Jesus’ Halakah: Strict and Lenient

In my latest reading of volume 4 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Meier talks about the co-existence of strictness and leniency in Jesus’ approach to the Torah.

According to Meier, Jesus was stricter than the Judaisms of his day and thereafter on the issues of divorce and oaths.  Jesus prohibited divorce and remarriage, which set him apart from Second Temple and (later) rabbinic Judaism.  Whereas the Dead Sea Scrolls are concerned about people having more than one spouse, they do not contain a blanket prohibition of divorce.  And, while scholars have compared Jesus’ position on divorce in Matthew 19:9 (which has the exception clause for fornication) to the position of Shammai, Meier believes that Jesus and Shammai had different views on the subject.  Shammai believed that a man could divorce a woman if she shamed him, whereas Jesus prohibited divorce, period.

For Meier, Jesus was also revolutionary on the issue of oaths because he prohibited them altogether.  Even Jews who had issues with oaths, such as Philo, still believed that they were permissible on some level because they were commanded in the Torah.  Consequently, there was discontinuity between Jesus and Judaism, and Meier views that as a reason that Jesus historically held these positions on divorce and oaths.

But Jesus was lenient on the issue of the Sabbath.  Meier does not regard as historical the interactions in which Jesus gets in trouble for healing on the Sabbath, for rabbinic Judaism largely did not prohibit that.  Moreover, Meier does not believe that Jesus getting in trouble in Mark 2 for his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath is plausible.  While Meier acknowledges that there were voices in Second Temple Judaism (i.e., Philo) that considered plucking grain to be work, he does not think that the Pharisees would have popped out of nowhere near the grain-fields, accosting Jesus and his disciples for plucking grain on the Sabbath.  Moreover, according to Meier, had Jesus historically made the Scriptural bloopers he makes in Mark 2 (i.e., referring to Abiathar, when the priest in I Samuel 21 was Ahimelech), the Pharisees would have laughed at Jesus rather than taking him seriously and getting angry at him.

But Meier regards Jesus’ statements that people on the Sabbath could pull an ox or a man out of a ditch to be historical, even though they were later attached to “Sabbath controversies” contrived by the early Christians.  For Meier, Jesus had a common-sense halakah when it came to the Sabbath, one that sympathized with peasants who felt they needed to pull their ox or a person out of a ditch.  Meier speculates that Jesus was responding to the Essenes or stricter voices within Pharisaism.

Why Jesus was strict in some areas and lenient in others, I do not entirely know.  One point that Meier makes is that creation played a significant role in elements of Jesus’ halakah.  Jesus opposed divorce and believed that the Sabbath was less important than human well-being on the basis of the creation stories in Genesis, for example.

The (Gentile) Demoniac

For my write-up today on volume 2 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, I will talk some about Meier’s discussion of Jesus’ exorcism of the Gedarene demoniac.  This story appears in Mark 5, Luke 8, and Matthew 8 (only, there, the land is called the country of the Gergesenes, and there are two demoniacs).

Meier believes that the demoniac in the story was actually Gerasene, on the basis of many “early and excellent” ancient manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  But, according to Meier, there was a change to “Gedarenes” and “Gergesenes” because those particular areas are closer to the Sea of Galilee than Gerasa, which is not close to the Sea (see the map here).  For those who made the change, the city of the demoniac had to be close to the Sea of Galilee, for, in the story, the demons enter the pigs, who then jump off of a cliff into the Sea. 

But, for a variety of reasons, Meier believes that the part of the story about the pigs was added later.  (For example, Meier states that Jesus in the Gospels usually does not destroy other people’s property.)  Meier’s conclusion is that the story was originally about a Gerasene demoniac and did not have the part about the pigs, but that people altered the location to Gedar or Gerges after the pigs part was added.  That, for Meier, accounts for the present of Gerasa in ancient manuscripts.  And Meier is open to the possibility that the historical Jesus performed an exorcism in Gerasa and that “the unusual venue of the exorcism helped anchor it in the oral tradition” (page 651).  Why was the venue unusual?  Because it was part of the Decapolis, “a group of Hellenistic cities with mostly pagan populations in the region of southern Syria and northeastern Palestine” (page 651).  Ordinarily, Jesus ministered to fellow Jews.

This information actually answers a question I have had about the story: Why were there pigs in Israel, which regarded them as unclean?  It turns out that the pigs were in predominantly pagan areas.  And, when Jesus told the ex-demoniac to go home and testify to his family about what the Lord did for him, there’s a likelihood that the ex-demoniac’s family was pagan and did not worship the God of Israel, meaning that the ex-demoniac was witnessing to Gentiles.  Of course, as I noted, Meier does not believe that the story originally had the pigs.  But the information about the Decapolis helped me to understand the pigs’ presence in the story (at some stage).

