.

Gehenna is a place where both body and soul are destroyed (Matthew 10:28). It is a “furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:49-50) If Sheol was darkness, Gehenna was the outer darkness (Matthew 8:12), “where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.” (Mark 9:48) “This is the second death, the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14).

Western Christians still believe in Gehenna, calling it Hell. But how do we account for the fact that Sheol is not generally believed in today? In the Apostle’s Creed, it states that Jesus “was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day He arose again from the dead.” What did Jesus do in Hell? One work of Christian Apocrypha called the “Acts of Pilate / Gospel of Nicodemus” includes the story of Christ’s descent into Hell. In this account, we see what supposedly happened to Sheol. Jesus, in fact, went there to close it down. The story goes like this:

Satan tells the ruler of Sheol, Hades, that Jesus, King of Glory, is coming down to him. Hades becomes afraid, remembering how Jesus’ power took Lazarus away from Sheol. Hades orders the gates shut, but Jesus breaks them down, and defeats Satan and Hades. Holy people like Abraham, David, Adam, and Isaiah are there to meet him. Jesus empties Sheol, the section known as the Bosom of Abraham which contains the virtuous, and leads a long procession from Sheol to Heaven, where Enoch and Elijah greet them.

In the centuries up to the present, specific beliefs about Heaven and Hell have been varied, and particular to various branches of Christianity. Western Christianity generally holds that souls are sent to Heaven to be with the Lord after death, ever since Jesus’ redemptive work. But there is still a universal judgment day to come, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:6-10: “...we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord [...] and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.”

The End is... Near?

2008-11-21T10:20:00.001-08:00

The second coming of Jesus is an event known as the Parousia, in which Jesus will return to judge the world, punish evil, and redeem the saved. This event is still expected as an article of Christian faith, but it has seemingly been long delayed. An examination of New Testament passages shows that the earliest Christians expected Jesus’ return within their lifetimes. The Gospels and Paul’s letters reveal what happened when the Parousia did not occur. They show how it upset many believers, and they detail the explanations people came up with for why it did not occur – reasons which still make sense, even today. It is a story of hope and doubt, fear and reassurance, fevered expectation and changing perspective.

Paul’s letters were written perhaps 20-30 years after Jesus’ resurrection. In that period, as we shall see, Christians were already worried about the delay in Jesus’ return. The gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke were written perhaps 40-50 years after Jesus’ resurrection, but we have to look at them first, for they tell the beginning of the story, during Jesus’ lifetime.

The gospels set up the basic idea that in the near future, Jesus would return, and the present world would come to an end. Of course, the Christian faithful were understandably very much interested in exactly when the Parousia would occur. There are two thoughts about this in the gospels. One is, the second coming would occur suddenly and unexpectedly, and no one could predict the time. The other is, the second coming would be preceded by and heralded by many dramatic signs and portents, by which people could know it was coming. These contradictory thoughts exist side by side in the gospels, as shown in Matthew when Jesus discusses when the end would come (the following passages are from Matthew 24:3-44).

Jesus is asked by the disciples, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Jesus responds by listing many signs of the end, the sort of things no one could fail to notice. “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs. Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. […] But anyone who endures to the end will be saved. And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come. […] For at that time there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. […] For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. ‘Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. […] when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates.”

On the other hand, in the very same chapter of Matthew (24), Jesus proclaims that no one except God the Father, not even Jesus himself, knows exactly when the end will come. “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. […] Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Even so, Jesus gave broad hints that the Parousia would occur during the lifetimes of his listeners, as shown in the following passages. “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” (Matthew 24:34) “And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” (Mark 9:1)

Twenty to thirty years after Jesus spoke these words, when Paul’s letters were written, the second coming had not yet occurred, and Christians were beginning to worry. Despite Jesus’ promise, people were indeed beginning to “taste death”, dying as people eventually do, without the kingdom of God coming with power. First Thessalonians, a letter of Paul, deals with this issue. Paul has to comfort people, telling them that those who die before the second coming will be raised up when it finally does happen, so there is nothing to worry about. “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.” (1 Thess. 4:13-17)

