Abundant Life Ministries WorldWide
"How Great Thou Art"
THE ISSUE OF AUTHORSHIP is a difficult one. First, it covers sixty-six biblical books, and it would take a book of its own to discuss the issue properly for each of them. In fact, New Testament introductions and Old Testament introductions are books devoted to this and related issues. Second, there are a number of problems involved in defining exactly what we mean by authorship. I will tackle this second question and then give a brief answer to the first.
First, there are many books in the Bible that do not indicate who their author is. For example, only one of the four Gospels (John) gives any information about the author. Even in that case, the only information we are given is that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is the witness whose testimony is being reported. It is not at all clear from John 21:20-25 whether “the disciple whom Jesus loved” actually wrote the Gospel (or part of the Gospel) or whether the Evangelist is telling us, “I got my stories from this man.” Even if this beloved disciple actually wrote the Gospel, his name is not given. We can therefore safely say that none of the Gospels gives us the name of its author. Other books which do not give us the name of their authors include Acts, Hebrews, 1 John and all of the Old Testament historical books. There are other instances where scholars do not agree if a particular phrase actually indicates authorship. Many of the Psalms are labeled in English “of David,” and Song of Songs is labeled “of Solomon,” but scholars debate whether the Hebrew means that the work is by the person named or whether it is in the style or character of that person’s tradition. Commentaries make us aware of these discussions, which is one reason to read good exegetical commentaries before jumping to a conclusion about authorship. The issue in this case is not whether the attribution of authorship is inaccurate, but whether the person who put the books together (since Psalms, for example, consists of the work of several authors) intended to indicate authorship at all. It would be silly to say, “You are wrong; David did not write this or that psalm,” when the compiler of Psalms would reply (if he were alive), “I never said that he did.” There is another set of books more like the Gospel of John. These works do refer to authorship, and they even give some indication of who the author is, but they do not give a name. For example, 2-3 John were written by “the elder.” There is no identification of who “the elder” is. A different situation occurs in the case of Revelation, where the author is named “John,” but there is no further indication of who this John is (John was a reasonably common name in some communities at that time). Naturally, church tradition has added specific identifications in many of these books. Various church fathers stated that Mark was written by John Mark, who was recording the preaching of Peter. The “beloved disciple” and “the elder” and the “John” of Revelation were all identified with John the son of Zebedee, a member of the Twelve. Hebrews was attributed to Paul (although as early as A.D. 250 some church fathers recognized that this attribution was unlikely). However, it is important to understand that tradition may be right or it may be wrong, but tradition is not Scripture. In other words, we personally may find it easy to accept the idea that tradition was correct about Mark, but if someone else decides that the work was written by someone other than Mark, we are not discussing whether Scripture is right or wrong, but whether tradition is right or wrong. Such discussions have nothing to do with the accuracy of the biblical text. Second, the fact that some biblical books have the name of an author does not mean that the author personally wrote every word in the book. Normally ancient authors used secretaries to write their works. Sometimes we know the names of these secretaries. For example, Tertius wrote Romans (Rom 16:22) and Silas (or Silvanus) probably wrote 1 Peter (1 Pet 5:12); Jeremiah’s scribe was Baruch. In some cases these secretaries appear to have been given a lot of independent authority. That may account for stylistic changes among letters (for example, whoever wrote the Greek of 1 Peter did not create the much worse Greek of 2 Peter). Authorship also does not mean that a work remained untouched for all time. Presumably someone other than Moses added the account of his death to the end of Deuteronomy. There are also notes in the Pentateuch to indicate that the names of places have been updated (for example, Gen 23:2, 19; 35:19). It is possible that other parts of the documents were also updated, but it is only in place names that one finds clear indications of this, because there the later editor includes both the original name and the updated one. Likewise, it is probable that some works in the Bible are edited works. The book of James may well have been put together from sayings and sermons of James by an unknown editor. Daniel includes both visions of Daniel and stories about him. It would not be surprising to discover that it was a long time after Daniel before the stories and the visions were brought together and put into one book. Psalms is obviously an edited collection, as is Proverbs. We do not know what shape Moses left his works in. Did someone simply have to add an ending to Deuteronomy, or was there a need to put a number of pieces together? Probably we will never know the complete story. The point is that a work is still an author’s work even if it has been edited, revised, updated or otherwise added to. I own a commentary on James by Martin Dibelius. I still refer to it as by Martin Dibelius although I know that Heinrich Greeven revised and edited it (and then Michael A. Williams translated it into English). Dibelius died before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, so the commentary now refers to things that Dibelius knew nothing about. Yet it is still accurate to refer to it as by Dibelius (and to put his name on the cover) because the basic work is by him. We have also received letters from various executives with a note “signed in his (or her) absence” at the bottom after the signature. The executive in question probably told his or her secretary to reply to our letter along thus and so lines and then left the rest to be completed and mailed while they were away. It still carries the executive’s authority, even if the exact wording is that of the secretary. Therefore, when the Bible says that a certain work is by a given individual, it need not mean that the author is always responsible for every word or even for the general style. The author is considered responsible for the basic content. Third, even understanding that a work might have been updated or edited at some time, can we trust the statements that Scripture (rather than tradition) makes about authorship? I am talking about those instances in which a work clearly indicates that Paul or whoever wrote it. The question is whether all of these books are basically by the people whom the Bible claims wrote them. Scholars would divide on this question. Even evangelical scholars are not totally unified about how much of Isaiah was written by Isaiah son of Amoz or whether Paul actually wrote Ephesians. Yet it is also fair to say that a good case can be made for saying, “Yes, each of the works is basically by the person whom the text claims wrote it.” In order to argue this in detail I would have to repeat the work of R. K. Harrison in his massive Introduction to the Old Testament or Donald Guthrie in his New Testament Introduction. Naturally, other scholars have done equally thorough jobs. In a book like this I cannot repeat that work. However, it is worthwhile asking if authorship questions are important and why. Basically, two issues are involved. On the one hand, there is the issue of whether the Bible is accurate in what it teaches. So long as the author of Revelation was John, it does not affect the accuracy of the Bible one little bit which John the author turns out to be. All the Bible claims is that he was some John. Yet if we claim that Paul did not write Romans, it would certainly reflect on the accuracy of the Bible, for Romans clearly intends to claim that it was written by Paul of Tarsus, the apostle to the Gentiles. Some scholars believe that pseudepigraphy (attributing one’s work to another person) was accepted in the ancient world and that it would not have been considered deception. Certainly some forms of pseudepigraphy were practiced in the ancient world, yet with some possible exceptions (which would be cases in which a person in a vision thought he or she was actually experiencing something from the point of view of another person or receiving a message from them) the evidence is that pseudepigraphy was not accepted practice. That is, the person who wrote a pseudepigraphical work normally was trying to deceive others to get an authority for his or her work that it would not otherwise have had. Also, when such letters or acts were exposed they were quickly rejected and, in some cases, the author was punished. Thus the evidence does not support the idea that an author could use the name of another and expect others in the church to understand that he or she was not trying to deceive them. It does appear that the accuracy and nondeceptive character of the biblical books is at stake on this point. On the other hand, there is the issue of the proper setting of a work. For example, if Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy, then they were written before the mid-60s (when Paul was executed). We know who the Caesar was and something of what was going on in the world at that time. We also know a lot about Paul’s history up to that point. If we argue that Paul did not write them, we have lost a definite historical context. Even when authorship does not matter from the point of view of biblical accuracy (for example, Hebrews does not mention who wrote it), we still discuss authorship, trying to determine all that we can about it because this information helps us give a date and context to the work. In summary, we can trust what the Bible says about authorship, but we must be careful to be sure that it is saying what we believe it to be saying. If we argue that the Bible is saying more than it actually claims, then we may end up trying to defend a position that even the biblical authors would not agree with! At the same time, accurate information on authorship assists us with interpretation by giving the work a setting in history, a context which is the background of interpretation. Go TO Contents
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT we read about numerous miracles. Did these really happen, or are they simply legends or perhaps the way ancient people described what they could not explain?
First we need to look at what is at stake in this question. Both Old Testament and New Testament belief are based on miracles. In the Old Testament the basic event is that of the exodus, including the miracles of the Passover and the parting of the Red Sea. These were miracles of deliverance for Israel and judgment for her enemies. Without them the faith of the Old Testament has little meaning. In the New Testament the resurrection of Jesus is the basic miracle. Every author in the New Testament believed that Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified and on the third day had returned to life. Without this miracle there is no Christian faith; as Paul points out, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). Thus in both Old and New Testaments, without miracles, biblical faith is meaningless. The fact that miracles are at the root of biblical faith, however, does not mean that they happened. Thus we need to ask if it is possible that they did occur. Some people take a philosophical position that miracles cannot happen in that the “laws of nature” are fixed and that God, if he exists, either cannot or will not “violate” them. While this is an honestly held position, it is also outdated. The idea of firmly fixed “laws of nature” belongs to Newtonian physics, not the world of relativity, which views laws as generalities covering observations to date. The issue for us, then, is whether there is evidence that there is a force (a spiritual force) which creates those irregularities in our observations of events that we term miracles. The response of the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular is that there is. The basic spiritual force is that of God. He, Scripture asserts, is the only fully adequate explanation for the existence of the world. His personality is the only adequate explanation for the existence of personality in human beings. What is more, because he is personal he has remained engaged with this world. Some of his engagement we see in the regular events of “nature” (Col 1:16-17; Heb 1:3), while at other times he reveals his presence by doing something differently. It is those events that we call miracles. A miracle has two parts: event and explanation. The event is an unusual occurrence, often one which cannot be explained by the normally occurring forces which we know of. Sometimes the event itself is not unique, but its timing is, as is the case in the Old Testament with the parting of the Jordan River and at least some of the plagues of Egypt. At other times, as in the resurrection of the dead, the event itself is unique. The explanation part of the miracle points out who stands behind the event and why he did it. If a sick person suddenly recovers, we might say, “Boy, that was odd. I wonder what happened?” Or we might say, “Since I’ve never seen such a thing happen, perhaps he or she was not really sick.” We might even say, “This is witchcraft, the operation of a negative spiritual power.” Yet if the event happens when a person is praying to God the Father in the name of Jesus, the context explains the event. So we correctly say, “God worked a miracle.” Thus in the New Testament we discover that the resurrection of Jesus is explained as an act of God vindicating the claims of Jesus and exalting him to God’s throne. How do we know that such a miracle happened? It is clear that we cannot ever know for certain. On the one hand, I cannot be totally sure even of what I experience. I could be hallucinating that I am now typing this chapter on this computer keyboard. I certainly have had dreams about doing such things. Yet generally I trust (or have faith in) my senses, even though I cannot be 100 percent sure of their accuracy. On the other hand, we did not directly experience biblical miracles, although it is not unknown for Christians (including us) to have analogous experiences now, including experiences of meeting the resurrected Jesus. Still, none of us were present when the biblical events happened. Therefore we cannot believe on the basis of direct observation; we have to trust credible witnesses. When it comes to the resurrection, we have more documents from closer to the time of the event than we have for virtually any other ancient event. The witnesses in those New Testament documents subscribe to the highest standards of truthfulness. Furthermore, most of them died on behalf of their witness, hardly the actions of people who were lying. They claim to have had multiple personal experiences that convinced them that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead (see 1 Cor 15:1-11). None of this absolutely proves that this central miracle happened. There could have been some type of a grand illusion. Yet it makes the resurrection believable enough for it to be a credible basis for faith. We see enough evidence for us to commit ourselves to, which is something that we do in everyday life constantly when we commit ourselves to something that someone has told us. If the central miracle of the New Testament actually happened, then we have much less of a problem with any of the other miracles. Some of those same witnesses are claiming to have observed them, or to have known others who did. After the resurrection of a dead person, a healing or even the calming of a storm appear to be relatively minor. After all, if God is showing himself in one way, it would not be surprising for him to show himself in many other ways. Miracles in the Bible have several functions. First, they accredit the messengers God sends, whether that person be Moses or a prophet or Jesus or an apostle or an ordinary Christian. Miracles are how God gives evidence that this person who claims to be from him really is from him. He “backs up their act” with his spiritual power. Second, miracles show the nature of God and his reign. They may work God’s justice, but more often they show his character as full of mercy and forgiveness. Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God had come. The people might rightly ask what that rule of God looked like. Jesus worked miracles which showed the nature of that reign. The blind see, the lame walk, the outcasts are brought into community, and the wild forces of nature are tamed. That is what the kingdom of God is like. Third, miracles actually do the work of the kingdom. When one reads Luke 18, he or she discovers that it is impossible for a rich person to be saved, although with God all things are possible. Then in Luke 19:1-10 Zacchaeus, a rich man, is parted from his wealth and is saved. Clearly a miracle has happened, and the kingdom of God has come even to a rich man. The same is true of the demons being driven out, for each time this happens the borders of Satan’s kingdom are driven back. Similarly, many other miracles also have this function. So, did miracles really happen? The answer is that, yes, a historical case can be made for their happening. Furthermore, we have seen that it is important to establish that they happened. A miracle is central to Christian belief. And miracles serve important functions in certifying, explaining and doing the work of the kingdom of God. Miracles are not simply nice stories for Sunday school. They are a demonstration of the character of God, not only in the past but also in the present.Go TO Contents
WHEN MANY PEOPLE READ the Old Testament they get the impression that God is a God of wrath and judgment, but in the New Testament they find a God of love. Why is there this difference in Scripture?