Something else that interested me was Meier’s reference to Franz Annen’s view that the story was written by early Christians to justify the mission to the Gentiles against conservative Jewish-Christian detractors.  Jesus, after all, is visiting a Gentile area and is conducting an exorcism there.  Meier maintains that the story was historical, however, because the very appeal to it demonstrates that Jewish-Christians accepted its historicity as well, for why refer to a story that the Jewish-Christians could simply say was made-up?  This argument stood out to me because of the scholarly view that Jesus did not envision a mission to the Gentiles, for Paul would have spoken about that in his debates with Judaizers had Jesus given any indication of support for a Gentile mission.  Perhaps.  Or maybe Paul didn’t know about that story, or it didn’t come to his mind in his debates.

Matthew 10:23; Jesus and the Kingdom

I have two items for my write-up today on volume 2 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.

1.  Matthew 10:23 states (in the KJV): “But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.”  As I showed a few days ago, Meier believes that this statement in Matthew 10:23 was from early Christians, not Jesus himself.  But isn’t the statement embarrassing, since it was an unfulfilled prophecy?  And isn’t stuff that’s embarrassing to the early Christians most likely from Jesus, since the early Christians would not invent an embarrassing tradition?  Meier says that we see here “the limits of the criterion of embarrassment” (page 391).  Sure, after the second or the third generation, Matthew 10:23 probably became embarrassing.  But before then, early Christians could have believed that the Son of Man would come in their lifetimes.

Why did the final redactor of Matthew include Matthew 10:23, however, when he lived at a time when Matthew 10:23 was an embarrassment due to its non-fulfillment?  Meier’s answer is that the final redactor may have believed that Matthew 10:23 was fulfilled when the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples in the Gospel of Matthew’s final scene, in “a sort of ‘proleptic parousia’” (page 391). 

What’s interesting about Meier’s note on page 391 is that he talks a little about the history of interpretation of Matthew 10:23.  Meier states that v 23b “is not cited before Origen and not often after him”.  Meier believes this is due to embarrassment, but a scholar named Kunzi, on page 181 of Das Naherwartungslogion Matthaus 10, 23, denies that.

2.  Meier talks about how the Kingdom of God was present in Jesus, in part because Jesus was liberating people from the bondage of Satan when he healed them and cast out their demons.  For Meier, Jesus expected the fullness of the Kingdom to come in his life time, and Jesus was starting that.  Perhaps Meier believes that Jesus was offering a preview of the Kingdom in its fullness, or that he was starting the assault against evil that God would continue by dramatically intervening in the course of human events.  I’m still unclear about whether or not Jesus considered himself to be the Messiah, in Meier’s eyes.  Obviously, Meier believes that Jesus considered himself to be a significant figure in terms of the Kingdom of God, but was he significant as a prophet, or as something more, according to Meier?

Ben Witherington’s Critical Methodology and Apologetics

I finished Ben Witherington III’s Jesus the Sage.  I have two items:

1.  Are the Gospels fiction, or are they historical?  Witherington says on page 154:

“I have argued elsewhere that the ancient popular biography provides us with our closest analogies for the genre of the Gospels…There are certainly many other options besides pure fiction and photographic recall.  For instance, it is possible the Gospel writers have used material of some historical substance and a broad historical outline of the life of Jesus, coupled with their selection, editing, and arrangement of various pericopes according to their various theological purposes.”

On the TV program, Faith Under Fire, Witherington said that the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony, and that the testimony is reliable (even though the Gospels were written about forty years after the events that they clam to narrate) because the Mishnah states that disciples were able to remember vast amounts of material that their teacher taught them.  Witherington notes that Luke claims to draw from the testimony of eyewitnesses, and that both Matthew and Luke carefully use the sources that they have, such as Mark, showing that they were responsible historians.  For Witherington, there is a good chance that Mark wrote the Gospel of Mark and that Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke, even though these Gospels are formally anonymous, for the second century church would not attribute Gospels to non-eyewitnesses or to non-apostles unless those figures actually wrote them (and Mark and Luke were not apostles).  Regarding Matthew, Witherington does not claim that Matthew the apostle was responsible for the Gospel of Matthew’s final form, but he does suggest that the Gospel contains traditions going back to Matthew the apostle.  And, if my impression is correct, Witherington appears to believe that John wrote the Gospel of John, and he notes that the end of the Gospel says that it represents eyewitness testimony.  You can watch or listen to Witherington making his points here and here.