Of course, Paul’s readers still worried about the timing of the Parousia. Paul has to repeat the idea that it will happen at an unexpected time. “Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape! […] So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.” (1 Thess. 5:1-6)

In another letter of uncertain authorship, 2 Thessalonians, another problem arises. Some Christians have even begun to worry that the Parousia has already happened. The writer has to reassure them that no, it has not. In fact, the writer claims, the second coming cannot occur until a particular agent of evil is revealed. “As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. […] And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the manifestation of his coming.” (2 Thessalonians 2:1-8) Between the two letters to the Thessalonians, there is again a tension between the opposing ideas that the Parousia will be both unexpected and preceded by signs.

Another letter, 2 Peter, was written around 140-150 CE, and was probably the last canonical book of the New Testament to be composed. By that time period, over a century after Jesus’ resurrection, the second coming had obviously still not occurred, and it seemed that it might even be delayed into the indefinite future. At that point, an explanation had to be found which would satisfy people for the long term. The writer of 2 Peter explained that the reason for the seeming delay was to give more people time to repent and be saved. “First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come […] saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!” […] But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:3-9)

The idea that any delay is to allow more people to be saved is a good one, and even in the present day, it makes sense. We have to admit that there are still many people in the world who could be redeemed, and so the delay, already approaching 2,000 years, is perhaps likely to continue. But what can we do in the meantime? The gospel writers encourage us to watch, wait, stay spiritually awake, and be ready. The author of 2 Peter has some last advice as well. We can hasten the second coming by leading righteous lives. “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise […] what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God,[…]? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home. Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” (2 Peter 3:10-15)

Cutting a Covenant

2008-11-21T10:19:00.001-08:00

The story of God’s covenant with Abraham includes a strange ritual, described in an eerie scene in the book of Genesis. “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. Then he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

“As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land […]” (Genesis 15:5-18)

What was the reason for this odd ritual, with animals cut in half and fire passing between the pieces? The ceremony was actually based on the way ancient covenants were made between people in Bible times. A covenant was a solemn agreement, a binding oath between two parties, which was sealed by blood. The usual steps in a covenant were these: First, the terms of the agreement were decided upon. If there were rewards for keeping to the terms, they were spelled out, along with any punishments for breaking them. Second, binding oaths were sworn. An animal was sacrificed, and then the body was cut in half. (In fact, the actual phrase in Hebrew, usually translated as “making a covenant,” is really literally “cutting a covenant.”) The two parties then walked between the animal halves. They made sure to make contact with the blood, by stepping in it. This was a kind of self-curse. They were in effect saying, “If I break the covenant, then may what happened to this animal, happen to me.”

A vivid illustration of this self-curse and its penalty may be found in the book of Jeremiah, in which God declares that the people have broken part of the covenant they made with him at Mount Sinai. The agreement they had made was this: “If a member of your community, whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free.” (Deuteronomy 15:12)

God says through Jeremiah, “You yourselves recently repented and did what was right in my sight by proclaiming liberty to one another, and you made a covenant before me in the house that is called by my name; but then you turned around and profaned my name when each of you took back your male and female slaves, whom you had set free according to their desire, and you brought them again into subjection to be your slaves. Therefore, thus says the Lord: You have not obeyed me by granting a release to your neighbors and friends; I am going to grant a release to you, says the Lord--a release to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine. I will make you a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. And those who transgressed my covenant and did not keep the terms of the covenant that they made before me, I will make like the calf when they cut it in two and passed between its parts: the officials of Judah, the officials of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf shall be handed over to their enemies and to those who seek their lives. Their corpses shall become food for the birds of the air and the wild animals of the earth.” (Jeremiah 34:15-20)

The covenant with Abraham, though, is different. Abraham asks how he can be sure he will receive the land, and God’s answer is to swear a binding oath, a covenant, according to the rituals used at the time. The terms are spelled out in a description of the future, and the animals are cut in half. But notice that Abraham does not walk through the animal halves. Only the fiery representation of God passes between them. This is an unconditional covenant, in which only God makes a promise – Abraham only needs to accept it.

