The Story Retold

https://www.wtsbooks.com/products/the-story-retold-a-biblical-theological-introduction-to-the-new-testament-9780830852666?variant=31538037456958

Genre of the Gospels

From Craig Blomberg (Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey, 2nd ed., pp 121-2):

What, then, is encoded in the texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to help us know how to interpret them on the "macro-scale"? Are they unadorned works of history or biography? Are they extended myths? historical fiction? In short, how do we assess the genre or literary form of an entire "gospel"?

G.K. Beale Lectures on iTunes

I’ve been listening to Dr. Greg Beale’s New Testament Biblical Theology lecture series on iTunes, which seems to be the lecture series upon which his New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament In the New was based. (It seems to me that the lectures occurred prior to the release of the book, but it’s the same subject matter).

It’s a strongly exegetical treatment, and he emphasizes the “inaugurated” components of the Old Testament’s “last days” all throughout the New Testament. Beale stresses that Christ has a “back story” that extends all through the entire sweep of the Old Testament back to Adam, what he calls “the Old Testament background”.

The book may be found here: G.K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic ©2011).

The Hitchcock/Hanegraaff Debate On The Date Of Revelation

Earlier this week, I wrote about the date of the book of Revelation. I want to recommend a couple of resources for those who are interested in doing more research on the subject.

When Was Revelation Written?

The issue of the date of the book of Revelation came up in a recent thread. I think Revelation was written near the end of the first century, probably in the 90s.

Paradigms, Tradition, and the Lexicon, Part 3

Which “tradition”?

Everett Ferguson, in his “Backgrounds of Early Christianity”, (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, © 1987, 1993, 2003), defined the Halakah this way:

The authoritative compilation of the oral law in the Mishnah was the achievement of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch (or Prince) at the end of the second century. He was the great-great grandson of Gamaliel the Elder (Paul’s teacher from Acts 22:3 and Acts 5:34) and is often cited simply as “Rabbi”…

Rabbi Judah’s compilation of the oral law in written form and with a few minor additions is the Mishnah, a topical collection of legal rulings. The word comes from a verb meaning “to repeat,” and so means “study.” The Tannaim (lit. “repeaters”) were the rabbinic scholars of the first and second centuries whose interpretations are collected in the Mishnah. More specifically, the Mishnah is a codification of the Halakah (pl. Halakoth). The verb halak means “to walk,” and halakah referred to an authoritative legal decision on how one was to conduct himself according to the law. (Note the frequency of “to walk” in the practical, ethical sections of the New Testament Epistles – e.g., Gal. 5:16; Eph 4:1, 17; 5:2; 8’, 15; Col 4:5; 1 Thess 4:1) (pg 492).

This was a first century “oral law”, not written down and codified until about the year 200. However, various snippets of it were commented on in a variety of ancient sources, from which the following derives.

Halakah and Ethics in the Jesus Tradition

Previous generations of scholars frequently approached the ethics of Jesus from a naively Christian perspective, by categorically asserting the superiority of his love command and the Sermon on the Mount to the supposed ‘legalism’ and hide-bound casuistry of his Jewish contemporaries. More recently, however, the blossoming study of ancient Judaism has enabled us, perhaps for the first time since the first century, to explore Jesus’ moral teaching meaningfully in its original setting.

All the main features of Jesus’ ethics are deeply conversant with Jewish moral presuppositions. God is one and he is supreme. Ethics is therefore inalienably theonomous rather than autonomous: both the substance and authority of right behaviour have their source in the God of Israel. ‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus asks. ‘No one is good but God alone’ (Mark 10:18 par.). The commandment to love God in the Shema‘ Israel, along with the love of one’s neighbor, is for Jesus the heart of the Torah – as it was for some of his contemporaries (see Deut 6:4–5; Mark 12:29; [other non-New Testament references omitted], from Markus Bockmuehl, “Jewish Law in Gentile Churches”: Halakhah and the Beginning of Christian Public Ethics, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, ©2003, pg 4).

