Three Social Skills, Finny, Baffling P, Homer: The Platonic Edition, Origen and AA, “Translation”, Me to a T

1.  Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, pages 70-86:

The lessons today were smile, call people by their names to show them that they’re important to you, and listen to them talk about themselves and their interests.  The “smile” rule reminds me of something I heard in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.  Dale Carnegie is saying that we should try to have a positive attitude.  That recalls to my mind a person in AA who said that, when people tell him that they’re having a bad day, his question to them is, “What’s wrong with this day?”  His point is that the day is neither good nor bad in itself; rather, it’s our reaction to what is going on in that day that is making it good or bad for us.

I think that, listening to Joel Osteen these past five years, I should recognize the value of keeping a positive attitude.  But there are plenty of days when that is easier said than done.  A person in AA once referred to male PMS.  There are times when certain things bother us, and there are other times when we can blow them off, as if they don’t matter to us at all.  I wish that I could control my mood, rendering myself calm and at peace.  I once heard a person with Asperger’s state that his medication helps him to have that state of mind: he no longer obsesses over a person who disses him, for he’s able to blow that off and go about his business.  Sounds good to me, but I can’t really afford medication in this season of my life, so I’ll be going the “struggling and prayer” route for the next few years!

On calling people by their names, I find that helpful.  I wrote a post a while back on that, entitled What Is Your Name?  On getting people to talk about themselves, that rule deserves a little more nuance.  I need to say something that will encourage people to talk about themselves, as well as ask the open-ended questions that will keep the conversation going.  For some people, it’s easy: you just ask a question and they go on and on.  For others, it’s more difficult, since they’re quieter.  But, come to think of it, there are also talkative people who don’t like to talk to me when I’m asking them questions.  All I can really do is practice the rule of being a good listener.  Sometimes, it will work, sometimes not.

Deb Fine says that we should say to people, “Tell me more.”  I’m not sure if that works, for the reason that I don’t know how I’d respond to it.  “Tell you more?  I mean, there’s not much more that I can come up with!”  I prefer to answer a question rather than being told to tell a person more.

2.  Robert Heinlein, Sixth Column, pages 34-36: 

A character named Jeff Thomas has been assigned to gather information on the Pan-Asians, who have conquered the United States.  Jeff encounters an anarchist named Finny, who, unlike most Americans, does not hate the Pan-Asians.  Rather, he viewed them as “more misguided souls whose excesses were deplorable.”  Finny states that the Pan-Asians have been “duped into the old fallacy of the State as a super-entity.”

I have relatives like that.  They think that our system is corrupt, but they disagree with those who actually believe that Americans can mount a successful revolution.  These relatives of mine go about their lives and regard the system around them as misguided.  They don’t expect that much out of it.  As far as they’re concerned, Jesus will come and sort things out! 

3.  Rolf Rendtorff, The Covenant Formula, page 62:

Rendtorff refers to W. Zimmerli, whose thesis was that the Priestly Writing “‘ruthlessly pushed’ the tradition about the making of the covenant at Sinai, and spoke only of a covenant made by God with Abraham…”

The priestly writer has baffled me, ever since I wrote my first paper on the Documentary Hypothesis in the eleventh grade, for my Bible Literature class.  According to the traditional JEPD model, the Yahwist (J) presents God commanding Noah to take seven of each clean animal onto the ark, and two of each unclean animal.  The Priest (P), however, says that God commanded Noah to take two of each, period.

The reason that J has Noah take seven clean animals onto the ark is that Noah needs some animals for sacrifice after the Flood.  But what puzzled me was this: Wouldn’t the priest be the one who’d be big on sacrifice, since he was a priest?  I learned years later that the priest was somewhat leery about sacrifices being offered before the establishment of the Aaronide priesthood, for he believed that only Aaronides had sacrificial authority. 

Now, a new puzzle has been thrown into the mix: the priest has a beef with Sinai and prefers to see the covenant as Abrahamic.  I wonder what that’s all about!

4.  R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, pages 113-114:

Pfeiffer refers to a fourth century B.C.E. copy of Homeric works, which omitted some lines that Plato criticized in Republic 389E.  Wow!  Plato had influence there! 

5.  R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event, page 280:

The miracle of the stilling of the storm takes place in the experience of the Christian himself; he battles against the winds and waves of temptation; the Word comes to save him; the Peter in him attempts to be entirely master of the temptation and fails.

Origen saw allegorical meaning in the stories of the Old and the New Testaments.  Did he believe that those stories happened in history?  In many cases, yes, but there were exceptions.