To modern people, the necessity for blood to seal a covenant may seem distasteful, nevertheless, it was the way things were done. The covenant between God and the Jews at Mount Sinai was also sealed with blood. “And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early in the morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and set up twelve pillars, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel. He sent young men of the people of Israel, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed oxen as offerings of well-being to the Lord. Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he dashed against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” Moses took the blood and dashed it on the people, and said, “See the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” (Exodus 24:1-8)

Understanding this helps us to understand the story of Jesus at the Last Supper. There, Jesus spoke of a new covenant which was also to be sealed by blood. “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after giving thanks he broke it, gave it to his disciples, and said, “Take, eat, this is my body.” And after taking the cup and giving thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, that is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (Matthew 26:26-28) Just as ancient parties made contact with the blood of a covenant by stepping between the animals, we can make contact with the blood of the new covenant when we take part in the Eucharist, whether we think of it symbolically or literally. In baptism, and in faith, we pledge our own loyalty to this covenant, which is described by Jeremiah:

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt--a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

The Quotable Psalms

2008-11-21T10:15:00.001-08:00

The gospel story of Jesus’ crucifixion in Matthew and Mark includes a moment that always troubled me. Right before dying, Jesus seems to give up, to despair, to lose hope in God the Father. “Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God's Son.’” The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way. From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o'clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, […] “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” […] Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.” (Matthew 27:39-50)

Why have you forsaken me? It is an anguished cry. Does it really mean what it seems on the surface, that at the last moment, Jesus has lost his prior certainty that God will raise him up again? Has he felt the constant presence of God abandon him in the end, leaving him to face death alone, with all hope lost? The very idea of Jesus losing faith at the last moment, or of God really forsaking his anointed one, is troubling. Fortunately, that was not what was going on. That was not the real meaning of Jesus’ cry of “why have you forsaken me?” As strange as it may seem to us, Jesus was using his last moments to quote a song.

Imagine that you sadly broke up with someone you were dating. As you walked out that person’s door for the last time, you turned back and said, “You think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I, I will survive.” Did you truly mean that there was a real chance of your dying over the breakup? No, chances are, your “ex” would know you were just quoting a popular song by Gloria Gaynor. The words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are from a popular song of Jesus’ day, which we know as Psalm 22. By quoting it, Jesus was actually being a Rabbi, a teacher, to the end. It was common practice at the time to quote just one line of a passage from scripture, in order to bring to mind the entire passage. The dying teacher was responding to all the mocking people around him by reminding them about the entirety of Psalm 22, which begins in despair, but which ends on a very different note.

Here is the first half of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame. But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads; “Commit your cause to the LORD; let him deliver— let him rescue the one in whom he delights!” Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God. Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help. Many bulls encircle me, strong bulls of Bashan surround me; they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death. For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. My hands and feet have shriveled; I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.”

It is easy to see why Jesus was thinking about this Psalm. His suffering was similar, and the mocking crowd surrounding him was much like the one in the Psalm. Perhaps most of all, it was because he had just seen the following thing happen: “When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top. So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see who will get it.” (John 19:23-24) It was like the words of the Psalm coming to life. Psalm 22 is widely regarded as a kind of prophecy to be fulfilled, in which the Holy Spirit foretold Jesus’ suffering through the words of the Psalmist King David. Jesus was aware of this when he said, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you-that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” (Luke 24:44)

Psalm 22 does not end on a message of despair. In quoting it, Jesus not only reminds the listeners about his suffering, but also, he rebukes them for their doubt and scorn. As the Psalm tells us, suffering is followed by salvation. Here is the second half of Psalm 22: “But you, O Lord, do not be far away! O my help, come quickly to my aid! Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog! Save me from the mouth of the lion! From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me. I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him. From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him. Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.”

