Committed Critic

Most non-scholars might not be aware that the people who wrote the New Testament appear to actually have read the Old Testament in a Greek translation, rather than the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts. This makes sense since all the NT books were written in Greek, and it’s natural for a writer to quote from the language he’s writing in.

Relying on translations

This use of different versions can create some problems when we consider how often the NT writers quoted scripture, and that their use of a Greek translation means they weren’t reading and quoting the exact same text as we do: all major modern translations use the original Hebrew Bible as the primary basis for our English Bibles.

The most common Greek translation in antiquity is called the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX), but multiple Greek translations existed in antiquity, and none of them was anywhere near perfect. There is no such thing as a truly literal translation even under the best of circumstances: a Hebrew word could have multiple nuances that no one Greek word could ever capture, and Hebrew grammar uses constructs that Greek can’t really translate. A good translation can capture the sense of the text it translates, but it can never communicate exactly what the text was saying. This is one reason many people today read multiple English translations of the Bible, to try to get the multiple possibilities for the sense of the Greek and Hebrew originals.

Mis-translating Scripture?

But the problem goes deeper than merely the nature of Hebrew and Greek as languages. Modern English translations such the NRSV and NIV will sometimes include footnotes admitting that a passage can be translated more than one way, or that the translators really aren’t sure what a passage means in the original Hebrew of the OT, and the same was true with the old Greek translations –– only worse. A lot of the Septuagint, for example, gives a pretty faithful translation of the Hebrew text of the OT. However, the translation wasn’t all done by the same people or even in the same place or time period, and some parts get pretty messy. In Isaiah, the Septuagint translator sometimes seems to have badly misunderstood what the Hebrew said.

So for example, Isaiah 25:7 in the Hebrew says,

And on this mountain he will destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples.

An important point to realize is that the Hebrew original uses very rare words in this verse for the “shroud” being “cast” over all peoples. Modern scholars debate what exactly the passage means, but all are confident that it does not mean what the Septuagint translates it as:

And on this mountain he will hand over all these things to the people.

It seems pretty clear that the Septuagint translator in this case just has no idea what the Hebrew text meant. In fact, “all these things” is so general that I actually laughed the first time I saw it as a translation of the Hebrew. Isaiah can be difficult to read in Hebrew, and on this verse, the translator just gave up and punted.

The Isaiah 25 passage is pretty obscure, but in some places the use of the LXX makes a substantial difference. One of the most famous is the meaning of Isaiah’s oracle to Ahaz in 7:14, which the LXX translates,

On account of this the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Immanuel. He shall eat butter and honey; before he knows or selects evil, he shall choose the good. Therefore before the child knows good or evil, he shall disobey wickedness in order to choose the good, and the land whose two kings you fear shall be made desolate.

It is easy to see why early Christians read this as a prophecy of Jesus. A child will be born of a virgin, and will choose good before ever knowing of good and evil––a description clearly compatible with Jesus as the sinless savior of the world. The difficulty is, this isn’t what the original Hebrew text actually says. Rather, the Hebrew reads:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, the young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and she shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat butter and honey by the time he (starts) to reject what is bad and choose what is good. For before the child knows how to reject what is bad and choose what is good, the land whose two kings you dread shall be made desolate.

The key point is that in the original Hebrew, it is a young woman, not necessarily a virgin, who has the child. The “sign” appears to be not a miraculous birth, but rather that fact that by the time the child knows good from bad (that is, by the time he’s old enough to make decisions for himself), the kingdom that threatens Ahaz will have been destroyed. Butter and honey (or milk and honey) appear to be signs of abundance, and the name of the child is an oracle of encouragement: “God is with us.” In other words, God will be on Ahaz’s side in the coming conflict, and the sign that will confirm the oracle will be when Ahaz sees this new baby grow into a child as Ahaz’s kingdom prospers.

This may seem a strange “sign” since there’s nothing directly miraculous about it, but in fact it’s the same kind of sign God gives Moses in Ex 3:12. In that passage, Moses’ “sign” that God is sending him to rescue the children of Israel is that after the exodus, he and Israel will worship God on mount Sinai.  In other words, the “sign” just means: wait, and you’ll see that God has delivered you. Similarly, in Luke 2:12, the “sign” for the shepherds that they have found Jesus will be that he is wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. Again, the sign isn’t a miracle in itself; rather, it’s simply a fact that the person can notice and realize that God’s word has come true. This is what Isaiah seems to have meant in the Hebrew of 7:14.

Mis-quoting Scripture?

This passage from Isaiah is of course quoted in the New Testament. Matthew 1:23 says Isaiah was fulfilled in Jesus.  What’s interesting (and perhaps troubling) is that a virgin bearing a child reflects the LXX (which is what Matthew quotes here), while the original Hebrew text just has a young woman bearing a child.  The word is similar to our use of the English word “maiden,” in that it generally refers to a virgin (under the assumption that most young women have not had sex), but is not a technical designation.

This leads to the difficult question: Why would God have let NT writers sometimes quote Greek translations that differed from the original Hebrew? For this I don’t have a completely satisfactory answer, but I think it points us to a better understanding of what it means for the OT to be fulfilled in Christ. Some people assume that passages in the OT that refer to Christ must have been prophecies about Christ in the exclusive sense, meaning they were written down in order to refer to Christ.  This seems to be the case in some passages, but other prophecies seem to have more than one meaning at the same time. I think that when Matthew quotes Isaiah 7, Christians should understand him as claiming that the OT passage was fulfilled in a new way, not necessarily that Isaiah was originally prophesying about Jesus in Isaiah 7.

An important point to compare is Matt 2:15, where Matthew says the scripture is fulfilled, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”  When we actually look at the passage from Hosea 11:1, we find that Matthew is using a Greek translation that follows the Hebrew quite literally. However, in Hosea the quoted verse is clearly referring to the nation Israel as God’s son, rather than to a future messianic individual. In this case there’s no way it could refer to Jesus––because Hos 11:2 says he’s worshipping idols!

It is actually quite common in the NT for passages like this to use LXX readings that don’t match the original Hebrew. This should not cause undue problems in our understanding of Scripture if we recognize that God isn’t just using the OT as a collection of straightforward predictions, but rather is showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of the entire OT. As Randy Harris says, we should read these fulfillments in light of what Paul says in 2 Cor 1:20: “In [Christ], every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’.”

These kinds of inexact fulfillments can actually say something more interesting than a direct fulfillment of a literal prophecy. As Matthew’s narrative continues, Satan tempts Jesus as the “son of God” in Matthew 4, and it seems we’re supposed to recognize that Jesus was a faithful son, even though Israel (as in Hosea 11:1) had been an unfaithful son. And just as God had been “with Israel” (Immanuel) when they were led by a wicked king in Isaiah 7, so in Jesus, God comes to be with Israel as the good, long-promised king from the line of David.

I’m not quite sure how a completely literal interpretation of Scripture would deal with these texts, though I’m sure some would insist that the Hebrew word can simply mean virgin. In my opinion, however, that still does not account for the flow of Isaiah 7:1-16, which clearly anticipates a sign that will be fulfilled in Ahaz’s lifetime, and clearly provides him with such a sign––once we observe how “sign” can refer to the outcome of events rather than a specific supernatural miracle.

Difficulties like this call for us to understand Scripture with greater nuance, and they make it far more difficult to prove our faith on objective grounds of miraculous prophecy followed by specific fulfillment. From what we actually have in Scripture, it appears we should conclude that God does not intend for us to be able to do this.

For some parts of my reading of Isaiah 7, I made reference to John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (2004), 311-314.

After the last post, I thought I should start doing some reading of actual CofC history, so I found Alexander Campbell’s The Christian System, in Reference to the Union of Christians, and a Restoration of Primitive Christianity, as Plead in the Current Reformation, published in its 3rd edition in 1840. Google books has a free full-text pdf at this link.

