From Malachi to Jesus: The 400 Silent Years in Seven Minutes

Ever wondered what happened between the end of Malachi and the beginning of Matthew (if you primarily know the Protestant Bible)?

Well, here it is, the so-called 400 Silent Years – presented in a heavily slanted view. Conservative Jews at the time of Christ would have been happy with this presentation; hellenistic Jews, Greeks and Romans not so much.

I recorded this years ago in pre-YouTube days while doing a leadership course in Sweden, but I just posted it now online:

Prometheus: Bad Rep for Zeus (Yea for Humanity, Nay for the Gods)

I just re-read Prometheus Bound – that classic play from the 5th century BC traditionally attributed to the Greek playwright Aeschylus – and I was again struck by just how badly Zeus comes off.

Whoever the real author was, he clearly didn’t think too highly of the father of the gods. In fact, I wonder if he actually believed in Zeus, because the play certainly wouldn’t have put him into very good standing with the divine despot. The author treats Zeus much more like a fictional character whom he feels free to portray in a negative light.

All the sympathies of the audience lie with the tragic hero Prometheus who – unlike Zeus – actually cares for humanity. It’s safe to say that the author of the play also cared much more for humanity than for the gods.

Flying Snakes in the Bible

In the fifth century BC—a time when several Old Testament books were composed—there lived a Greek historian called Herodotus. His books The Histories are, among other things, an extremely interesting read about the various countries, cultures and exploits of the ancient world. They are a great source of information on a bygone time.

However, I would advise every reader to take certain accounts with a grain of salt. Not everything in Herodotus is accurate by a modern historian’s standard. His books often blend fact with legend—sometimes clearly stating that it is a legend, but at other times not. Some of his accounts are twisted by Greek prejudice; others contain scientific inaccuracies. The modern reader should be aware of these and read the books accordingly.

For instance, in Book II of The Histories, Herodotus reports on the existence of flying snakes in Egypt, getting there from the East. Now as far as we know, there was never any such thing as a flying snake. It must have been a legend which Herodotus believed because he did not know any better. And when, in addition to our scientific knowledge on the non-existence of flying snakes, archeologists tell us that they have found pictures of flying snakes on Egyptian monuments,[1] we have found a probable source for Herodotus’ account.

He simply followed common belief. This is quite excusable, since we often do the same. But it is, nonetheless, (as far as we know) scientifically inaccurate.

If we approach the books of the Bible in the same way that we approach Herodotus and we found a report of flying snakes there, we would have to draw the same conclusion that we did in Herodotus’ case. We cannot have a double standard. We cannot brand Herodotus’ account of the flying snakes as scientifically inaccurate, but explain the Bible’s account away. If one is scientifically inaccurate, so is the other.

Are there, then, biblical references to flying snakes in Egypt? Yes, there are. The prophet Isaiah writes: “Through a land of trouble and distress, of lioness and roaring lion, of viper and flying serpent, they carry their riches on the backs of donkeys, and their treasures on the humps of camels, to a people that cannot profit them. For Egypt’s help is worthless and empty, therefore I have called her, ‘Rahab who sits still’” (italics mine).[2]

From these verses we have to conclude that Isaiah, like Herodotus, held to the inaccurate belief that there are flying snakes. Otherwise he would not have included it in his oracle. This means that if the oracle was inspired by God, then God did not attempt to correct Isaiah’s false assumption about flying snakes.

One could, of course, also endeavor to explain the flying snakes by saying that they were another term for locusts or a similar flying animal. But the main point is that we have to interpret Isaiah the same way that we do Herodotus. And since I, at least, find the explanation most convincing that Egyptian paintings and a common belief suggested the flying snakes to Herodotus, I am forced to adopt the same explanation about Isaiah’s flying snakes.

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[1] See John Marincola’s notes on The Histories by Herodotus.

