Supersessionism; A More Ethical Acts 15:20

I started Brad Young’s Paul the Jewish Theologian.  I have two items:

1.  On page 3, Young quotes Abraham Joshua Heschel, who talks about Christian supersessionism:

“The Christian message, which in its origins intended to be an affirmation and culmination of Judaism, became very early diverted into a repudiation and negation of Judaism; obsolescence and abrogation of Jewish faith became conviction and doctrine; the new covenant was conceived not as a new phase or disclosure but as abolition and replacement of the ancient one; theological thinking fashioned its terms in a spirit of antithesis to Judaism.  Contrast and contradiction rather than acknowledgement of roots relatedness and indebtedness, became the perspective.  Judaism a religion of law, Christianity a religion of grace; Judaism teaches a God of wrath, Christianity a God of love; Judaism a religion of slavish obedience, Christianity the conviction of free men; Judaism is particularism, Christianity is universalism; Judaism seeks works-righteousness, Christianity preaches faith-righteousness.  The teaching of the old covenant a religion of fear, the gospel of the new covenant a religion of love…”

I thought of this passage when I read John Mayer’s comments on Psalm 78:43-51 in Charles Spurgeon’s Treasury of David:

“Moses wrought wonders destructive, Christ wonders preservative: he turned water into blood, Christ water into wine; he brought flies and frogs and locusts and caterpillars, destroying the fruits of the earth, and annoying it; Christ increased a little of these fruits, five loaves and a few fishes, by blessing them, so that he herewith fed five thousand men: Moses smote both men and cattle with hail, and thunder and lightning, that they died, Christ made some alive that were dead, and saved from death the diseased and sick; Moses was an instrument to bring all manner of wrath and evil angels amongst them, Christ cast out devils and did all manner of good, giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, limbs to the lame, and cleansing to the leper, and when the sea was tempestuous appeasing it; Moses slew their firstborn, thus causing an horrible cry in all the land of Egypt; Christ saveth all the firstborn, or by saving makes them so; for thus they are called, Hebrews 12:23 .”

Young disagrees with the sentiment that Christianity is better than Judaism or the Old Covenant, at least in the way that Heschel says Christianity has conceptualized the issue.  According to Young, we cannot say that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a God of wrath, whereas the God of the New Testament is a God of love and grace, for there are times when the God of the Hebrew Bible is loving and gracious, and there is a prominent theme of God’s wrath in the New Testament.  I would add that Judaism and the Hebrew Bible contain such concepts as universalism (God’s love for all people), faith, and obeying God out of love (although there is also a strong particularist streak as well as an emphasis on ritual observances).  Young also contends that the New Testament does not promote a lawless sort of faith, for, like elements of Second Temple Judaism, it holds that good works are an expression of faith.

I agree with Young on these points, but I also believe that the New Testament contains the roots for the Christian supersessionism that he criticizes.  Paul, after all, associates the law with wrath and condemnation, while he holds that Jesus Christ has brought in a new age of grace.  John 1:17 says that the law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  I don’t think that Paul and John are like Marcion, who maintained that the God of the Old Testament was cruel whereas the God of the New Testament was loving.  Paul and John probably felt that God had good reason to run things as he did during the old dispensation—-to convict people of sin so that they’d recognize their need for Christ, to regulate their behavior and provide discipline until Christ came, etc.  But now it’s a new dispensation.

2.  Young talks about the Codex Bezae manuscript.  You can read about that here.  This Codex dates to the fifth century, but Young believes that it may contain a more original version of the Jerusalem conference’s decree in Acts 15.  In Acts 15:20, the church decides that the only requirements for Gentile Christians will be for them to refrain from sexual immorality, not to eat meat offered to idols and animals that have been strangled, and to abstain from blood.  The Codex Bexae, however, says “to abstain from pollutions of idols, from fornication, from blood[shed] and whatsoever you would that men should do to you do not to another.”

I happen to like the Codex Bezae’s version.  A problem with the requirements for Gentiles in Acts 15:20 is that so many things are left out.  As Desmond Ford has asked, does Acts 15:20 mean that Gentiles don’t have to honor their parents, since “Honor your father and mother” is not one of the requirements for Gentiles?  It makes more sense, therefore, for the church to have required Gentiles to obey some form of the Golden Rule.