Note here, whereas Bockmuehl does not hesitate to provide a source for Jesus’s ethical teaching (“deeply conversant with Jewish moral presuppositions”), Bryan Cross introduces his concept of “agape paradigm” to support the Roman Catholic view of “infusion of agape as “the law written on the heart”.

Jesus’s ethical teaching features no such “infusion” of anything at all, much less agape. In pointing to “law written on the heart” (Jer 31:33). Paul notes the nature of this in 2 Cor 3. Scripturally, this new ethical teaching is “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God”, “the ministry of the Spirit”, “the ministry of righteousness”.

He contrasts this with a so-called “list paradigm”, but this is what an ethical law is.

What is the content of this law? As I suggested in my last blog post in this series, the content of the New Testament is overwhelmingly taken from the Old Testament:

By standards that Beale relates, there may be more than 4,000 “allusions” or “echoes” of the Old Testament found within the New. Given that there are 7956 verses in the New Testament, more than half the New Testament can be seen as bearing at least some form of “echo of” or “allusion to” some Old Testament concept or idea.

Thus, when a New Testament writer talks of “tradition” “handed down (παρέδοσαν) to him by “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word”, which in Luke 1:2 is a clear reference to the apostles, the “content” of that “tradition” was oozing with Old Testament words and concepts.

Bockmuehl concurs with this:

To this day, textbooks continue to make much of the fact that explicit use of the Torah plays only a minor role for the Gospel writers. This in itself might seem to cast doubt on Jesus’ indebtedness to Jewish moral teaching. Three points, however, must be raised in defense of our proposition.

First, many other Jewish ethical texts also make only limited explicit use of the Torah (see Niebuhr 1987; also cf. the Mishnah), and one must not extrapolate from the specialized exegetical discourse of certain sages and Dead Sea Scrolls to the whole of pre-70 Judaism, as is still so often recklessly done.

Secondly we are dealing with Gospels written in Greek for a Gentile or mixed audience outside Palestine; and that in itself will have a great deal to say about the shape in which the gospel material has been transmitted.

But thirdly and most importantly, to understand the Jewishness of Jesus’ morality it is in any case far less appropriate to theologize abstractly about what he said (or indeed did not say) about the Torah in general than to examine the verbal and practical clues as to how and why he acted as he did. In other words, it is impossible to judge the supposed ‘uniqueness’ or otherwise of Jesus’ moral teaching without an adequate assessment of his practical ethics and his halakhah. It is to this subject, therefore, that we must now turn.

I’ll look at this in another blog post, Lord willing.

On going back to the first century church

Andrew Preslar 907

My question is exactly, “What is God saying?” Furthermore, I want to know “Where has he said it?” and “What does it mean?” I also want to know “What is God doing, and where, and through whom, and in what ways?” I cannot begin my inquiry into these question by exegesis, because I need first to know that there are sacred texts, which texts they are, where they come from, and where to find them. Otherwise, there will be nothing to interpret

Even if we say, for the sake of argument, that the church precedes the Bible (or the New Testament), we’re not living in the first century. We don't have direct access to the 1C church. Our access to the New Testament church is mediated by the New Testament itself. Even if the church were prior in the order of being, the New Testament is prior in the order of knowing.

I know this is where where you guys say you begin:

ideally an adult would come to seek full communion with the Catholic Church only after a careful study of Church history, the Church Fathers, and Scripture. He would start with the Church in the first century at the time of the Apostles, and then trace the Church forward.

But my question to you is, when you say “start with the church in the first century”, how do you get there? Do you ride some magical telephone booth back to the first century? You talk about “a careful study of church history”, but your response shows very clearly the presuppositions you take with you back there:

It would be foolish to pluck and bite into the fruit without considering the tree that produced it (the visible, human side of Scripture). In this case, it is a very old tree, and much grown from its seed-like origin. And of course the same God who breathed out the Bible gives life to the tree. The Word of God, being alive and powerful, gives us all things in their place, in union with him, with his Body, and because he is alive and powerful, his written word lives. Sacred Scripture is not a dead letter, but to know and appreciate this, we have to take it, to feed upon it, in context.