[2] Isaiah 30:6-7. The Hebrew word which is here rendered “flying” is עוּף (“oof”), which, as far as I understand with my limited grasp of the matter, quite clearly implies that the said serpents had wings. Some translations render it to mean “darting,” but such a translation seems to stem from the presupposition that the text cannot contain any scientific inaccuracies and therefore has to mean something reasonable.

The Reformation: Blessing or Curse?

Exactly 492 years ago, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg – or so Philipp Melanchthon tells us three decades later. This event is commonly seen as the spark that ignited the Reformation.

I’ve often asked myself whether the Reformation was mostly a curse or a blessing. Reformation was necessary at that time, yes, but the way it came about and all the horrors that followed …

I think it’s good to remember all of this and not celebrate Reformation Day as if it had been the only light after centuries of darkness. Such a picture, which is not unheard of in some Protestant circles, is certainly a very sad distortion of the past and does not bode well for the future.

A Brief History of Interpreting the Bible, Or: The Failure of the Historical Critical Method

Several Christians I know are still overly optimistic about the historical critical method of studying the Bible, without being willing to take the method to its logical conclusion. For those people, Prof. Dale Martin gives something to think about. Here’s a slightly edited transcript taken from one of his lectures:

Before the Reformation, basically the Bible was supposed to mean what the Catholic Church said it meant, what the Pope and bishops said it meant. The authority structure of the church was taken to be the way that you controlled wild interpretations.

People in the ancient world knew that you can interpret a text any way you want to. So what keeps heretics from interpreting this text in false ways? The institution of the church. So Ignatius said that you can’t just interpret scripture any you want to; you must be in agreement with your bishop. The rule of the bishop and the rule of the church was the way to keep control over the interpretation of the text.

Of course in the pre-Reformation time, you did have the rise of humanism and the Renaissance, which started questioning that a bit, and they started going back and looking at the original Hebrew, the original Greek, insisting that you should read these texts in their original languages and not just in Latin. That was before the Reformation. You already had this move toward history and reading the text in historical context in the humanist movement and the Renaissance.

With the Reformation, though, of course you really get it in the sixteenth century with Martin Luther, John Calvin, Melanchthon, different writers saying, “Well, we’re going to throw out this Catholic authority on the text. We’re going to get back to the text itself.” The only authority for the radical reformers was scripture. You know this as sola scriptura, scripture only; scripture only will be the guide for authority for Protestants.

Then they start realizing that different people can interpret scripture differently. They’re very familiar with medieval Christian ways of interpreting scripture to have several different meanings and layers of meanings. And so they say, “The predominant guide of scripture isn’t going to be just scripture; it’s going to be one particular meaning of scripture.” And that’s sensus literalis. The literal sense of scripture is what will be now the guide for the Reformation, not the Pope, not the bishops. Even the bishop must submit to the literal sense of scripture.

Now it’s rather debatable what they meant by “the literal sense” because some of these reformers said that the literal sense of scripture could even be a prophetic sense, so they still said that the literal sense of scripture could be in a Psalm when the Psalm says, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” They knew that the  text would be referring to the Davidic King, but they also said that Psalm also could refer to Jesus, even in its literal sense. The literal sense that they were talking about in the Reformation was not necessarily what we would call the historical critical sense. It was what they took it to be the most fundamental plain sense meaning of the text.

So that was the literal sense. Then again they realized the more they did this that Protestant churches started splitting all over the place. Presbyterians and Calvinists split off from the Lutherans, the Anabaptists split off from the Reformation. And then you have a rise of so many Protestant movements that the idea that scripture alone could settle debates and give you a foundation started becoming questionable.

Beginning somewhat in the eighteenth century but mainly in the nineteenth century, and mainly in German speaking lands, scholars started pushing the historical reading of the text. They said, “We’ve got to get down to what the author meant. What did the historical Paul mean? How did we discover that?” That’s when you have the rise of the dominance of the historical critical method. It was elaborated and invented in the nineteenth century, and in some places it was precisely invented in order to try to make the text of the New Testament and the Bible a firm foundation for doctrine and ethics within Protestantism and within the wide of varieties of different kinds of Protestantism.

