Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Bible Commentary

  • A Rant about Study Bibles

    A Rant about Study Bibles

    Study Bibles Galore!
    Despite my dislike, all these Bibles were within arm’s reach of my desk

    I dislike study Bibles. I almost said I hate them, but since I do tolerate some of them, that would be overstating the case.

    My problem with them is that they tend to blur the distinction between the text that we’re studying and the commentary made about it.

    I have managed to keep my annoyance under control by dividing these Bibles into two classes. The first class is those that present historical and technical data as an aid to the reader. This information is much like what would be found in a Bible handbook, but it is conveniently presented within the same covers as the Bible text. I still would prefer a separate Bible handbook, but I understand the value.

    There are still differences in the material presented. What editors choose as the most relevant material to be included in limited space is going to be determined to some extent by their philosophy and view of scripture. Someone who studies the Bible from a secular viewpoint, as history, will be largely interested in the historical context; someone who reads the Bible as the church’s literature will be more interested in theological connections. Both of these items may be valuable to the reader.

    Because of the limitations of space, it’s usually not possible to cover a text from all angles, or to provide a wide variety of information that relates to interpretation. So if a Bible student becomes tied too closely to a particular study Bible, which can happen quite easily if it’s the Bible that person carries to church, their perspectives will be limited.

    So I’m uncomfortable with these Bibles, but I understand their purpose, and believe that if used appropriately they can be valuable.

    But there’s a second class of study Bible. I encountered a number of them over the last couple of days as I looked for a Bible to giveaway at 2014 Reimagine Santa Rosa County. (We ended up using the NLT Study Bible, which I think is one of the better study Bibles, though its notes reflect somewhat more conservative views than mine.) But on the way to buying that Bible, I had to wade through dozens of editions of Bibles with notes by one person. The So-and-So Study Bible. It just doesn’t work for me.

    I believe that teachers and scholars are important. I don’t have a problem with commentaries. I don’t mind study guides (I even publish a few.) I would like to see people have the goal of getting to the point where they study the Bible text directly. Use commentaries for backup. Compare notes with others. But get to the text.

    In my experience there’s a very real tendency to confuse the interpretations in the notes of such Bibles with the text itself. I recall one man who showed up for a series I was teaching on Revelation with a Jack Van Impe Prophecy Bible. I didn’t mind being challenged by Jack Van Impe’s views. Actually, I don’t find them very challenging. But for this man, what that Bible said a text meant was precisely what the text meant. You couldn’t get him to discuss the text itself. He would only quote the notes.

    Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. One lady called me aside in the church hallway with a question. She had read a text and then read the notes, and she couldn’t see how the writer of the note got that interpretation from the text. She assumed she must be wrong, since the note writers were so much more educated about the Bible than she was, but could I please explain. Actually, I thought the note was wrong. I explained to her how the writers might have gotten their interpretation and then explained why I disagreed, and suggested she spend more time with the text and less with the notes.

    While I’m uncomfortable with study Bibles generally, I really can’t see the purpose in the study Bible written by an individual. I think it points away from the text and toward a single expert’s opinion. I think that’s bad.

    Well, maybe I nuanced my rant a bit …

     

  • On Interpreting Hebrews 6:1-8

    David Allen has an excellent series of posts on this passage (HT: David Alan Black), which I think is the key to the entire book. I am, of course, especially impressed with the fact that much of what he says is compatible with the way I believe the passage should be interpreted!

    Agree or disagree, I think one must admit this is exceptionally well written and reasoned.

    I will doubtless acquire a copy of his commentary on Hebrews in the New American Commentary Series [Hebrews: 35 (New American Commentary)].

     

  • One Law for Yourselves and for the Alien (Numbers 15:16) – An Exercise in Application

    The Pentateuch is one key source for Christian debates about the treatment of aliens (especially illegal aliens) here in the United States. There are a number of commands that might apply, and they are interpreted differently, or perhaps seen as applicable or inapplicable, by the different sides in fairly predictable ways.

    For example, Leviticus 19:34 – “Like a citizen shall the Ger who is living (cognate of Ger) among you be to you, and you shall love/befriend him as yourself, for you were Gerim (pl) in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God” (My literal translation). On the one hand it seems rather clear. The Israelites were instructed not to mistreat the non-citizens living among them. They were to treat them well. Milgrom notes that “…‘ãhab is related to its semantic cognates in the diplomatic vocabulary of ancient Near Eastern treaties which denote fidelity and loyalty pledged by a vassal to his suzerain as well as the reciprocal obligations of support owed by the suzerain to the vassal.” Thus the treatment of the foreigner was in a sense guaranteed as part of the covenant, as Israel’s obligation to God. This didn’t refer to an emotional response, but to lawful and principled treatment. (I commend to you all of Milgrom’s comments on the word “ger” in his Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, The Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 2000, 1416-1420.)