At the same time, I’m not sure if Young is correct that the Codex Bezae has an earlier and more authentic version of the Jerusalem Conference’s decision.  I can understand why a manuscript would give the decision a more ethical orientation, which is what we see in the Codex Bezae.  But why would one take an ethical decision and remove ethical pieces from it, such as the Golden Rule?  It makes more sense to me that the former happened, not the latter.

Another point that I’d like to make is that Young, in his discussion of the Jerusalem Conference, believes that there was some diversity within the New Testament church.  On page 39, Young states:

“Paul would probably view these legal requirements [in the Codex Bezae of Acts 15:20] as a maximum for the non-Jews to observe.  Peter, on the other hand, would tend to view these laws as a minimum.  He would hope that the new believers from pagan backgrounds would adopt more of the Jewish religious observance.”

The Sadducees and Angels; the Pharisees’ Lemons

For my write-up today on volume 3 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, I have two items.

1.  Acts 23:8 says that the Sadducees did not believe in angels or spirits.  Meier finds this odd because the Sadducees accepted the written Torah, and the written Torah talks about angels.  On page 380, Meier attempts to account for Acts 23:8 as follows: “Perhaps Luke is reflecting in a garbled way the idea that the Sadducees rejected the explosion of speculation about angels and demons that was current in Jewish apocalyptic, mystical, and magical circles around the turn of the era, while at least some Pharisees were open to such developments.”  For Meier, the Sadducees did not reject the existence of angels, but rather the speculation about angels in Jewish apocalypticism, mysticism, and magic.

2.  I like what Meier says on page 395 about why the Pharisees were more influential than the Sadducees with the people, even though the Sadducees had the political power:

“Unlike the Pharisees, the Sadducees did not have a great amount of influence with the common people.  Perhaps this might be explained in part by the fact that, at least during direct Roman rule, the Sadducees were accustomed to issuing orders backed up by police power, and so felt little need to rely heavily on moral suasion, exemplary living, and exact knowledge of the Scriptures, as did the Pharisees.  Needless to say, the usual tension in ancient Mediterranean society between the poor common people and the rich and powerful elite played its part as well.”

This has a flavor of “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade!”  The Pharisees did not have much political power (though, as Meier notes elsewhere in the book, some of them had a degree of influence with Herod the Great, since they helped him out when he was a commoner).  But they used that lack of political power as an opportunity.

Jesus’ Death in Acts; Matthew—-Jew or Gentile?

I finished Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, volume 1, and I have two:

1.  S.G. Wilson states on pages 157-158: “…the soteriological significance of Jesus’ death is never made explicit in the missionary speeches and is rarely apparent elsewhere in Luke-Acts.  [T]he most that can be said is that ‘Luke has taken over certain traditions regarding the meaning of the death of Jesus but he has not in any way developed them or drawn attention to them.’  The longer reading in Luke 22:19-20 and the reference to the church as having ‘been obtained by his own blood’ in Acts 20:28 are not to be overlooked, and a practical theologia crucis, understood as a daily bearing of the cross modelled on the careers of Jesus and his apostles, is clearly a matter of some interest to Luke.  Yet the failure of Luke to develop the positive notion of Jesus’ death as an atonement, even though he is aware of it, means that there is little to counterbalance the negative emphasis on Jewish culpability.  Of course, this is not necessarily a deliberate move on Luke’s part, for it may well be that Paul’s concentration on this theme makes him, rather than Luke, the exception in early Christianity, or that the atonement was an inner-church theme and not part of the missionary kerygma.  The effect, however, whether intended or not, is that our attention is focused without distraction on the accusations against the Jews.”

I found this interesting because some have argued that Luke does not believe in blood atonement and that the few passages that do refer to it are interpolations.  Wilson sees those few passages as authentic, however, and he maintains that Luke knows of the notion that Jesus’ death was for blood atonement but does not develop it.  The result is that the Jews in Acts bear a significant amount of onus for Jesus’ death, which is not even given much redeeming value in Acts.  At the same time, Wilson does note that the Jews in Acts act according to the plan of God when they kill Jesus.