Then the last part of this — just in the last, say, thirty years — is that people like me come along and say, “You know, it hasn’t worked. This attempt to use historical criticism, to settle disputes about the meaning of the text, doesn’t work.” Because even the historical critical method can render wildly varying interpretations of these texts.

So you’ve got some people reading Romans 1 as a condemnation of modern homosexuality and thinking they’re doing a good historical reading of this text. You’ve got other people who read the same text, using the same methods of historical criticism, and say, “Are you crazy? He’s not talking about homosexuality, that’s not his concern. It’s talking about idolatry or something else.”

Even scholars using the same method of historical criticism, trained in the same schools, getting degrees from the same places, come up with different interpretations of these texts. And that’s why you have right now a lot of questioning of this method as not supplying the firm foundations that Protestants originally thought it might.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

Before catching a flight to Switzerland yesterday, I stayed at a hostel in Derry just around the corner from the Bloody Sunday incident of 1972. Here are a few pictures of the murals in that part of town:

The Higher Naiveté

In the past weeks, I’ve been watching several Yale lectures, among them a course in ancient Greek history by Professor Donald Kagan. One of the things that caught my attention was his epistemological approach to history:

[T]here is this critical school that says, “I won’t believe anything unless it is proven to me.” At the other extreme, there’s me, the most gullible historian imaginable. My principle is this. I believe anything written in ancient Latin or Greek unless I can’t.

Now, things that prevent me from believing what I read are that they are internally contradictory, or what they say is impossible, or different ones contradict each other and they can’t both be right. So, in those cases I abandon the ancient evidence. Otherwise, you’ve got to convince me that they’re not true.

Now, you might think of this as, indeed, gullible. A former colleague of mine put the thing very, very well. He spoke about, and I like to claim this approach, the position of scholarship to which we call the higher naiveté.

The way this works is, you start out, you don’t know anything, and you’re naïve. You believe everything. Next, you get a college education and you don’t believe anything, and then you reach the level of wisdom, the higher naiveté, and you know what to believe even though you can’t prove it. Okay, be warned; I’m a practitioner of the higher naiveté.

So, I think the way to deal with legends is to regard them as different from essentially sophisticated historical statements, but as possibly deriving from facts, which have obviously been distorted and misunderstood, misused and so on. But it would be reckless, it seems to me, to just put them aside and not ask yourself the question, “Can there be something believable at the root of this?”

“An Ancient Superstition” – Suetonius on the Messianic Expecations of the Jews

I’ve been reading The Twelve Caesers this week, written AD 121 by the Roman historian Suetonius. For me, one of the most interesting passages was his mention of the Messianic expectations of the Jews in connection with the Jewish revolt in the late 60s AD:

An ancient superstition was current in the East, that out of Judaea at this time would come the rulers of the world. This prediction, as the event later proved, referred to a Roman Emperor, but the rebellious Jews, who read it as referring to themselves, murdered their Governor, routed the Governor of Syria when he came down to restore order, and captured an Eagle. …

Why Martin Luther Added the Word “by Faith ALONE” to His Translation

Recently, I was surprised to find that Luther added the word “by faith ALONE” not for theological reasons but for linguistic reasons. That’s at least what he says in the following text. (This continues a previous post. Read it here.)

For you and our people, however, I shall show why I used the word “sola”–even though in Romans 3 it wasn’t “sola” I used but “solum” or “tantum”. That is how closely those asses have looked at my text! However, I have used “sola fides” in other places, and I want to use both “solum” and “sola”.

I have continually tried translating in a pure and accurate German. It has happened that I have sometimes searched and inquired about a single word for three or four weeks. Sometimes I have not found it even then. I have worked Meister Philip and Aurogallus so hard in translating Job, sometimes barely translating 3 lines after four days. Now that it has been translated into German and completed, all can read and criticize it.