This question has bothered Christians for a number of years. In the period of the church fathers Marcion pointed out this problem and suggested that the Creator God of the Old Testament was an inferior being to the God and Father of Jesus. He then set about to remove from the New Testament any influences from this “Jewish” Creator God (for example, in Gospels like Matthew), for the Creator was evil. He ended up with a shortened version of Luke as the only Gospel we should use. The church’s response was to reject Marcion’s teaching as heresy, to list all of the books it accepted as part of the canon and to assert that all of these were inspired by the one and same God. Still, Marcion’s question remains with us. The reality is that there is no difference between the images of God presented in the Old and New Testaments. John points this truth out when he states that “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (Jn 1:18). What John is pointing out is that what one sees in Jesus is precisely the character of the Father, the God of the Old Testament. There is no difference among them in character; to meet one of them is to meet them both. Thus Jesus is no more loving than his Father. The Father is no more judging than Jesus. All New Testament writers see a similar continuity between the Old Testament God and the God they experience through Jesus. There are three points that we can make to expand on this statement: (1) there is love in the Old Testament; (2) there is judgment in the New Testament; and (3) the main difference is a difference between judgment within history and judgment at the end of history. First, there is love in the Old Testament. God does not present himself first and foremost as a God of judgment, but as a God of love. For example, look at Exodus 34:6-7: And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” This is God’s fundamental presentation of himself to Moses. This is who he is. Notice how he first states his compassion, grace, love, faithfulness and forgiveness. He then notes that this is not to be taken advantage of, for those who do not respond to his love will not escape. He is loving, but he is not an indulgent parent. He will bring justice. Throughout the Old Testament God continually tells people that he chose Israel out of love, not because they were particularly deserving. When Israel rebels, he reaches out through prophets. When they continue to rebel he threatens (and then sends) judgment, but in the middle of it we find verses like Hosea 11:8, “How can I give you up?” God is anguished over the situation. On the one hand, justice demands that he act in judgment. On the other hand, his loving heart is broken over his people, and he cannot bear to see them hurting and destroyed. As he portrays in Hosea, he is the husband of an adulterous wife. What he wants to do is to gather her into his arms, but he cannot ignore her behavior. His plan is not ultimate judgment but a judgment that will turn her heart back to him so he can restore his “family.” This is not God’s attitude toward Israel only. In Jonah 4:2 we read: He prayed to the LORD, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” Jonah is unhappy about God’s grace toward Nineveh. He was apparently quite happy about announcing that in forty days Nineveh would be destroyed, but when they repent and God forgives them, he is upset. This is not a new revelation to him, for he says, “Is this not what I said?” He seems to have hoped that if he did not deliver the warning, the people of Nineveh would not repent and would be destroyed. But God made him deliver the warning so that they would repent and he could forgive them. Jonah’s complaint is, “You are too nice, too loving, too forgiving.” That is the way God is portrayed with respect to a violent pagan nation, Assyria. Jonah and Hosea are also clues to reading all of the judgment passages in the Old Testament. God is not in the judgment business but in the forgiveness business. Yet he cannot forgive those who will not repent. So he sends prophets to warn people about the judgment that will inevitably come, his hope being that the people will repent and he will not have to send the judgment. When his prophets are killed and rejected, he often sends more of them. It can take decades or even hundreds of years before he comes to the point when he knows that if justice is to mean anything at all, he must send judgment, even though he does not enjoy doing so. And even then he often sends with the judgment a promise of restoration. Every good parent knows that they must eventually punish an erring child, but no such parent enjoys doing it. Second, there is judgment in the New Testament. A word count on judge or judgment in the New Testament in the NIV comes up with 108 verses. Even more significant is the fact that Jesus is the one who warns most about judgment. He is the one who said, If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. (Mt 5:29-30) He is the one who spoke the warnings in Matthew 7:13-29 and 24:45–25:46. Indeed, Jesus talks about judgment more than anyone else in the New Testament, especially when we realize that Revelation is “the revelation of Jesus Christ” (that is, a message from Jesus). There are several types of judgment in the New Testament. There is self-judgment (Jn 9:39; 12:47-49), the judgment of God (Jn 8:50), judgments on individuals (Acts 12:23) and final judgment (Jn 5:22, 27). There are simple statements that people doing certain things will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:9-10; Gal 5:19-21) and elaborate pictures of judgment scenes (Rev 20:11-15). The point is that all of these involve judgment and many of them involve Jesus. He is indeed just like his Father. The New Testament preaches grace and love, but grace and love can be rejected. The New Testament also preaches final judgment. Everyone, according to the New Testament, is worthy of final judgment, but God is now offering grace to those who repent. Yet if people refuse this grace, there is one fearful fate awaiting them. Thus it becomes apparent how like the Old Testament the New Testament is. In the Old Testament God sent the prophets with solemn warnings of judgment and also revelations of the heart of God, who was even then ready to receive repentant people. In the New Testament God sends apostles and prophets preaching the gospel, calling people to repentance in the light of the coming judgment of God. In this respect the two Testaments are in complete unity. Third, there is a difference between the Testaments in their portrayal of judgment. In the Old Testament judgment normally happens within history. When Israel sins, they are not told that they will go to hell when they are raised from the dead, but that they will be punished by the Midianites or the Assyrians. Therefore there are many judgments in the Old Testament. In Judges the Canaanites, Moabites, Midianites, Ammonites and Philistines are all used to punish Israel. Later on it is the Arameans, Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians. In other words, Israel “graduates” from being judged by the use of relatively local groups of people to being judged by the use of great empires. Yet in each case the judgment happens within history. It does not happen at the end of time but is already written about in our history books. Even with respect to Daniel most of what he predicts takes place in recorded history in the story of the conflicts of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties between 300 and 164 B.C. Because of this difference from the New Testament, Old Testament judgment generally does not talk about eschatological scenes like lakes of fire and the dissolving of the heavens and the earth or the falling of stars or eternal chains. Instead it gives vivid pictures of fearful events that the people living then knew all too well, such as famine, plague, marauding armies and the like. It is unpleasant for us to read the prophets spelling out the details of such events, but they were the realities of life then (and for much of the world, also today). Furthermore, God is spelling them out so that people can repent and avoid them, not because he enjoys them. Related to these descriptions is the fact that in the Old Testament the idea of an afterlife was only partially revealed and even that revelation comes toward the end of the Old Testament period. Most of the time the people thought of death as going down to the shadow world of Sheol where there was no praise of God and at best only a semilife. What they hoped for was to die at a ripe old age with a good name, having seen their children and grandchildren, who would carry on their name. Therefore the judgments in the Old Testament are those which speak to such hopes: warning of whole families being wiped out or of people dying when they are still young. By the New Testament period God has revealed a lot more about the future life. Therefore the judgments spoken of there are the judgments related to the end of history and the resurrection of the dead: eternal life or being thrown into hell, seeing all that one worked for being burned up or receiving a crown of life. All of these take place beyond history, when Christ returns, and thus when history as we have known it has come to an end. So, does the Old Testament reveal a God of judgment and the New Testament a God of love? Emphatically no. Both of the Testaments reveal a God of love who is also a God of justice. God offers men and women his love and forgiveness, urging us to repent and escape the terrible and eternal judgments of the end of history. Go TO Contents
IT IS OFTEN ASKED if the numbers of the genealogies of Genesis 5:3-32 and Genesis 11:10-32 can be used to calculate when Adam was born. The most important fact to notice is that the biblical writers never used these numbers for this purpose, although they did provide other numerical summaries. For instance, in Exodus 12:40 they note that Israel was in Egypt for 430 years, in 1 Kings 6:1 that it was 480 years from the exodus until the beginning of the construction of the temple under King Solomon, and in Judges 11:26 that it was 300 years from the entry into the land until the time of Jephthah, a judge who lived around 1100 B.C.