There are many times when the allegorical meaning that Origen claims to detect does not speak to me.  It appears to place a lot of the burden for spiritual growth on the shoulders of the individual.  Martin Luther himself had this problem with Origen: Origen allegorized from the Bible such concepts as asceticism and overcoming sin, rather than pointing to the love and the mercy of God through Jesus Christ (which Luther deemed to be the Gospel).  Origen’s allegorization of the “miracle of the stilling of the storm” is an exception, for it states that we by ourselves cannot overcome temptation, for we need God’s help through Christ.

Alcoholics Anonymous has a similar concept: our steps teach that we look to a higher power to restore us to sanity and to remove from us our character defects.  Those defects are usually defined as selfishness and unkindness to others.  There is a “sexual moral inventory” that people take, but AA doesn’t really require people to practice the Judeo-Christian principle of “abstinence before marriage, fidelity thereafter.”  Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, supposedly had a mistress. 

I wonder to what extent God delivers us from temptation.  There are homosexuals who struggle against their sexual orientation, to no avail.  I can decide that I won’t lust after women, but I don’t expect to get too far, there.  But there are people who report that God has removed from them their lust.

Change takes work.  Some of it is realistic.  Some of it is not.  But I do hope to get to the point where I don’t snap at people as much. 

6.  N.F. Marcos, The Septuagint in Context, page 346:

Not only did Christianity adopt a translated Bible as the official Bible, but from its beginnings it was a religion that favoured translation of the Bible into vernacular languages.  Unlike Jewish communities, the Christian communities did not feel themselves to be chained to the Hebrew text as such but only to its contents, nor were they tied to the Greek text of the LXX.  The new translations, as distinct from what happened with the Aramaic Targumim, became independent and took the place of the original in the life of the communities.  This attitude conferred on the new versions of the Bible a status unlike that of the Jewish translations.  They were not merely an aid to understanding the text but they replaced the original with authority.  Hence, biblical translation is spoken of as a specifically Christian activity.

This may explain some of the odd quotations of the Bible in the Epistle to Barnabas (see Sneaking Stuff In).  Maybe there were Christians who mixed their Christian interpretation in with their translation of the Old Testament, for they believed that their interpretation was the truth.  The Jews did something similar: they translated the biblical text in services and added their interpretation.  But this occurred orally.  They didn’t add their interpretation to the written text, at least not ordinarily (see Theological Correction for exceptions).   

7.  I’m superstitious about the number 6, so I’ll be adding a seventh item.  On Rachel Held Evans’ blog, I encountered a post by Donald Miller, entitled, Does Your Personality Influence Your Theology?.  The following fits me to a T:

Then there is the scholarly type, who tends to understand everything from different angles, but has trouble landing or stating they believe in much of anything. They are on a search, looking for truth, and don’t like the idea of having arrived. These people make great Bible Scholars because they try to understand an idea from various angles, and yet they have a very hard time landing, mainly because they feel like when they land, they stop learning.

Uninspired LXX, Barnaban Antinomianism, Non-Israelite Kashrut

1. Benjamin Kedar, “The Latin Translations,” Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Martin Jan Mulder (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004) 320.

“In order [for Jerome] to obtain the sense of the biblical message, recourse must be had to the original ‘truth’ of the Hebrew text…This bold conception entailed the discarding of the authenticity of the LXX as maintained by Church autorities (sic.) such as Augustine…Gradually Jerome became more outspoken in his views until, at the end, he rejects the view of the LXX as being an inspired version…[T]he apostles’ quotations of the OT did not agree with the Greek text.”

I said in my post, Diverse Bibles, God’s Unforgiveness, Bad and Good Waters, that Jerome asserted the inspiration of both the Hebrew and the LXX of the Old Testament. I thought that’s what I heard from one of my professors. The quote above, however, seems to affirm the opposite, unless Jerome changed his mind at some point. If Jerome thought that the Septuagint was uninspired, I wonder what he made of Jesus’ use of it in the Gospels.

2. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1910) 673-674.

“The Old Testament is, with [Barnabas], rather a veiled Christianity, which he puts into it by a mystical allegorical interpretation, as Philo…In this allegorical interpretation he goes so far, that he actually seems to deny the literal historical sense. He asserts, for example, that God never willed the sacrifice and fasting, the Sabbath-observance and temple-worship of the Jews, but a purely spiritual worship; and that the laws of food did not relate at all to the eating of clean and unclean animals, but only to intercourse with different classes of men, and to certain virtues and vices…Paul, in Galatians and Colossians, likewise takes an uncompromising attitude against Jewish circumcision, sabbatarianism, and ceremonialism, if made a ground of justification and a binding yoke of conscience; but nevertheless he vindicated the Mosaic law as a preparatory school for Christianity. Barnabas ignores this, and looks only at the negative side.”