2.  On pages 184-187, Benno Przybylski (which I will abbreviate as “BP”) argues against G. Strecker’s idea that a Gentile Christian was behind the final redaction of the Gospel of Matthew.  Some of Strecker’s arguments resemble those of John Meier and Michael Cook, who contend that Matthew was not a Jewish-Christian Gospel.

First, Strecker says that Matthew 5:43 reveals ignorance of the Jewish tradition, for it says that Jesus’ audience has heard that you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.  Strecker states that such a concept is not in the older rabbinic tradition.  BP responds, however, that it “could easily reflect teaching similar to that of the Qumran sectarians as expressed in 1QS 1.10 or 9.21.”

Second, Strecker says that Matthew is unaware of Hebrew parallelism, for Matthew 21:1-9 presents Jesus riding two animals in fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9, when Zechariah 9:9 is not saying that the king will ride on both an ass and also a colt.  Rather, Zechariah 9:9 is using Hebrew parallelism (repeating a thought), which means that the ass and the colt both refer to one and the same animal.  The argument that Matthew does not understand Hebrew parallelism is used by John Meier and Michael Cook.  But I agree with BP: the rabbis themselves took parallelism literally at times, just like Matthew.  For example, BP cites Psalm 28:5, which says that “He will break them down and not build them up”.  This looks like parallelism because a thought is being repeated.  But the rabbis believed that God did not repeat himself superfluously, and so the Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael Shirata 6 held that Psalm 28:5 refers to two separate things rather than being a repetition of one idea:  “He will break them down” relates to this world, and “and not build them up” pertains to the World to Come.  See my post here for more information on Matthew 21 and Zechariah 9:9.

Third, Strecker says that Matthew 12:11 contradicts Jewish law.  Matthew 12:11 says that the Pharisees believed that one could pull his sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath.  According to BP, “Strecker argues that according to rabbinic law the owner could feed the animal or even help it to help itself but he could not actually lift it out.”  But BP responds that Matthew may be going with a minority rabbinic opinion, or that popular practice was more liberal than the majority rabbinic view.

God’s Offspring

G. Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy: The Schools of the Imperial Age, trans. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) 84-87.

Today, I read about the Stoicism of Epictetus, the slave philosopher who lived in approximately 55-135 C.E. What stood out to me was Epictetus’ teaching on the brotherhood of man. From what I understand of Epictetus, all human beings are the offspring of God, or Zeus, and that should make us happy. Since Zeus is the father of all men, Epictetus argues, a tyrant should not assume that he’s superior to a lowly slave.

A mainline Protestant concept that many conservative Christian fundamentalists love to attack is “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” They seem to oppose it on two grounds. First, it sounds a little too “new world orderish” for their taste–the idea that the people of the world should come together as brothers and sisters to live as one. In their reading of Revelation 13, the human figure who will establish a one world government will be the Antichrist, and he’s not one of the good guys!

Second, fundamentalists point out that, according to Scripture, non-Christians are not the true children of God. In John 8:44, Jesus calls the Jewish leaders children of the devil, whereas John 1:12 states that Jesus gave to those who received him (Jesus) the power to become children of God. I John 3:10 also distinguishes between children of God and children of the devil, and I John seems to presume that the children of God are those who believe in Jesus and practice righteousness. Likewise, Paul affirms in Romans 8 that those who are led by the Spirit of God (Christians) are God’s children.

The idea that “all are God’s children” is pretty ubiquitous in America’s religious culture, such that even some fundamentalists appear to assume it. A fundamentalist once chastised me for “not loving God’s children,” even though the person he thought I wasn’t loving was not a Christian in his estimation.

I think that the fundamentalist case from Scripture deserves serious consideration, but I also notice another voice: Paul quotes the Stoic “fatherhood of God, brotherhood of man” doctrine in Acts 17:28-29: “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals” (NRSV). Paul appears to agree here with the Stoic notion that human beings are God’s offspring.