Therefore to add up the numbers of the ten antediluvians in Genesis 5 and the ten postdiluvians in Genesis 11 in order to determine the date for the creation of the world and the creation of Adam and Eve is to do exactly what the text does not encourage us to do! What, then, is the significance of these numbers that are so carefully recorded in these texts? If they are not to be added up, of what importance could their inclusion be? First, they were given to show us that human beings were originally meant to be immortals and to live forever. If one charts the twenty life spans on a line graph, it is clear that there is a general but determined downward trend from a figure that at first bounces just short of one thousand years to a figure that approximates the life expectancy of persons living today, around seventy years. Second, the figures also show that the effects of sin and death in the human body meant that individuals became unable to have children in as elderly a state as once was possible. Bishops Lightfoot and Usher were grossly mistaken to advocate that the human race was created on October 24, 4004 B.C. , at 9:30 A.M., 45 Meridian time. The data does not allow for this conclusion! Abridgment is the general rule in biblical genealogies. Thus, for example, Matthew 1:8 omits three names between King Joram and Ozias (Uzziah), Ahaziah (2 Kings 8:25), Joash (2 Kings 12:1) and Amaziah (2 Kings 14:1). In Matthew 1:11 Matthew omits Jehoiakim (2 Kings 23:34). Matthew’s goal is to reduce the genealogies to a memorable three sets of fourteen individuals, for fourteen is the number of “David,” D = 4, V or Hebrew waw = 6 and the last D = 4, for a total of 14. But even more typical of the genealogies is Matthew 1:1, where “Jesus Christ” is said to be the “son of David,” who in turn is “the son of Abraham.” David lived about 1000 B.C. and Abraham about 2000 B.C. Similar huge leaps over intervening generations are also taking place in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11. If one turns Matthew 1:1 around and puts it in the style of the prepatriarchal genealogies, it could read as follows: “And Abraham was 100 years old [at the time that he begat Isaac through whom his line continued to David], and he begat David. And David was 40 years old [an approximate date for when Solomon was born, through whom Jesus would come], and he begat Jesus Christ.” Thus the numbers of when these ancients had their firstborn function as the times when the line that was to come was given to them. It is as if my father were one of these Very Important Persons (VIPs), and he had four sons, born when he was 100, 120, 140 and 160. Now let us suppose that it was my line, as the eldest in the family, that was the line through which Messiah was to come, and I was born when my father was 100. The Messiah would not come for another 1000 years, but it would be just as accurate, biblically speaking, to say that my father begat Messiah when he was 100. Furthermore, there are some warnings in the biblical text that if we add up these numbers, there will be distortions and errors. Take, for example, the last one in the series of twenty VIPs: Terah. It would appear that he lived 70 years and then had triplets born to him (Gen 11:26). His total life span was 205 years (Gen 11:32). However, something does not add up, for Abram left Haran after his father died (Gen 12:4; Acts 7:4), but he was only 75 years old at time and not 135, which he should have been had the figures been intended in a way that current usage would approve! Hence, had we added up the numbers in this part of the genealogy, we would already be 60 years in error, for the text must have meant that Terah “began having children when he was 70 years old,” but that Abram was actually born when his father was 130 and not when he was 70. He was not the eldest son, but his name is given first because he was the most significant figure. No one has studied this phenomenon more closely than the late William Henry Green in his April 1890 article in Bibliotheca Sacra entitled “Primeval Chronology.” F-1 For example, Green demonstrates that the same high priestly line of Aaron appears in 1 Chronicles 6:3-14 and Ezra 7:1-15, but it has twenty-two generations and names in Chronicles, while Ezra only has sixteen names. When the two lists are placed side by side, it is clear that Ezra deliberately skipped from the eighth name to the fifteenth name, thereby abridging his list, but in a way that was legitimate within the traditions of Scripture. This is exactly what is illustrated in the lists in Matthew. In fact, Ezra 8:1-2 abridges the list even further, seemingly implying that a great-grandson and a grandson of Aaron, along with a son of David, came up with Ezra from Babylon after the captivity! Now that is abridgment! Of course, Ezra was only indicating the most important persons for the sake of this shorter list. In our discussion of some of these genealogies and lineages in the corpus of this work, further examples will be found. However, it must be acknowledged that the phenomenon is a major one, and interpreters will disregard it to the damage of their own understanding of the text.Go TO Contents
AMONG THE PARTICULARLY hard sayings of the Bible are those portions that record large numbers, such as those in census lists in the early periods of Israel’s history or in numbers coming from the battles of that nation in her latter years.
The transmission of numbers in ancient documents was especially susceptible to textual error due to the fact that the systems were so diverse and with little standardization between cultures or periods of history in the same nation or culture. In the Old Testament documents now available to us, all the numbers are spelled out phonetically. This is not to say, however, that a more direct numeral system or cipher notation was not also in use originally for at least some of these numbers. While no biblical texts with such a system have been found, mason’s marks and examples of what may well be simple tallies have been attested in excavations in Israel. The only numbers that we have found in epigraphical materials uncovered by the archaeologists are those that appear on the earliest inscriptions known as the Gezer Calendar, the Moabite Stone, the Ostraca from Samaria and the Siloam Inscription of Hezekiah. There the numbers are either very small in magnitude, from 1 through 3, or they are written out phonetically. Some numbers should never have been introduced into the discussion whatsoever, for they come from modern additions not found in the text themselves. Thus, one thinks first of all of the 1,656 years that allegedly elapsed from the creation to the flood according to the Hebrew manuscripts, while the Greek Septuagint has 2,242 years and the Samaritan texts have 1,307 years. The fact that the Samaritan text has deleted one hundred years from Jared and Methuselah, and one hundred plus another twenty-nine years from Lamech’s age, at the time of the birth of their firstborn, is consistent enough to signal perhaps a transcriptional problem in copying from one text to another. Meanwhile, the Septuagint adds another one hundred years to the ages of Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel and Enoch at the birth of their firstborn, while with Lamech they add only six more years. In giving the tally for the rest of the lives of these same six antediluvians, they deduct the same one hundred years. The Hebrew and Greek texts agree on the figures for total years lived (if one were to do what the text never does, that is, add them up), except for a four-year difference in the life of Lamech. The Samaritan text, however, only gives a total of 720 years to Methuselah, while the Hebrew text would add up to 969 years total. The differences between the three texts are so regular that the mistakes are more easily explained if the copyist was working from some direct numeral cipher system that used a system of marks rather than phonetically spelling out these numbers. Similar problems occur elsewhere. For example, some texts say that the number of persons that were on board with Paul when he was shipwrecked was 276, but a few manuscripts read 76. Likewise, the famous 666 number of Revelation 13:18 is found in a few manuscripts as 616. In the Old Testament the death of 50,070 male inhabitants of Beth-shemesh for irreverent treatment of the ark of God (1 Sam 6:19) is better put, as some manuscripts have it, at 70, since the town hardly even came close to having 50,000 inhabitants at this time. Not all the large numbers in the Bible are as easily handled as the ones just surveyed. The number of warriors in Israel twenty years and older would seem to imply that the population that came out of Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for forty years exceeded two million people. This has given rise to a number of attempts to reduce this number and to serve as a model for treating similar claims in the Bible. One of the most famous is to take the Hebrew word elep4, usually translated “thousand,” and to translate it instead as “family,” “clan” or “tent-group.” F-2 If the word were so rendered in Numbers 1 and Numbers 26, it would yield a total of only 5,000 or 6,000 men of fighting age, instead of 603,550. It is true, of course, that the word can be used that way, for Judges 6:15 reads, “my clan ()elep4) is the weakest in Manasseh.” But the problem with this attempted reduction is that it only creates more problems elsewhere in the text. For example, in Exodus 38:25-26, where a half shekel was to be given for each of the 603,550 warriors above the age of twenty years old, the amount given was 100 talents and 1,775 shekels. There are 3,000 shekels to a talent, therefore 3,000 times 100 equals 300,000, plus 1,775 equals 301,775. Given the fact that each male over twenty was to be valued at a half shekel, 301,775 times 2 equals 603,550, a number matching that of Numbers 1:46, or similar to the number at the end of the march in Numbers 26:51 (601,730 men). Therefore, if the problem is solved at one end as “family units,” it is only made worse elsewhere—in this case in the list of materials for the tabernacle; therefore, 603,550 warriors is the correct number and the nation probably numbered around two million. Some of the most notorious discrepancies in biblical numbers are to be found in the postexilic era, particularly in Chronicles. Most nonevangelical interpreters feel the Chronicler’s numbers are impossibly high. It is this fact, more than any other, that has made the Chronicler’s work so suspect in the eyes of many modern exegetes. There are some 629 specific numbers that occur in 1 and 2 Chronicles. F-3 A typical example would be the number of Jehoshaphat’s army. Second Chronicles 17:14-18 details the fighting personnel in five groups of 300,000, 280,000, 200,000, 200,000 and 180,000, which add up to give an army of 1,160,000 men. This many scholars thought to be excessive. But there are no other comparative figures with which to judge the authenticity of this number except what moderns regard as “excessive.” More serious are those texts where we do have parallel figures. Some noteworthy examples include: 1 Chronicles 19:18 has “7,000 chariots” whereas 2 Samuel 10:18 has “700”; 1 Kings 4:26 has “40,000 stalls,” but 2 Chronicles 9:25 has “4,000”; 2 Kings 24:8 declares “Jehoiachin was eighteen years old,” while 2 Chronicles 36:9 assures us “Jehoiachin was eight years old.” F-4 It is clear in each of these examples that there is a transcriptional error that represents a primitive error in one or more of the families of manuscripts of the Hebrew texts. The conclusion of J. Barton Payne is that “in the eleven cases of disagreement over numbers that have arisen between the MTs of Chronicles and of Samuel/Kings because of copyists’ errors, Chronicles is found to be correct in five cases, incorrect in five, and one remains uncertain.” F-5 One more outstanding example of some unreconciled numbers in parallel lists can be seen in Nehemiah 7 and Ezra 2. F-6 Thirty-three family units appear in both lists with 153 numbers, 29 of which are not the same in Ezra and Nehemiah. Once again, it may be said that if a cipher notation was used with something like vertical strokes for units, horizontal strokes for tens, and stylized mems (the initial letter in the Hebrew word me4)a=h—“hundred”) for hundreds, then the scribe miscopied a single stroke. Most of the differences, on this supposition, would involve a single stroke. There is also the real possibility that the different circumstances under which the count was taken affected the numbers. Ezra’s list was made up when the people were assembling in Babylon, while Nehemiah’s was drawn up in Judea after the walls of Jerusalem had been built. Thus many could have changed their minds while others may have died in the meantime. In the end the matter is as Allrik stated it: “while at first glance these textual-numerical differences may seem detrimental, actually they greatly enhance the value of the lists, as they bring out much of their real nature and age.” Go TO Contents
IF CHRONOLOGY, AS THEY SAY, is the backbone of history, it would seem that a major attempt ought to be made to reconcile the plethora of chronological notations about the kings of Israel and Judah in the Bible. The astonishing fact is that the book of Kings is filled with chronological material concerning the Hebrew kings: when their reigns began, when a king came to the throne in the parallel kingdom of Israel or Judah, the total number of years that each king reigned and an occasional correlation of events in biblical history with those in the other nations of the ancient Near East.