Is this consistent with what Witherington argues in Jesus the Sage?  I’d say yes and no.  In both, Witherington maintains that the Gospel authors used sources, and he is confident that these sources, on some level, reflect the historical Jesus.  At the same time, I think that Witherington in Jesus the Sage is more sensitive to the fact the the Gospel authors had ideological and theological agendas and were not simply recalling what actually happened.  He criticizes scholars for unjustifiably (at times) preferring Luke’s forms of sayings over how other Gospels’ present them, and he attributes that to the scholars’ attraction to Luke being less Jewish and apocalyptic in his presentation of the sayings (page 215).  Witherington also proposes to uncover what is authentically Q by peeling back the layers that obviously reflect Matthew and Luke (and one can see the characteristics of Matthean and Lukan interaction with sources by looking at their use of Mark).  Witherington affirms that Matthew softens Mark’s portrayal of the disciples as dense in their failure to understand Jesus, and he also discusses differences between the synoptic Gospels and James.  For example, Witherington notes that James does not really talk about the inbreaking Kingdom of God through Christ.

Regarding John, Witherington does not believe in Jesus the Sage that the Gospel of John goes back to John the Galilean son of Zebedee, for there is not much in that Gospel about Jesus’ Galilean ministry or the sons of Zebedee.  But Witherington does acknowledge that the Beloved Disciple could have been a Judean eyewitness to Jesus as well as the source of traditions that made their way into the Gospel of John (whose present form came from someone other than the Beloved Disciple, according to Witherington).  This is similar to what Witherington said about Matthew on Faith Under Fire.  Another point: In Jesus the Sage, Witherington says that Peter in the Gospel of Matthew is given a scribal authority to bind and to loose.  Does this imply that there were written sources going back to the original disciples of Jesus, according to Witherington?

I think that the passage with which I opened this item, the one from page 154, is a reasonable way to see the Gospels: they are not a photographic recall of events, but rather they are the result of a process of using sources and composing a work that accords with the ideologies of the Gospels’ writers.  Some, or even many, of these sources may go back to eyewitness testimony.  But a significant part of uncovering the historical Jesus is sifting what is ideological in the Gospels from what is historical—-though it is possible that the ideological can overlap with the historical, as Witherington seems to believe when he regards the Gospels of Matthew and John to be accurately depicting Jesus as one who claimed to be wisdom itself.

2.  On page 353, Witherington says: “Kings were often said to have miraculous births in antiquity, and Jesus is no different.”  In my opinion, this differs from Witherington’s defense of the historicity of the virgin birth in his blog post, The Virginal Conception—-Miracle on Nazareth Street, where he argues that the virgin birth is historical because (1.) Matthew and Luke had to get the idea from somewhere, and there were no true parallels in the ancient world, and (2.) the story was embarrassing within that honor and shame culture, so it was most likely not made-up.  Based on what Witherington says on page 353 of Jesus the Sage, I can argue that early Christians could have attributed to Jesus a miraculous birth to show that he was like other kings (even if other kings were not said to be the products of a virginal conception).

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.

N.T. Wright on the Virgin Birth

Claude Mariottini on his blog has a link to an article by N.T. Wright on the virgin birth of Jesus.  Wright’s article is entitled Suspending Scepticism: History and the Virgin Birth.  In my post here, I’ll interact with a few of Wright’s defenses of the historicity of the virgin birth.  I’ll only be scratching the surface of what Wright’s article is about, however, and so I’ve linked to it here so that you can read it for yourself.

1.  Here are some quotes from Wright, which make essentially the same point:

“…there is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin. No one used Isaiah 7:14 this way before Matthew did. Even assuming that Matthew or Luke regularly invented material to fit Jesus into earlier templates, why would they have invented something like this?  The only conceivable parallels are pagan ones, and these fiercely Jewish stories have certainly not been modelled on them. Luke at least must have known that telling this story ran the risk of making Jesus out to be a pagan demigod. Why, for the sake of an exalted metaphor, would they take this risk – unless they at least believed the stories to be literally true?”

“Smoke without fire does, of course, happen quite often in the real world. But this smoke, in that world, without fire? This theory asks us to believe in intellectual parthenogenesis: the birth of an idea without visible parentage. Difficult – unless, of course, you believe in miracles, which most people who disbelieve the virginal conception don’t.”

This appears to be similar to Wright’s argument in defense of Jesus’ resurrection.  In that case, Wright argued that first century Judaism did not expect the Messiah to rise from the dead before the eschaton, and that Messianic movements generally folded after the death of their leader.  For Wright, the fact that the Jesus movement continued after Jesus’ death and claimed that their founder was risen had to be due to some reason, and Wright believes that reason was the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  Similarly, in the area of the virgin birth, Wright’s argument seems to be that the notion of the virgin birth of Jesus had to come from somewhere, and, for Wright, the most plausible explanation is that it came from the fact that Jesus was born of a virgin.  Wright does not believe that Matthew or Luke got the idea from pagan stories, which first century Jews anathematized, plus Luke was already putting himself at the risk of making Jesus out to be a demigod, in the eyes of his Jewish audience.  For Wright, as I understand him, Matthew and Luke believed in the virgin birth of Jesus, and they got that idea from its occurrence.