I found one passage in particular (beginning on page 329) that I thought would be of broad interest to members of Churches of Christ. Alexander Campbell here describes a typical meeting of a small Restoration Movement church during the early 1800’s.

What strikes me is the excitement and sincerity that Campbell finds in the whole meeting. It is apparent that these Christians feel they have finally found the right way to worship, and the reason is not simply because of some hyper-rationalist drive to follow the Bible exactly (though some of that may be present as well). For Campbell, the Restoration Movement mode of worship does not simply satisfy a set of biblical criteria; instead, he experiences it as the way that allows for heart-felt and simple worship, rather than heartless ritual.

It’s interesting to me that the Emergent Church movement of today makes some of the same claims, as it sets aside a variety of traditional church practices in favor of something that feels less forced and more authentic. It seems that leaving behind old church practices can often spur a group to approach worship in a new way so that they indeed experience worship of God that is more heart-felt. However, we should be careful not to assume that the particular form of worship is the real reason for the renewed fervence, when often the simple fact of change can create an excitement that helps us meet God anew. Such drastic changes have benefits, but they can also have harmful side effects. The real challenge of church leadership, then, is helping people meet God in new ways without throwing out traditions simply for the sake of shaking things up.

Campbell writes:

The church in –––––– consisted of about fifty members. Not having any person whom they regarded as filling Paul’s outlines of a Bishop, they had appointed two senior members, of a very grave deportment, to preside in their meetings. These persons were not competent to labor in the word and teaching; but they were qualified to rule well, and to preside with Christian dignity. One of them presided at each meeting. After they had assembled in the morning, which was at eleven o’clock, (for they had agreed to meet at eleven and to adjourn at two o’clock during the winter season,) and after they had saluted one another in a very familiar and cordial manner, as brethren are wont to do who meet for social purposes; the president for the day arose and said:–– “Brethren, being assembled in the name and by the authority of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on this day of his resurrection, let us unite in celebrating his praise.” He then repeated the following stanza:––

“Christ the Lord is risen to day!
Sons of men and angels say;
Raise your joys and triumps high,
Sing, O heavens! and earth reply!”

“The congregation arose and sang this psalm in animating strains. He then called upon a brother, who was a very distinct and emphatic reader, to read a section of the evangelical history. He arose and read, in a very audible voice, the history of the crucifixion of the Messiah. After a pause of a few moments, the president called upon a brother to pray in the name of the congregation. His prayer abounded with thanksgivings to the Father of Mercies, and with supplications for such blessings on themselves and for all men as were promised to those who ask, or for which men were commanded to pray. The language was very appropriate; no unmeaning repetitions, no labor of words, no effort to say any thing and every thing that came into his mind; but to express slowly, distinctly, and emphatically, the desires of the heart. The prayer was comparatively short; and the whole congregation, brethren and sisters, pronounced aloud the final Amen.

After prayer a passage in one of the Epistles was read by the president himself, and a song was called for. A brother arose, and after naming the page repeated––

“Twas on that night when doomed to know
The eager rage of every foe;
That night in which he was betrayed
The saviour of the world took bread.”

He then sat down, and the congregation sang with much feeling.

I observed that the table was furnished before the disciples met in the morning, and that the disciples occupied a few benches on each side of it, while the strangers sat off on seats more remote. The president arose and said that our Lord had a table for his friends, and that he invited his disciples to sup with him. “In memory of his death, this monumental table,” said he, “was institutded; and as the Lord ever lives in heaven, so he ever lives in the hearts of his people. As the first disciples, taught by the Apostles in person, came together into one place to eat the Lord’s supper, and as they selected the first day of the week in honor of his resurrection, for this purpose; so we, having the same Lord, the same faith, the same hope with them, have vowed to do as they did. We owe as much to the Lord as they; and ought to love, honor, and obey him as much as they.”

Thus having spoken, he took a small loaf from the table, and in one or two periods gave thanks for it. After thanksgiving, he raised it in his hand, and significantly brake it, and handed it to the disciples on each side of him, who passed the broken loaf from one to another, until they all partook of it. There was no stiffness, no formality, no pageantry; all was easy, familiar, solemn, cheerful.

He then took the cup in a similar manner, and returned thanks for it, and handed it to the disciples sitting next to him, who passed it round; each one waiting upon his brother, until all were served. The thanksgiving before the breaking of the loaf, and the distributing of the cup, were as brief and pertinent to the occasion, as the thanks usually presented at a common table for the ordinary blessings of God’s bounty. They then arose, and with one consent sang––

“To him that loved the sons of men,
And washed us in his blood;
To royal honors raised our heads,
And made us priests to God.”

The president of the meeting called upon a brother to remember the poor, and those ignorant of the way of life, before the Lord. He kneeled down and the brethern all united with him in supplicating the Father of Mercies in behalf of all the sons and daughters of affliction, the poor and the destitute, and in behalf of the conversion of the world. After this prayer the fellowship or contribution was attended to; and the whole curch proved the sincerity of their desires, by the cheerfulness and liberality which they seemed to evince, in putting into the treasury as the Lord has prospered them.

A general invitation was tendered to all the brotherhood if they had any thing to propose or inquire, tending to the edification of the body. Several brethren arose in succession, and read several passages in the Old and New Testaments, relative to some matters which had been subjects of former investigation and inquiry. Sundry remarks were made; and after singing several spiritual songs selected by the brethren, the president, on motion of a brother who signified that the hour of adjournment had arrived, concluded the meeting by pronouncing the apostolic benediction.

I understand that all these items were attended to in all their meetings; yet the order of attendance was not invariably the same. On all the occasions on which I was present with them, no person arose to speak without invitation, or without asking permission of the president, and no person finally left the meeting before the hour of adjournment, without special leave. Nothing appeared to be done in a formal or ceremonious manner. Every thing exhibited the power of godliness as well as the form; and no person could attend to all that passed without being edified and convinced that the Spirit of God was there. The joy, the affection, and the reverence which appeared in this little assembly, was the strongest argument in favor of their order, and the best comment on the excellency of the Christian institution.

Disclaimer for this post: I’m trying out ideas here, and I have no particular expertise in Church of Christ history or in patristics. I do, however, have a fair amount of experience with how intellectuals in the Church of Christ think and study today. Hopefully what I suggest here can be a worthwhile point of reflection and start some discussion among my friends who know more than I do about history.

From what I know of the history of the Church of Christ, one of our founding points was the desire to overcome the disunity caused by creeds and fine points of theological dogma and to unite in Christ. Alexander Campbell, along with others, reasoned that the Bible should serve as the source of unity for Christians, since creeds had aimed to be derived from Scripture anyway.

Whether such a plan could ever work is not the topic of this post. Instead, I want to consider one of the corollaries of having the Bible as the sole foundation for Christian doctrine: namely, that Churches of Christ came to reject “tradition” as lacking authority for the church, and ultimately as an influence that was unnecessary at best and ungodly at worst. This attitude has sometimes been defended by quoting Matt 15:9 (which quotes Isaiah): “in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

The point from Matthew is well taken in my opinion, a good warning to guard against tradition turning into crude dogma. Yet a crucial part of the church’s tradition is the teachings of church fathers through the centuries who studied scripture, reflected on it, and developed theology for the church’s practice. Some of these figures, like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, are surely among the greatest thinkers who ever lived. And both of these men, along with countless others, studied and preached from Scripture, believing that God would lead the church in large part through the study of Scripture and careful reflection among Christians. They read the scriptures theologically, seeking ways to understand the faith in changing cultures.

I have no doubt that many Church of Christ members over the years have read these theologians and learned from them, yet until very recently in my lifetime there has been very little impetus to learn from what the church father taught. The exception to this would be very early Christian texts, since they can potentially help us understand the ideas of the most primitive church. But on the whole, and especially as we move into the third century and beyond, Church of Christ scholars have given little attention to Christian theology. The church fathers might be objects of historical interest, but from what I can tell they have rarely been sought as a source of truth.