    So the first approach might be to simply transfer the command to the present. The Israelites were commanded to do this. God must think it’s a good idea. We should do the same thing. We would, of course, have to deal with details such as what today would constitute a ger, or resident alien, and the differences in borders and how they were handled then as opposed to now.

    Of course, we are not Israel, we were not guided out of Egypt where we were once slaves, though we use those experiences as metaphors for elements in our spiritual lives. So this is also very clearly a command given to Israel. It may be applicable to us in principle, but it is not directed at us as gentiles. Thus one approach to application would be to say that it doesn’t apply to us at all.

    Another approach is to deal with the niggling detail of defining what a ger would be in our society. Perhaps such a person is only a legal alien who has established residency. In that case, the text would have nothing to do with any illegal aliens at all.

    I like to test people by asking them to apply Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 19:33-34. Very few people apply both equally. Generally they apply one but explain around the other. It’s an interesting test of your hermeneutics (the way you interpret scripture). Look at these two texts and ask if either or both of them apply to people in the church today. Why or why not?

    The text that I was reading this morning, however, was Numbers 15:16 – “There will be one torah and one mishpat for you and for the ger who is living among you” (again my literal translation). Milgrom (op. cit.) identifies torah here as religious law and mishpat as civil law. The principle is again very clear, in my view. This puts in to practice the “love” that is commanded in Leviticus 19:34. By applying the principles and particular commands of the covenant to the foreigners living among them, the Israelites were obeying that command.

    In practice, it turned out that foreigners weren’t subject to precisely the same religious laws. It was quite possible to adjust provide specific exceptions that derived from the fact that they were not Israelites and therefore lacked some of the obligations of Israelites. Note that the gerim were given relief from some laws. No extra requirements were imposed on them.

    Again, quite clearly this command is not giving to us as modern Christians living in America. I would, however, suggest that it expresses a principle and gives us an idea of God’s intention. It’s an application itself of the principles contained in the golden rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you.

    There are a number of things this leaves unanswered, but I think that this same question would apply in our Christian answer to each of these questions. Who should be able to come through our borders and settle and work here? Does it mandate open borders? I don’t think it answers that question and the nature of borders in the time of Israel was much different from what it is now. What about children born in our country of people living here illegally? Again, it isn’t explicit, because it doesn’t speak to a time when such a thing could occur. The person who was in Israel living and working was a ger, and the law would apply to him. For a certain number of generations, his children would be gerim, and the law would apply to them. We now have a legal situation in which someone can be a legal resident alien or, on the other hand, be an alien and residing but not legal.

    I can see a number of ways to apply the law there, but at a minimum, I think it would mandate that we treat not just fairly but generously those whose situation is not of their own making, as in the children of illegal aliens.

    What I do not think is that this passage mandates an immigration policy. Israel’s law provides us with principles and those principles are reiterated in other contexts by Jesus. (Jesus didn’t experience an immigration situation. The resident aliens of his day were generally in charge!) These principles are primarily applicable to each of us in the way we personally treat others, but I think they would also be applicable in the way we act in society as well.

  • The Bible Gives No New Science Revelations

    My title is slightly modified from No Scientific Revelation in the Bible, posted by RJS at Jesus Creed, with links in turn to work by John Walton. I think this is an important point.

    My argument since I was an undergraduate just trying to work my way through these issues, has been that if you can easily explain terminology used in terms of the cosmology of the time there is no adequate reason to try to read modern ideas into the text.

    Some find every reference that might just allow them to sneak advanced scientific revelation into the text and try to claim that as evidence that the Bible writers had some advanced knowledge. But unless one makes a claim that is clearly different from what was commonly believed about the way the world works, and that claim matches later knowledge, there’s no basis to assume advanced revelation.

    The Bible speaks within the world of its original hearers and readers. That shouldn’t be a problem for us. That is precisely what it should do. It’s our function to carry on the story in our world as we know it. Should the world carry on for so long, in another couple of millenia other people, who may know as much more about how the universe functions as we do compared to the ancients, will be telling the story within their context and their knowledge.