You realize this paragraph is chock-full of assumptions that need to be examined.

How do you get to the first century, New Testament church?

And when you get there, what do you find there? What do you suppose (imagine, etc.) you find regarding the church's leadership, authority structure, etc.

Otherwise, we are left with the option of willy-nilly deciding the God must have produced a book, and then just selecting whatever we like from the shelf, and digging in with exegesis of the text.

This too is attributing things to me that I don’t accept. I don’t “willy nilly decide that God must have produced a book”. This is a horrible assumption for you to make.

“New Testament Backgrounds”: How They Work to Clarify Our Understanding of the Texts

In my first post here at Triablogue, I discussed the “oral character” of some of the New Testament documents, and especially with regard to a comment that R.T. France had made about a much-disputed passage, Matthew 16:18. In his commentary, France had posited a hypothetical oral presentation between Jesus and Peter, with France suggesting that if Jesus was pointing to Peter’s “faith” or “confession” in that passage, then “Jesus chose his words badly”:

A second escape route [to suggest that Peter himself was not “the Rock” of that passage], beloved especially by those who wish to refute the claims of the Roman Catholic Church based on the primacy of Peter as the first pope, is to assert that the foundation rock is not Peter himself, but the faith in Jesus as Messiah which he has just declared. If that was what Jesus intended, he has chosen his words badly, as the wordplay points decisively toward Peter, to whom personally he has just given the name, as the rock, and there is nothing in his statement to suggest otherwise. Even more bizarre is the supposition that Jesus, having declared Simon to be Petros, then pointed instead to himself when he said the words “this rock” (“The Gospel of Matthew,” R.T. France, Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, U.K.: William B.Eerdmans Publishing Company, ©2007, pg 622).

While France may be correct to suggest that Jesus “did not point to himself” when he uttered that phrase, given the rhetorical character of the ancient world, it is highly likely that Matthew had some form of oral delivery system in mind, complete with hand gestures, when he penned his Gospel. And within the context of that oral delivery system, the awkward construction of that verse (“you are Peter, and on this rock …”) can be seen in a new light.

Robert Jewett, in his 2007 Commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans (a part of the Hermeneia commentary series, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press), building on the work of other scholars, has assembled a fantastic overview of “the cultural situation in first century Rome”, (from which I’ve taken much of my previous House Church series). I’d like to continue with this “cultural situation” in ancient Rome for a number of reasons.

The first of which is that, as in the example above, it helps to shed new light on the New Testament Scriptures. (And in fact, such “cultural background” is helpful for understanding all the Scriptures. I really benefitted from this series by John Currid in that regard.)

But “backgrounds” are important for many reasons.

In 1977, E.P. Sanders published a work, “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” (©1977, London: SCM Press and Philadelphia: Fortress Press) which, as many of you know, blindsided the world of Protestant New Testament scholarship and sent it reeling for a time. Sanders’s work was a study in the “background” of Second Temple Judaism, especially the Tannaitic literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sanders’s work was extremely difficult to respond to, precisely because not many others had studied these “backgrounds” in quite the detail that he had done. Fortunately, D.A. Carson, Peter O’Brien and Mark Seifrid were able to “out-background Sanders,” and they also “out-Pauled” him in their two volume work on Justification and Variegated Nomism. Carson puts this into perspective:

This means that the place to begin is with the literature of Second Temple Judaism, and the questions to be asked have to do with whether or not “covenantal nomism” serves us well as a label for an overarching pattern of religion. The scholars who have contributed the chapters of this book are not in perfect agreement on this point. The disagreement may spring in part from legitimate scholarly independence, but it springs even more (as the following chapters show) from the variations within the literature: the literature of Second Temple Judaism reflects patterns of belief and religion too diverse to subsume under one label. The results are messy. But if they are allowed to stand, they may in turn prepare us for a more flexible approach to Paul. It is not that the new perspective has not taught us anything helpful or enduring. Rather, the straitjacket imposed on the apostle Paul by appealing to a highly unified vision of what the first-century “pattern of religion” was really like will begin to find itself unbuckled… (5).