But here’s the problem: Alexander Campbell may have been intellectually rigorous, but he was no Augustine or Aquinas. That is not to negate his importance, but rather to point out that Campbell‘s work has not provoked the countless academic dissertations that have engaged the writings of the church fathers from ancient times, the middle ages, and the Reformation.

My point is not to bemoan some lack of prestige for the Church of Christ tradition, but rather to notice that the rejection of Christian tradition meant that virtually all Church of Christ scholars interested in theology went into the study, specifically, of Bible. When I started at ACU, they didn’t have a theology department; they had a bible department. My youth ministry degree didn’t require so much as an introduction to Christian theology, but it did require a year and a half of Greek as well as introduction to exegesis. Bible was the focus of theology in the church, and so it was the focus of theology in the academy.

So here’s the problem: as long as the Church of Christ resisted historical-critical readings of Scripture, it could do biblical theology that would benefit the church. But as scholars have come to sense that reading the Bible without reference to history is naive, they have had only one way to turn to make their studies more rigorous: mainline Bible scholarship. Which means, historical-critical scholarship.

The problem is, historical-critical scholarship (which I am learning to do professionally) works on the assumptions of historiography –– that is, that Scripture cannot be assumed to do anything miraculous like predict the future. If a historical critic claims the Bible as the word of God, he or she nevertheless treats it academically as essentially the words of humans.

In most Christian traditions, these historical studies are passed along to academic theologians, who reflect upon the new findings in light of the centuries of Christian theological thought. These theologians try to incorporate difficult new historical conclusions with a deep understanding of how the church has read scripture theologically through nineteen centuries.

In the Church of Christ, we have had no such mediator between scriptural study and truth. I know from experience that a Church of Christ Bible scholar has almost instant credibility when he or she walks into a church. People of course don’t simply accept what they are told. However, to the extent that Bible scholars can persuade people of historical facts about the Bible, they can tend to persuade those people about truth.

Compare that with a Catholic or Calvinist church. They take Christian tradition very seriously (perhaps too seriously at times), and they have fleets of scholars trained in thinking carefully about the theological traditions that their churches ascribe to. They have Bible scholars as well, who (ideally, at least) have conversations with theologians to try to shape theology according to Scripture. But the key point I want to raise is that the scholars who study Christian tradition typically do so as Christians. And more importantly, the great works of scholarship they study in their field are typically done by Christians, from a Christian perspective, seeking truth.

Returning to Churches of Christ: our scholars typically study the Bible, which means that we study authorities whose work is based largely on historical-critical scholarship. Such scholarship is often done by Christians, but it need not be. The biblical studies guild boasts excellent cooperation between Jews, Christians, and agnostics. Furthermore, historical-critical scholarship is not carried out from a Christian perspective. Instead, as I have mentioned, it is based on totally naturalistic assumptions. I can’t publish an historical reconstruction of Scripture that depends on God having done something. We work to establish historical facts based on surviving evidence, but truth claims are considered prejudicial, not essential to what we do.

I’m overstating things a bit. Bible scholars can often maintain a strong faith while doing historical-critical work, and plenty of Bible scholars find ways to make their biblical work theological. Furthermore, Church of Christ schools like ACU have worked hard in recent years to expand studies of Christian theology and history, as well as philosophy. Historical-critical study is important and necessary.

(To add a note to this post on further reflection, I should mention the Restoration Theological Research Fellowship as an example of CofC scholars doing serious theological work for the sake of the church. The RTRF met at the Society of Biblical Literature meetings each year from 1994-2002 and 2004-2007, and the scholars involved in those meetings could no doubt give an account of much more theological work than I was cognizant of when I wrote this post. I hope this post can still raise points worth considering, even if my own perspective is more limited than it should be.)

Yet the point remains: those who accept tradition welcome great Christian thinkers (who read scripture theologically) as primary dialogue partners in the effort to understand the truth of Christ and to shape church practice. Churches of Christ, by rejecting tradition, have unwittingly created a situation where most of our scholars learn about our sole theological texts primarily from scholars whose work aims to achieve the same results that an agnostic would reach studying the same text.

When most of a church group’s theologians are trained primarily by non-believers, it’s not difficult to imagine problems.

A quick disclaimer: My wife is Roman Catholic (see her blog here), and I am a member of a Church of Christ. We are committed together to working for unity among our Christian fellowships, and we believe that table fellowship––that is, sharing of the Lord’s Supper––should be an early step toward this goal. So as I consider John 6 here, I make no pretense of being a disinterested interpreter.

My friend Scott Slaughter made a good point in response to my last post, and I want to take it up as a new post interpreting John 6. Scott wrote:

Seems to me that Jesus was stringing together little bits of information at a time so the people could understand it.

He feeds the 5000 and the people missed the point. Right off the bat he tells them that they need to work “for food that endures to eternal life”.

So they stand around scratching their heads while thinking about what’s for dinner that night that would keep them alive forever.

Jesus tells them again. “I am the bread of life.”

They miss it again. Eventually Jesus repeats himself…again. Now the Jews really start to freak out, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Seems to me that the people Jesus was speaking to, just didn’t get it. They were so stuck on thinking with their stomachs that they were not making the connection.

How could they make the connection that he meant his flesh his body, his blood would all be a sacrifice for sin?

To me, this entire passage seems to be more about faith than communion. The people got frustrated and went away after waiting for their food handouts. The disciples got frustrated and Jesus calls them on it. Verse 62…“What if you see the Son of Man ascend”…

If they have to see it to believe, then where’s the faith?

I think Scott gives a good reading of what’s going on in John 6, and he highlights something that I didn’t do justice to with the sermon in the last post––that people constantly misunderstand Jesus in John’s Gospel, and that it’s often because they take things literally when he means them spiritually. So let me see if I can think through this more clearly than I did before.

Misunderstanding in John

Nicodemus (John 3) thinks Jesus is talking about being born a second time from his mother’s womb, while Jesus is talking about a spiritual rebirth: the word can mean either “born again” or “born from above,” and it seems Nicodemus thinks the former, and Jesus means more of the latter.

The Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) thinks Jesus is offering her actual water that will last forever: the phase “living water” in Greek was the normal expression for “running water,” and it seems the woman thought that’s what Jesus meant, whereas he actually meant a different kind of “living.”

It seems simple to read these in light of John 3:31 and be done with it: “The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks about earthly things.” If we take that at face value as our interpretive principle, then we expect to see Jesus in John rejecting physical meanings in favor of spiritual meanings.

Spiritual and Physical as a False Dichotomy

But Jesus isn’t always talking about purely spiritual things. In 2:18-22, the Jews misunderstand what Jesus is saying, but the real meaning isn’t spiritual as opposed to physical––rather Jesus was talking about his body (a physical thing) instead of the Temple (another physical thing). Now of course, spiritual application was key––Jesus’ death on the cross was certainly a spiritual event. Yet it was his body, not just a spirit, that died. So while the deeper spiritual meaning of the crucifixion might be key, the physical death on the cross was necessary and indeed central to what was happening.

This is what I was pushing with the sermon: on the one hand there’s a sharp break between the world and God, between the physical and the spiritual. But in another sense there isn’t. My sermon suggests that communion is a place where the division breaks down.

What is being revealed in John 6?

So then in John 6, Jesus tells people to look for food that endures (6:27), which sounds a lot like what he said about water with the Samaritan woman at the well. At this point, we can take Jesus as saying something spiritual, which the crowds misunderstand as physical. Then he calls himself the bread of life and compares himself with the manna from heaven; again, we could take this as spiritual talk which the crowd misunderstands as physical. The Jews think they know where Jesus is “from” (his mother and father, Mary and Joseph), while John constantly reminds us that Jesus is actually “from” the Father above.

Next Jesus says, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). Now things are getting more confusing for the crowd, so the Jews naturally ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (6:52). We as Christian readers assume that Jesus “giving” his flesh must have something to do with the crucifixion (and I think we’re partly right), but we’re waiting for his explanation of exactly what he’s getting at.