That was the complete lesson Jesus the teacher was giving to those mocking him at the end of his life. They mocked his inability to save himself, and they scorned his trust in God’s deliverance. But Jesus did trust in God to the end. As we have seen, his cry of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was not a failure of trust. It was a quote that brought to mind the whole of Psalm 22, and in the second half of that Psalm was the answer to the mockery of the crowd: “For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” God did deliver Jesus from death, and the conclusion of Matthew’s gospel echoes the promise of the last lines of Psalm 22 (All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him). “And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20)

Who the Heck.... was Melchizedek?

2008-11-21T10:14:00.001-08:00

The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament compares Jesus to a little-known biblical character named Melchizedek. It states that “he [Jesus] became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.” The letter writer goes on to say, “About this we have much to say that is hard to explain…” (Heb 5:8-11) In fact, it is a little hard to explain. Who was this Melchizedek, and was Jesus really a high priest “according to his order”? What does that mean? To get the answers, we have to look back in time to the earlier appearances of Melchizedek in the Bible. This mystery takes us from the New Testament all the way back to the book of Psalms, and finally clear back to the beginning of the Bible, the book of Genesis. This one strange character ties together writings which spanned more than a thousand years.

Before we are ready to see what the writer of Hebrews means about Jesus, we have to look at the beginning of Psalm 110, a famous Psalm of David that Christians believe talks about the Messiah. Here is the text: “The LORD says to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” […] The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” (Psalm 110:1-4) In this Psalm, King David seems to be describing what God (“The LORD”) is saying to the Messiah (“my lord”). God appoints the Messiah to be a priest forever. “According to the order of Melchizedek” is a phrase meaning, “just like Melchizedek.”

So far, so good. We’ve found the passage in Psalms that the writer of Hebrews was referring to. But we still don’t know who this Melchizedek was. For that, we have to look at Genesis 14, the story of Abram (Abraham). When an alliance of various kings attacks the city of Sodom, Abram’s nephew Lot is captured there as a prisoner of war. Genesis explains that “When Abram heard that his nephew had been taken captive, he led forth his trained men, born in his house, three hundred eighteen of them, and went in pursuit as far as Dan. He divided his forces against them by night, he and his servants, and routed them and pursued them to Hobah, north of Damascus. Then he brought back all the goods, and also brought back his nephew Lot with his goods, and the women and the people. After his return from the defeat of [king] Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him at the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King's Valley). And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. He blessed him and said, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!” And Abram gave him one tenth of everything.” (Gen 14:14-20)

The passage above is the only personal appearance of Melchizedek in the entire Bible. His name means “King of Righteousness”, and he seems to be two things; one, a priest of the same God Abram worships, and two, the King of the city of Salem (“City of Peace” - probably an ancient name for Jerusalem.) Upon Abram’s victorious return from battle, Melchizedek meets Abram, blesses him, and accepts a tithe from him. At first glance, it seems to be an unimportant incident. Genesis quickly moves on to describe the much more important matter of the Covenant God makes with Abram, and the promise of descendants and a land for them to live in. Melchizedek is not mentioned again. So why is he important enough to be associated with the Messiah in Psalm 110? Why is Jesus compared to him at length in Hebrews? We’ve come all the way back to Genesis, and now that we know who Melchizedek was, it is hard to understand what was so special about him.

The answer lies in the fact that Melchizedek’s story is found in the Torah, the five books of Moses. These books were so incredibly important to later Jewish and Christian writers that even a small character in them became very important, or even larger than life. When you look at Melchizedek from the perspective of a later biblical writer like the author of Hebrews, some very strange things start to emerge. First, it appears that the man has ‘no beginning and no end.’ We’ve all seen the many genealogies in the Bible – long lists of who begat who, from father to son (or daughter) down through the ages. But the brief story of Melchizedek does not list any parents or any children for him. It does not say when he was born or when he died. It may sound very illogical to the modern person, but it was believed back then that if something was not written in the Torah, a book dictated to Moses by God himself, then it did not exist. In other words, because the death of Melchizedek is not mentioned in the Torah, he therefore never died!

