Jesus and the Israelite Scriptures

Over two years ago we concluded Messy Revelation by stating:

The old models of exegesis--coded messages that are uncovered and interpreted by exegetes using grammar, allegory, typology, etc.,--are attempts to house train God, to make his self revelation in Jesus conform to a pattern that is comfortable for men. But is it reasonable that we should expect this of God? Enns' answer, if I may extend his logic somewhat, is or should be, No. We should expect, rather, that revelation should be "somewhat messy." For the reason that reality, and above all human life, is "somewhat messy." Enns, of course, is following his Protestant (Judaizing--h/t Spengler) model of revelation, by which God "speaks to man through Scripture," but he realizes that that is not the whole story. Not by half. For, "in much the same way: he enters into our world and uses our own cultural patterns to reveal himself." Here, unfortunately, Enns is still trapped within the notion of God's self revelation in Jesus having been accomplished through a collection of books that we call the New Testament, rather than in the very personal reality of Jesus of Nazareth. For the Christian, Jesus IS revelation, and all else, including Scripture, can only be "revelation" in a secondary sense. This must be the beginning of exegesis. And as a start we must seek to determine Jesus' own understanding of how to deal with "scripture."

We are now in a position to follow up on the project we defined as central to development of a theory of revelation: What was Jesus' own understanding of “scripture?” To answer that question we will look at how Jesus made use of the Israelite scriptures. That is, we will examine how the Gospels portray Jesus' use of those scriptures when speaking in his own voice, as opposed to how the evangelists use the Israelite scriptures when reflecting on the meaning of Jesus' life, death and resurrection.

It has become something of a truism to state that the early Christian writings we now know as the New Testament reflect the “theologies” of their authors. Some would, in fact, argue that that is all we have--that it is impossible to separate out a “theology of Jesus” as distinct from that of the early Christian authors or to distinguish the original words that Jesus spoke from the theologizing of the evangelists. While we do not minimize the difficulties involved and do not claim that a completely definitive account can be given, our reading of the Gospels convinces us that the distinction between the “theologies” of Jesus and of the evangelists is both valid and significant. Moreover, we are convinced that differing approaches to the use of the Israelite scriptures lies at the heart of that distinction. Thus, this undertaking will shed light on the "original voice" of Jesus.

Israel and Revelation

What follows is the text of an email I sent some years ago.  Since it constitutes in many respects the outline of a theory of revelation it seemed appropriate to post a lightly edited version of it.

Sometimes I recommend books more for the ideas and issues that they raise than for the actual solutions that they offer. With regard to Mircea Eliade's work, I see his importance as due to his formulation of what he calls the "ontology" of archaic man (the man of "traditional" cultures), the ontology of archetypes and repetition. Of particular importance, in my view, is that he recognizes that the strand of Western thought known by the Greek term "philosophy" is, in fact, derived from this archaic ontology--as of course is the advanced thought of other cultures as well. This, I believe, provides the indispensable framework for any theoretical understanding of man in history.

Original Sin: The Later Fathers

J. N. D. Kelly resumes his discussion of original sin in Chapter XIII of Early Christian Doctrines, “Fallen Man and God's Grace.” Having dealt with the earlier Fathers, up to the 3^rd Century, he now turns to the later Fathers. He once again contrasts the relative optimism of the Greek Fathers with the decidedly pessimistic Western view of man, especially the Augustinian tradition that was passed on to the Western Middle Ages. He then notes the unsettled state of opinion regarding the origin of the soul. Early Christians were in general agreement that man is composed of body and soul, but there was some disagreement on the specifics. The opinion of most of the Greek Fathers--that the soul for each individual is created by God at the moment that the body is ensouled--ultimately won the day.

That, however, was not at the time a universal opinion. We have seen that Origen—an influential figure—held that the soul pre-existed the body and was attached to a body as punishment for sins that were committed by the soul in its pre-existing state, i.e., before being “assigned” to a body. This was definitely a minority opinion, but was not formally condemned until the 6^th Century. Hilary, Ambrose (d. 397) and Jerome all accepted the dominant Greek view, which was to become the orthodox view in both East and West. Pelagius (d. 420), of course, also held that view.