I don’t entirely know if Schaff is correct in his interpretation of Barnabas’ epistle. Couldn’t Barnabas have meant that God expected the ancient Israelites to observe the literal sense of the Torah, while simultaneously recognizing that the laws had deeper spiritual meaning? That was essentially Philo’s position, which he held against the antinomian Jews, who thought they should stick with the law’s spiritual meaning and dispense with its literal application. I could be wrong or right in my assessment of Schaff, but it’s a legitimate question.

I have to admit, however, that I too found Barnabas’ treatment of the law to be rather strange, or at least it was something that I’d never really encountered before. Barnabas states that the law of clean and unclean meats was designed to teach the Israelites to hang around with good people rather than bad. Barnabas appealed to Psalm 1 as evidence that the Israelites once viewed the dietary laws in this spiritual sense. I had always assumed that the Israelites of the Old Testament kept the laws without understanding their spiritual or christological significance. After all, all they’re given is the literal, at least as far as we can see in the Torah.

Another thing I don’t understand: Schaff says that Paul viewed the law as a preparatory school for the coming of Christ. Why couldn’t God have started the Israelites out with a more spiritual religion at the outset? Why prepare them for Christ with a bunch of rituals? Some may say that this was all the ancients knew, and God was reaching the Israelites where they were. After all, they had to work hard to avoid representing God as an image, so enamored were they with what they could see and touch. I wonder if there was a spiritual side to ancient religions as well, however.

3. H. Loewe, “Introduction,” A Rabbinic Anthology, ed. C.G. Montefiore and H. Loewe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938) xcvi.

“When David Rahabi came to India and found some people whom he rightly thought to be Jews, though they were scarcely distinguishable from their Indian environment, it was not the Shema which proved that they belonged to the house of Israel, but the fact that they eschewed fish lacking scales and fins.”

I’ve heard people say that non-Israelite cultures have some sort of kosher. Africa comes to mind. Too bad I’m void of actual facts, examples, or documentation at the moment!

Stephen Collins–not Reverend Camden, but the Armstrongite who wrote a book on British Israelism–tried to argue that the Parthians were actually descended from the lost tribes of Israel because their customs were similar to those of the Jews. I think he may have mentioned kashrut as an example, but I could be wrong.

Another issue in which this is relevant is the attempt to identify ancient Israel archaeologically. One indication for maximalists is that the Israelite areas of Palestine lacked pig bones. But I vaguely recall hearing others argue that there are Canaanite areas that lack pig bones too. But I’m just shooting from the top of my head here!

Legalistic Christians?

Source: H. Graetz, History of the Jews, volume II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893) 473.

“[According to the Mishna, t]he discharge of certain duties secures the enjoyment of reward on earth and in the world to come; such are the veneration of parents, charity, timely attendance at the school, hospitality, and endowment of (indigent) brides, the accompanying of corpses to the grave, devout prayer, peace-making, and especially the pursuit of religious studies (Talmud Torah)…The most heinous and atrocious sins are expiated by death, and lesser ones by repentance and the Day of Atonement, while pardon was obtained for sins of negligence by sacrifice.”

What must one do to be saved–to be forgiven of sins, to receive acceptance from God, and to enter the good afterlife? Many Christians believe that this is the crucial issue that separates Christianity from Judaism and Islam. For them, Christians hold fast to justification by faith through grace alone, whereas other religions embrace some form of salvation by works. At a Jewish institution, a colleague of mine wrote a paper that contrasted the Mishnah with Tertullian, and he argued that Christians are grace-centered, whereas Jews focus more on the nuts-and-bolts of halakah.

To my surprise, the student’s professor responded that Tertullian was actually quite legalistic. This somewhat undermined my colleagues stereotype of Christianity, but I can actually see the professor’s point as I read through Christian literature. Look at all the good deeds in Graetz’s quote that the Mishnah treats as a path to eternal life. A Christian wouldn’t agree with that sort of “salvation by works” mindset, would he?

Not so fast! Barnabas 14:20 says, “Thou shalt also labour with thy hands to give to the poor, that thy sins may be forgiven thee.”

(This is according to the translation in The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden. The version on BibleWorks does not have that. It numbers the chapters and the verses differently, and it has, “Thou shalt remember the day of judgment, night and day. Thou shalt seek out every day the faces of the saints, either by word examining them, and going to exhort them, and meditating how to save a soul by the word, or by thy hands thou shalt labor for the redemption of thy sins.” So I don’t know if there are different manuscripts at work, or what.)