I like the Stoic doctrine for a variety of reasons: (1.) it holds that God can interact with Christians and non-Christians, which makes God appear inclusive and loving, (2.) I’m not always sure where I stand with Christ, so I’d like to think that I’m God’s kid however good or bad I may be, and (3.) I want to see everyone as a child of God, not only those in a Christian clique.

Is there a way to believe that all humans are God’s offspring, while taking seriously the Scriptural statements the Christians specifically are the children of God?

LXX’s Contemporizing, Sectarian Leaders, Fence Around the Law

1. Emanuel Tov, “The Septuagint,” Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Martin Jan Mulder (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004) 178.

“In order that the subject matter of the translation should be understood by the readers, the LXX translators used words and terms taken from daily life in Egypt and also made actualizing changes. E.g., in Isa 9:11 ‘Aram on the east and the Philistines on the west’ has been changed to ‘Syria on the east and the Greeks on the west’. In this translation the names of the enemies of Israel in the time of the OT have been changed to conform with the situation existing during the Hellenistic period…The new enemies are the Hellenistic cities on the shore of the Mediterranean and the Seleucid kingdom in the East. In Isa 46:1 ‘Bel…Nebo‘, the last name has been changed to [Dagon]. Seelingman applies this change to a Hellenistic source which knew Dagon as a Babylonian godhead side by side with Bel.”

This overlaps with what I wrote about yesterday, in Reapplied Prophecy, Marcion on Matthew 5:17, Atoning Marriage. I see here an example of how the LXX rewrites a prophecy to fit the nations of its day. It doesn’t do so in a way that’s totally unfaithful to the Hebrew text, however, for Aram and Syria are the same nation.

I also see that the LXX rewrote the Bible in light of the historical research of its time. There were Hellenistic sources that placed Dagon beside Bel, so the LXX interpreted Isaiah 46:1 in light of that. I’m not sure if the translator thought the Hebrew text was wrong, or if he felt he was clarifying and elucidating it.

2. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1910) 515.

“Another characteristic feature of patristic polemics is to trace heresy to mean motives, such as pride, disappointed ambition, sensual lust, and avarice. No allowance is made for different mental constitutions, educational influences, and other causes. There are, however, a few notable exceptions. Origen and Augustin admit the honesty and earnestness at least of some teachers of error.”

The New Testament does the same sort of thing: it believes heretics have a bad character. Here are some examples:

Galatians 6:13: “Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh” (NRSV).

II Peter 2:1-3: “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions. They will even deny the Master who bought them– bringing swift destruction on themselves. Even so, many will follow their licentious ways, and because of these teachers the way of truth will be maligned. And in their greed they will exploit you with deceptive words. Their condemnation, pronounced against them long ago, has not been idle, and their destruction is not asleep.”

Are false teachers necessarily bad people? I think there are many who are, since we know of religious figures who try to gain power for themselves. Moreover, II Peter may discuss a group that was antinomian–which justified its own sinful lifestyle with the claim that we don’t have to keep a moral law. In that case, bad character and false doctrine tended to go hand-in-hand. Then there’s the NT notion that false teachers may themselves be deceived (II Timothy 3:13).

I’ve been thinking about factionalism as I’ve read the Koran and James Crossley’s Why Christianity Happened. My impression from the Koran is that it believes people should accept the message of Muhammad, the prophet of Allah. My question is, “Why?” If Muhammad’s basic message was that people should believe in God and the final judgment while avoiding evil and doing good, can’t one do those things without embracing the person of Muhammad? If so, then why is acceptance of Muhammad necessary?

I wonder the same thing about Jewish sects. What was so special about the Teacher of Righteousness (in Qumran)? What did he offer that was substantially different from other Judaisms of the Second Temple Period?

Can one say the same about Jesus? The New Testament often focuses on accepting the person of Jesus, since he was the one God raised from the dead (Acts 2:24, 32; 3:15, 26; 17:31). But can one accept moral principles without embracing the person of Jesus? Is Christianity the same as other religions, only it adds the person of Jesus to the mix–as Islam adds Muhammad, and Qumran had the Teacher of Righteousness?