There was also a third view, the traducian view of Tertullian, which held that the soul of the offspring is somehow generated from the souls of the parents. Tertullian, as we have seen, held a materialist view of human nature. In the East, Kelly notes (345) that Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) seemed to share something like Tertullian's view, for he argued (against Origen) to the effect that the soul comes into being simultaneously with the body but that “the power of God work[ed] mysteriously on the human sperm to change it into a precious living being.”

However, by far the most important figure who tended toward Tertullian's views was Augustine (d. 430). While Augustine never fully made his mind up on the matter, and while he was critical of Tertullian's materialist views, he also realized that “a spiritual version of the same theory [traducianism] fitted in best with his teaching about original sin.” (345)

Early Christian Thought on Original Sin

We have seen (in Paul and the Yetzer Ha-Ra) that in Second Temple Judaism—the period during which the Genesis Adam and Eve narrative was written—there was no sense that this narrative had to do with a “Fall” of man based on an “original" sin. Rather, the narrative was intended to express the experience of the human condition in all its frailty and imperfection. The Judaic concept of the origin of human sin was instead expressed through the metaphor of the evil and good impulses in man, the yetzer ha-ra and the yetzer ha tov. By this view man is subject to both good impulses as well as purely natural impulses that, if embraced in a turning away from God, constituted a type of self worship that defined sinfulness. Habitual yielding to this impulse involved mankind in a downward spiral of sin, as described graphically by Paul in his Letter to the Romans.

Paul and the Yetzer Ha-Ra

W. D. Davies devotes Chapter 2 (“The Old Enemy: The Flesh And Sin,” 17-35) of his classic Paul and Rabbinic Judaism to an examination of the role in Pauline thought of the rabbinic doctrine of good and bad “tendencies” (Heb. yetzer) in human nature. (We should note that Davies uses the term “rabbinic” in a somewhat anachronistic sense since, at the time of Paul, Judaism was still in the Second Temple period and had not yet entered the Rabbinic period. Properly speaking, Rabbinic Judaism become dominant over the period from the 2nd to the 6th centuries AD. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that the roots of Rabbinic Judaism are to be found in the earlier Second Temple period.)

Davies begins his inquiry from the assertion of some earlier scholars that the Pauline opposition of “flesh” and “spirit” (sarx/pneuma) reflects a Hellenistic, dualist influence that is foreign to Israelite thought. Davies dismisses this argument, noting that in Hellenist thought the body/soul dichotomy is never expressed in terms of “flesh/spirit,” whereas Paul's use of such key concepts as psyche, kardia and pneuma (soul, heart, spirit) closely tracks the usage of the Israelite scriptures: nephesh, leb, ruach. In contrast, in later Israelite writings the Hebrew word for sarx/flesh, basar, is used to express:

Trinity and Revelation

Chapter Nine, “The Church and the Kingdom of God,” in Charles Norris Cochrane's classic study, Christianity and Classical Culture, contains a discussion of issues that hold great interest for us and that we have already touched upon..

Cochrane begins by observing that, for the fourth century Church, the vision of the Kingdom was of “a society regenerated by the acceptance of Christian truth.” (359) As we have seen—and this is a point that we will return to in greater detail--the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity was seen to solve many of the theoretical problems inherent not only in the more traditional expressions of the archaic ontology but also those problems that were raised by the Platonic elaboration of that ontology: “philosophy,” especially in its Neoplatonic form. (As we have already seen, the Arian heresy can be viewed as a Neoplatonizing version of Christianity, and so involves the same issues.) That being the case, the Christians considered that their faith held the key to all truth, and that those aspects of truth which they found in pagan thought could be “baptized,” subsumed under the superior theoretical insight of Trinitarian thought. It was thus true to say, from this standpoint, that “all truth is Christian truth” and that Christian truth is human truth--the truth of and for all men. As Cochrane states, the function of this Christian universalism was “to heal the wounds inflicted by man on himself in classical times and, by transcending while still doing justice to the elements of truth contained in philosophical paganism, to revive and give direction to the expiring spiritual ideals of classical antiquity.” (360)

The Identity of God: Trinity

The Christian embrace of monotheism and creation ex nihilo was not an entirely straightforward development. While the overall direction was clear enough from the start, there were indications that the end was not a foregone conclusion. For example, Origen, whom Gilson credits in his monumental History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages with the clearest presentation of creation ex nihilo, in fact held that the cosmos is eternal. A god who creates an eternal world on a Neoplatonic model is problematic at best, from a Christian perspective, since the entire conception has its origin in the Greek view of the gods and man as parts of one organic whole. And Charles Norris Cochrane, in his classic study, Christianity and Classical Culture, notes that both Clement of Alexandria and Origen exhibit a fundamental Neoplatonic influence:

Creation Ex Nihilo In Early Christian Thought

Our position is that creation ex nihilo is a fundamental insight into the structure of reality and that it is essentially unique to Israelite religion.  This insight stands as opposed to the conception of origins in traditional thought (Eliade's "archaic ontology"), which portrayed the origins as a shaping of preexisting matter by a god or gods. This insight did not develop from Israel's roots in archaic ontology until relatively late in the pre-Christian history of Israelite thought—shortly before the time of Jesus. Further, we will contend that creation ex nihilo became absolutely fundamental to Christian thought from its earliest times.

In reviewing the New Testament evidence, we pointed out that these early writers were primarily concerned with the person of Jesus and the significance of his life and message. Nevertheless, we concluded that the Christian view of God's basic identity--from Apostolic times--focused on God as Creator and that this view had turned decisively toward an explicit doctrine of creation ex nihilo. We will now survey the evidence from the early Christian writers of the first three centuries, in support of our contention that the idea of creation ex nihilo had a fundamental, formative influence on the early development of Christian thought, setting it on a course which it has followed ever since.

The Identity of God: Creator

We have followed Mark Smith's study of the development of monotheism in Israelite religion and have seen that monotheism eventually developed under the pressure of historical challenges to the continued survival of Israelite political entities. In the face of the overwhelming might of the Mesopotamian and, later, Hellenistic World Empires, Israelite thinkers engaged in a type of ideological warfare in which Yahweh—previously a national god, one of many in the West Semitic pantheon under the fatherhood of El—developed into the supreme god and eventually the only god. However, this ideological victory of Yahweh did not save the Israelite kingdoms in historical existence and it therefore became necessary to articulate the ultimate vindication of Yahweh's people as a future event. We summarized Smith's account as follows:

Eliade: From Theogony to Philosophy

While Frank Moore Cross' account of the transition from archaic ontology is more theoretically complete, including a fuller account of the relationship between the theogonic and the cosmogonic gods and myths (see here and here), in Myth and Reality (1963) Mircea Eliade offers his own analysis of this important issue in his characteristically compressed style. Eliade's focus is on the process of demythicization and the survival of myth in "philosophy."

Eliade begins by referring to the process by which the “olden gods,” the Creator gods, lose their place in the cult and become marginalized, replaced by the young storm and warrior gods, such as Ba'l, Marduk, Zeus and later Yahweh.

Even when his name is still remembered—Anu of the Mesopotamians, El of the Canaanites, Dyaus of the Vedic Indians, Ouranos of the Greeks—the Supreme Being no longer plays an important role in religious life and is but little represented in mythology. The passivity of Ouranos as deus otiosus is plastically expressed by his castration... El yields the primacy to Ba'al as Anu does to Marduk. Except for Marduk, all these Supreme Gods are no longer “creative” in the active sense. They did not create the World, they only organized it and assumed the responsibility for maintaining order and fertility in it.. Primarily, they are Fecundators, like Zeus or Ba'al who, by their hierogamies with the Earth goddesses ensure the fertility of the fields and the abundance of harvests. (109)

The result of the replacement of the Creator god is that attention in myth is shifted from the ultimate origins to the activities of these young gods:

The accent is now on what happened to the Gods and no longer on what they created. To be sure, there is always a more or less clearly “creative” aspect in every divine adventure—but what appears more and more important is no longer the result of the adventure but the sequence of dramatic events that constitute it. The countless adventures of Ba'al, of Zeus, of Indra, or those of their colleagues in the respective pantheons, represent the most “popular” mythological themes. (110)

This state of affairs proved unsatisfying and even unedifying to the elite thinkers. This is most evident in Greece and in India (Eliade neglects to mention the Israelite prophets), but it is attested in many other societies to varying degrees. The result is the process of demythicization that we have already discussed, which leads to a paradoxical conclusion:

The Early Development of Greek Thought

Demythicization—a term that Mircea Eliade uses—was a movement that gained significant cultural momentum in Greece. Eliade uses this term to refer primarily to the intellectual reaction against the literary myths concerning the gesta of the cosmogonic gods--the young gods. Whereas the cultic devotions of popular Greek religion dated to time immemorial, an intellectual elite began to view the adventures and misadventures of the young gods, especially in their more purely literary elaborations, as unseemly and absurd. Increasingly attempts were made, beginning with the Ionian thinkers of Asia Minor, to find a single unifying principle for the cosmos. Their efforts of these thinkers are characterized by intellectual passion and reforming zeal, including the rejection of mythical accounts of the gods. Nevertheless, as we will see, their thought remains clearly linked to the archaic ontology. 