Another strange thing about the man is that he blesses Abram, not the other way around. The idea is that if someone blesses you, then they are by definition greater than you, so Melchizedek must have been greater than Abram. And another thing – Melchizedek was a priest of God Most High – the same God Abram worshipped – but this was generations before God established the priesthood of the tribe of Levi, the one “after the order of Aaron,” so to speak. If the priesthood of Melchizedek came before the Levitical priesthood, well… you guessed it – the earlier priesthood must have been superior. So now we see more clearly what was special about Melchizedek. He never died, and he was part of an older priesthood that was greater than the normal one that ran the Temple sacrifices. Now perhaps we can see why the Psalmist said the Messiah would be part of Melchizedek’s priesthood and not the regular one. The Messiah was a special case, and had to be in a special category all his own.

The letter of Hebrews discusses Jesus and Melchizedek in chapters 5-8, as part of an effort to convince fellow Jews of the first century that they should accept Jesus as the Messiah. The writer compares Melchizedek to Jesus in order to argue to reluctant readers that the then-current Temple and Priest system has been replaced. There is a new High Priest, his name is Jesus, and everything that was believed and prophesized about old Melchizedek now applies to Jesus. Here are the main points the writer makes:

1. Jesus has been appointed as the new High Priest by God, and the passage in Psalm 110 is talking about Jesus specifically, therefore Jesus’ priesthood is the same kind as Melchizedek’s was. Jesus is like Melchizedek, in several ways. They are both “Kings of Righteousness”, and “Kings of Peace”. They both have neither beginning of days nor end of life. They both remain Priests forever.
2. Melchizedek, who was greater then Abraham, blessed the inferior Abraham and took tithe money from him. It follows that Abraham’s descendants, namely the Priests, the sons of Levi, are also inferior to Melchizedek. Therefore the law given under the Levite Priests is also inferior. There is a superior Priesthood, namely the Melchizedek kind, a superior law, and a superior Priest, namely Jesus. Jesus is a High Priest of the superior type, because of his resurrection and eternal life. He wasn’t born to the tribe of Levi, so he cannot be of the inferior type.
3. Like Melchizedek, whose death was not written, Jesus continues forever, the only High Priest we will ever need to make intercession for sin. Levite priests have to sacrifice over and over for sin, but Jesus only had to do it once and forever, with his death on the cross.
4. Jesus has the more excellent ministry, the better sanctuary in Heaven, and the better Covenant: “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” (Heb 8:10-12)

So now we know who Melchizedek really was, and as a character in the Bible, he will always remain vague, mysterious and controversial. Because so little is really known about him, scholars will always argue over his true nature. But one thing is very clear. The ideas and concepts which were built up around him can tell us a lot about our Messiah, Jesus, and teach us fundamental things about our Lord, as shown in the letter to the Hebrews. It is okay to let Melchizedek remain a mystery, as long as we continue to learn about Christ.

Heroes of the Apocrypha, Part Four- Judah Maccabee

2008-11-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the Roman Catholic Bible contains a longer Old Testament than the one Protestants use? That’s because the Catholic Bible includes the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha are a set of biblical books with titles like “Tobit”, “Judith”, “Wisdom of Solomon”, “Baruch”, and “Ecclesiasticus”. They appeared in the first Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and so they have been considered Holy by many Christians ever since. The Jews, however, later decided to exclude these books from their canon, leaving it to the Christians to preserve them. They were part of the Bible for all Christians until the Reformation, when Protestants decided to exclude them too. But in doing so, we miss out on a number of great stories and characters from these books. Perhaps the Apocrypha are to be considered less authoritative than the rest of scripture, but there is still much there to learn from and enjoy.

The Jewish holiday of Hanukah celebrates the victory of a warrior hero named Judah “the hammer” Maccabee over the forces of the Seleucid King Antiochus IV “Epiphanes” of Syria, and the liberation of the Temple, in the year 165 BCE. How do we know about this victory, which happened in between the Old and New Testaments, and isn’t recorded in either part of the Protestant Bible? It is, of course, part of the Apocrypha.