But the tangle of dates and systems is so complex that the remark attributed to Jerome in the fourth century appears correct: Read all the books of the Old Testament, and you will find such discord as to the number of the years of the kings of Judah and Israel, that to attempt to clear up this question will appear rather the occupation of a man of leisure than of a scholar. F-8 Modern scholars are even more vehement in their denunciations of unwieldy material. But one such scholar who gave most of his life to untangle this Gordian knot was Edwin R. Thiele. He was finally able to make sense out of all the data and to show it all was accurate, as a part of his doctoral program at the University of Chicago. Despite the fact that neither Thiele’s system nor anyone else’s has achieved anything approaching universal acceptance, the evidence Thiele has amassed has never been completely refuted. The main complaint is only that he has taken the biblical data too seriously and has harmonized it perfectly. However, the word harmonized is not seen as a positive concept, but a negative one. Nevertheless, I think his case has stood now for well over forty years and will follow here, though there are numerous other efforts to supply other solutions that do not take all the biblical data as seriously as did Thiele. Thiele began by first establishing some basic dates. Most important in accomplishing this first step was the archaeological find of the Assyrian eponym list that covered every year in order from 892 to 648 B.C. These lists named a “man of the year” as the eponym, but they often noted principle events that took place as well. For the year of Bur-Sagale, governor of Guzana, it noted that there was a “revolt in the city of Assur.” In the month of Simanu an eclipse of the sun took place. Now this event we can locate on our Julian calendar as June 15, 763 B.C. by astronomical computation. Since we can establish every year with an absolute date on either side of this solar eclipse on June 15, 763 B.C., in the eponym list, it is significant that in the eponymy of Daian-Assur, 853 B.C., the sixth year of Shalmaneser II, the battle of Qarqar was fought, in which the Israelite king Ahab opposed him. Twelve years later, in the eponymy of Adad-rimani, 841 B.C., Shalmaneser received tribute from a king “Ia-a-u,” a ruler of Israel. This could be none other than King Jehu. Now it so happens that there were twelve years between the death of King Ahab and the accession of King Jehu (two official years, but one actual for King Ahaziah, 1 Kings 22:51) and twelve official, but eleven actual, years for Joram, 2 Kings 3:1). Thus 853 is the year of Ahab’s death and 841 is the year for Jehu’s accession. This gives us a toehold on linking Israel’s and Judah’s history with absolute time and world events. Another such linkage is to be found in the Assyrian chronology that puts the third campaign of Sennacherib in 701 B.C., when he came against Hezekiah. The Assyrian sources put 152 years from the sixth year of Shalmaneser III’s battle against Ahab at Qarqar in 853 B.C. But according to the reconstructed history of the Hebrews, it was also 152 years from the death of Ahab to the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, 701 B.C. Thus there is a second main tie-in with world history and chronology. As Thiele worked with these two main linkages with world history, he noted three important chronological procedures in ancient Israel and Judah. The first involved the distinctions in the calendar years of Judah and Israel: Israel began its year from the month of Nisan in the spring, while Judah reckoned its year as beginning in Tishri in the fall. This meant that in terms of an absolute January calendar year, a Nisan year began in the spring and extended into the next spring, thus bridging parts of two of our calendar years. The same would be true of a Tishri year lapsing over into two falls. But even more complicated is the fact that a regnal year in Israel would also overlap two regnal years in Judah. A second feature was the use of accession year and nonaccession year reckoning. Ever since the division of the country after Solomon’s day, the northern and southern kingdoms mostly used the opposite method of counting up regnal years that their neighbor was using. Thus, on the nonaccession year principle, the first year counted as year number one, while the accession year principle did not count regnal year one until the month starting the calendar (Nisan or Tishri) was passed and one year after that was completed. Judah used the accession year principle from Rehoboam until Jehoshaphat, while Israel used the nonaccession year principle from Jeroboam to Ahab. However, the relations between the two nations thawed during the days of Ahab and Jehoshaphat, as it was sealed with the marriage of Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, to prince Jehoram, son of Jehoshaphat. Clearly, as 2 Kings 8:18 notices, Jehoram “walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as the house of Ahab had done, for he married a daughter of Ahab.” Jehoram and Athaliah introduced the nonaccession year system into Judah, which remained until the snub of King Jehoash of Israel to King Amaziah of Judah over the proposal of marriage of the royal daughter to Amaziah’s son (2 Kings 14:8-10). However, prior to this rupture in diplomatic relations, both nations had already resorted to the accession year principle, which for some reason they continued to maintain to the end of their respective histories. A third principle Thiele sets forth was that each nation used its own system in reckoning the years of a ruler in the other nation. Thus Rehoboam of Judah had a seventeen-year reign according to Judah’s accession year system, but according to Israel’s nonaccession year principle it was eighteen years. These three basic principles of chronological reckoning in the two nations of Israel and Judah are foundational to grasping the meaning of the numbers used to describe the reigns of the kings. The date Thiele projected for the division of the kingdom after the death of Solomon was 931/930 B.C. This date, however, is generally rejected by the larger academic community. The fashion had been (until just a decade or two ago) to accept William Foxwell Albright’s date of 922 B.C., but his date involved an almost outright rejection of some of the biblical data. Albright argued that in view of the data found in 2 Chronicles 15:19 and 2 Chronicles 16:1, it was necessary to “reduce the reign of Rehoboam by at least eight, probably nine years” F-9 from that required by the biblical text. Such a reduction is not necessary when the details are correctly understood, as Thiele sorted them out. More recently, the figure of 927/926 B.C. has been proposed as the first regnal year of Rehoboam in Judah and Jeroboam I in the northern ten tribes of Israel by John Hayes and Paul Hooker. F-10 This date is arrived at by denying all three principles of Thiele and readjusting the biblical dates when they are not felt to be accurate for one reason or another. But Thiele’s date of 931/930 B.C. can be demonstrated to be accurate. One need only consult the following diagram to demonstrate this claim. Judah Israel Official Years Official Years Actual Years Rehoboam 17 Jeroboam 22 21 Abijam 3 Nadab 2 1 Asa 41 Baasha 24 23 Jehoshaphat 18 Elah 2 1 79 Omri 12 11 Ahab 22 21 Ahaziah 2 1 86 79 This chart from Thiele demonstrates two important points: (1) the eighty-six years of Israel on the nonaccession year reckoning is only seventy-nine actual calendar years, fully in accord with Judah’s accession year system; and (2) from Ahab’s death in 853 B.C., as established from the astronomical observations in the eponym lists and the twelve years separating Jehu from Ahab, to the beginning of the divided monarchy was 78 years. Therefore, 78 plus 853 equals 931/930 B.C. for the division of the kingdom. During the time of the Hebrew kingdoms there were nine overlapping reigns or coregencies. This fact makes the fourth important principle that must be recognized and factored in when using the numbers of the reigns and coregencies of the kings of Israel and Judah. The first overlapping reign was that of Tibni and Omri in Israel. First Kings 16:21 reads, “Then the people of Israel were split into two factions [or, parts]; half supported Tibni son of Ginath for [or, to make him] king, and the other half supported Omri.” Accordingly, there were three kingdoms at this time: two in the north under Tibni and Omri and one in the south, Judah. The same three-kingdom phenomenon happened later on, for Menahem ruled one kingdom in the north and Pekah ruled the other, probably from Gilead. Hosea 5:5 witnessed to this fact as it warned, “Therefore Israel and Ephraim [they] will stumble [or, fall] in their iniquity, Judah also will stumble [or, fall] with them” (my own translation, emphasis added). Note the three Hebrew plurals, for again there were two kingdoms in the north. A third overlapping involved a coregency of twelve years between Jehoash and Jeroboam II in Israel according to 2 Kings 13:10 and 2 Kings 14:23. Thus the sixteen years of Jehoash and the forty-one years of Jeroboam II would add up to fifty-seven, but with the coregency, it was actually only forty-five years. In another coregency, twenty-four years of Azariah’s fifty-two years overlapped with the twenty-nine years of Amaziah. Again, this reduced the total from eighty-one years to fifty-seven actual years. A fifth overlapping reign came in the coregency of Jotham and Azariah, as mentioned in 2 Kings 15:5. Azariah became a leper, so his son governed the land in his stead. Likewise a sixth overlap took place between Ahaz and Jotham in Judah, for the attack of Pekah and Rezin were not solely against Ahaz (2 Kings 16:5-9), but it is also against Jotham as well (2 Kings 15:37). King Jehoram was coregent with his father Jehoshaphat, as alluded to in 2 Kings 8:16: “In the fifth year of Joram son of Ahab king of Israel, when Jehoshaphat was king of Judah, Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat began his reign as king of Judah.” Further confirmation comes from the synchronism given in 2 Kings 3:1, where Joram began in “the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah,” but according to 2 Kings 1:17, he began “in the second year of Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat.” Thus, the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat was the second year of Jehoram’s coregency. That would mean that Jehoram became coregent with his father in the seventeenth year of his father’s reign, the year in which, it turns out, Judah joined forces with Israel against Syria. Prudence dictated that Jehoshaphat place Jehoram on the throne prior to his undertaking this joint venture—a venture in which Ahab of Israel lost his life (1 Kings 22:29-37), and Jehoshaphat narrowly escaped losing his own life. The eighth coregency was between Jehoshaphat and his elderly father Asa. In the thirty-ninth year of Asa’s reign, he became seriously ill with a disease in his feet. This led him, at the close of his forty-one-year reign, to make Jehoshaphat regent with him to help govern the people (2 Chron 16:12). The final coregency was between Manasseh and Hezekiah. Here again illness was the factor (2 Kings 20:1, 6). Knowing that he, Hezekiah, had only fifteen years to live, it is only to be expected that he would place his son Manasseh on the throne early enough to train him in the ways of government. Such is the nature of dual dating in reckoning the reigns, coregencies and synchronisms of the kings of Israel and Judah.Go TO Contents
TO CELEBRATE THE TWENTIETH anniversary of the Biblical Archaeology Review, the editors invited Michael D. Coogan to list the “10 Great Finds” or discoveries from the years of modern archaeological exploration in the ancient Near East. F-11 His selections included: (1) the Gilgamesh Epic tablet XI from Nineveh, a parallel with the biblical flood story; (2) the Beni Hasan mural from nineteenth-century Egypt, showing 37 Asiatics coming to trade and depicting what the patriarchs may have looked like; (3) the Gezer High Place near Tel Aviv from 1600 B.C.; (4) the carved ivory knife handle from Megiddo in the thirteenth or twelfth century B.C.; (5) the fertility goddess pendant from Ras Shamra, Syria, from the fourteenth or twelfth century B.C.; (6) the Gibeon Pool, six miles north of Jerusalem, from the eleventh century B.C., where David’s forces probably fought under Joab against the forces of Saul’s son Ishbosheth under Abner (2 Sam 2:12-17); (7) the Beersheba Altar in southern Israel from the eighth century B.C.; (8) the seventh-century B.C. silver scroll amulet from Ketef Hinnom, near Jerusalem, with the name Yahweh on it; (9) Masada on the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea from the second century B.C.; and (10) the sixth-century B.C. mosaic map from Madaba, Jordan. Each of these was indeed a sensational find, illustrating some aspect of the biblical text.