II Clement 16:4 (in the BibleWorks version) says that almsgiving lessens the burden of sin. These Christian writings are consistent with the deutero-canonical documents, which state that giving alms performs an atoning function (Sirach 3:30; Tobit 12:9). And, to the Protestants who will say, “That’s one reason we don’t like the apocrypha–it promotes salvation by works,” take a look at what Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:27: “atone for your sins with righteousness, and your iniquities with mercy to the oppressed, so that your prosperity may be prolonged” (NRSV). I do believe that Daniel is part of the Protestant canon.

Something else to note is that Origen, like the Mishnah, believed that a person’s death could atone for his sins (or at least certain ones). I remember reading this in Origen’s Homilies on Leviticus.

Don’t get me wrong. The early Christians and the church fathers firmly believed that Christ atoned for people’s sins, and they held fast to the necessity of faith in Jesus Christ for salvation. In terms of atonement, they wouldn’t view almsgiving as an alternative to Jesus Christ.

But they saw atonement differently from a lot of contemporary evangelicals. For the ancient Christians, people needed forgiveness even after they embraced Jesus Christ at baptism.

Clement, Dispensationalism, and Salvation

For my daily quiet time, I’ve been reading early Christian writings, such as Shepherd of Hermas, Barnabas, and I-II Clement. Their Christianity seems to differ from dispensationalism, particularly the brand I encounter when I read Bullinger and Scofield.

According to the dispensational writings and churches that I’ve encountered, we’re now in the age of grace. Jesus preached to people who were still under a covenant of works, so when he said that God wouldn’t forgive them if they didn’t forgive others (Matthew 6:14-15), he wasn’t establishing a principle that applies to Christians today. For certain dispensationalists, Christians don’t forgive others in order to be forgiven by God. Rather, they forgive others because they’ve already been forgiven by God (see Colossians 3:13). As far as they’re concerned, this is the age of grace, which began under the apostle Paul.

Dispensationalists also tend to go with once-saved-always-saved. They point to passages that talk about believers having been sealed with the Holy Spirit unto the day of redemption (Ephesians 1:13; 4:30). For them, a seal is an absolute guarantee that one will enter the good afterlife–no “if”s, “and”s, or “but”s.

But this isn’t exactly the view that I encounter in early Christian literature. I’ll focus here on I-II Clement, epistles written in the first-second centuries C.E. I’ll be quoting the version that appears in The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden.

Regarding forgiveness, let’s take a look at I Clement 7:4: “Be ye merciful and ye shall obtain mercy; forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: as ye do, so shall it be done unto you: as ye give, so shall it be given unto you: as ye judge, so shall ye be judged; as ye are kind to others, so shall God be kind to you: with what measure ye mete, with the same shall it be measured to you again.”

As far as Clement was concerned, Jesus’ principle of forgiving others in order to be forgiven by God still applied, long after Paul had supposedly inaugurated an age of free grace (in the view of dispensationalists). And, unlike certain dispensationalists, Clement deems the Sermon on the Mount to be authoritative for Christians, since he cites it as an authority.

On the seal, let’s consider II Clement 3:13, 18: “Thus speaks the prophet concerning those who keep not their seal; Their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched; and they shall be for a spectacle unto all flesh…This, therefore, is what he saith; keep your bodies pure, and your seal without spot, that ye may receive eternal life.”

According to the author of II Clement, the seal of the Christian can indeed be broken, leading to his eternal punishment in hell. That’s why he needs to repent. His eternal life is at stake. It’s similar to the Catholic belief of “you need to repent of mortal sin before you die.”

I don’t care for this doctrine, but I don’t think I can blithely blow it off, either. People can respond, “Well, Clement isn’t the New Testament, and the New Testament is what we follow as Scripture.” But if Paul had inaugurated a special dispensation of free grace and eternal security, as dispensationalists maintain, isn’t it odd that Christian writers in the second century didn’t seem to know about it?

Sneaking Stuff In

Source: H. Graetz, History of the Jews, volume II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893) 385-386.

“Akylas became celebrated through his new Greek translation of the Holy Scriptures. The license with which the Christians treated the old Greek version appears to have awakened him to the necessity of a simple but fixed form of translation. As the Christians read the Holy Scriptures at their service, and employed the Alexandrian translation of the so-called Seventy (Septuaginta), they were anxious to deduce from this text numerous references to Christ. They changed various sentences and added others, in order to obtain the desired prophecies about Christ in the Greek text, which they held sacred…The Jews, on the other hand, startled at the alterations made in order to confirm the Christian point of view, did not hesitate to introduce changes of their own in order to remove all apparent allusions to Christ.”

Aquila was a second century C.E. figure who translated what became the Masoretic Version of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. According to Graetz, he did so to rid the text of Christian additions.