Not exactly, for Christianity is a religion with substantial differences in terms of content. James Crossley talks about Jesus’ message of repentance, and he asks why many Jewish leaders had problems with it, when they themselves believed that sinners should repent. His answer is that Jesus’ idea of repentance differed from that of most Jewish leaders. For Jesus, repentance didn’t mean living a life that had a lot of religious rituals. So Christianity isn’t just about having a certain personality (Jesus) who leads a movement. Rather, Jesus makes the content of Christianity different, although it also has clear overlaps with other religions.

3. Jacob Neusner, Judaism’s Story of Creation: Scripture, Halakhah, Aggadah (Boston: Brill, 2000) 263.

“Man showed his arrogance in adding to God’s commandment concerning the tree (GR XIX:III).”

This is from Genesis Rabbah. Here’s the text, from my Judaic Classics Library:

“BUT OF THE FRUIT OF THE TREE WHICH IS IN THE MIDST OF THE GARDEN, GOD HATH SAID: YE SHALL NOT EAT OF IT, NEITHER SHALL YE TOUCH IT, LEST YE DIE (III, 3). Thus it is written, Add not unto His words, lest He reprove thee, and thou be found a liar (Prov. XXX, 6). R. Hiyya taught: That means that you must not make the fence more than the principal thing, lest it fall and destroy the plants. Thus, the Holy One, blessed be He, had said, For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die (Gen. II,17); whereas she did not say thus, but, GOD HATH SAID: YE SHALL NOT EAT OF IT, NEITHER SHALL YE TOUCH IT; when he [the serpent] saw her thus lying, he took and thrust her against it. ‘ Have you then died? he said to her; just as you were not stricken through touching it, so will you not die when you eat it, but For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, etc. (ib. 5).”

God commanded Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When Satan tempted Eve to eat from it, Eve recited the rule with a slight addition: you can’t touch the tree either. Satan proved the rule-plus-the-addition to be wrong by making Eve touch the tree, which didn’t result in her death. As a result, Eve concluded that the entire command must be incorrect.

A teacher I had once drew a parallel between Adam’s addition to God’s command and the Jewish concept of a “fence around the law.” Within Judaism, there are fences that protect the law: you don’t get to the point where you violate the law because you avoid situations where you remotely can disobey it. Similarly, Adam prohibited Eve from even touching the tree, since, if she didn’t touch it, she wouldn’t eat from it.

Interestingly, the midrash doesn’t say we shouldn’t have fences around the law. Rather, it states that we shouldn’t allow the fence to overshadow the law itself. Maybe this means that we should view the fence as a fence–it’s not a divine command, but it’s a boundary we can set for ourselves to avoid compromising situations.

In the Sea-Storm

Source: John Sellars, Stoicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) 66.

“According to Gellius’ account, the passage from Epictetus said the following. It argued that the impressions we receive that present external objects to us are not within our control. We do not have the power to choose them; instead they force themselves on us. However, we do have the power to choose whether to assent to these impressions or not. But in a situation such as the storm at sea, the mind of even the Stoic sage will be disturbed by the sudden impressions it receives against its will. In an interesting discussion of Gellius’ account, Augustine glosses this point by saying that it is as if the resulting emotion is just too quick for the mind (De Civitate Dei 9.4.2). However, although the Stoic philosopher might be briefly overcome by the force of the sudden impression, he will not give his assent to the impression. Instead he will stand firm, reject the impression that something terrible is happening, and affirm that in fact nothing bad has occurred. In contrast, the other passengers in the storm will unthinkingly assent to the impression that something terrible is indeed happening.”

If a storm at sea strikes, even a Stoic will be afraid, at least for a little while. That’s human nature. Sure, because life is so hard, there have been times when I’ve thought that I wouldn’t care that much if my life were endangered. But I shake when I think about being at a high point and possibly falling. The thought of drowning scares me. So I can understand why someone would be afraid of a storm at sea. The vulnerability of a person at that moment, as a storm threatens to tear up his very ground amidst a vast body of water! I shudder to think about it.

This quote on the Stoic at sea reminds me of things I’ve seen in Christianity. One evangelical told me that a true Christian should have a resolute faith in God, even if he were hanging over Niagra Falls. I’m sure she’d recognize that even a strong Christian would be afraid in that sort of situation, but she’d probably go on to say that he would overcome such fear as he clung to his faith.