I’ll list three problems that I have with this argument.  First, why couldn’t the virgin birth have simply been an original idea that Matthew and Luke came across and included in their works?  The fact that an idea is original does not mean that the idea has any grounding in reality.  There are all sorts of original ideas out there!  Second, why couldn’t a first century Jew absorb ideas from pagan cultures, while still opposing paganism?  We see that sort of thing a lot in the Hebrew Bible: things are said about the God of Israel that other nations say about their gods, such as Baal.  By drawing on these motifs, the writers of the Hebrew Bible may be saying that the God of Israel is the one who truly does the deeds that pagan nations attribute to their own gods.  Why couldn’t something similar be going on with the virgin birth story?  Third, and this contradicts the first problem that I listed, I think that the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin could have come from something other than its actual occurrence—-that the concept, in a sense, has a Hebrew precedent.  In the Hebrew Bible, there are stories about figures who are born when their parents are really old, and such births can be described as miraculous.  Why couldn’t a Christian come along and suggest that Jesus’ birth was miraculous—-and even more astounding than the births of the Old Testament figures—-for Jesus was born, not of a woman whose womb had dried up, but of a woman who had never even known a man?

2. “Of course, legends surround the birth and childhood of many figures who afterwards become important. As historians we have no reason to say that this did not happen in the case of Jesus, and some reasons to say that it did. But by comparison with other legends about other figures, Matthew and Luke look, after all, quite restrained.  Except, of course, in the matter where the real interest centres. Matthew and Luke declare unambiguously that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. What are we to make of this?”

My impression is that Wright here is making the sort of argument that many evangelical apologists (such as David Marshall) have made: that the Gospels’ stories about miracles are more reliable historically than non-Christian miracle stories because the Gospels are more restrained and low-key than the non-Christian miracle stories.  I wonder what this proves, though.  Perhaps the main thing we can conclude is that the Gospel writers were simply imitating the style of the Hebrew Bible, which was low-key in its description of miracles.

3.  Wright makes the following statements:

“Further, anyone can say that Matthew made it all up to fulfil Isaiah 7:14 (‘the virgin shall conceive’). Since Luke doesn’t quote the same passage, though, the argument looks thin. Is Bethlehem mentioned only, perhaps, because of Micah 5:2-4?”

“What then about his central claim, the virginal conception itself, dropped almost casually into the narrative, with no flourish of trumpets? Some have argued, of course, that there is instead a flourish of strumpets: Matthew has taken care to draw our attention to the peculiarities (to put it no stronger) of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Batlisheba, presumably in order to warn us that something even stranger is coming; or perhaps to enable us, when the news is announced, to connect it with God’s strange way of operating in the past. He is hardly likely on this occasion, however, to have made up the story of Mary’s being with child by the Holy Spirit in order to ‘fulfil’ this theme.”

I can see Wright’s point that Matthew did not make up the virgin birth story, for the concept of Jesus’ virgin birth also appears in Luke, and their stories are so different that they appear to be independent.  Both could have gotten the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin from a common source.  I also agree with Wright that Matthew 1 is trying to show that the strange circumstances around Jesus’ birth do not detract from Jesus being the Messiah, for God in the past was involved in peculiar situations, such as births from Gentile women, some of whom engaged in trickery or sexual immortality.  Matthew is responding to something.  But what?  Could it have been a prominent belief that Jesus was a mamzer?  Matthew does not believe that Jesus was a mamzer, for he has the tradition of the virgin birth, which could have been developed by someone else in response to the charge that Jesus was a mamzer.  I guess my point here is that the fact that Matthew did not invent the virgin birth and was seeking to defend Jesus from a charge does not show that the virgin birth happened.

Time for Carlos to Sacrifice

I watched the new Desperate Housewives tonight, and the plotline that stuck out to me the most was Carlos’ job dilemma. But Lynette almost running over that guy who threatened her son was a close second!

Carlos is getting his sight back, and he needs a job. One of his old cut-throat CEO colleagues wants Carlos to work for him, since he respects Carlos as a “shark.” Carlos’ wife, Gabby, wants him to take the job, since it pays in the six figures and offers all sorts of fringe benefits. After she accepts the CEO’s offer on Carlos’ behalf, she rushes to the mall to buy some expensive shoes.

Carlos, however, has something else in mind: he wants to work with the blind at a community center. Gabby invites the CEO and his wife to dinner so Carlos can hear him out, and Carlos grows annoyed with the CEO’s stories of his exploits as a cut-throat businessman. “Maybe you can tell that story to the other CEOs in hell,” Carlos jokes to him. Carlos and Gabby also get to observe the CEO’s strained relationship with his wife.

