Provocateurs and Peacemakers

Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

From:	Christopher
Sent on:	Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 1:13 PM

Eugene,

It seems that I'm not communicating clearly. I'm not saying in the least that he was "making up" the "virgin birth" story. You apparently think I'm claiming that he falsely took something from the HS, pretended it was about a virgin, and ran off with it to create the birth narrative, which turned entirely on the point that Jesus was born of a virgin. No. That would be silly. I don't at all think

"that Matthew invented the virgin-birth story on the basis of a wholly novel and idiosyncratic interpretation of Isaiah 7:14. . . ."

I think it's a simple and, honestly, negligible point; Matthew's story does not in the least turn on the virgin birth claim. I find this aspect quite incidental to the story. I'm claiming--as does every scholar I know of (check it out)--that "Matthew" was trying to establish Jesus's messiahship on the basis of Isaiah 7.14. as he read it in Greek in the Septuagint. Very few Jews were still capable of reading the Hebrew text, so there is nothing surprising or sinister here. The original Hebrew, which Mt. did not know, simply read "a young woman shall conceive and bear a son." This original Hebrew word implies nothing about the chastity or otherwise of the "young woman." But Matthew's community didn't know the text in Hebrew: they knew the Septuagint version, which translated the original Hebrew word that meant simply "young woman" with the Gk. word parthenos, which happens to mean "virgin." You can easily imagine how this happened: as the dictum says, languages don't really translate. It is a usual thing that a word in one language has to be translated with a word that carries an additional meaning that the original didn't have (I could give examples upon request). That is the source of the confusion, and, I repeat, it is not an important matter so far as I can see. Mt. simply read straightforwardly what the Greek said, since he did not know Hebrew. In the Septuagint, the text did say virgin (parthenos); but that's not Mt's fault. He read what he could see in the language he knew. The story of the nativity does not turn on the virgin birth, and he did not make up a virgin to be Jesus's mother, and nothing else of the kind. Rather, Mt.'s thinking was something like this: 1) Isaiah 7 was a prophecy about the birth of Jesus; 2) Jesus's nativity must have occurred in the manner described by what he took to be the prophecy (Isaiah 7) of Jesus's birth; and, most importantly, 3) Jesus was the wonderful figure whose life and nature were described in Isaiah, which he took to prophesy about him. What was important was not virginity, but that Jesus would live out the characteristics of the Messiah as prophesied in Isaiah 7. The idea that Jesus was born of a virgin was thus a simple mistake caused by glitch in translation: not a fraudulent fiction that Matthew nefariously wanted to foist on the world.

Once more: I'm not alleging anything conspiratorial or even dishonest. I don't think there was any dishonesty involved whatsoever, and nothing was "made up", as I've stated from the first. I'm not alleging any dishonestly in this procedure, which is really a fairly common one in ancient literature. For my part, I don't think the supposed virginity is a major issue. The nature of Jesus as the predicted Messiah is decidedly the issue.

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Eugene Curry <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, February 18,[masked]:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

Hi Chris,

I largely agree with you take on Jesus's messiah-ship. The critical question therefore becomes, "What sort of event was responsible for converting the disappointment the Apostles felt in the aftermath of the crucifixion into the conviction that, despite the crucifixion, Jesus was really the Messiah after all? In all our records, the resurrection is what's put forward as the answer to the question.

Concerning the virgin birth, it seems we disagree. If you're inclined to think that Matthew invented the virgin-birth story on the basis of a wholly novel and idiosyncratic interpretation of Isaiah 7:14, on what basis do you think that Luke (who never cites Isaiah 7:14) just happened to simultaneously invent the same story?

Sincerely,

Eugene

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, February 18,[masked]:46 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

As for the virgin birth claim, I think I've satisfactorily indicated how it came about; and I think this explanations is accepted by almost all NT scholars. It had to do with the Greek of the Septuagint, which the gospel writer was using, and its translation of the OT's "young woman": parthenos really means "virgin," whereas the Hebrew word (meaning simply "young woman" which is translated into Greek as parthenos does not.

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785) [masked]

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, February 18,[masked]:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

Eugene,

I'm sorry that you were again unable to send me your carefully expressed thoughts. It's been a rough day, and now I can say only this much. I don't even have the energy to proofread:

"2. But the virgin-birth, crucifixion, and resurrection are not amenable to the same treatment. While the 1st century Jews expected the messiah to be born in Bethlehem, they didn't expect him to be virgin-born, crucified, or raised from the dead in the midst of on-going history."

Pending further investigation, I can only repeat what I said about this before. I agree that none of this is what the Jews expected in their Messiah. What I think happened is something vaguely like this: Jesus's followers believed, on the basis of certain features of his life and teaching, that he had a unique relationship to God, and that he would grant to them a similar relationship to God. if they believed and followed him. Thus, his death, which was radically un-messiah-like, was for them a catastrophic disappointment: one in which they had invested their lives. Then, retrospectively, they reinterpreted passages in the OT as vindicating Jesus: he was not the kind of Messiah the Jews expected, but he was the real Messiah, the one whose kingdom is not of this world.

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Eugene Curry <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, February 18,[masked]:11 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

Hi Chris,

Yet again, I wrote you a super-amazing email flawlessly addressing each of your concerns with crystal clarity and inescapable power. Had you read it, you would have gone out immediately and gotten the Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed down your ribs and joined the IMB to bring the gospel to head-hunters in Borneo. Yes, it would be dangerous, but you would have done it because my email would have given you an unshakable confidence in all things Jesus. You would have married the hottest headhunter lady in the tribe, had fifty kids, and lived as a kindly anti-type to Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

But, alas, I accidentally lost the email again. Booo!