Yet what’s striking to me is that Jesus’ explanation that follows says nothing about the crucifixion, nor does it say anything about faith. Instead, he says this (NRSV):

“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

If the answer to the whole quandary raised by chapter 6 was that Jesus’ talk of bread refers directly to our faith in him through his crucifixion, then what Jesus says here at the end of the discourse is exceedingly unhelpful for making that point. Instead we get “my flesh is true food,” to which is added (out of the blue) “my blood is true drink.” Granted that flesh and blood tend to go together, blood hasn’t been mentioned since John 1:13, and here suddenly it shows up in 6:53, 6:54, 6:55, and 6:56.

So what do we make of this? I’ll grant that there’s not a completely self-evident answer, yet the sudden reference to flesh and blood as food and drink is striking. The last supper traditions in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul (1 Cor 11:23f) all use very similar language to John here. In 1 Corinthians, it’s explicit that churches were reciting that tradition in preparation for communion: bread and wine were body and blood. And it seems like the other Gospels are doing the same thing.

So when John turns to flesh as true food and blood as true drink, it seems that almost any Christian reader at that time would naturally think of communion. To me, that has to be the first interpretation of the text, unless John gives us some reason to think he’s talking about something else. Yet as I’ve noted, John’s concluding explanation for the discourse (6:53-58) doesn’t say a thing here about faith or about the crucifixion. Instead, it repeats over and over again that those who follow Christ must eat his flesh and drink his blood. John must have known people would assume this meant communion, and he does nothing to deny that that’s the case.

The possible problem with my argument here is that Jesus goes on to make another anti-flesh comment in 6:63. Here’s the passage:

Many of his disciples, when they heard this, said [to one another], “This is a hard teaching. Who can heed it?”

Now Jesus knew in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, so he said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the son of man ascending to where he was before? The spirit is the one who gives life––the flesh does not contribute anything. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning which ones didn’t believe, and which one was the one who would betray him.) “This is why I said to you that no one can come to me unless it is granted to him from the Father.”

I can see how someone could want to use this passage to summarily dismiss all the references to the flesh in 6:52-58, but I don’t think such an argument is warranted. Rather, the start of the quote above (6:60) has the disciples wondering who can accept Jesus’ teaching, and the end of the quote (6:65) has Jesus answer that God must be the one to draw people to Jesus. Assuming that that’s the topic of discourse, then the dismissal of flesh in 6:63 isn’t a blanket statement claiming that all flesh is useless, so the Lord’s supper must not entail Jesus’ real flesh. Rather, it affirms that people cannot accept Jesus’ teachings on fleshly terms––which is what the disciples are trying to do, and are finding difficult. Instead, Jesus’ teachings must be accepted spiritually, through faith––which only happens when God grants it to people.

So coming back to Scott Slaughter’s comment: I think he’s exactly right until he writes, “this entire passage seems to be more about faith than communion.”

Instead, I would say that the passage encompasses both of these things, but with an emphasis on the latter. Jesus’ audience is indeed taking things too literally, but that doesn’t mean Jesus’ alternate explanation is purely physical. Both the crucifixion and the communion table are thoroughly physical, but they’re also charged with spiritual action and spiritual meaning. The crucifixion is where Jesus became bread, and that’s why we take communion.

Now, the tough question is: In what sense is the communion meal Christ’s flesh and blood? For that, I’m not sure. However, I see nothing in John 6 that somehow pushes faith and memorial over against Jesus’ actual body and blood. Rather, John seems adamant that somehow, we consume Christ’s body and blood when we eat communion. And while this obviously happens in faith, I don’t think John 6 allows us to reduce the whole thing to faith alone. The eating of Jesus’ body isn’t something we do through faith while eating communion, but rather something we do by eating the physical bread and drinking the physical wine of communion.

I’m not sure how anyone could prove to me that this must be transsubstantiation. But I don’t see how I could read John 6 and then insist that it isn’t.

This post is adapted from a sermon that I gave at Brookline Church of Christ this past Sunday, August 9.

The lectionary text was John 6:35-51:

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever has faith in me will never be thirsty. But I said of you that you’ve seen me but don’t have faith. The ones that my Father gives me––all of them come to me, and I’ll never cast away a person who comes to me.

You see, I’ve come down from heaven to do not my own will, but the will of the one who sent me––and this is the will of the one who sent me: not to lose for him anything that he’s given me, but to raise it up on the last day. That is, this is the will of my Father: that whoever sees the Son and has faith in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise that person up on the last day.”

Then the Judeans started to grumble about him because he had said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven.” They said, “Isn’t this Jesus the son of Joseph? Don’t we know his father and mother? How can he tell us now, ‘I’ve come down out of heaven’?”

Jesus answered them, “Don’t grumble among yourselves!”

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets: they all shall be taught by God. Everyone who hears from the Father, and learns, comes to me. But of course, no one has seen the Father except the one who is from the Father––that is the one who has seen the Father.

Truly I tell you, whoever has faith has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and died; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one who eats it will not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If someone eats from this bread, she will live forever. The bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The last line, where Jesus’ flesh is given as bread “for the life of the world,” highlights the rocky relationship in John’s Gospel between Jesus and the world that will be the topic of this post.

To help clarify the discussion, I want to start out with a sketch of John’s view of the cosmos. It’s helpful if you imagine it visually:

John’s Cosmos
Below is the world, created by God but now a dark place, under the control of evil powers. Above is the realm of the Father, where truth and light reign. Jesus, then, is on a sort of a mission: he is from the Father, but he is sent here, into the world, to bring the light and truth from the Father into the dark world, more or less behind enemy lines.

Like lots of stories, John’s has good guys and bad guys. Most of the dark world rejects Jesus and kills him. But some of the people in the world see the truth when they see Christ, and they have faith. These people remain in Christ even as Christ returns to the Father, leaving the Counselor behind. The promise is that Christ will prepare a place for us, then return to the world a second time and raise us up on the last day to take us with him to the Father.

John on the World
Now, some specific passages. Some of the Jesus’ words about the world in John seem very positive:

John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but in order for the world to be saved through him.”

This is very good news for the world. God loved the world. Not just certain individuals, but the world. Jesus didn’t come to judge or condemn the world, but to save the world.

Yet God’s love for the world doesn’t preclude condemnation for people in the world. For example, John 12:47-48:

If anyone hears my words and doesn’t keep them, I am not the one who judges him; for I didn’t come to judge the world, but to save the world. Yet the one who rejects me and doesn’t receive my words has a judge: the word that I spoke will judge him on the last day.

Jesus is saying that his office isn’t to judge, at least not during his first coming. Rather, the truth is something fixed, revealed by Christ, and people effectively judge themselves by whether they accept it. So the message of good news for the world includes also a message of judgment. Jesus came to save the world, but people in the world who reject him are still condemned.

Then later in the Gospel, Jesus has harsher things to say about the world (NRSV):

If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you don’t belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world––therefore the world hates you (15:18-19).

In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world! (16:33).

Anti-Worldly?
Depending on how you read these passages, it’s easy to end up with a world that people need to be saved from, rather than a world that Jesus came to save. If we’re not careful, we could jump to the conclusion that Jesus is opposed to the created world. At one point in John 6 Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless” (6:63). The book of 1 John, which seems to be written for the same church as the Gospel of John, but at a later date, suggests that this church has actually split from other Christians who deny that Jesus came in the flesh. Apparently they thought that human flesh was unseemly, such that Jesus wouldn’t want to have any part of it. The second century saw an explosion of groups with these kind of beliefs, often called Gnostics. Many Gnostics thought the world wasn’t created by God at all but was actually a horrible mistake, created by demons. And some of the Gnostics seem to have liked the Gospel of John.

Even people who affirm that God created a good world can be drawn into an attitude that flesh is basically evil. For example, we could assume that human lives aren’t very important, because our souls are the only part that will survive. Or that we don’t have to take care of the world, because it’ll be burned up when Christ returns. Or perhaps most likely, we may simply denigrate the world and the bodies God has given us, which are an extraordinary gift. It’s possible, by trying to be more “spiritual,” for us to ignore whatever is physical to the point of ingratitude toward God.