In Volume 1 of this work, more than a dozen authors consider a far broader range of literature than Sanders himself assessed. And the results of this study helped to put “the New Perspective” into perspective. While Sanders had forced New Testament scholars to consider a far broader range of literature, the “backgrounds” of the New Testament, he himself had spoken too boldly about his own conclusions. Carson summarizes:

There is strong agreement that covenantal nomism is at best a reductionistic category. … But covenantal nomism is not only reductionistic, it is misleading, and this for two reasons. First, deploying this one neat formula across literature so diverse engenders an assumption that there is more uniformity in the literature than there is. In Philo, for instance, there is no real notion of being “saved” in any of the traditional senses. In Sanders’s usage, the “getting in” of covenantal nomism is bound up with how the community becomes the people of God. Philo is really not interested in this (though he does hold that Israel has a special relationship with God): his focus is on the individual’s pilgrimage toward God. Compare the “getting in” and “staying in” here, with whatever they mean in the Tannaitic literature, in Josephus, in the apocalypses: Sanders’s formula is rather difficult to falsify precisely because it is so plastic that it hides more than it reveals, and engenders false assumptions that lose the flavor, emphases, priorities, and frames of reference, of these diverse literary corpora.

Secondly, and more importantly, Sanders has erected the structure of covenantal nomism as his alternative to merit theology. At one level, of course, he has a point. Earlier analyses of the literature of Second Temple Judaism often found merit everywhere, and Sanders, as we have seen, is right to warn against a simple arithmetical tit-for-tat notion of payback. Even where some of the apocalypses use the language of weighing deeds in the balance and the like, it is possible to understand the relevant passages as reflecting a holistic assessment of an entire life and its direction. Nevertheless, covenantal nomism as a category is not really an alternative to merit theology, and therefore it is no real response to it. Over against merit theology stands grace (whether the word itself is used or not). By putting over against merit theology not grace but covenant theology, Sanders has managed to have a structure that preserves grace in the “getting in” while preserving works (and frequently some form or other of merit theology) in the “staying in”. In other words, it is as if Sanders is saying, “See, we don’t have merit theology here; we have covenantal nomism” – but the covenantal nomism he constructs is so flexible that it includes and baptizes a great deal of merit theology. …

Examination of Sanders’s covenantal nomism leads one to the conclusion that the New Testament documents, not lest Paul, must not be read against this reconstructed background – or, at least, must not be read exclusively against this background. It is too doctrinaire, too unsupported by the sources themselves, too reductionistic, too monopolistic The danger is that of the “parallelomania” about which Sandmel warned us, by which texts are domesticated as they are held hostage to the ostensible background called forth by appealing to certain other antecedent texts. One of the hopes of the editors of this pair of volumes is that the breaking up of fallow ground attempted in this first volume will lead to fresh exegesis of crucial Pauline texts in the next (543-548).

And so on it goes – new material is discovered and considered and incorporated into the historical-critical exegesis of a text.

My intention here is not to begin a discussion on the New Perspectives on Paul. I’ve not read nearly enough to speak confidently about it. But I do trust that Evangelical and Reformed scholars have treated the topic adequately, and I trust the work they’ve done.

But my intention rather is to highlight the process of how some of the background information – provided through historical studies in ancient literature and archaeology can help to shed light on things we’ve been reading all of our lives.

Ancient Rome is one of these topics where studies in secular history and literature and archaeology of the period are shedding new light on very old topics, and where some of the seemingly intractable dilemmas of the last 500 years and more (i.e., the history of the early papacy) are being forced to give way, in a decidedly Protestant direction, in the new light of the additional evidences that are being uncovered.

And it’s in this direction that I hope to move in the coming weeks.