The harvest from archaeological discoveries has truly been amazing. Among some of the most startling finds that have been uncovered in recent years are (1) the 1993 discovery by Avraham Biran of an Aramaic inscription from Tel Dan of a mid-ninth-century mention of the “House of David”; (2) the inscription from Aphrodisias in southwestern Turkey published in 1987, mentioning for the first time indirect evidence for Luke’s references to “God-fearers”; (3) the first external evidence for Pontius Pilate, discovered at Caesarea in 1961; (4) a plaster text at Deir Alla in Jordan from the mid-eighth century, recording a vision of Balaam, son of Beor, apparently the same Balaam of Numbers 22–24; (5) the 1990 discovery of twelve ossuaries, or bone chests, including two bearing the name of “Joseph, son of Caiaphas,” F-12 probably the same high priest who tried Jesus; and (6) the 1995 location of Bethsaida on the northeastern shores of Galilee from where several of Jesus’ disciples came. The list could go on and on. But not all of the finds have occasioned an advance in our understanding of the biblical world and the Bible. Some have presented us with enormous problems of interpretation and have resulted in hotly contested opposing positions. The most outstanding of these dilemmas is that neither the Egyptian nor the Israelite data have been able to settle the issue of the date, route and nature of the exodus. This is most disappointing, for it covers almost everything from the exodus from Egypt and the wilderness wanderings to the conquest and settlement of Canaan. Today the field is in more disarray than ever before on these questions. For example, several issues have prevented scholars from accepting the traditional biblical evidence of a 1450 exodus and a 1410 B.C. entry into the land. Since the middle of this century, there has been a tendency to favor what has become known as the Generally Accepted Date (GAD) of 1230-1220 B.C. for entry into the land of Canaan. But even that is breaking down now as six of the sites that the Bible says were conquered by the Israelites (namely, Jericho, Ai, Gibeon, Hebron, Hormah/Zephath and Arad) have yielded no occupation evidence from the thirteenth century. The same story could be repeated for the cities of Debir and Lachish. This poor “fit” between the archaeological evidence and the biblical tradition of the conquest has led scholars, who had down-dated the entry into the land already by nearly 200 years from the date that the biblical evidence implied of 1410 B.C. to the revised date of 1230 or 1220 B.C., to look for different solutions. Several new theories have now gained considerable support. Among them are the peaceful infiltration theory (a view long favored by German scholars) or the more recent peasant revolt theory of George Mendenhall and Norman K. Gottwald. Both of these theories drop the necessity of a conquest altogether and substitute for it instead a revolt of local peasants against urban centers or a peaceful takeover. But 1 Kings 6:1 claimed that the exodus was 480 years before Solomon began to build the temple in 967 B.C., which would again place it in 1447 B.C. Judges 11:26 also claimed that the Israelites had been settled for 300 years prior to Jephthah’s day, who lived about 1100 B.C., again yielding approximately 1400 B.C. for the entry into the land. Recently John J. Bimson and David Livingston have offered major strides forward in solving the archaeological problems and in harmonizing these results with the Bible. F-13 They accomplish this mainly by moving the dates for the end of the Middle Bronze down 100 years or so from 1550 B.C. to around 1420 B.C. When this shift is made, there is almost a perfect correlation between the archaeological evidence and the biblical account of the conquest of Canaan. It will be interesting to watch what will happen on this issue in the future. There are other examples of a present incongruity between archaeology and the Bible. One case is that of Genesis 14. If ever there was a chapter that promised to link the patriarchs with the outside world of that day, it is Genesis 14. Alas, we have not been able to identify with certainty any one of the four kings from Mesopotamia. Some think that “Arioch king of Ellasar” (Gen 14:1) might be the Arriyuk mentioned in the eighteenth-century Mari tablets, but that too is not certain. Years ago some thought Hammurabi (allegedly the Amraphel of Gen 14:1) was one of the four, but that proved to be incorrect both on philological grounds and the grounds that Hammurabi came much later in time (c. 1792-1750 B.C.) than the setting given in Genesis 14. In Genesis 14:13 there is the first occurrence of an ethnic name in the Bible, “Abram the Hebrew.” In the Mari tablets and in the Tell el-Amarna letters of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., there is frequent mention of a mysterious ethnic group of people who at times also served as mercenaries called the Hapiru, Habiru, Hapiri or Apirim—all variants on what might be a group of people who were associated in one way or another with the Hebrews. Etymologically, the name Hebrew comes from the name Eber, one of Shem’s descendants. Still, it is thought that the Hebrews may have been one group that made up the Hapiru. The reference to the “trained men” in Genesis 14:14 is a technical term that is a loan word from Egyptian texts dating about 2000 B.C. for “retainers” of Palestinian chieftains. Finally the title for God found in Genesis 14:19, “God Most High,” )e4l--(--elyo=n, “Creator of heaven and earth,” occurs in a Phoenician inscription found in Karatepe, dating about the eighth century B.C. Thus, even though we have not found the main characters in any of the external epigraphic materials from archaeology, there are already a number of other points in the chapter that prompt us to continue to look for the evidence that this chapter is an authentic report of actual events. Scholars have tended to become extremely skeptical, as we have already illustrated in the exodus and conquest debates, about almost all events prior to the days of Omri and Ahab in the middle of the ninth century B.C., when it is felt that the history of Israel, in the technical sense, actually begins. Thus even such figures as David and Solomon are thought by some to be Persian time creations retrojected back onto the eleven and tenth centuries in order to glorify Israel. But the recent find of an inscription from Tel Dan reading “House of David” may have assuaged some of this skepticism and given promise of more evidence to come. Another sort of archaeological evidence from the Near East is The Instruction of Amen-em-opet, which many believe bears a strong resemblance to Proverbs 22:17–24:22. Papyrus 10474 in the British Museum, or The Instruction of Amen-em-opet, consists of thirty somewhat brief chapters and is of uncertain date, though usually assigned somewhere between the tenth and sixth centuries B.C. What is most startling about this connection with the Bible is that Proverbs 22:20-21 reads, “Have I not written thirty sayings for you,... so that you may give sound answers to him who sent you?” The parallel to these two verses is found in the Egyptian document at xxvi.15, “See thou these thirty chapters: They entertain; they instruct... to know how to return an answer to him who said it.” The similarity is striking. There are several other close, but not exact, parallels to this short section in the book of Proverbs. Biblical scholars differ over whether there is a direct or indirect literary dependence of Proverbs on Egyptian wisdom. Since the dating is lower for the Egyptian proverbs than those traditionally assigned as coming from Solomon (971-931 B.C.), there is just as strong a question as to whether there is a direct or indirect dependence of The Instruction of Amen-em-opet on Proverbs. Even if some kind of dependence could be proved, the book of Proverbs remains free of all allusions and senses that are distinctive to the cultural, political and religious environment of Egypt. It would only be an example of common grace of the created order in which all persons are made in the image of God and therefore reflect his truth in bits and pieces all over the world. Archaeology will continue to produce many exciting moments since it has been estimated that less than one percent of the available material on the tells of Israel have been excavated, not to mention those in the rest of the ancient Near East. Moreover, there are still great quantities of tablets and manuscripts in the basements of many universities that have conducted excavations over the years that still need decipherment and publication. In that sense, the future for this discipline could hardly be brighter.Go TO Contents
ONE OF THE MOST COMMON introductory sets of words in the prophets is the formula “thus says Yahweh/the LORD.” Obviously, what was intended by these messengers of God was to indicate that it was not really the prophet who was speaking, but Yahweh. It was stated explicitly that Yahweh was speaking “through” the prophet (Isa 20:3; Jer 37:2; 50:1; Hag 1:1, 3; 2:1; Zech 7:7; Mal 1:1).