Affirmation of the world
So we have this Gospel that in some ways is very other-worldly. But it is in this same story of John’s Gospel that God becomes very much a part of this world, because John also says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It would seem that that moment changed everything. Christians have long affirmed that once Jesus became flesh, flesh could not longer be dismissed at sinful or dirty. God became a part of the world of matter, a person made of dirt, like the rest of us.

When Jesus, the Word, offered his flesh up to death, he became the bread of life: in his teaching, in the crucifixion, and in the Lord’s Supper. As the lectionary reading tells us, Jesus said that “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). And as he will tell us later in the chapter, his flesh is real food, and his blood is real drink.

So even if the earth isn’t permanent, while it’s here Christ becomes a part of this world for our sake. One of the inspirations for this sermon is a book by a Greek Orthodox priest called For the Life of the World. The author says that the Greek Orthodox church understands all of creation as a sacrament by which God gives us his grace. What that means is that the life that Christ gives us is a life we live in this world. Because of that, we don’t need to be saved from the world itself––not from our bodies, not from the creation around us. This is God’s world, first and foremost, and it’s a gift given to us. Our life will continue eternally with God, but on this earth our life still embraces creation.

Saved from the world
But there’s another side. Christ came to save the world, and he did it because the world is lost. The world is still a dark place, and we still need a savior who is bigger than its boundaries. There are false voices in the world that want to deceive us.

Most everyone agree that there are false voices in the world––politicians, marketers, preachers, theologians, philosophers––we just tend to disagree on which voices are false. 1 John has a guideline for deterining which is which, a passage I alluded to earlier: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2).

We don’t just accept this uncritically, of course. Some people confess Christ and spout lies, and non-Christians often say things that are true and that should command Christians’ attention. And we also have to admit that the even the faithful followers of Christ we love and admire––and of course we ourselves––have our own falsehood mixed in with the truth.

But when we’re considering what the truth is, John does give us a very clear standard to start with, and that’s Jesus Christ. We’re too much a part of this world to be able to save ourselves from it, so we can’t just turn to our own ideas, or whatever we can derive from reason. Christ is the one who came into this dark world and spoke light.

We also have to avoid following just the idea of Christ, or a purely spiritual Christ, which is what the group who left John’s church seems to have taught. Instead, we follow the actual risen Jesus Christ, the word who became flesh and walked among us. And that Christ, who saves us from the world, also leaves us here to live in our flesh in this world. And he remains here with us in the flesh––the flesh that he gave for the life of the world, which is real food, and which Christians share at communion every Sunday. It is at the communion table where the body of Christ (the church) encounters the body of Christ (the bread). There is a sort of nexus between heaven and earth, where Christ’s flesh is present among us here in the world, even as we gather at the foot of God’s throne with all the saints of heaven.

John’s Gospel doesn’t tell us everything we need for our Christian lives––it is famously short on moral teachings, for example––but the book is acutely clear on another point: when we’re looking for truth, Jesus is our starting point. The bread of life that nourishes us is truth, come from heaven down to this world for us. And the place we start is each week at the table of Communion, where Christ gives to us his flesh for the life of the world.

The communion table is the center of our Christian worship, because it is something the God gives to us––lest we get confused and think that the songs and prayers we offer to God are the most important things that happen on Sundays. It is this worship that drives our lives as Christians. The communion table is where we meet him in the flesh, to give us life for our time in this world.

The discussion under one of my earlier posts has me thinking about what it means to over-intellectualize the Bible. And while I believe in the importance of critical study of the Bible (which will remain the focus of this blog), I want to dedicate a post to some more basic teachings in Scripture.

One day this week I read a couple of times through Titus, a book that doesn’t get much attention from Bible scholars. One reason is that critical scholars typically don’t think Paul really wrote it (a conclusion I tend to agree with), and another reason is that it lacks the more interesting (i.e., complicated) kinds of arguments we find in books like Romans and Galatians. Also, scholars often prefer theology that challenges the status quo, and the letter to Titus focuses more on passing along a tradition that’s already been established.

An emphasis on complex theological arguments would have been offensive to Paul, whether he wrote Titus or not. Paul famously resolved “to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2), and I’m guessing he would have burned his letters if he thought they would detract from that core of Christian faith.

So we turn to Titus. The short letter is focused mostly on moral teachings, but I’ll begin with two passages that are brief, forceful presentations of the gospel. Neither contains quite the whole gospel, but between them they present a well-rounded portrait of Christianity. The first is Titus 2:11-14:

For the saving grace of God has appeared to all people, training us to renounce impiety and worldly desires, and to live soberly, justly, and piously in this age, while looking forward to the blessed hope––the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself on our behalf, in order to redeem us from all wickedness and to cleanse for himself a chosen people, zealous for good works.

The second passage comes just a few verses later, in Titus 3:3-8:

Once, we also were senseless, unbelieving, led astray, enslaved to desires and all kinds of pleasures, going through life in evil and envy, hateful and despising one another. But when the kindness and goodwill of God our savior appeared, he––not by works of righteousness that we did, but according to his mercy––saved us through the washing of recreation, and the renewal of the Holy Spirit, which he richly poured upon us, through Jesus Christ our savior, so that we––justified by that grace––might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

The two passage use a lot of themes and terms from Paul’s other letters, only here they’re presented compactly, rather than explained at length. This is one reason scholars think the letter was written by a later person reading Paul and trying to continue his message, though of course it could simply be Paul setting forth the basics of his own theology.

Either way, it’s a very different reading experience than some of Paul’s other letters. When you read Galatians or Romans, if you want to take them seriously you’re practically forced into spending your time doing careful exegesis and trying to figure out what Paul’s argument is. Otherwise you have to ignore big parts of the text, or risk badly misunderstanding them.

Titus is much simpler. Despite a few red flags that are important but potentially distracting from the main point of the letter (like whether it’s right to insult Cretans and to tell slaves to submit to their masters), most of the teachings in Titus are pretty clear and immediately applicable to our lives: exhortation to things like self-control, good works, and avoiding divisions among believers.

There is a tendency for people like me, with an academic mindset, to spend our time on the difficult texts of the Bible like Romans, where we’re more likely to get bogged down in technical questions. That’s fine, but simpler texts like Titus often put more emphasis on simple morality, and as Christians we frankly should spend more time worrying about how to do good works than analyzing the more difficult theological texts.

Certainly Christians should understand the Bible, a skill that takes a lot of work. But understanding the entire argument of Romans isn’t part of the essence of being a Christian, at least not as a top priority. Instead, what we are called to hold is a series of simple truths, emphasized in one way or another throughout the New Testament: faith in Christ, salvation by his grace, cleansing by baptism, obedience to Jesus’ words, guidance of the Holy Spirit to do good works, and hope in eternal salvation. If anything detracts from our commitment to these, our priorities are probably misplaced.

One problem with the Christian emphasis especially on Romans and Galatians is that people develop the misconception that Paul was most concerned with people not focusing on works. Certainly when Jews were attacking Gentiles for not following the Jewish law, Paul opposed them. And certainly he insists that our works cannot merit salvation apart from God’s grace. But as I have tried to show here and more briefly here, being righteous entails good works in Paul’s theology; just because the good works are dependent on justification by faith, that doesn’t mean they’re any less important.

Turning back to Titus, the letter reminds us of Paul’s insistence that our own righteousness can’t save us and that salvation is completely dependent on God’s grace (3:5), but it focuses mostly on what Christianity is: living a life of good works, by the grace of Christ and for the glory of God. Over and over in Titus the term “good works” shows up. What is the church? A people God has created to be zealous for good works.

Scholars don’t always like simple moral teachings, because it’s easier to analyze theological arguments than to simply do good.