One can now read three or four pages without stumbling one time–without realizing just what rocks and hindrances had once been where now one travels as as if over a smoothly-cut plank. We had to sweat and toil there before we removed those rocks and hindrances, so one could go along nicely. The plowing goes nicely in a clear field. But nobody wants the task of digging out the rocks and hindrances. There is no such thing as earning the world’s thanks. Even God cannot earn thanks, not with the sun, nor with heaven and earth, or even the death of his Son. It just is and remains as it is, in the devil’s name, as it will not be anything else.

I also know that in Rom. 3, the word “solum” is not present in either Greek or Latin text–the papists did not have to teach me that–it is fact! The letters s-o-l-a are not there. And these knotheads stare at them like cows at a new gate, while at the same time they do not recognize that it conveys the sense of the text–if the translation is to be clear and accurate, it belongs there. I wanted to speak German since it was German I had spoken in translation–not Latin or Greek.

But it is the nature of our language that in speaking about two things, one which is affirmed, the other denied, we use the word “solum” only along with the word “not” (nicht) or “no” (kein). For example, we say “the farmer brings only (allein) grain and no money”; or “No, I really have no money, but only (allein) grain”; “I have only eaten and not yet drunk”; “Did you write it only and not read it over?” There are a vast number of such everyday cases.

In all these phrases, this is a German usage, even though it is not the Latin or Greek usage. It is the nature of the German tongue to add “allein” in order that “nicht” or “kein” may be clearer and more complete. To be sure, I can also say “The farmer brings grain and no (kein) money”, but the words “kein money” do not sound as full and clear as if I were to say, “the farmer brings allein grain and kein money.” Here the word “allein” helps the word “kein” so much that it becomes a clear and complete German expression.

“An Ass Does Not Have to Sing” – Martin Luther on Translating the Bible, Part III

I continue with Luther’s  defense (often slipping into biting polemics) of his Bible translation, particularly in relation to his phrase “by faith alone”:

Returning to the issue at hand, if your Papist wishes to make a great fuss about the word “alone” (sola), say this to him: “Dr. Martin Luther will have it so and he says that a papist and an ass are the same thing.” Sic volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. (I will it, I command it; my will is reason enough) For we are not going to become students and followers of the papists. Rather we will become their judge and master.

We, too, are going to be proud and brag with these blockheads; and just as St. Paul brags against his madly raving saints, I will brag over these asses of mine! They are doctors? Me too. They are scholars? I am as well. They are philosophers? And I. They are dialecticians? I am too. They are lecturers? So am I. They write books? So do I.

I will go even further with my bragging: I can exegete the psalms and the prophets, and they cannot. I can translate, and they cannot. I can read Holy Scriptures, and they cannot. I can pray, they cannot. Coming down to their level, I can do their dialectics and philosophy better than all of them put together. Plus I know that not one of them understands Aristotle. If, in fact, any one of them can correctly understand one part or chapter of Aristotle, I will eat my hat!

No, I am not overdoing it for I have been educated in and have practiced their science since my childhood. I recognize how broad and deep it is. They, too, know that everything they can do, I can do. Yet they handle me like a stranger in their discipline, these incurable fellows, as if I had just arrived this morning and had never seen or heard what they know and teach. How they do so brilliantly parade around with their science, teaching me what I grew beyond twenty years ago!

To all their shouting and screaming I join the harlot in singing: “I have known for seven years that horseshoe nails are iron.” So this can be the answer to your first question. Please do not give these asses any other answer to their useless braying about that word “sola” than simply “Luther will have it so, and he says that he is a doctor above all the papal doctors.”

Let it remain at that. I will, from now on, hold them in contempt, and have already held them in contempt, as long as they are the kind of people that they are–asses, I should say. And there are brazen idiots among them who have never learned their own art of sophistry–like Dr. Schmidt and Snot-Nose, and such like them. They set themselves against me in this matter, which not only transcends sophistry, but as St. Paul writes, all the wisdom and understanding in the world as well. An ass truly does not have to sing much as he is already known for his ears.