The next day, Carlos announces that he’s made his decision: he still wants to work with the blind at the community center. He doesn’t desire a job that robs him of his soul and keeps him away from his family. He wants something fulfilling, a job that can allow him to make a difference in the world.

Gabby responds, “Look, I’ve been helping a blind man for the past five years. It’s not as fulfilling as it looks!” And she goes on to remind Carlos that she has sacrificed for him for five years, and it’s now time for him to step up. The family has been poor, and she has had to sell her cherished items (e.g., fancy clothes, shoes, etc.) to take care of life’s necessities. Carlos then calls the CEO and accepts the job. And Gabby goes to her closet and kisses her new shoes!

At first, Gabby struck me as rather shallow. “I thought this lady grew after her years of self-sacrifice. But no. She’s still the same old materialistic Gabby!” But when Mary Alice (the narrator) said at the end of the show that people don’t like to struggle, and Gabby was shown looking out the window with a tired look in her eyes, I began to identify with her more.

Personally, I don’t care about dresses and a new pair of fancy shoes because (1.) I’m not a woman, and (2.) I’m not obsessed with how I look. But fashion is something that’s important to Gabby. And she has had to do without for five years to take care of life’s necessities. I can’t always buy everything my heart desires, and I’d probably have to sell my cherished CDs, DVDs, and books if my family didn’t help me out. Fortunately, I haven’t come to the point where that is necessary. Gabby, however, was not so lucky.

Here are some things that come to my mind:

1. Will Carlos be a shark when he takes that CEO position? Sure, Carlos looked rather selfish when he expected Gabby to keep on sacrificing just so he could fulfill his feel-good desires. But the fact is that Carlos has changed. He’s no longer the money-grubbing, ruthless CEO that he was five years before. He’s learned to value other things, like family, life, beauty, and giving to others. Will he be able to resume his role as a shark? Or will his soul continue to be intact just because he’s doing what he doesn’t like for Gabby and his kids?

2. Gabby’s statement that helping the blind isn’t all it’s cracked up to be is refreshingly honest. A lot of us expect community service to resemble what we see on Highway to Heaven–with everyone smiling and feeling good about helping others. And service work can indeed have those sorts of rewards. But there’s another side to it: the grunt work, people’s lack of appreciation, wondering if you’re even making a difference, etc.

3. I thought about the rich young ruler, the one Jesus told to sell all his possessions. Mark 10:22 says, “When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (NRSV). Gabby’s situation reminded me of that, since she preferred having possessions over her husband helping the blind full-time. (She was open to him doing service work on the weekends, just so long as he took the job with the six-figure salary.) Similarly, the rich young ruler chose wealth over Jesus’ ministry to the poor, the sick, and the blind (among others).

Is Christianity only about giving things up? I remember Joyce Meyer saying that the rich young ruler was actually the one making the sacrifice with his selfish, short-sighted decision. He could have gotten so much more had he forsaken his wealth to follow Jesus! Not only would he have gotten treasures in heaven and the satisfaction of helping others, but he also would have received his treasures back, and so much more.

We see something like this in the text. Later in the chapter, Jesus tells his disciples, who gave up everything to follow him: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age–houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions–and in the age to come eternal life” (vv 29-30). Notice that Jesus mentions rewards in this life, not just the hereafter.

And here are some points that came to me in my Luke quiet time ages ago. I always had problems with Jesus’ sayings about giving to others. I have in mind passages like the following:

“[A]nd if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” (Matthew 5:40-42)

“Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys” (Luke 12:33). This is directed towards Jesus’ disciples, so we can’t use the argument that Jesus’ command to the rich young ruler applied only to him!

Give to everyone who asks? Give even my cloak? I’d have nothing if I did that!

But Jesus says these things with the presupposition that God is an abundant provider:

“[G]ive, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back” (Luke 6:38).

“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:31-33).

As Proverbs 11:24 affirms, “Some give freely, yet grow all the richer; others withhold what is due, and only suffer want.”

I’ve heard stories in which these principles work in real life: a person tithes or is generous, and God blesses him financially. But then I’ve heard the opposite as well. Armstongites could be extremely generous in their tithes and offerings, and many of them suffered as a result.

But the Bible doesn’t necessarily present a zero-sum game, in which giving to others means deprivation for oneself. Rather, there are places where it affirms that people can experience the best of both worlds: service, along with happiness in this life.

Lord’s Prayer, Booting the Quartos, Sabbath as Eden

1. Source: David Flusser, “Psalms, Hymns, and Prayers,” Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 560-561.

“Of special interest is line 11b-12a: ‘Do not bring me into difficulties insurmountable for me; keep me far from the sins of my youth.’ This does not only resemble the rabbinic prayers of the apotropaic type, but also the last sentence of the Lord’s prayer: ‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’ (Matt. 6:13; cf. Luke 11:4 and see especially Luke 10:13).”