One common image that I grew up with in church is that the Bible serves as a mirror, in which we see who we really are before God. Reading Titus in light of this is a challenge, because its moral teachings include at least something to convict everyone. I once heard Randy Harris say in a sermon, “Christianity is about what we do in our mundane lives.” Once we adopt that principle, a mundane letter like Titus is a powerful guide.

The Old Testament has many references to gods other than Yahweh, and scholars have spent more than a century trying to sort them all out. Baal is one of the Canaanite gods, mentioned often in the OT without much explanation; the Bible usually only cares that he was an idol that many Israelites worshiped.

Though the OT doesn’t tell us much about the Canaanite’s religion, the people originally writing and reading the OT did know more, and so it can help us understand what’s going on if we’re familiar with the stories the Canaanites told about Baal. Here is a synopsis of perhaps the most popular account. I leave out several characters, but I try to capture the heart of the story:

The story begins with El, the head of the pantheon, pictured as an old many with a grey beard sitting upon a throne as judge of the gods. While the gods pay El respect as a figurehead, his son Baal is the mighty warrior, the storm god and “Rider of the Clouds,” the giver of rain to the earth, and the one whom the gods actually obey.

But El also has another son named Sea, who is alienated from the royal family. At one of the royal feasts, while the gods eat and drink, Sea sends messengers to seize Baal so he can usurp his throne. Most of the gods are terrified, and El quickly acquiesces, ready to hand over his son.

But Baal refuses with an impassioned speech: “Lift up your heads, O gods! –– off your knees, off your princely thrones –– And let me answer Sea’s messengers!” Baal strikes the messengers, then enlists the help of a craftsman named Kotaru to carve two maces for the fight against his brother. Baal finds Sea, strikes him dead, and maintains his princely throne.

In celebration, Baal throws a great feast, after which he demands that a temple be built for him on Mount Zaphon, the great mountain to the north of Canaan. After clearing the idea with El and the chief goddess, the craftsman Kotaru is summoned again, and Baal gets his temple. In celebration, he hosts yet another feast, and the gods eat and drink yet again.

However, feeling proud of his new temple, Baal sends a boastful message to Death, who is king of the underworld and another rival to Baal’s power. Death replies with a threat: “Invite me, Baal…and eat bread with my brothers, drink wine with my kin! Have you forgotten, Baal, that I can pierce you through?” Baal is frightened and backs off his boast, but Death soon finds him and kills him anyway.

Baal’s sister Anatu, distraught at his death, wonders how the world will survive with the rain-god dead. While the other gods try in vain to find an apt replacement to fill Baal’s throne, Anatu goes instead to Death for vengeance. She cuts, burns, and grinds Death to pieces, setting Baal free to return to life.

Though Death somehow survives the drubbing, Baal reemerges as ruler of the gods, taking revenge on the rest of his foes and thwarting Death’s plots against him. The story ends with Baal on his rightful throne as ruler of the gods.

This story raises some helpful points for understanding what mythology is:

• The names of the gods are often symbolic: Sea and Death make obvious appearances in the translation I’ve used here; also, El means God and Baal means Lord.
• Symbolism is key for the story. Baal is the storm-god who brings rain to the land of Canaan, which allows the crops to grow so people can feed their children. Sea is a sort of chaos-monster; the ocean has sea-monsters like Leviathan and waves that sink ships. For Baal to conquer Sea means for the powers of order (e.g., predictable crop cycles) to conquer the powers of chaos, so that people can live safe lives.
• The other key point of symbolism is that Baal is killed by Death, but he only stays dead for a time. In an ancient agricultural society, people had to reckon with life and death every year, and the reality of winters––when crops didn’t grow and the land seemed to die––brought fear and uncertainty. The Baal myth reminds the people that even though a time of death (winter) comes each year, the rain-god only stays dead for a time, after which he comes to life again in spring.
• I don’t know how seriously people took this as a literal story, but its purpose was religious, not historical. It helped the Canaanites understand the god they worshipped, not specific historical events.
• Certainly Baal doesn’t live up to the ideas of God in Jewish and Christian scriptures –– for example, that he is just, unchanging, and intimately concerned with people. The portrait of Baal corresponds instead to something the Canaanites perceived: that whoever provided rain was fickle and inconsistent.

The Hebrew scriptures are generally more interested in what God does in history than in myth, which is why the exodus from Egypt receives so much attention. However, the OT also uses mythical images borrowed from Israel’s Canaanite neighbors.

In some passages, the OT texts seem to “demythologize” these myths, at least in part, so that Yahweh isn’t actually fighting a war against other gods. An example of this is Genesis 1: Yahweh brings order (land) out of the watery chaos, but he doesn’t have to fight any Sea-God in order to do it. And rather than describing Yahweh warring against astral deities, Genesis 1 describes how Yahweh created the sun, moon, and stars as objects, such that they’re aren’t gods at all, as other peoples thought them to be.

In other passages, however, OT scriptures use the myths themselves as apparent descriptions of what Yahweh actually did. An example is Psalm 74:12-14: “Yet God my King is from old, working salvation in the earth. You divided Sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan.” Here God basically takes on the role of Baal from the epic above: reigning as king, fighting Sea and the dragons within him. The psalmist also applies this myth to the historical situation (he’s asking why God has allowed Jerusalem to be conquered), but he seems to have no problem with describing Yahweh using myth.

The point here isn’t that the OT is a collection of “myths,” which most people would assume to simply mean stories that aren’t true. Rather, myth is a literary genre used to argue something theological, not to recount something historical. We should consider that some authors can use myths that aren’t meant to be taken literally in order to paint images of their gods, and that in fact our Bible uses some of those images to describe our God, Yahweh.

See also my earlier post on the names of Baal and Yahweh.

My previous post compared Jesus’ trial before Pilate in Mark and Luke, and I tried to explain how Luke, who was probably basing his story on Mark’s version, changes the scene to make a different point than Mark made with it.

Here I’ll add Matthew to the mix (Mt 27:11-26):

Now Jesus was standing before the governor. And the governor asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus said, “You say so.” And when he was being accused by the chief priests and the elders, he didn’t answer anything. Then Pilate said to him, “Don’t you hear all the things they’re testifying against you?” But he didn’t answer him with even a word, to Pilate’s great amazement.

At feast-time, it was the governor’s practice to set free for the crowd one prisoner whom they wanted released. At that time they were holding a notorious prisoner named Jesus Barabbas. Pilate gathered them together and said to them, “Which one do you want me to set free for you, Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called messiah?”

While he was seated on the platform, his wife sent him a message saying, “Have nothing to do with that innocent man; I had a very painful dream about him today.”

But the chief priests and the elders convinced the crowd to ask for Barabbas, and to execute Jesus. So when the governor asked them, “Which of the two do you want me to set free for you?”, they said, “Barabbas.” Pilate said to them, “Then what should I do with Jesus who is called messiah?” They all said, “Let him be crucified.” [Pilate] said, “But what wrong did he commit?” But they shouted louder, “Let him be crucified!”

Now when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but that it was becoming a riot, he took water and washed off his hands in the presence of the crowd and said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood––see for yourself.”

And the whole people answered, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

(For all three accounts in parallel columns, see this page.)

Matthew keeps the story a lot closer to Mark’s account than Luke does, though he does add the part about Pilate’s wife, which is absent from the other Gospels. Because of her dream, we have a stronger sense that Pilate actually wants to save Jesus’ life, though Matthew doesn’t make this nearly as clear as Luke, who has Pilate practically beg the crowd to acquit Jesus.

The other major change in Matthew comes at the end of this passage, and I think it shows us what Matthew finds most important about this part of the story. Unlike any of the other Gospels, Pilate washes his hands in front of the crowd, saying that he is innocent of Jesus’ blood; then the crowd of people cry out, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

MATTHEW AND THE JEWS

This is a climactic scene, and scholars rightly suspect that Matthew’s angle on the story tells us something he holds very dear. The theme of blood shows us the point: Matthew wants to be very specific about where blame is assigned for Jesus’ death.