Acts 27 is the story of Paul in the midst of the sea-storm. An angel tells him that everything will be all right, Paul then eats before the other passengers with utter peace, and the passengers begin to take comfort. I kind of like this. The quote on Stoicism reminds me of what I see in evangelicalism: “Look at me! I’m at peace in this difficult situation. Those heathens are not. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.” But Acts 27 actually shows Paul giving encouragement and comfort to those very “heathens.” He’s at peace, but not only for his own sake.

But even Paul had to deal with fear, as II Corinthians 7:5 states: “For even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted in every way–disputes without and fears within” (NRSV). And he had every reason to be afraid, with all the people trying to kill him and the storms at sea he continually encountered. But he found a way to be courageous through all of his fears. What gave him strength was his realization that nothing in creation could separate him from the love of God in Jesus Christ his Lord (Romans 8:35-39). As he said to his shipmates in the midst of the storm, he belonged to God (Acts 27:23).

Moses, Peter, and Get Out of Jail Free

Source: Harold W. Attridge, “Historiography,” Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 167.

“Moses, after the burning bush encounter, returns to Egypt where he is imprisoned. He miraculously escapes when, during the night, the doors of the prison miraculously open. (It was the parallel between this account and the report of the escape of Peter in Acts 12:3-17 which caught the attention of Clement of Alexandria.)”

Attridge is referring to the Jewish historian Artapanus (second century B.C.E.), who is cited by Clement of Alexandria in the Stromata (second-third centuries C.E.).

I’m not sure what Attridge has in mind here. I checked Clement’s Stromata 1:23, which is where Clement refers to the story of Moses’ release from prison. Clement doesn’t mention Acts 12, but he does compare Moses to Peter in the sense that both killed people with the words of their mouths (Acts 5). Here’s what Clement says:

“And the mystics say that he slew the Egyptian by a word only; as, certainly, Peter in the Acts is related to have slain by speech those who appropriated part of the price of the field, and lied (Acts v. 1). And so Artapanus, in his work On the Jews, relates ‘that Moses, being shut up in custody by Chenephres, king of the Egyptians, on account of the people demanding to be let go from Egypt, the prison being opened by night, by the interposition of God, went forth, and reaching the palace, stood before the king as he slept, and aroused him; and that the latter, struck with what had taken place, bade Moses tell him the name of the God who had sent him; and that he, bending forward, told him in his ear; and that the king on hearing it fell speechless, but being supported by Moses, revived again.’”

Maybe Clement is saying something like “Moses and Peter are alike in such-and-such a way, but here’s another example of their similarity.” I don’t know. I’m a little disappointed, however, because I was wondering how Clement accounted for the similarity between the two stories. I can picture modern scholars asserting that Acts copied the story of Moses’ release from prison and applied it to Peter, but Clement of Alexandria wouldn’t do that, even though he often accuses the pagans of plagiarizing off the Hebrews. He may just think that two similar events happened in history.

Unremarkable Agrippa

Source: H. Graetz, History of the Jews, volume II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893) 260.

“The Zealots barred the entrance of the Temple against any one belonging to the peace party, and gained over to their side the masses who had brought wood for the altar, as well as the Sicarii who made their way into the Temple through the crowd. Strengthened by the increase of numbers, the Zealots drove away their opponents and became masters of the upper town. The anger of the people was aroused against the friends of Rome, they set fire to the palaces of King Agrippa and Princess Berenice, devoting to the slaves likewise the house of the rich priest Ananias, and the public archives, among which the bonds of debtors were kept.”

This quote stood out to me because it discussed Agrippa and Berenice, who also appear in Acts 25-26. It’s like seeing someone on a TV show whom I recognize from another series (“Hey, that’s Mrs. Landingham!”): it’s just cool.

I looked at David Braund’s article on Agrippa in the Anchor Bible Dictionary. Agrippa did a lot of positive things for his nation and his religion, but he took the side of the Romans when the revolt was going on. And he lived a long life as a result. According to Braund, “In Rome in a.d. 75 Agrippa was awarded the symbols of praetorian rank.”