Judah Maccabee’s story is told in two books, 1 and 2 Maccabees, which are two versions of the events written by two different authors. The first book is mostly a historical account, and the second is much more religious in character. They both recount Antiochus’ attempt to wipe out the Jewish religion, and the rise of a hero to save it. Antiochus was ruler of a huge empire to the west of Israel. In 168 BCE, thwarted in his desire to rule Egypt, the mad Antiochus turned his wrath towards Israel. “So, raging inwardly, he left Egypt and took the city [Jerusalem] by storm. And he commanded his soldiers to cut down relentlessly every one they met and to slay those who went into the houses. Then there was killing of young and old, destruction of boys, women, and children, and slaughter of virgins and infants. Within the total of three days eighty thousand were destroyed […] and as many were sold into slavery as were slain. Not content with this, Antiochus dared to enter the most holy temple in all the world…” (2 Macc.5:11-15)

“Not long after this, the king sent an Athenian senator to compel the Jews to forsake the laws of their fathers and cease to live by the laws of God, and also to pollute the temple in Jerusalem and call it the temple of Olympian Zeus […] For the temple was filled with debauchery and reveling by the Gentiles, who dallied with harlots and had intercourse with women within the sacred precincts […] The altar was covered with abominable offerings which were forbidden by the laws. A man could neither keep the Sabbath, nor observe the feasts of his fathers, nor so much as confess himself to be a Jew.” (2 Macc. 6:1-6)

Now the basic pattern of history observed by the writer of 2 Maccabees is this: God uses enemies like Antiochus to discipline God’s people for their sins. Those of the faithful who die can still look forward to resurrection. “You accursed fiend” says one martyr, “you are depriving me of this present life, but the King of this world will raise us up to live again forever.” (2 Macc. 7:9) Eventually God has mercy and is reconciled to his people. In the end, God’s people are redeemed, while their enemies are utterly destroyed. When God’s wrath turns to mercy, he sends a man like Judah Maccabee to save his people.

In 167 BCE, an old Priest named Mattathias and his five sons defied the edicts of Antiochus and refused to worship pagan gods. They joined together with other pious Jews, and began to fight back against the Syrians. Upon the death of Mattathias, his son Judah, a warrior from his youth, became leader of the army. He was so well loved that the following words of praise were written of him: “Like a giant he put on his breastplate; he girded on his armor of war and waged battles, protecting the host by his sword. He was like a lion in his deeds, like a lion's cub roaring for prey […] and his memory is blessed for ever. He went through the cities of Judah; he destroyed the ungodly out of the land; thus he turned away wrath from Israel. He was renowned to the ends of the earth…” (1 Macc. 3:2-9)

Unable to face the Syrian armies directly at first, Judah Maccabee led his rebels to strike from the hills and use guerilla warfare. In this way, he won a string of early victories. Judah won against all odds precisely because he had faith that God would give him strength for victory. “Judah replied, “It is easy for many to be overcome by few, for in the sight of Heaven there is no difference between deliverance by many or by few; for victory in war does not depend upon the size of the army, but on strength that comes from Heaven. […] we fight for our lives and our laws. He [God] himself will crush them before us; so do not be afraid of them.” (1 Macc. 3:18-22) “So now let us cry to Heaven in the hope that he will favor us, remember his covenant with our fathers, and destroy this army before us today.” (1 Macc. 4:10)

Every time Judah needed a victory, he would pray to God to deliver his enemies into his hands. Every time Judah won a victory, he and his men sang songs of praise to God. New recruits flocked to his side, and soon his army was large enough to win in open battle. Eventually, the Syrians were driven to the coast. In 165 BCE, another victory opened the road to Jerusalem, and Judah marched in at the head of his forces to liberate the city. The Holy Temple was in rough shape, thoroughly defiled by the Syrians.