I wrote recently about how this passage has often been used by Christians to blame “the Jews” for Jesus’ crucifixion, and at times Christians have turned against Jews in violence for this reason. But the anti-Jewish reading falls apart, especially since practically everyone in the story (including Jesus, of course) is Jewish, and the only Gentiles we see are the Romans who carry out the crucifixion.

Probably, Matthew considered himself a Jew, and he believed Jesus really was the Messiah for the Jews. The Old Testament has a long tradition of prophets proclaiming violent punishment against Israel and Jerusalem for their faithlessness, and it is likely that that’s what Matthew has in mind here. The people who accept Jesus’ blood-guilt before Pilate are not “the Jews” as a race or religion, but rather the people of Jerusalem at that time, and Matthew (writing perhaps in the 80’s A.D.) thinks that the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D. is Jerusalem’s punishment for rejecting its messiah. That doesn’t mean they stop being God’s people, just that they’re punished for disobedience.

There may even be some irony intended in the story: if Matthew is thinking of the Christian belief whereby Jesus’ blood cleanses us from our sins, then the story could both demonstrate Jerusalem’s guilt and foreshadow their forgiveness as seen, e.g., in Acts 2.

However, there’s another side to the matter: Matthew also believes that Jesus and his apostles are the leaders that Israel must now answer to, so Jesus’ teachings do effectively turn most of Israel into apostates (i.e., outsiders), since they reject Jesus’ teachings and lordship. This is a problem that Paul wrestles with in Romans 9–11, and it’s still a theological problem today. (Paul thinks all Israel will eventually believe in Christ [see Rom 11:11, 23, 25-26], but that doesn’t seem to have happened.)

In any event, from a Christian theological perspective, Matthew’s general view makes good sense: Jesus was the Jewish messiah who called all Israel to repentance and obedience, after which he invited Gentiles throughout the world to join the people of God as well.

WHAT CAN COMPARISONS GET US?

Redaction criticism is the academic term for studying how authors like Matthew and Luke copied certain parts of their Gospels from earlier works (especially Mark) but changed parts of the source text to suit their own message.

The reason redaction criticism is so important is that it helps highlight the arguments that the different Gospels are making about Jesus, since we can see where they went out of their way to change the text they used as their source for the story. It helps us draw conclusions about the authors and the churches they were writing for, which can also help us find where the author wants us to be surprised, angry, or amused by the story he tells.

For some contexts, I suppose it is fine to conflate the different stories; however, my conviction here is that these three Gospels want to tell us different things about what Jesus’ trial means, and that we are meant to understand all three of them as different insights into our faith.

In these two posts, I have suggested three very different points that the Gospels make using Jesus’ confrontation with Pilate. Each serves as a trial scene, but not exactly the kind we would expect:

• Mark emphasizes the injustice of the envious high priests manipulating the scornful and cynical Roman governor so that Jesus gets crucified by getting caught in the middle of an unjust system. In effect, it is the world that is found guilty, for no one in Mark’s Gospel (including the disiples) passes the test of believing in Jesus properly.
• Luke puts Jesus on trial before the readers of Luke’s Gospel, so that Pilate, Herod, the criminal on the cross, and the centurion by the cross all become witnesses who testify that Jesus is innocent. The jury is Luke’s Gentiles readers, who find Jesus a worthy lord despite his shameful execution.
• Matthew puts the people of Jerusalem on trial, which is ironic since they’re condemning themselves when they think they’re condemning Jesus; Jesus’ unjust punishment is crucifixion, while their just punishment is the destruction of Jerusalem 40 years later. Yet there is the possibility of forgiveness for those who later repent, even though Jerusalem will be destroyed nonetheless.

On the whole, we should compare each Gospel to a stage play rather than a history book. While a history book needs to cover all the facts and acknowledge all the subtleties of history, a play can simplify story-lines and stylize confrontations between characters in order to make us feel things and realize things that we might miss if we were only given facts. This, I’m convinced, is what Mark, Luke, and Matthew have done for us here.

A key idea of Gospel studies is that each author told the story of Jesus in order to emphasize different things about who Jesus was (or is). One way to put it is that the Gospels are works of rhetoric; they don’t just tell a story, they also make an argument.

A great place to see this at work is in the different accounts of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. Here I’ll deal with just Mark and Luke, though all four Gospels are different. Most scholars think Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke both copied Mark’s story as the basis for their own––so when we see differences in their stories, Matthew and Luke probably changed Mark for some particular reason.

First, Mark’s account (Mk 15:2-15):

Pilate asked [Jesus], “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then the chief priests accused him of many things, so Pilate asked him again, “Aren’t you going to answer anything? Do you hear all the things they’re accusing you of?” But Jesus no longer answered anything, to Pilate’s amazement.

At feast-time, [Pilate] typically set free for them one prisoner that they requested, so the crowd came up to him and began to ask him to do what he usually did for them. Pilate, knowing that the chief priests had handed [Jesus] over because of their jealousy of him, answered [the crowd], “Do you want me to set free for you the “King of the Jews”? Now, there was a man named Barabbas, who had been imprisoned with some men who had committed murder during a revolt. So the chief priests stirred up the crowd for him to set free Barabbas for them.

Then Pilate again answered them, “Then what do you want me to do with the one you call the “King of the Jews”? And they again cried out, “Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “But what wrong has he committed?” But they cried out even more, “Crucify him!” So Pilate, wanting to satisfy the crowd, set free Barabbas for them, and he handed over Jesus to be flogged and crucified.

Now, compare the same story in Luke (Lk 23:2-25):

They began to accuse [Jesus], saying, “We found this man stirring up our nation, and stopping people from paying taxes to Caesar, and saying that he is an anointed king.”

So Pilate asked [Jesus], “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, “I find no charge against this man” But they persisted and said, “He’s been stirring up the people, teaching through all of Judea, beginning in Galilee and coming all the way here.” When Pilate heard this, he asked if the man was a Galilean. When he found out that [Jesus] was from the jurisdiction of Herod, he sent him before Herod, who was in Jerusalem in those days.

When Herod saw Jesus he was very pleased, because he had wanted to see him for some time: he had heard about [Jesus] and hoped to see some sign done by him. [Herod] questioned him at some length, but [Jesus] didn’t answer him anything. The chief priests and the scribes stood there accusing him vehemently; meanwhile Herod, along with his soldiers, belittled him and mocked him, wrapping a purple cloak around him and sending him back to Pilate. That day, Herod and Pilate became friends, while previously they had been enemies.

Pilate called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people and said to them, “You brought me this man as one who was stirring up the people, but I have examined him right in front of you, and I haven’t found any charge against this man such as you have accused him of. And neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us, and look––nothing deserving death has been done by him. I will discipline him and set him free.”

But they cried out together, “Take this one! Set free Barabbas for us!” ([Barabbas] had been thrown into jail because of a certain revolt that had happened in the city and because of a murder.) But again Pilate spoke to them, wanting to set free Jesus. But they cried out, saying, “Cruficy! Crucify him!”

Then a third time he said to them, “But what wrong has he committed? I haven’t found any capital charge against him. So then, I’ll discipline him and set him free.”

But they insisted with loud voices asking for him to be crucified, and their voices prevailed. So Pilate passed judgment that their request be carried out. He set free the man they asked for, who had been thrown into jail because of revolt and murder, but Jesus he handed over to their will.

A couple of parts of the story are almost identical, but Luke has obviously made the story a lot longer with the trial before Herod and with Pilate speaking more to the crowd.

But Luke has also lost something: in Mark, the whole episode with Barabbas is really just a sly attempt by Pilate to embarrass the chief priests (Mk 15:9-10) by getting the crowd to request that Jesus be released while the priests are trying to have him killed. Jesus becomes a pawn in their political game, as the chief priests stir up the crowd to thwart Pilate’s move. Pilate briefly questions whether Jesus has done anything wrong, but he quickly gives in once they shout for crucifixion.

WHY THE DIFFERENCES?