Flusser is referring to the Syriac Psalms, whose Hebrew originals he places at Qumran. I don’t know much about this topic, but I’ve heard that Flusser sort of has a thing for hypothetical Hebrew originals. He believes that the New Testament was originally in Hebrew.

“Lead us not into temptation.” When I lived in New York, I attended the New York Metro Adventist Forum, which is a liberal Seventh-Day Adventist group. A lady there asked me what “Lead us not into temptation” means. For her, it was a pretty problematic statement. We actually have to ask God to lead us not into temptation? Why would he lead us into it in the first place? God is good, right?

To be honest, I’m still not sure how to answer her question. On the one hand, there are clear passages denying that God tempts people to sin. James 1:13 affirms, for example, that “God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one” (NRSV). On the other hand, there are other passages in which God seems to lead people into sin. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 4:21 et al). He incites David to conduct a census (II Samuel 24:1). He sends a lying spirit to deceive King Ahab (I Kings 22). God also tests his people, for Deuteronomy 13:3 states that God uses idolatrous prophets to put Israel to the test. Does God lead people into temptation? Maybe so.

A blogger who wrestles with this issue is Ryan, a conservative Christian who comments here every now and then. In one of his blogs, Ryan’s Notes From God’s Word, he has a post: “Difficult Passages: Do 2 Sam 24:1 and 1 Chron 21:1 Contradict?” Ryan’s argument seems to be that God may lead into temptation those who are already sinful and unrepentant. For example, Pharaoh was a jerk before God hardened his heart. So God may harden people’s heart in judgment of their sins, as Isaiah 6:9-10 appears to indicate.

Another point: the Lord’s prayer may be based on previous Jewish ideas. If I’m not mistaken, I’ve read things in Ben Sira about God not tempting people (although I also vaguely recall an acknowledgement in that book that God hardens people’s hearts). And Ben Sira 29:2-5 says that God will only forgive those who forgive others, an idea that appears in the Lord’s prayer.

Some may say that Jesus’ command to love your enemies was revolutionary. On some level, it was. The Qumran community didn’t really follow that idea. But the concept does appear in the Hebrew Bible. An Israelite was to return the lost ass of one who hated him (Exodus 23:5). And Proverbs 21:25 says, “If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink.”

Maybe Jesus was preaching new stuff, but he proclaimed old truths as well.

2. Source: Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1910) 217.

“Victor turned a deaf ear to this remonstrance, branded the Asiatics as heretics, and threatened to excommunicate them. But many of the Eastern bishops, and even Irenaeus, in the name of the Gallic Christians, though he agreed with Victor on the disputed point, earnestly reproved with for such arrogance, and reminded him of the more Christian and brotherly conduct of his predecessors…who sent the eucharist to their dissenting brethren.”

Schaff is discussing the Quartodeciman controversy, which occurred in the second century and concerned a question of the festival calendar: will the church observe Easter Sunday, as Rome desired? Or would it commemorate Jesus’ death on the Jewish Passover, as many Christians in Asia Minor did? Victor excommunicated the Asiatics who observed the Passover.

I’m surprised that Irenaeus challenged the pope. One thing I don’t know is this: How much power do Catholics think the pope has? Sometimes, they talk like the pope has ultimate authority on faith and practice. God tells Peter in Matthew 16:19, after all, that Peter has authority to bind and loose, and there are Catholics who read Acts 15 to mean that the church had to accept the Gentiles after Peter gave his little speech, since Peter was pope.

At the same time, they don’t exactly treat Peter or subsequent popes as infallible. They recognize that Paul challenged Peter’s alienation of the Gentiles in Galatians 2, and they acknowledge there were corrupt popes in history. If memory serves me correctly, they usually address this by saying that these were mere foibles. In matters of faith and practice, however, God will guide the pope to make the right decision.

But, here, we see a pope exercising his authority to excommunicate, and a church father tells him that he’s not acting very Christian. Maybe Irenaeus respected Victor’s authority and decision, but he didn’t think it corresponded with how Jesus would handle the situation. For Irenaeus, Jesus would still treat the Asiatics as brethren, rather than excommunicating them.

3. Jacob Neusner, Judaism’s Story of Creation: Scripture, Halakhah, Aggadah (Boston: Brill, 2000) 40.

“The household on the Sabbath recapitulates Eden…”

Neusner may be discussing the rabbinic rules for the table, and how they treated a meal like a mini-temple service. I’m intrigued by his statement that the Sabbath recapitulates Eden. In a sense, I’ve felt that way when I have gone to Jewish Sabbath services: it’s an atmosphere of peace and relaxation, in which God seems to be present. In a world of continual chaos, it’s good to have a mini-Eden in the week.