“Then said Judah and his brothers, “Behold, our enemies are crushed; let us go up to cleanse the sanctuary and dedicate it.” So all the army assembled and they went up to Mount Zion. And they saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts they saw bushes sprung up as in a thicket, or as on one of the mountains. They saw also the chambers of the priests in ruins. Then they rent their clothes, and mourned with great lamentation, and sprinkled themselves with ashes. They fell face down on the ground, and sounded the signal on the trumpets, and cried out to Heaven. Then Judah detailed men to fight against those in the citadel until he had cleansed the sanctuary. He chose blameless priests devoted to the law, and they cleansed the sanctuary and […] built a new altar like the former one.

“[…] Then Judah and his brothers and all the assembly of Israel determined that every year at that season the days of dedication of the altar should be observed with gladness and joy for eight days, beginning with the twenty-fifth day of the month of Chislev.” (1 Macc. 4:36-59) And so began the tradition which is now observed as Hanukah, although neither book of the Maccabees mentions the miracle of the lamp oil which burned for eight days – that story comes from another set of writings called the Talmud. Finally, in keeping with the pattern of history explained above, the human instrument used to discipline God’s people had to be completely destroyed, and so King Antiochus died just two years later. (1 Macc. 6; 2 Macc. 9)

This ends our brief meeting with the heroes of the Apocrypha. We have encountered quite a variety of heroes, but they have one thing in common – extraordinary faith in God. Daniel was an intellectual hero who used his cleverness to defend his faith while in exile in Babylon. Then there was Judith, a brave woman who used beauty and trickery to kill an evil General and save Israel. Tobias and an angel defeated a demon to save his new wife and his father, who had both lost their faith. And Judah Maccabee led the outnumbered warriors of Israel to save the Jewish faith one hundred sixty years before Jesus. Each hero embodied and expressed true faith in God. Although their stories appear in apocryphal books, they deserve to stand proudly next to all the other heroes of faith in the Bible.

Heroes of the Apocrypha, Part Three- Tobias

2008-11-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the Roman Catholic Bible contains a longer Old Testament than the one Protestants use? That’s because the Catholic Bible includes the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha are a set of biblical books with titles like “First and Second Maccabees”, “Tobit”, “Judith”, “Wisdom of Solomon”, “Baruch”, and “Ecclesiasticus”. They appeared in the first Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and so they have been considered Holy by many Christians ever since. The Jews, however, later decided to exclude these books from their canon, leaving it to the Christians to preserve them. They were part of the Bible for all Christians until the Reformation, when Protestants decided to exclude them too. But in doing so, we miss out on a number of great stories and characters from these books. Perhaps the Apocrypha are to be considered less authoritative than the rest of scripture, but there is still much there to learn from and enjoy.

The book of Tobit is one of the strangest books in the Bible. To the modern reader, it seems like an ancient folk tale, a short religious novel meant to teach important truths, rather than a historical tale. Introducing a world of angels, demons, and magical cures, Tobit is a bridge between the religious ideas in the Old and New Testaments. Written around the second century BCE, Tobit tells the story of two people who suffer great misfortunes, lose hope, and ask God to let them die. The story follows the heroic adventure of a young man, Tobias, who sets out to solve both of their problems, aided by an angel in disguise and opposed by a powerful demon. The book teaches us that God answers prayers and helps the faithful.

The title character, Tobit, is an old and very pious man who lives in exile in Nineveh with his wife and son, after the Assyrians have destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel. If anyone deserves not to suffer, it is Tobit with his many good works. He obeys the Jewish Law in all ways, serves God with all his heart, and is charitable and helpful to everyone in need. He frequently risks his life to give proper burials to any Israelites he finds murdered by the Assyrians. Despite all that, Tobit suffers. He gets bird droppings in his eyes, and eventually goes blind from cataracts. A few years later, we find a miserable Tobit praying to God to let him die.

Meanwhile, Sarah, the innocent daughter of Tobit’s kinsman, is also suffering over in Media, where Iran is today. Sarah has been married seven times, but before she could consummate any of the marriages, a Demon named Asmodeus killed each husband on each wedding night. The Demon loves Sarah and will let no man have her. Some people think Sarah murdered all the husbands herself, and she too prays to God to let her die. God hears the prayers of both Tobit and Sarah, and sends an angel named Raphael to help both of them.