The same is true of the rejection of the “pagan idols” by certain of the Israelite "prophetic" thinkers. Their scorn for "idols" was directed at deities such as Ba'l and the mother goddesses, who were the Israelite/Middle Eastern counterparts to the cosmogonic young gods of Greece--Zeus and the Olympians. Initially we find Yahweh subsuming the roles of all other gods, including winning the cosmic victory over Leviathan the sea monster. However, these mythic allusions to Yahweh's past as a fairly conventional Middle Eastern storm and warrior god gradually atrophy into literary convention that appears to lack cultural roots, as the intellectuals develop a “higher” conception of divinity (cf., especially, our discussion of Mark Smith's work on these topics.). On the other hand, the 'olden gods' of the theogonic myth, who made the world in illo tempore, continue under various guises in Israelite thought. Of special importance, in Genesis 1 we find water and breath/wind/spirit, the unformed and earth, light/dark, day/night together with God “in the beginning.” But for the Israelite thinkers God with his word is master of all that exists; God is seen as a person, but one with no generative origin, who is increasingly seen to be independent of the universe. The Greek thinkers, on the other hand, accept almost as a given that the cosmos is part of an eternal process that is all embracing and includes both the gods and the world of men in one cosmos.

In contrast with the “attenuated” survival of the olden gods in Israelite thought, the pairs of theogonic gods played a more central role in Greek thought in the development of what we now call philosophy. Frank Moore Cross contrasted the Greek “transformation” of theogony into cosmology with the Israelite transformation of theogony into the “monotheistic creation story of Genesis 1.” As Cross recognized, the Genesis 1 account functions as a cosmology, but it differs from the Greek cosmology in that Yahweh is not world immanent in the manner of the Greek gods—and ultimately Yahweh became a truly creative god. In contrast, the Greek thinkers sought among the older theogonic gods for a principle or source of the cosmos, be it “water,” “air,” “the boundless,” “fire,” “being,” etc. As Cross notes:

It is not by chance that in the proto-philosophical speculations of the pre-Socratics of the Milesian school, lists of opposites played a fundamental role. One thinks particularly of the pairs cold (wind/air) and hot (fire), wet (water) and dry (earth), which separate out of the substratum 'the Unbounded' (apeiron) in the thought of Anaximander. The abstraction vividly reflected in the theogonic genre of gods no doubt gave impetus to philosophical abstraction and classification. In any case, the linkage and continuity between theogonic speculation and cosmological speculation of the Milesian school is difficult to deny. As for the substratum of Thales (primordial water [Chaos]), of Anaximander (the Unbounded [apeiron]), and of Anaximines (air-wind-vapor), all are found in the theogonies of Phoenicia and Egypt. (81)

The difference between the Greek and Israelite thought—for there is a difference and it is a great difference—is that Israelite thought led in Christianity to a focus on the very being of these theogonic realities, their act of existing, whereas Greek thought focused on their conceptual content. In this sense, as Eliade wrote, Plato truly remains the great philosopher of archaic ontology, a profoundly conservative figure, whereas Thomas Aquinas is the thinker who develops the latent tendencies of Israelite thought to their fullest potential.

Frank Moore Cross: Theogony, Cosmogony and Philosophy

Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic

We have previously had occasion to note the distinction that Frank Moore Cross draws between two types of creation myths: theogony and cosmogony. Cross first addressed this distinction in his classic Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (CMHE, 1968). Cosmogonic myths are those that deal with the establishment of the world order, and the cosmogonic gods are those that feature in cultic worship (the Olympian gods, for example). In the ancient Middle East, from Egypt to Mesopotamia—but also including the Greeks--cosmogonic myths took the characteristic form of a struggle in which a young generation of gods overcame the “olden gods” and as a result of this victory established the world order and, most especially, kingship both among the gods and among men. (The relation of the cosmogonic creation myth to Eliade's archaic ontology is clear.)