Were there Christian additions? I’ve read Jewish apologists who say “yes.” Rabbi Toviah Singer, for example, has claimed that the word “parthenos” (virgin) in the LXX of Isaiah 7:14 was written by a Christian, for the purpose of supporting the virgin birth. The Hebrew is actually almah, which means a young woman (the same way that alam means young man).

And there are Christians who claim that Jews expunged the Hebrew Bible of stuff that sounds Christian, stuff that supposedly predicted Jesus. I saw a book that argued this when I was at Harvard Divinity School. I didn’t read all of it, and it was popular rather than scholarly. But, again, we see the claim that people have tampered with the Hebrew Bible.

I recently read the Epistle of Barnabas for my daily quiet time, and I often found myself scratching my head and saying, “Barnabas claims he’s citing Scripture, but I’ve never encountered a verse like that before!” For example, Barnabas 12:8-10 states:

“What again saith Moses unto Jesus (Joshua) the son of Nun, when he giveth him this name, as being a prophet, that all the people might give ear to him alone, because the Father revealeth all things concerning His Son Jesus? Moses therefore saith to Jesus the son of Nun, giving him this name, when he sent him as a spy on the land; Take a book in thy hands, and write what the Lord saith, how the Son of God shall cut up by the roots all the house of Amalek in the last days. Behold again it is Jesus, not a son of man, but the Son of God, and He was revealed in the flesh in a figure.” (Lightfoot’s Apostolic Fathers in English)

What’s Barnabas referring to? It appears to be something like Exodus 17:4, which says (in the LXX), “And the Lord said to Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and speak this in the ears of Joshua; for I will utterly blot out the memorial of Amalec from under heaven” (Brenton translation). There’s nothing about the son of God or the last days, from what I can see.

I’m not sure if the Christians were adding stuff to that verse, since they could have made it more overtly Christian had they so desired. What’s in the above verse looks like something a Jew could conceivably write: Jews called the Davidic king the Son of God (Psalm 2; II Samuel 7:14), and there would be a need for him to kill the Amalekites in the last days, since they seem to keep cropping up. Haman was an Agagite, after all (Esther 3:1)!

I guess my point is that there seemed to be flexibility in the biblical text. How much of that was a means of interpretation? I’m not sure. We know that the Jews sort of mixed interpretation and translation, since that’s what they did in their targumim (Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible).

Quickly–In a Few Thousand Years!

Source: H. Graetz, History of the Jews, volume II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893) 167-168.

“[Jesus' disciples] believed that some then alive would not taste death until they had seen the Son of Man enter his kingdom. His disciples were hourly expecting the return of Jesus…This kingdom was to last a thousand years: the Sabbath year of jubilee, after the six thousand years of the world, would be founded by Jesus when he returned to earth, bringing the blessing of peace and perfect happiness to the faithful.”

The Armstrong movement often taught the seven thousand year plan. It pointed out that the week has six days of toil and labor, with a Sabbath of rest on the seventh day. According to the Armstrongs, this pattern existed on a larger scale as well. God has given human beings six thousand years to toil and live independently of God. Then, Christ will return and establish a millennium of rest, peace, and joy. They based their belief on verses like Psalm 90:4 and II Peter 3:8, which say that a day in God’s eyes is like a thousand years. And the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Charles Taze Russell, supported this notion with Romans 8, which affirms that the earth is in bondage and suffers labor pains. He likened that condition to the six days of labor.

The first-second century Epistle of Barnabas has a similar view, which is articulated in Barnabas 13:4-6. But I’m puzzled: if the early Christians believed that Jesus was coming soon, how could they also maintain that he would return six thousand years after the creation of the universe? Most calculations place that date in the twentieth or twenty-first century, basing their conclusions on biblical chronology. Did the author of Barnabas see things differently?

If Barnabas is a late book, as in from the second century C.E., then my dilemma is not as bad, or so it would seem. According to some scholars, the second century was a time when people didn’t really expect the imminent return of Jesus Christ. That was the historical context of II Peter’s remark about a day in God’s eyes being as a thousand years. Christians by that time pushed the date of Christ’s return far into the future, since Christ hadn’t come back yet.

Yet, the above paragraph is rather simplistic, for we find an imminent expectation of Christ’s return in second century sources. The Shepherd of Hermas warns Christians to repent, since the time for repentance will soon come to an end. And Barnabas 3 appears to have an imminent expectation, which is why he exhorts and warns his fellow Christians.

So how did Barnabas reconcile his belief in Jesus’ imminent return, with his notion that Christ would return in the seven thousandth year? I have no idea.