The content of some prophetic oracles was so weighted with negative words of judgment at times that it was known as a mas8s8a4), “a burden” (for example, Jer 23:33; Zech 9:1; 12:1; Mal 1:1). Modern translations tend to translate this word as “an oracle,” but the heavy, somber, burdensome aspect of this word would seem to demand otherwise. F-14 Thus the prophets brought words of comfort, encouragement and judgment. It was said that the word of the Lord “came” to the prophets. By saying this, the stress was on the action coming from the prompting divine source and not from the prophet who was the recipient. In that setting, Yahweh was said to speak through the prophets. The characteristic technical formula of the prophets that appeared over and over again was ne)um Yahweh Yahweh, “the utterance of the LORD,” or simply, as a frequently repeated refrain, “says Yahweh.” Such formulas emphasized the importance and the reliability of what the prophet had just said or was about to say. The chief mission of the prophets was to carry Yahweh’s words to the people of Israel and to the nations at large. They had a charge to keep: it was simply that they were to speak God’s word. Even when the prophets received nothing but scorn for their efforts, as Jeremiah frequently experienced (Jer 20:8), they were, nevertheless, to carry on with an indefatigable spirit. Jeremiah, for example, knew that the word spoken to him was veritably “the voice qo=l of the LORD (Yahweh)” (Jer 38:20 RSV). The people also understood it to be the same, for when they responded to what the prophet had said, they obeyed “the voice of the LORD (Yahweh)” their God (Jer 42:6 RSV). Thus the refrain rang out throughout Scripture, from the time of the exodus until the last prophet, “Listen to my voice,” said the Lord through his prophets (Jer 11:7; Hag 1:12). Thus there was no essential difference between Yahweh’s word as heard through the prophet and Yahweh’s own voice. Even more metaphorical was the expression that “the mouth” of Yahweh had spoken what the prophet just said (Ezek 3:17). Thus the true prophet said what the mouth of the Lord directed him to say, but the false prophet pronounced what came from his own heart, rather than what came from the mouth of the Lord (Jer 23:16). When a king wanted to know “a word from the LORD,” he sent to the prophet to ask him to inquire on his behalf, “Is there any word from the LORD?” (Jer 37:17). It was like asking it from Yahweh’s own “mouth” (Isa 30:2). When one asked for an oracle from God, one asked, “What has the LORD answered?” or, “What has the LORD spoken?” (Jer 23:35, 37). That is how intimately connected the prophet’s word was with the very heart and mind of God. God would “put [his] words in [the] mouth [of the prophet]” (Jer 1:9, Ezek 3:17), and those words would, at times, be like “a fire and these people the wood it consumes” (Jer 5:14). Those words from God were so certain that they would “overtake” those who thought that they were outside the pale of their effectiveness (Deut 28:15, 45; Zech 1:4-6). It was as if the words themselves were like policemen in their cruisers, with a blinking light on top of them, pulling the law breaker over to the curb for violating the word of God. The relation between Yahweh and the authors of the divine word is very clearly illustrated in the relation between God, Moses and Aaron (Ex 4:15-16). Moses would be instructed by God what he was to say to Aaron, and Aaron would be his prophet, who would speak the same words to Pharaoh. Therefore, what Aaron is to Moses here, every prophet was in relation to Yahweh. The analogy could not be any clearer or the connection any more direct. God used many means to communicate with his prophets. There was God’s “mouth,” his “voice,” his “vision,” his “dream” and his “appearance,” among a host of other means of communicating, that were used to give the message to individual prophets at one time or another. It is often asked if the prophets became unconscious and wrote or spoke like automatons, as if in a trance or on drugs. There is no evidence whatsoever for that suggestion, for the prophets were never so fully alert as they were when they were receiving revelation. When they did not understand, they would say so, whether the revelation came in a dream or in a word. Daniel and Zechariah often asked for an interpretation if they did not understand the vision or dream given to them. This would then be followed with another divine word or a word from an interpreting angel. God wanted his prophets to understand what they wrote and spoke, for after all, this was supposed to be a “revelation,” a “disclosure,” a “making bare or naked” what God wanted to say (1 Pet 1:10-12). The only things the prophets did not understand were “the time” and “the circumstances” surrounding the time. But they did know that they were speaking of the Messiah, his sufferings, his return in glory, the order of the previous two affirmations, and that their words were not simply for their own day, but for the days when Peter was speaking to the church as well! But did they hear an audible voice? some will ask. Apparently they did at times, for was not the baptism of Jesus accompanied by just such a phenomenon when the Holy Spirit came upon him? Was there not a voice from heaven that said, “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”? And Paul too heard a voice when he was converted as he was on the road to capture more Christians, even though those around him said it merely thundered. So we can assume that the same audible voice may at times have been the experience of the prophets. It is curious that the prophets not only are said to have heard the word of God, but they often say they saw it as well. The prophetic revelations are treated as visions even when nothing is “seen” in our sense of the word. Thus Amos tells us about the “words” he “saw” (Amos 1:1). Likewise, Isaiah tells us in his second chapter how he saw the word of God on the mountain of the Lord. It is probably for this reason that the prophets were at first called “seers” (1 Sam 9:9) before they were given the name of “prophets” neb{i=li=m). But 1 Corinthians 2:13 is the most definitive statement that we have on the nature of inspiration and how it took place on most occasions. Paul argued there that just as no one knows the thoughts of a person except that person, so no one knows the thoughts of God except the Holy Spirit. Now it is this same Holy Spirit who takes the inner thinking of God and makes it known to his prophets. He does this by “expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.” Thus, it is not a mechanical symbiosis between the divine and the human, but instead a living assimilation between the skills and personality of the writers and the mind of God takes place. Accordingly, all that has gone into the preparation of that writer, the vocabulary, the metaphors of life, the occupation entered prior to the call of God, all play a real part in the “teaching” experience of preparing the speakers for their roles as prophets. What, then, was the process of this communication from God and the actual writing of Scripture? The best description of this process is to be found in Jeremiah 36. There Jeremiah informs us that he was in the habit of dictating “all the words the LORD had spoken to him” to his secretary, Baruch (v. 4). Baruch would then write them down on a scroll. The fact that less than a century later, when Daniel was reading “the Scriptures, according to the word of the LORD given to Jeremiah the prophet,” Jeremiah’s prophecies were already being read by those as far away as in Babylon and treated as “Scripture” and as being from God is remarkable. This predates any councils by either the Jewish community or the church in the matter of what was canonical and what was inspired. God is the God who spoke his word to his people and who made it clear to his prophets. Of this fact, the prophets bear consistent and constant witness.Go TO Contents
THE ARGUMENT FROM FULFILLED prophecies of the Bible is essentially an argument from omniscience—that God is able to both know and foretell the future. That, indeed, is the claim that Isaiah 41:22-23 makes:
Bring in your idols to tell us what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come, tell us what the future holds, so we may know that you are gods. Do something, whether good or bad, so that we will be dismayed and filled with fear. That is why the test for a prophet in Deuteronomy 18:22 was: If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him. Nevertheless, the arguments against prophecies in the Bible have continued unabated down to the present era. The complaints have been that the language is often too vague, the prophecies are artificially fulfilled, the prophecies were written after the events they were alleged to have predicted, their fulfillments are all a matter of misinterpretation and the same phenomenon occurs in other religions. But all of these complaints are without justification. For example, what is termed “vague” is certainly sharpened in the progress of revelation and fully by the time of its fulfillment. And to claim that it was an artificial fulfillment takes more faith to believe in than to trust the claims themselves, for how can one prophet arrange events as complex as that of a Babylonian captivity? How can one person, or even a group of persons, arrange for a child to be born in Bethlehem, in the line of Judah, of the house of David, to be announced by a John the Baptist, to do the works that Jesus performed in accordance with the predictions of Scripture, and to die on the cross and rise again on the third day? Likewise, to claim that these prophecies were vaticinium ex eventu, “prophecy after the event,” means that the one complaining must be very confident in his or her own ability to date events such as the prophecies of Isaiah 40–66, Daniel or the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24–25! But there is something else that is at work here, illustrated by the recent commentary by W. S. Towner on Daniel 8: We need to assume that the vision as a whole is a prophecy after the fact. Why? Because human beings are unable accurately to predict future events centuries in advance and to say that Daniel could do so, even on the basis of a symbolic revelation vouchsafed to him by God and interpreted by an angel, is to fly in the face of the certainties of human nature. So what we have here is in fact not a road map of the future laid down in the sixth century B.C. but an interpretation of the events of the author’s own time, 167–164 B.C. F-15 Towner’s distrust of Daniel’s prophecy is based in his “certainties of human nature.” This is a clear discounting of the power of God and his ability to communicate his word to his servants the prophets, while trusting in “human nature” as being more “certain”! There could not be a clearer example of the way one’s presuppositions and hermeneutical circle strongly affect the outcome of any work in predictive prophecy. Others resort to a misinterpretation thesis, claiming that what is called fulfilled prophecy is often a mere coincidence of language. True, there are some allusions made to the Old Testament by the New Testament precisely because the language is the vehicle they wish to use to carry the freight of their meaning. But these cases are rare and never in a claim about fulfilled prophecy. Those who would cite Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I called my son,” as a case of misinterpretation in Matthew 2:15 fail to notice that it is quoted when Jesus and his parents entered Egypt, not when they exited it. The reason Matthew quoted this text from Hosea was not the often stressed “out of” Egypt, but because of the corporate solidarity of “my Son” with those who crossed over the Red Sea. F-16 Thus God’s marvelous deliverance on one occasion was used to serve as a reminder of another deliverance—this time not from Pharaoh’s hand, but from Herod’s hand! Finally, to claim that the same phenomenon occurs in other religions is to ask, “Where?” While the histories of pagan nations abound in stories of auguries, oracles and detached predictions, the distance between the dignity and credibility of the prophecies in the Bible and those in the sacred books of other religions is enormous. They form little or no part in any enduring divine plan that embraces the history and redemption of the world; instead, they function as mere curiosities that satisfy particular inquiries or aid the designs of a military or political leader in an immediate and personal predicament. Absent are all global, universal and salvific linkages. Since the nineteenth century it has been popular to point to the following examples of prophecies that were not fulfilled in Scripture: 1. The prophecy of the ruin of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar (Ezek 26:7-14; 29:17-20). 2. Jonah’s prophecy of the destruction of Nineveh (Jonah 3:4). 3. Elijah’s prophecy against King Ahab for murdering Naboth (1 Kings 21:17-29). 