But he had some disappointments in life as well. Agrippa was about to be appointed to succeed his father, Agrippa I, but he was deemed too young and inexperienced for the position, so the Romans gave most of the power to a governor. I guess young Agrippa’s role was ceremonial rather than official.

Here’s one thought, which I may repeat a lot as time goes on: Agrippa was influential in his own time, but his influence did not go beyond that. Jesus and Paul, by contrast, created a current that persists to this very day. Often, a life of just seeking power and fame doesn’t have a lasting effect. Neither does simply being religious, since Agrippa paid his dues to God through his support of Judaism. But a contribution to the world of ideas in an attempt to help others and glorify a cause beyond oneself can actually have a long life.

Second Degree Impure Food

Source: Sid Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (Hamden: Archon, 1976) 103-104.

According to the rabbis, a person who touches an impure object gains second degree impurity with respect to his hands. One removes such impurity through ritually washing them. Leiman states: “If the hands are not ritually washed, they in turn defile the priestly gifts (terumah) which they touch. Such priestly gifts may no longer be eaten and must be burned.” Eventually, unwashed hands defiled all food that they touched, not only that of priests. This may be because the rabbis were trying to make ordinary meals an experience of the divine.

This rabbinic ritual may go back to New Testament times, since the Pharisees criticized Jesus’ disciples for not washing their hands. For them, unwashed hands rendered the food defiling to the one who eats it (Matthew 15; Mark 7).

I remember reading an article from the Worldwide Church of God on clean and unclean meats. In Acts 10:14, Peter said he never ate food that was common or unclean. According to the article, the unclean meats referred to those prohibited in Leviticus 11, whereas the common ones were meats defiled through unwashed hands. That may be true, since there seems to be a distinction between common and unclean food in the verse.

Are Gentiles Under the Law?

Are Gentiles obligated to obey the Mosaic law, as Armstrongites and other Sabbatarians have argued?

Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by law!

1. Let’s look first at the “yes” side. In his writings to Gentile churches, Paul often cites the Old Testament law as an authority for moral conduct. Here are some examples:

Romans 3:20: “For ‘no human being will be justified in his sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin” (NRSV).

Romans 8:3b-4: “[God] condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

Romans 13:8-10: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

I Corinthians 9:7-11: “Who at any time pays the expenses for doing military service? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock and does not get any of its milk? Do I say this on human authority? Does not the law also say the same? For it is written in the law of Moses, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.’ Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was indeed written for our sake, for whoever plows should plow in hope and whoever threshes should thresh in hope of a share in the crop. If we have sown spiritual good among you, is it too much if we reap your material benefits?”

I Corinthians 14:34: “[W]omen should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says.”

Galatians 5:14: “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Ephesians 6:1-3 (which is technically Deutero-Paul, for liberal scholars): “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’– this is the first commandment with a promise: ‘so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.’”

You can see that Gentiles are under the authority of the Mosaic law, for Paul quotes it as an authority on how they should live.

This runs counter to two popular anti-law views within Protestantism. The first one states that Christ has abolished the Mosaic Torah while replacing it with a new law, the law of Christ. This is the position of the Church of Christ.

Granted, the New Testament contains a number of new laws and commands (Matthew 5-7; John 13:34; I Corinthians 9:21; Galatians 6:2), and it often exhorts believers to behave in light of Christ, without rooting its morality in the Old Testament law (Philippians 2:2-12; Ephesians 4:12; Colossians 3:13). Consequently, Sabbatarian Des Ford is wrong to deny that the New Testament is a book of legislation, for it does appear to present a new Torah for God’s people.

But we have seen that Paul also appeals to the legislation of the Old Testament. In I Corinthians 9:9, he even goes so far as to call his source “the law of Moses.” You can’t get any clearer than that! Essentially, the law of Moses is still authoritative, but it has been supplemented with the teachings and moral example of Christ.