    God didn’t intend to provide a science textbook, or a crib sheet for scientific advancement. I can make this claim because if God did try to do such a thing, it was a miserable failure. I prefer not to call God a miserable failure.

  • Daniel Wallace on Manuscripts of Q

    There’s a great moment in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the book, not sure about the movie) when the truly incredible synthesizer on the ship is trying to produce tea. The results? Something almost, but not quite totally unlike tea.

    Daniel Wallace asks whether manuscripts of Q still exist, and prefaces his answer with:

    A favorite argument against the existence of Q is simply that no manuscripts of Q have ever been discovered. No more than this bare assertion is usually made. But a little probing shows that this argument has some serious weaknesses to it.

    He does make some good points regarding the likelihood that Q would continue to be copied if it was absorbed into Matthew and Luke as well as the scarcity of manuscripts dating from the first or even early second century. Thus, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. One always needs to qualify that little line by noting that if there is an event that would definitely leave evidence, and that evidence is absent, that absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.

    Having now tried to attain a record for the use of “evidence” and “absence” in a single paragraph, let me move on to the technical content. Dr. Wallace presents us with eight papyri containing just portions of the gospel of Luke and suggests it’s hypothetically possible that at least one or two of these are actually papyri of Q.

    He continues by presenting all the reasons one might reject that hypothesis with respect to a particular manuscript, and what happens next might be described as the case of the mysteriously vanishing evidence. One manuscript of these eight remains after the sifting, and Dr. Wallace’s conclusion hardly seems conclusive:

    Altogether, the evidence thus far presented can hardly be said to build confidence that any missing Q fragments have actually been discovered.

    You know, that’s what I thought before I read his post, so what’s this “has serious weaknesses” thing of which he speaks?

    I do not absolutely reject Q myself. I have simply become less and less confident that it existed. I started on this path reading the works of William R. Farmer, and most recently when my own company published Why Four Gospels? by David Alan Black.

    I still feel that the redaction theories for Mark that I’ve encountered are less than convincing. But my confidence in Markan priority and the existence of Q has still been seriously weakened.

     

  • Biblical Studies Carnival Posted

    … at Dust. It’s quite a carnival. I’m pretty sure I won’t manage to read even decent percentage of the posts listed and classified. Great job!

     

  • A Note on Hebrews 1:3 (Orthodox Study Bible)

    I’ve said enough negative things about the Orthodox Study Bible that I need to mention when I find it quite helpful as well. Generally, this is when it is either quoting or referring to various church fathers.

    In the note on Hebrew 1:3a, “who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person …”

    The first half of v. 3 is quoted verbatim in the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great. The brightness of His glory expresses the Son’s nature, His origin from and identity of nature with the Father. He is the Father’s brightness because He is begotten from the Father beyond time and without change. Thus, the Nicene Creed speaks of “Light of Light.” As the sun does not exist without radiating light, so the Father does not exist without the Son (p. 1653, on Hebrews 1:3).

    I particularly liked the last sentence. It’s hard to use analogies for the trinity without falling into one or another heresy, but this one does a great deal. The note goes on to state that the “express image” speaks of the Son as distinct from the Father, thus bringing together the two elements of the incarnation—one with the Father and yet with us, truly an icon of God.

  • Biblical Studies Carnival Posted

    … at Sansblogue, and an excellent and fun carnival it is. It even includes a link to this very blog, which is unusual for the Biblical Studies Carnival.

  • Interactive Covenants and Prophecies or God Has a Plan B

    It’s interesting to me how we (and I definitely include myself) often read scripture. One concept can easily override another. For example, I recall a conversation in which someone was claiming that no human being was ever righteous. I brought up Job, who is described as righteous in Job 1. “Oh, but that is only as he was seen through the righteousness of Christ,” I was told. Of course, Job 1 isn’t speaking of the righteousness of Christ, and in fact the entire book would be very silly with that change. Job is concerned that he has been punished, but that nothing he has done deserves these results.

    This post is a follow-up to Psalm 89: When Eternal Doesn’t Last, and you should read that post first.

    It’s funny that I begin this post with an illustration from Job, because Job provides a counterpoint to the theology I’m looking at. Jeremiah 18, which I cited in the previous post, talks about how if God is sending disaster, and the recipients of the disaster repent, God will repent of that disaster. One implication that might be drawn is that good deeds result in blessing, and bad deeds result in curses. One need look no further than Deuteronomy 28 to find this theology made explicit, and it is repeatedly hammered in through the various books of the Deuteronomic history.