Enter the young hero, Tobias, son of Tobit, who is to be sent on a journey by his father to reclaim some money from a kinsman in Media. When Tobias needs someone to travel with, Raphael appears, disguised as a human, and offers to accompany him. On the journey, Tobias is attacked by a large fish by the Tigris River. Raphael instructs Tobias to gut the fish and save its gall, heart and liver, organs with supposed medicinal properties. Then the angel leads Tobias to the home of Sarah, and arranges it so that the young couple can fall in love. Tobias agrees to marry his kinswoman Sarah, despite being told of the fate of all the other husbands. On their wedding night, Raphael tells them to burn the heart and liver from the fish, and to pray to God for mercy and a long and happy married life. The odor of burning organs drives away the Demon, who flees to the desert where he is bound by Raphael.

Sarah and Tobias return home, while Raphael recovers Tobit’s money. Tobias applies the fish gall to his father’s eyes, and the cataracts peel away, restoring Tobit’s sight. Raphael privately reveals his true identity to the two men, and Tobit sings a song of praise to God. Tobit lives with his family for about forty more years, while Tobias and Sarah have seven sons. After burying Tobit and his wife, Tobias takes his family and leaves Nineveh to escape God’s judgment on the Assyrian city as foretold by prophecy.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this book is the world of demons and angels it reveals. As the Lord God came to be thought of as more remote, up in Heaven, attention was given to the powers between the Earth and Heaven. Non-canonical Jewish writings from this period, including Enoch and Tobit, begin to describe the names, ranks, and functions of the beings in God’s Heavenly court, and the evil beings who oppose them. Angels, like Raphael in this story, are messengers for the Lord who can fly and who wear white garments. Raphael is one of seven intercessor archangels who enter before God’s throne and serve God’s glory. Two others, named in the New Testament, are Gabriel and Michael. Four others are named in Enoch: Uriel, Raguel, Sariel, and Jarahmeel. Their function was to present and read the record of human prayers before God. From their reports, the Lord knew that Tobit was a good servant – Tobit once left his own feast to go and pray for and bury a murdered Israelite man who was left in the street. God therefore sent the angel Raphael to do two things; first, to further put a faithful Tobit to the test, in order to make him an even better servant, and second, to provide help and healing for both Sarah and Tobit (Raphael’s name means “God has healed”).

Asmodeus the Demon (his name means “Demon of wrath”) is like the fallen angels who fell in love with human women in the Books of Enoch and Genesis. Demons are supernatural beings who were thought to live in the deserts of Egypt. Part of the lore of Demons came from Persian influences as these books were being written. Some writings gave lists of the names of Demons. Jesus certainly defeated many Demons in the New Testament, such as the one named Legion. But the Old Testament is not much concerned with such beings. Books like Tobit, then, fill in the centuries-long gap between the Testaments and show us when religious ideas like Angels and Demons began to grow.

The lesson of Tobit is that God looks after the faithful and answers prayers, and that sometimes suffering is a test. Sarah and Tobit lose hope because of their suffering. Tobit says, “Lord, command me to be delivered from such anguish…for it is better for me to die than to endure such misery in life…” (Tobit 3:6) Likewise, Sarah says, “I have already lost seven husbands; why then should I live any longer?” (Tobit 4:15) But Raphael says, “Take courage! God has healing in store for you; so take courage!” (Tobit 5:10) After Tobit’s ordeal is over, Raphael tells him, “I was sent to put you to the test.” (Tobit 12:13) The angel suggests that the proper response is to “Thank God now and forever…continue to thank him every day; praise him with song.” (Tobit 12:17-18) Tobit’s song of praise contains a message of hope for all people who are suffering, that God will first test us and then show mercy to us. It is one of the seeming contradictions of faith. As Tobit puts it, “Happy are all the men who shall grieve over you [God], over all your chastisements, for they shall rejoice in you as they behold all your joy forever.” (Tobit 13:14) This is similar to the words of Jesus in Matthew 5: “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”