Luke isn’t really interested in this whole exchange, at least not as a battle of wits between Pilate and the chief priests, and in fact he leaves out the explanation of why Pilate would release a prisoner to the crowd in the first place (compare Mk 15:6). Instead, Luke has Pilate declare Jesus’ innocence not just once (as in Mark), but three times.

It’s not that Pilate is being portrayed as a good guy here in Luke, even though he seems to lobby on Jesus’ behalf. If we look at the rest of Luke 23, we see that Jesus’ innocence is enormously important to Luke. Not only does Pilate insist three times that Jesus has done nothing wrong (Lk 23:4, 14, 22), but he also points out that Herod has found no charge against Jesus (Lk 23:15). Then in 23:41 we have one of the criminals on the cross declaring that Jesus has done nothing wrong (a passage that isn’t in Matthew or Mark), and in 23:47 the centurion by the cross declares, “Indeed this man was innocent” (where both Matthew and Luke have the centurion say that Jesus is the son of God).

This amounts to six proclamations of Jesus’ innocence in the span of 46 verses, which seems to be Luke’s way of hammering home a key point. Mark surely agrees that Jesus is innocent, but Luke wants to make it exceedingly clear. Pilate, meanwhile, doesn’t actually come off so well in Luke. While Mark portrays Pilate as not caring much whether Jesus dies or not, Luke makes him adamant that Jesus doesn’t deserve the punishment, which implies that Pilate is just too weak to stand up to the crowd.

We can’t know for sure exactly why Luke put so much emphasis on Jesus’ innocence, but one theory is that Luke wrote for Christians who wanted to defend the legitimacy of their religion in the eyes of sophisticated urban people, much as many Christian apologists do today. The Christian Gospel obviously included the story of Jesus’ death on the cross, which we might compare to being hanged, drawn, and quartered in more recent days. The point is that crucifixion wasn’t just painful, it was above all shameful; Roman skeptics wouldn’t have had a lot of sympathy for someone Rome had executed. So if Jesus was going to die a shameful death, it needed to be completely undeserved, a point Luke makes more clearly than Mark did.

Interestingly, Luke does the exact same thing with Paul in the last few chapters of Acts, where Paul is repeatedly proclaimed innocent even though he stays in prison and eventually (though not reported in Acts) gets executed in Rome. Paul created the same problem as Jesus: Christians were reading his letters, yet he was known to have been executed by Caesar; Luke’s two stories defend both Jesus and Paul in the same way.

SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

It would be nice if we could know exactly how things went down during Jesus’ trial, but a careful reading of each of the Gospels suggests that we can’t just harmonize the different texts, assume they “mean” the same thing, and conclude that we’ve recovered what really happened. The reason is, whether Pilate declared Jesus innocent three times or one time or never at all, Mark and Luke also tell their stories in ways that suggest why Pilate did what he did, and their suggested motives differ. In Mark, Pilate comes across as fickle and uncaring, while in Luke he comes across as an earnest weakling. The only way to combine these two characterizations is to destroy both of them.

These dramatic portrayals can’t just be dismissed. Just like a movie gives totally different ideas about a character by what kind of music or lighting it uses, a story tells us things about characters by its portrayal–things that can’t be set aside for the sake of establishing the blunt “facts” of history. If I had to choose, I’d say the account in Mark is closer to history, but in reality I don’t know whether either Gospel reflects history accurately. The stories seem intended not so much to describe what happened to Jesus, but rather to explain who Jesus was and why he matters.

Sunday morning I preached on the Magnificat, the poem Mary recites shortly after learning she’ll become mother of the Son of God. The passage reflects Mary’s celebration that she, a peasant girl, is to be blessed with such an honor (Lk 1:46-55):

My soul magnifies the Lord
And my spirit exults in God my Savior,
For he has looked upon the humility of his slave-girl.

Look: from now on all generations will regard me as blessed
Because the Mighty One has done great things for me;
Holy is his name,
And his mercy is from generation to generation
for those who fear him.

He has done a mighty deed by his arm;
He has scattered the haughty in the thought of their heart;
He has pulled down the powerful from thrones,
And has exalted the humble.
The hungry he has filled with good things,
And the wealthy he has sent away empty.
He has helped Israel his servant,
Remembering mercy,
just as he announced to our fathers,
To Abraham and to his seed
Forever and ever.

I’ve been talking with my fiancee Beth (who’s Roman Catholic) about Mary as a model of spirituality, so I wanted to reflect on how we’re supposed to read toward that end.

One point I decided to press is that when we use Mary as a model for our spiritual lives, we should also consider another model alongside her: Paul. This might seem odd, and I could imagine Catholics and feminists being irritated that I brought Paul into the discussion. The two figures are quite different, in particular that Mary was a peasant girl and Paul was an educated Pharisee. But since a lot of us are more like him than like her, I think we could be misled by focusing on Mary’s example in Luke without considering Paul as another angle on Christian spirituality.

A key theme of the Magnificat, especially as it relates to Mary, is God’s lowering of the mighty and exaltation of the humble and lowly. Mary reflects this humility, both in her attitude and in her station in life. The danger for us is that we’ll try to imitate the first half of her example (the attitude) even though the second half (our station in life) is wildly different than hers. That is to say, if we put all our emphasis on Mary, we’re liable to think that God is satisfied if we simply change our attitude. I think that’s a half-truth that ignores what Luke really has to say about Jesus.

When you read the teachings of John and Jesus in Luke, it’s clear that the call to repentance goes well beyond changing one’s attitude. Jesus has a few things to say about how we feel about money, for example, but more often he gives specific instructions for us simply to give money away. The reason this is important is that it allows us to actually participate in the kind of reversal that the Magnificat proclaims. The reason we should take it literally is because it’s exactly what Paul does, giving up status for the sake of the gospel.

Probably the most famous passage where Paul addresses his loss of status is 2 Cor 12:7b-10:

So that I wouldn’t become arrogant, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to strike me so that I wouldn’t become arrogant. I begged the Lord three times about this, that he would take it away from me, but he said to me, “My grace is enough for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Accordingly, I enjoy boasting in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can rest upon me. I am pleased with weakness, with insults, with needs, with persecutions and distresses, on Christ’s behalf. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

I think that when people read about Paul’s strength in weakness, they usually assume either that he’s being humble and “staying out of God’s way,” or else that he’s acknowledging his feeble human abilities that God overcomes to allow him to write great letters.

I think this is missing Paul’s point. When he talks about weakness, Paul talks a lot more about his suffering, and about the embarrassing things that have happened to him –– things like being flogged, which left real scars that people would see if he ever had his cloak off. In the ancient world, people who had status in a city or community had their rights protected by that community; people without status weren’t guaranteed the same kind of protection. A strong person could avoid suffering or persecution; only a weak person or a slave would have to submit to floggings and danger. That’s what Paul accepted willingly for his ministry.

Paul gave up being respected and cared for by society. Weakness, in this sense, means losing some of the ability to control your own life and call your own shots –– the opposite of having power, which means being able to do what you want. Being genuinely weak means making your life less convenient and putting yourself at the risk of sufferings that are no longer under your control, leaving yourself at the mercy of God and other Christians to get you through things. That is what so few Christians ever do, even when it puts us at risk of becoming “the last,” by Jesus’ own words, when he returns.

Other parts of Scripture make a different point, and as I’ve said, there are plenty of passages that call us to have humble attitudes. But I think that Mary’s poem reflects what Christ will do to us unless we do it first. In other words, the way to avoid being knocked from our thrones when Christ returns is to surrender those thrones ourselves, while we have the freedom to do so.

In the incarnation, God didn’t just change his attitude in order to understand how we might feel; instead, he took on flesh and became human. The change didn’t keep God from still being God, but it was still a real change. Paul didn’t lose everything –– he still had his education, for example, that helped him write powerful letters. But he wasn’t content to just try for an inner change. If we want to live up to the teachings of Christ, I would argue that our loss of power and status needs to be real and external as well.