    But what I’m more interested in here is the interactive nature of the texts, the way in which people’s actions are woven in with God’s will with the implication that you can change the future. Even if God has said things will go one way, that might be changed through human action.

    In theology we tend to reconcile the differences in some way. God might only appear to react to the actions of humans, but he actually knows precisely what is coming and he does precisely what he planned. It may be considered blasphemous to suggest otherwise. But open theism and process theology both suggest that God is more interactive than traditional theology holds, though to different degrees and in different ways.

    My interest here is in the way we read the biblical text, and the way that we understand prophecy and its fulfilment. I’ll get to the covenants shortly.

    Imagine a father who tells his children that he will take them all to the movies in the evening. Now think about the father’s mental processes. Did he suddenly realize that in the fixed future he would have taken his children to the movies, and thus he informed them of this information he had received (or divined, perhaps)? Or did he decide at this moment that he wanted to take his children to the movies, and that he would, in fact, do so this very evening?

    Given that this human father does not know the future, such as to see himself taking future action, we’ll have to assume the latter. He makes a decision in the present, and he announces it to his children by saying, “I’m going to take you to the movies.” At the point at which he makes that statement it’s true. Being an optimistic sort, this particular father doesn’t think of all the possible reasons he might not make it or might change his mind. He just says he’s going.

    Let’s imagine now that the children, having heard of their good fortune, decide that nothing else matters. They fail to do their chores. They ignore their mother. The fail to put away their toys. They say unfortunate things. In fact, they generally make life miserable for their parents.

    Now the father says, “Because you have been misbehaving, we are not going to the movies any more.” Does this make his earlier statement a lie? It was true (at least in intent) when he said it, but it does not actually take place.

    My suggestion is that prophecies are more like this father’s statement than they are like scenes which one might see in a crystal ball. (If crystal balls worked, which they don’t!) When God says “Nineveh will be destroyed in 40 days,” he doesn’t mean that he has observed the future and seen that this happens, but rather that he intends, in 40 days, to destroy Nineveh. That’s clearly the way the Ninevites understand it. It’s the way Jonah is afraid it’s going to work.

    I’m not certain how much difference there is between these two ways of thinking when it is God making the promises or predictions. It makes a great deal of difference in the way we think about what God has to say.

    Now we come to covenant, and I’d like to call our attention to Jeremiah 31:31-34:

    31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (NRSV)

    (Note: I would use “lawful lord” rather than “husband” in this passage, but that gets beyond the scope of this blog post.)

    There are a few things to notice about this passage. First, the covenant came with promises (or are they predictions?). Does this make a difference? There are conditions. It is by violating these conditions that the covenant is broken. Once broken, the covenant is not in effect.

    Then comes the unheard of grace—a new covenant. It’s not a restoration of an old covenant. That one has been broken, and as we learned in Psalm 89, no matter what we do we cannot make the promises “have been” fulfilled, because they weren’t. David’s throne was removed. There was no one sitting on it. No amount of restoration years later can make what did not happen happen. Instead, there’s a new covenant. God is now on plan B, unless it’s plan C or D and we didn’t realize it. But at least it’s not plan A.

    And this is where Christians can go off the rail, especially considering how much this passage is used in the book of Hebrews. The easy Christian solution is to assume that the new covenant that God created is a covenant with the church. And I believe that God does indeed have a new covenant with the church.

    But having a covenant with his people the church does not really fulfil the words of Jeremiah 31:31-34, because there he says that a day is coming when he will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. That precludes one set of ideas, specifically that the church replaces Israel, and that Israel as such is no longer a player.

    But on the other hand we have the view that everything said in the old covenant, the one that was broken, must still be fulfilled. That is not, in my view, scripturally justified. In fact, that is to make the same mistake as those Jeremiah mentioned (7:1-20) who kept repeating: “The temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord!” God calls attention immediately to Shiloh which had once been the seat of God’s tabernacle, but which had not done so well.

    So it’s now plan B, or perhaps plan C. (Shiloh?) How do we know the form that God’s blessing will take? Perhaps no eye has seen it nor any ear heard it, nor has it entered into any human heart (1 Cor. 2:9).

  • March Biblical Studies Carnival Posted

    … at Zwinglius Redivivus.