4. Isaiah’s prophecy of the destruction of Damascus (Isa 17:1). The so-called nonfulfillment of prophecies is to be explained on the basis of the threefold classification of biblical prophecy; that is, prophecy may be unconditionally fulfilled, conditionally fulfilled or sequentially fulfilled. F-17 All three types are commonly used by the prophets and are accompanied by textual indicators that aid the reader and interpreter in distinguishing them. The list of unconditional prophecies is not long, but they are central, for they concern, for the most part, our salvation. They are called unconditional because they are made unilaterally by God without any requirements on the part of mortals to maintain their side of the bargain. Just as God alone passed through the pieces in Genesis 15, implying that an oath of self-imprecation would fall on him if he did not accomplish what he promised Abraham in the Abrahamic covenant, so it follows that the same one-sided obligation rests with the other covenants that fall in this same category. They are God’s covenant with the seasons (Gen 8:21-22), his promise to Abraham (Gen 12:2-3; 15:9-21), his promise to David (2 Sam 7:8-16), his promise of the new covenant (Jer 31:31-34) and his promise of a new heavens and a new earth (Isa 65:17-19; 66:22-24). The majority of the prophecies, however, were of the conditional type. They contain a suppressed “unless” or “if you keep my commandments” type of conditionality. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, with the alternative prospects for obedience or disobedience, were quoted or alluded to by the sixteen writing prophets literally hundreds of times. It is this provisional nature to the threat or promise delivered by the prophet that explains such a famous case as that of the prophet Jonah. While it is true that he was only to warn the people that in forty days destruction would come from the Almighty, the people extrapolated, apparently, from Jonah’s own case of deliverance (Did not Jesus say that Jonah himself was a “sign” to the Ninevites? A sign of what? Mercy?) that God might be merciful and relent from his announced judgment. They presumed that such a God must have a suppressed “unless” or “if” in the threat of absolute disaster. They were correct, much to Jonah’s deep chagrin. This principle received formal articulation in Jer 18:7-10: If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it. This relenting from an announced judgment (or deliverance) by God based on the condition of repentance and change was effective not only in dealing with whole nations but in dealing with individuals as well. That is exactly what took place with regard to Ahab in 1 Kings 21:25-29 after he “humbled himself” before the Lord for what he and Jezebel had done in arranging the murder of Naboth. After noting that “there was never a man like Ahab who sold himself to do evil in the eyes of the LORD“ (1 Kings 21:25), the Lord instructed the prophet Elijah to reverse the threat he had just delivered against Ahab, saying, “Because he has humbled himself, I will not bring this disaster in his day, but I will bring it on his house in the days of his son” (1 Kings 21:29). This is a classic example of conditionality in prophecies working at the level of individuals. Presumably if his son also repented, the threatened judgment would likewise be removed from his son and that generation because of the same merciful provision of God. But there are some prophecies that do not fit comfortably in either the unconditional or conditional category. These are the sequentially fulfilled prophecies, a subcategory of the conditional type. The prophecy in Ezekiel 26:7-14 falls into this third category: For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: From the north I am going to bring against Tyre Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon.... He will ravage your settlements on the mainland;... he will set up siege works against you.... He will direct the blows of his battering rams against your walls and demolish your towers with his weapons. His horses will be so many that they will cover you with dust.... He will kill your people with the sword, and your strong pillars will fall to the ground. They will plunder your wealth and loot your merchandise; they will break down your walls and demolish your fine houses and throw your stones, timber and rubble into the sea. (emphasis mine) According to many critics of biblical prophecy, Ezekiel in 29:18-20 admits that his prophecy was not fulfilled: Son of man, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon drove his army in a hard campaign against Tyre.... Yet he and his army got no reward from the campaign he led against Tyre.... I have given him Egypt as a reward for his efforts because he and his army did it for me, declares the Sovereign LORD. Is this, indeed, an example of nonfulfillment? What has usually gone unnoticed is the shift in pronouns from the third person singular pronouns pointing to Nebuchadnezzar to the third person plural, “they,” pointing to some other force beside that of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar did indeed take the mainland city of Tyre after a long siege, only to have the Tyrians slip through his grasp as they simply moved out to the island a half mile out in the Mediterranean Sea. It was Alexander the Great, some two hundred years later, who came and attempted to capture the island fortress of Tyre. Frustrated in his attempts at first to float a navy that could compete with these masters of the sea, Alexander finally resorted to scraping up the dust, timbers, stones and rubble of the former mainland city, and dumping it into the Mediterranean Sea to form a causeway out to the island. Thus in the 330s B.C. Alexander took the city that Nebuchadnezzar had failed to take in the 570s B.C. In this manner the prophecy was fulfilled. There was an indicated sequencing of events denoted by the sudden shift in the middle of the prophecy from the repeated references to the third person singular pronoun to the third person plural. In like manner, Elijah’s prophecy about Ahab’s punishment for murdering Naboth and stealing his property was fulfilled. The threatened doom was carried out, after Ahab’s sudden repentance, on his son a decade later in 2 Kings 9:25-26. Joram’s corpse was cast onto Naboth’s ground; indeed, the very spot that had been predicted in 1 Kings 21:19. Isaiah 17:1 has also been used as an example of nonfulfillment: “An oracle concerning Damascus: ‘See, Damascus will no longer be a city but will become a heap of ruins.’” But what is missed here is that Damascus, as the capital of the nation, stands for the whole Syrian nation. Furthermore, there is a play on the similar sounding words of “city” and “ruin” me4)i=r and mei=). A careful reading of the rest of the prophecy will indicate that Damascus is not facing a permanent and full eradication of its existence from off the face of the earth. The other thing to note is that this prophecy is put in the final eschaton, “in that day” (Isa 17:4, 7, 9). Thus we conclude that the prophecies of the Bible were fulfilled just as they were predicted. When one considers the enormous amount of predictive material in the Bible and that it involves some 27 percent of the Bible, F-18 it is truly a marvel that it remains so accurate.Go TO Contents
IN MANY PLACES THE NEW TESTAMENT quotations of the Old Testament do not match up with what we have in our English Old Testaments. There are a number of reasons why this is so. First, our Old Testaments are generally translated from the Masoretic text, the traditional Jewish text, the earliest manuscripts of which are from around A.D. 900. Naturally, none of the New Testament writers had this text. If they knew Hebrew (as Paul did), they cited an earlier version of the Hebrew text, translating it into Greek themselves. This text was not necessarily identical with the text that we have.
Second, we have tried to get our printed Hebrew Bibles as close to the original as possible by comparing the Masoretic Text with manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran and the early translations of the Hebrew text into Aramaic and Greek. None of the New Testament writers had this luxury. They simply accepted whatever Hebrew text they had. In fact, it is unlikely that many of them owned any parts of the Scripture personally, so they were happy whenever they managed to get their hands on a copy of some part of the Scriptures. Third, even when a New Testament writer knew Hebrew, he did not necessarily use that text. He often used the text that his readers would be familiar with. For example, Paul sometimes quotes the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, even though he knew Hebrew and had probably memorized the Old Testament in that language. Fourth, not all New Testament writers knew Hebrew. The writer of Hebrews, for example, never quotes from the Hebrew text, so if he knew Hebrew, he has kept the fact well hidden. Thus when we come to Hebrews 1:6, which quotes Deuteronomy 32:43, we discover that the New Testament quotation does not agree with our English Old Testaments (translated from the Hebrew), but it does agree with the Septuagint. In many cases the Septuagint is so close to the Hebrew that we cannot tell if an author was using it or translating the Hebrew himself into Greek, but in this passage there is enough difference that we can tell that our author must have been using the Septuagint. Fifth, sometimes New Testament writers chose a particular version because it made the point they wanted to make, much as preachers today sometimes choose to quote from translations which put a passage in such a way that it supports the point they want to make. For example, when we read Ephesians 4:8 we discover that it reads differently than Psalm 68:18 in English. This is not because Paul used the Septuagint, for in this case that translation agrees with our English Bibles. Instead, Paul appears to have used one of the Aramaic translations (called a Targum). In many Jewish synagogues the Scriptures were first read in Hebrew and then translated into Aramaic, for that is the language the people actually spoke. Paul would have been familiar with both versions, and in this case he chose to translate not the Hebrew but the Aramaic into Greek. The Hebrew text would not have made his point. Sixth, we must remember that New Testament writers rarely if ever had the luxury of looking up passages they wanted to quote. Normally they quoted from memory. They were satisfied that they had the general sense of the Old Testament text but would not know if they were not exact in their quotation. Seventh, in quoting the Old Testament an author at times combines more than one passage in a general paraphrase. For example, Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:9 is probably making a loose paraphrase of both Isaiah 64:4 and 65:17. In James 2:23 the author joins Genesis 15:6 with the general sense of either 2 Chronicles 20:7 or Isaiah 41:8. When one is moving along full speed in dictation and is concerned about some issue in the church, a general paraphrase of the Old Testament often did the job without stopping to remember just how the text went. Finally, we must remember that there are some cases in which the New Testament author did not intend to quote the Old Testament, but his mind was so filled with it that it flowed out almost as if it were his own words. In these cases no quotation formula (“it is written”) occurs, but we may think that our author is quoting because it is so close to the Old Testament text. So what are we saying? We are noticing that New Testament authors were people just like us, but lacking the scholarly tools which we have. They sometimes quoted their favorite version or the version that fit what they were saying, just as we do. They sometimes paraphrased and quoted from memory, just as we do. They sometimes had limited resources available to them, just as is the case with some modern Bible readers. Finally, many of them did not know Hebrew and so had to be satisfied with whatever translation of the Hebrew they could read, just as is the case with many of us. In this we see that God used quite normal human individuals to write the New Testament. They did not have supernatural knowledge of the Old Testament text but lived within the limitations of their own culture and abilities. Yet it is the New Testament documents they wrote that the church has held to be inspired. The teachings of the New Testament are not inspired because they can prove from the Old Testament that what they say accords with that Scripture; they are inspired because the Spirit inspired what they themselves wrote. None of them are giving their readers lectures on the proper text of the Old Testament. In fact, they are not even giving teaching on Old Testament theology. What they are doing is teaching New Testament truth and showing that the Old Testament supports the point that they are making. In general this is true, even though they did not have the relatively accurate and carefully researched texts of the Old Testament that we have today. When they appear to be “wrong” (allowing that they interpreted the Old Testament differently then than we do now), we must remember (1) that it could be that they may indeed have a better reading for the text in question than we have in our Bibles and (2) that the Spirit of God who inspired the Old Testament text has every right to expand on its meaning. The point is that while we may understand why the New Testament writers cite the Old Testament as they do, it is the New Testament point that they are trying to make that is inspired in the New Testament document. Thus, while we may enjoy understanding what is happening and why our Old Testament quotations differ from what we expect, the real issue is whether we are obeying the New Testament teaching.Go TO Contents
CLEARLY THE NEW TESTAMENT refers to demons. According to the Gospels Jesus “cast out” many of them, and they appear to be personal beings who make requests, react in fear and take other actions that characterize personal beings. But are they real? Are demons not a prescientific way of talking about what we would now call psychoses (or some other mental problem)? Are there really spiritual beings in this world that can affect human beings?