Another anti-law view is that God gave the Torah specifically to Israel, meaning that it’s not relevant to non-Israelites. But if we’re going to take that approach, then we might as well dismiss all of the Bible’s authority. I can easily say, “Paul was writing to the first century church, so it doesn’t apply to James Pate.” We have seen that Paul treats the Torah as authoritative for Gentiles. Therefore, the argument that “God just gave those laws to Israel” doesn’t really cut the mustard, in my humble opinion. Granted, God revealed his perfect will specifically to Israel, but God’s standards apply to everyone, Jew and Gentile alike. And, while Paul acknowledges that the Gentiles know enough about right and wrong to be judged apart from the law (Romans 2:14-16), he is clear that the Jews alone possess the oracles of God, which enable them to know God’s will and determine what is best (Romans 2:18; 3:2). Sure, the Gentiles can be moral. But the Jews are the ones with access to the “best.”

2. On the “no” side, Paul says that believers “are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit” (Romans 7:6). He denies repeatedly that believers are “under the law.” Armstrongites maintain that “under the law” means under the law’s penalty, but that doesn’t work entirely. Paul says in Galatians 4:4 that Jesus was born under the law, and Jesus was not under the law’s penalty, for he was sinless. In Galatians 4:21, Paul addresses those who desire to be under the law. Why would anyone want to be under the law’s penalty? And Paul states in I Corinthians 9:20, “To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law.” How can Paul pretend to be under the penalty of the Torah? That makes no sense!

“Under the law” means “subject to the regulations of the Torah.” As far as Paul is concerned, that’s a life of slavery (Romans 7:6; Galatians 4:21-31). At the same time, being “under the law” can entail being under the law’s penalty, since people do not obey it! As Paul says in Galatians 3:10, “For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.’” That’s why Paul calls the Old Covenant system a ministry of condemnation (II Corinthians 3:9). Placing oneself under the legal system of the Old Testament is a dead end, in Paul’s mind.

Another indicator that Gentiles don’t have to obey the Mosaic Torah is Acts 15. A group of Jewish Christians wants to require the Gentile believers to be circumcised and obey the law of Moses. Sabbatarian Ron Dart has argued that the issue here is not the necessity of keeping the law, but rather whether or not people needed to observe it for salvation (see here). For Dart, one cannot earn God’s forgiveness through obedience to the Torah, but one should still fulfill the law because it’s God’s righteous standard.

But Acts 15 doesn’t seem to be about why one should observe the Torah (for justification vs. out of obedience). Rather, it appears to exempt the Gentile believers from the Torah’s commands. As James says in Acts 15:28-29: “[I]t has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.” The issue at the Jerusalem conference is what Gentiles had to do, not the proper motivation for keeping the law.

Another point: Armstrongites may claim that people are not saved through obedience to the law, but that’s not always how they acted! I’ve heard of ministers who said that people won’t enter God’s kingdom if they missed the Feast of Tabernacles or worked on the Sabbath. “Oh, but you don’t do these things to earn God’s forgiveness–you do them to obey God,” they may assert. It’s still a yoke of bondage, regardless of what justification one attaches to it! I can’t believe that Acts 15 is saying, “You Gentiles can’t earn salvation through doing the law, but you still must place yourself under its yoke, since that’s what your Christian walk is all about.” Such a view makes the Jerusalem conference a debate over semantics!

3. So does the New Testament teach that Gentiles have to do the Torah? It depends on how one defines “Torah.” If it means that the Gentiles have to observe the ceremonies of the Old Testament in a literal sense, then the answer is “no.” But if it entails that they’re under the authority of the law, in the sense that they obey its moral precepts and spiritually interpret its ceremonies as shadows of Christ, then the answer is “yes.”

Some may think that my explanation is slippery, in that I’m freely defining the “law of Moses” as I see fit in two different contexts. But there are times when one has to do this. Take a look at the following passages on circumcision:

I Corinthians 7:19: “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but obeying the commandments of God is everything.”

Colossians 2:11-13: “In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ;
when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses[.]“

So is circumcision essential or non-essential? It depends on what you mean by “circumcision.” In I Corinthians 7:19, Paul is discussing physical circumcision, and he deems that to be non-essential for pleasing God. In Colossians 2:11-13, however, the author talks about the spiritual circumcision of the flesh (which connotes the sinful nature). That is a circumcision that believers need to have!

So do Gentiles have to obey the law? It depends on one’s definition of the law!