I wonder, however, if the rabbinic rules of the Sabbath are conducive to this or not. We read in the New Testament that Jesus was critical of Pharisaic regulations regarding the Sabbath, since he believed that they subordinated human well-being to a day (e.g., Mark 2:27). But there are Jews who have argued that such rules are designed to protect the peace and sanctity of the Sabbath. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. Personally, I wouldn’t be too at peace if I had to worry about rules about a Sabbath days’ journey, or what technically constitutes work, etc.

A Christian Studying Judaism

Source: Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1910) 39.

“The Talmud is the slow growth of several centuries. It is a chaos of Jewish learning, wisdom, and folly, a continent of rubbish, with hidden pearls of true maxims and poetic parables…It is the Old Testament misinterpreted and turned against the New, in fact, though not in form. It is a rabbinical Bible without inspiration, without the Messiah, without hope. It shares the tenacity of the Jewish race, and, like it, continues involuntarily to bear testimony to the truth of Christianity.”

At the outset, let me say this: I’m not reading Schaff as if it’s an unbiased scholarly source. I’m reading it to get a feel for Christian history–who lived when, what did they teach, and what was going on at the time?

What’s interesting is that Schaff wrote in roughly the same time as Graetz, whose History of the Jews I’ve also been reading. Both can get pretty mean, let me tell you! Schaff writes that Judaism is uninspired and without hope, and Graetz portrays Christians as constantly distorting the Hebrew Bible (though he has a soft spot for Origen).

I took a class on the Talmud a few years ago at Jewish Theological Seminary, and one on the Mishnah here at Hebrew Union College. Both documents can be rather tedious, I have to admit. As I go through rule after rule about what is and is not permitted on the Sabbath, I inadvertently start to ask myself: “Who cares?” The Mishnah and the Talmud have a lot of beautiful stories (or “pearls”), such as one we read about a rabbi who honored his parents above himself. But much of these documents is law. What I liked about my Mishnah class, however, was that we got into the theological and religious significance of the laws.

This raises an important point: I may ask myself, “Who cares?” But somebody cares–for some reason. The Mishnah and the Talmud flow from a certain view of God and the universe–one that values a righteous order with clearly-defined boundaries. It may not be my view of God and the universe, since I prefer a “big picture mindset,” which says that it doesn’t matter if a person walks out of his house on the Sabbath carrying an object, just as long as he worships God and is kind to his neighbor. But maybe other religious views have something to teach me. Plus, Judaism isn’t getting its focus on the nuts-and-bolts of law from nowhere, since the Torah has a lot of laws that many would consider tedious. In certain respects, Judaism is a continuation of the Torah’s trajectory.

Is the Talmud void of inspiration, a Messiah, and hope? A Messianic Jew once asked me if I thought that the oral law was inspired. He loved studying the Talmud, and he was hoping my answer would be “yes” (not that anything I said would shape his beliefs, one way or another!). But I couldn’t really answer “yes,” since there are many places in the New Testament where Jesus opposes Pharisaic tradition. In Matthew 15:6, Jesus tells the Pharisees that their tradition makes void the law of God! So is the oral Torah inspired? I’m sure it has a lot of good things, but, as a Christian, I’d have to say “no.”

Is the Talmud without a Messiah? No! It believes a Messiah will arrive! But I remember my Talmud professor saying that Jews have to obey the law for the Messiah to come. In Judaism, he asserted, the Messiah is not a hero like he is in Christianity–a Savior from sin. Rather, the Jews play a role in ushering in the Messianic era.

That may look rather hopeless, especially since so many Jews are not orthodox, or even mildly observant. But it probably wasn’t hopeless to the authors of the Talmud. And I’m not even sure if traditionalist Jews today see it as utterly hopeless. When I was in Israel, a Chabad Jew was handing out tefillin on a Friday afternoon, since obeying the law of wearing tefillin on the Sabbath can help bring about the Messiah. I’m sure he realized that many of the Jews on the street were not orthodox! But he tried to do his part, once person at a time.

This whole topic of studying Judaism overlaps with my daily quiet time. I’m reading Ignatius, and Ignatius says that Christians shouldn’t be taught by non-Christian Jews. In Philadelphians 2:6, he states, “But if anyone shall preach the Jewish law unto you, hearken not unto him; for it is better to receive the doctrine of Christ from one that has been circumcised, than Judaism from one that has not” (from the Lost Books of the Bible). Ignatius means spiritual circumcision here: for him, Christians are circumcised in the sense that Christ has removed from them their sinful flesh; the Jews who rejected Christ, however, still have their sinful human nature. So Ignatius is asking what non-Christian Jews have that can benefit Christians. The law? That’s a path to nowhere, as far as Ignatius is concerned! Plus, in his eyes, Christ has fulfilled it.