It is true that in the Middle Ages and even today in some Christian circles much, if not all, of what we call psychological dysfunction was and is attributed to demons. The results of this misdiagnosis in the Middle Ages were often grotesque and rightly deserve the censure of Christians committed to expressing the love of Christ. Also, demons are rarely mentioned in the Old Testament, and most of the Old Testament texts in which they are mentioned are controversial. They certainly are not called “demons,” for that is a Greek word. And it is true that many of the symptoms attributed to demons in the New Testament could also be indications of such dysfunction as hysteria or epilepsy. This in itself makes one want to question the reality of demons. Yet this is not the whole story. First, the belief in demons is part of a development in doctrine within Scripture. In the Old Testament there is very little said about any spiritual being other than God until after the exile. There is the enigmatic figure of “the serpent” in Genesis 3, but it has no other name and does not appear again in the Old Testament text. There are also indications that at least some of the Old Testament people believed in the reality of the gods of the nations around them, even though they were themselves true worshipers of Yahweh. Still, that is not the official teaching of the Old Testament. The thrust of the Old Testament is that the gods of the nations were helpless idols, simply wood or stone (Isa 44:9-20). To whatever extent they existed, they were helpless before Yahweh, the living God of Israel. This, of course, is in keeping with God’s persistent emphasis up to the exile that he is One and that he will not accept both/and worship (such as worshiping both Yahweh and the Baals). It is therefore only late in the Old Testament period that we get references to Satan (and even then “Satan” may be more a name for a heavenly prosecutor than for an evil being) and only in the intertestamental period that we get significant references to demons (see, for example, Tobit). The New Testament is in line with this development of doctrine. The simplicity of the Old Testament view of the universe gives way to a greater complexity in the New. Thus it is not surprising to find references to demons in the New Testament where there are none in the Old. Second, the Bible as a whole and the New Testament in particular witness to the existence of nonphysical beings and a spiritual realm. Besides God the Father, there is Jesus, who according to John once existed completely in this realm and then became flesh (Jn 1:14). The ascension refers to his return to the spiritual realm, but as a physical being (that is, he remains a human being with a body). Then there are angels, which are referred to 176 times in the New Testament, mostly in the Gospels and Revelation. These holy beings point to the existence of a spiritual realm, which, the New Testament says, also contains a dark side. This dark side includes Satan (or the devil), referred to in the New Testament more than 65 times, spiritual forces that Paul calls “powers and authorities” (Rom 8:38; Eph 3:10; 6:12; Col 1:16; 2:15), and of course demons, mentioned 52 times (and “demon” is only one of the terms used for them; they are also called “unclean spirits” some 23 times). In other words, demons fit into a New Testament picture of a nonphysical or spiritual world surrounding human beings. In this context they are not strange but part of a normal biblical worldview. If one were to deny the possibility of the existence of such beings, the logical extension would be to deny the existence of all spiritual beings, most likely including God. Third, while demons do cause symptoms which we might at first interpret as psychological dysfunction, it is not true that such problems are all that they cause. Such diseases as epilepsy (Mt 17:14-18), paralysis similar to that caused by some forms of malaria (Lk 13:10-13) and probably fever (Lk 4:38-39) are all attributed to demons. Therefore, many forms of physical disease were attributed to demons, although not all physical disease was attributed to them, for the Gospels differentiate between healing diseases and casting out demons. The key is whether those physical diseases attributed to demons really disappeared when Jesus cast out the demon. If so, his claim that a demon was causing the problem and that it took casting out rather than a healing word would be confirmed. Fourth, there is a good reason for the emphasis on demons in the New Testament and especially in the Gospels (which is the only place that they receive emphasis). Jesus came announcing the reign or kingdom of God. When that “kingdom” came in a more physical form in the Old Testament, there was a conflict between God (Yahweh) and the gods of Canaan (and before that of Egypt). This ended with God’s demonstrating his power over these gods and often with the destruction of the idols. Now in the New Testament the kingdom comes and it is opposed by Satan, as seen in the temptation narratives and other references to Satan throughout the Gospels. Lesser powers associated with Satan (the exact relationship between Satan and the various other dark spiritual forces is never described in detail) would naturally be involved in this opposition. If the kingdom of God is going to come to individuals, the power of the kingdom of darkness is going to be broken and the demons may end up being destroyed (see Mk 1:24; 5:7-8). Thus the demons are part of the cosmic or spiritual conflict going on behind the outward actions of preaching, teaching and healing. Demons fit into the New Testament picture of what the reign of God means and the fact that salvation is not simply deliverance from physical sickness or political oppression or poverty, but at root a deliverance from final judgment, from spiritual sin and from the oppression by evil spiritual forces connected to these things. Therefore, if one believes that the New Testament picture of the world and the human situation is accurate, it is quite normal and logical to believe in demons as real personal beings. It would also be quite normal to believe that where the kingdom of God is expanding one might run into such beings. However, only spiritual discernment can reveal when words of comfort and counsel, when healing and when a command to expel a demon are needed. Where such discernment is present, the results will be good, as in the case of Jesus and the apostles. Where it is lacking, we will see either the rejection of the existence of demons (with the result that a certain number of people who could be healed will not be healed) or a fascination with them in which people either withdraw in fear or else try to “cast out” what is really a disease and by so doing violate other human beings. The New Testament teaches us about the reality of demons. It also teaches us not to fear them or to go looking for them, but to recognize that if and when they are encountered, there is more than sufficient power in Christ to expel them.Go TO Contents
IT IS CLEAR TO ANY READER of the Gospels that they are different. Sometimes the events are in a different order (John has the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and Mark has it at the end).
Sometimes they differ in their details (such as the names of the apostles or the names in the genealogies in Mt 1 and Lk 3). Sometimes there are differences in what they cover (so many of the events in John are not in any of the other three). Why is this the case? Our tendency in approaching the Gospels is to think of them as modern biography. We want them to give us all of the facts about Jesus and especially to get the chronology of his life right. We in our culture have a tremendous interest in order and detail. Judged by these standards, the Gospels fare poorly indeed. Yet the Gospel writers did not set out to write modern biography. They did not even know about it or realize that people would be interested in such issues in hundreds of years. What they did know about was ancient biography. The point of such works was not to give a chronology of a life but to present selected facts so as to bring out the significance of the person’s life and the moral points that the reader should draw from it. One would see this quickly if one read, for example, Plutarch’s Lives. Each life is so presented as to bring out a moral for the reader. This ancient literature is closer to what the Gospel writers were doing than what we now call biographies. The way the Gospel writers wrote was quite understandable to the readers of their time. Thus the Evangelists set about to present selected events from the life of Jesus with a purpose. John makes his purpose quite plain: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:30-31). Of the other Gospels, Mark and Luke have a similar purpose of evangelism. Matthew, as part of his purpose, also appears to include church instruction, for he arranges the sayings of Jesus into five large discourses on topics useful for the church. Each Gospel was aimed at a different audience. If tradition is correct, Mark records the preaching of Peter in Rome. That is, it is directed to a largely Gentile audience. Luke addresses his Gospel to a person who appears to be a Gentile official (Lk 1:1-4). Nobody knows who this person was (or whether Theophilus [lover of God] is a generic name for any God-loving person who would read the book), yet the two-volume Luke-Acts appears to have as part of its purpose the defense of the Christian faith before Gentile leaders (perhaps even the defense of Paul). This is not the same type of general audience that Mark addresses. Matthew, on the other hand, appears to have a Jewish-Christian or Jewish audience in view. John speaks to yet another audience. Naturally, even the same preacher does not use the same “sermon” for different audiences. Furthermore, the writers of the various Gospels were different people. The writer of John takes a Judean perspective on Jesus and mentions only a few events that took place in Galilee, while the other Gospels focus far more on Galilee and other non-Judean locations. The writers also had different interests. Luke is very much concerned about issues such as the use of money and possessions, the acceptance of women by Jesus, and prayer. Matthew, on the other hand, is quite interested in Jesus’ relationship to the Jewish law. Mark includes very little teaching of Jesus, so his focus is more on what Jesus did. Some of these were personal interests of the author, and some of these were concerns they had because of their intended audiences. It is also important to look at the length of the Gospels. Matthew, Luke and John are long enough that if they were any longer they would have to go to two volumes. Scrolls only came in certain lengths, and they are at the maximum length. Thus when they use material from Mark they must at times abbreviate if they are not going to have to leave other material of their own out. The rules of biography writing at that time did not dictate that one had to put everything in chronological order. Mark may have a rough chronology, but the others feel free to group things together by other rules of organization. Luke puts much of the teaching of Jesus within the context of a trip from Galilee to Jerusalem (Lk 9:51–19:10, the so-called “travel narrative”). Yet he also has the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6. Matthew groups much of this same teaching into his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7, including both material found in the Sermon on the Plain and material found in Luke’s “travel narrative.” These two Gospels have two different frameworks for presenting some of the same material. They are shaped by concerns of the respective authors. Luke is quite interested in geographical movement, Galilee to Jerusalem (and then in Acts, Jerusalem to Rome), while Matthew is more interested in Jesus’ fulfillment of Moses imagery. Interestingly enough, both Matthew and Luke use Mark, but they tend to use Mark in blocks. Luke edits Mark more than Matthew (partially because Luke is more concerned with Greek style and Mark is fairly rough in that regard). John is different. He does not tell so many stories about Jesus. Instead he selects seven signs to present, seven specific miracles (although he knows that Jesus worked many other miracles). He does not give a lot of short sayings of Jesus, but groups what Jesus said into longer discourses in which it is difficult to tell where Jesus leaves off speaking and where John begins speaking (in the original manuscripts there were no quotation marks or other punctuation or even word divisions). The point is that, as was the case in ancient biography, the Gospels are not photographs of Jesus but portraits. In a portrait it is important to bring out an accurate likeness, but the painter can also put in other things he or she sees in the person: perhaps some feature of their character will be brought out or some deed they did or office they held. Perhaps the person sat for the portrait in a bare studio, and then the painter painted a scene surrounding them that would bring out this feature of the person. We do not say that the portrait is inaccurate. We know that that is what a portrait is supposed to do. In fact, in some ways it is more accurate than the photograph, for it allows us to see things that could never be shown in a photograph (such as character), but are very much part of the person. In the Gospels, then, we have four portraits of Jesus. Each of the four writers is concerned with different aspects of his life and person. This was symbolized early in church history when the Gospels were identified with different images. John was identified with the eagle, while Luke was identified with a human being. Mark was identified with an ox, and Matthew with a lion (for royalty). (The images are drawn from Rev 4:7.) We are therefore not limited to one perspective on Jesus, but have the richness of four. This is why it is important to read each Gospel for itself rather than combine them into a harmony. A harmony tries to put all of the four Gospels together to make one story, but in doing this it loses the perspective of the Gospels. It is like taking bits and pieces out of four portraits and trying to make one collective portrait from them. The harmony satisfies our desire to get everything in order, but in doing this it often distorts the Gospels. In the end, the harmony is not what God chose to inspire. God chose to inspire four Gospels, not one single authorized biography. In other words, God appears to have wanted four pictures of Jesus, not one, four messages for the church, not just a single message. It is not that the four portraits are contradictory. They are just different. If four painters sat and painted the same sunset, each would have a different picture. Each would leave out or put in different details. Each would have a different perspective and perhaps select a different phase of the setting sun to emphasize. None of them would be “wrong,” for each was portraying the same sunset. Thus when we come to the Gospels the differences are important. When we find a difference we need to ask why this Gospel is different. Some differences are quite insignificant. For example, Mark 6:39 mentions that the grass was green and none of the other Gospels have this detail. They could leave out such a detail and save space. Others are significant. When Matthew reports Jesus’ word on divorce (Mt 19:9), he only speaks of a man divorcing a woman, for in Jewish law only men could divorce. When Mark speaks of this (Mk 10:11-12), he speaks of both men divorcing women and women men, for in Rome either sex could divorce. Each reflects the same truth Jesus was saying (probably in Aramaic, not Greek) in tune with the legal system their audience lives under. Each accurately portrays Jesus’ concern for the permanence of marriage. Likewise Matthew reports the order of the temptations so that they end up on a mountain, in accordance with his interest in Jesus as the new Moses (Mt 4:1-11), and Luke puts them in an order so Jesus would end up in Jerusalem, in harmony with his Galilee to Jerusalem interest (Lk 4:1-13). Neither claims to have their material in chronological order, so maintaining such an order is not an issue. Each of the Gospels is trying to deliver a particular message to us. The important issue for us as readers is not that we get the life of Jesus figured out with each event in order, but that we get the message the Gospels are trying to communicate, that we hear their call to faith, that we submit to the teaching of Jesus, and that we live in the discipleship that they are trying to call us to. In the end, we are not called to be art critics, but to fill our homes with the “glow” that comes from these four portraits.Go TO Contents