We see this sort of sentiment in the New Testament. Titus 1:14 says that we should “not [pay] attention to Jewish myths or to commandments of those who reject the truth.” Does that mean we shouldn’t study other religions? In the eyes of the early Christians, other religions were a path to nowhere. They did not make people moral, since only Christ could conquer people’s sinful nature. And they often focused on irrelevant details rather than what’s important: godliness and faith.

But there have been prominent Christians who have learned from the Jewish people. Origen and Jerome studied Hebrew under them. I wonder myself if there is a way to study and appreciate Judaism, without compromising my Christian beliefs. “Jewish fables” can teach a lot of valuable lessons about God and morality. And, while I don’t think that laws by themselves can conquer a person’s sinful nature, I wonder if I as a Christian can appreciate the order that Judaism strives to accomplish.

Signs of Revival

Yvette of Pascalian Awakenings has given me a link to a discussion about the Lakeland revival. It’s from the web site of Michael Brown, the author of Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus.

I don’t know much about the revival in Lakeland. Some Christians like it. Others hate it. Some think it’s crazy, authoritarian, and unorthodox. Others say it’s been accompanied by miraculous healings. In the world of blogdom, Jim West and Peter Kirk have written about Todd Bentley, a key figure in the revival, who looks like a rider from Hell’s Angels. And, whenever someone starts a thread on Todd Bentley on my Christian dating site, you can guarantee it will get tons of replies!

I want to make two points before I quote Michael Brown’s criteria for a true revival. First of all, just because something’s strange, that doesn’t mean it’s not of God. On two occasions, the spirit of God came upon Saul and inspired him to prophesy, and he ripped off his clothes in one of those incidents (I Samuel 10, 19). That prompted people to ask if Saul was one of the prophets. For them, “prophet” and “weird” could go in the same sentence. God instructed Isaiah to walk around naked and barefoot (Isaiah 20:2). I’m sure he got some odd stares when he did that! And, on Pentecost, people thought that the disciples were drunk when they saw them speaking in tongues (Acts 2:13). God doesn’t always work in conventional ways.

Second, critics of the Lakeland revival are not necessarily blaspheming the Holy Spirit (which is a frequent charismatic accusation, within a variety of settings). Criticism holds movements accountable. God actually anointed the kings of Israel and Judah, yet that didn’t stop the prophets from criticizing them. People should take heed not to become hardened to God or the possibility that he might be working in Lakeland. But no one should be insulated from criticism, not even revival leaders. Even Jesus invited critique when he said, “Which of you convicts me of sin?” (John 8:47). The people who shun criticism are usually those who have something to hide.

Now, here are Michael Brown’s criteria for true revival, which are based on guidelines established by Jonathan Edwards:

“1) Is it exalting Jesus? Does He have the preeminence and are people being drawn to Him and His centrality?

“2) Is there an increasing hunger for the Word of God and an increasing desire to submit to the Word of God?

“3) Are people repenting of sin and turning to holiness by God’s grace and power?

“4) Is there an increasing burden to touch and save the lost?

“If so, then God is at work, since Satan can’t cast out Satan and the flesh can’t give birth to Spirit.”

Brown doesn’t mention healing, since it may not be an actual criterion for a genuine revival. After all, people can embrace God without miracles. But isn’t healing at least one sign that God is involved in a phenomenon? Brown says that Satan can’t cast out Satan, but the biblical context for that statement is Jesus’ healing of a blind and mute demoniac. Jesus said he was plundering the kingdom of Satan when he did so, and that “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). I know that Michael Brown wrote a book on Jesus’ healing ministry, which I own but have not yet read. I’m puzzled about why he doesn’t comment on the healings at Lakeland, since healing in the Gospels is one way God delivers people from Satanic oppression.

But Jesus also preached repentance, godliness, and the possibility of a new life. Jesus said that “wisdom is vindicated by all her children” (Luke 7:32, 35). I wonder if Jesus meant that his message was confirmed by the new lives of the sinners who repented through it. The Pharisees were critics of John the Baptist and Jesus, whose ministries brought about dramatic conversions among people who ordinarily wanted nothing to do with religion. Tax collectors were leaving behind their lucrative business to follow Jesus. Prostitutes were turning to God. People were ceasing from their evil ways and learning to do good. This would be like hardened drug dealers experiencing a complete spiritual turn-around. It would be miraculous! And this is a sign that revival is taking place! Notwithstanding the Pharisees’ criticisms, the ministries of John and Jesus were vindicated by those who repented (wisdom’s children).

I don’t have to agree with everything that goes on in Lakeland. But if God is using it to bring people to himself, then praise God!