Rather than write it all again, here's the very-very short version.

1. Your approach to the Bethlehem issue is reasonable. I don't personally agree, but I'd have a *very* difficult time refuting such a view decisively.

2. But the virgin-birth, crucifixion, and resurrection are not amenable to the same treatment. While the 1st century Jews expected the messiah to be born in Bethlehem, they didn't expect him to be virgin-born, crucified, or raised from the dead in the midst of on-going history.

3. Isaiah 7:14 was never seen by the Jews as a messianic passage, or even as a passage about anything other than the events surrounding king Ahaz's troubled times.

4. It's unlikely therefore that Matthew would have invented parts of Jesus's biography to conform to an idiosyncratic interpretation of an obscure passage that no one in Israel connected to the messiah.

5. It's more likely that Matthew thought that Jesus was virgin-born on some other basis and then twisted Isaiah 7:14 into some sort of prophecy to make the whole thing more significant.

6. Similar things could be said, only with greater confidence, about a suffering messiah and a resurrection in the course of history. Nether were expected, and so such expectation could not have influenced the gospel writers account of Jesus's life.

"Most scholars doubt that the concept of a suffering Messiah appeared in jewish tradition before the revolt of Bar Kochba." Vincent Martin, A House Divided: The Parting of the Ways Between Synagogue and Church (Paulist, 1995), p. 42.

"A further point to take into consideration is that despite Luke and Paul, and the Creed, the resurrection of Jesus 'according to the Scriptures' cannot be seen as a logical necessity within the framework of Israel's prophetic heritage because, as has been indicated, neither the suffering of the Messiah, nor his death and resurrection, appear to have been part of the faith of first-century Judaism." Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels (Fortress, 1981), p. 48.

"No one expect the Messiah to suffer for sins. No one expect the Messiah to rise from the dead, because he was not expected to die. The biblical passages acknowledge as 'messianic' in Jewish tradition are consistent in this regard. Attempts to find evidence of a pre-Christian 'suffering messiah' have been unsuccessful." Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity (Fortress, 1992), p. 13.

"It is important to remember that there is no known pre-Christian Messianic text in Judaism that speaks of a suffering messiah [...] and given the above range of ideas, seemingly no possibility of such." James R. Edwards, Biblical Interpretation in Early Christian Gospels Vol. 1: The Gospel of Mark (T&T Clark, 2006) p. 62.

"One intriguing question scholars have wrestled with is why the early followers of Jesus began calling him 'Christ' in the first place. Is it because after he had died they came to believe he was raised from the dead and that therefore he must have been the messiah? It may be surprising, but the answer is a resounding no. This is because prior to Christianity there is not a single Jewish tradition that the messiah was supposed to die and be raised from the dead. As New Testament scholar Nils Dahl has convincingly argued, the resurrection would not prove to any Jew that Jesus is the messiah because the messiah was not supposed to rise from the dead. Christians later, of course, pointed to passages in the Jewish Scriptures that talk about the death of God's Righteous One and his ultimate vindication by God, arguing that these passages actually referred to Jesus (for example, Isa. 53, Ps. 22). But prior to Christianity, no one thought that these passages referred to the future messiah who would die and be raised. It is worth noting in this connection that the term 'messiah' never appear in these passages. For Jews, what made the messiah the messiah was the fact that he was God's chosen one who would rule God's people. These passages referred to someone else." Bart Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (Oxford University Press, 2008)

As I said, apart from Israel Knohl, the only scholars who deny this view are mythicist crackpots.

7. Therefore "prophecy-historicized" is not a plausible explanation for the belief in the crucifixion or resurrection of Jesus among the first Christians.

8. It seems more likely that, as most scholars believe, the first Christians really did just find Jesus's tomb empty and then had experiences that they thought were genuine bodily encounters with Jesus alive after his execution.

Sincerely,

Eugene

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Monday, February 17,[masked]:27 AM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

Another example illustrating what I wrote about fulfillment citations: The narratives of Jesus's birth, which appear in Matthew and Luke, are replete with fulfillment citations. It is especially obvious that these authors went to astonishing--and absurd--lengths to get Jesus born in Bethlehem of Judea, although all of his contemporaries knew that he was from Nazareth in Galilee (as is attested more than once in the gospels). The two authors' accounts differ markedly with each other, but what they have in common is the goal of, by hook or by crook, getting Jesus born in Bethlehem. This was surely intentional: they themselves probably knew that Jesus was from Nazareth; but, since the OT had prophesied that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, "the city of David," that is where Jesus would just have to be born, whatever contortions and geographical and other impossibilities were required to make him a native of that town.

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Christopher Riels <[address removed]>
To: "[address removed]" <[address removed]>
Sent: Sunday, February 16, [masked]:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

"But what I've sketched out above is, apart from the mythicist crackpots and, I think, one serious scholar, the consensus view among experts."

I'm not sure about that. I don't know the scholarship, so I can't say anything definite about the status quaestionis. I guess I'll need to check on that, too.

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Eugene Curry <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Sunday, February 16,[masked]:00 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

Hi Chris,

You're right that the New Testament authors are eager to connect Jesus's life, death, and resurrection to passages in the Old Testament. But one needs to be careful here. In a number of points, it seems that the Old Testament passages put forward as prophecies fulfilled by Jesus were not originally understood by the Jewish people as prophecies concerning the messiah.

As a result, in at least some cases, it is highly unlikely that the early Christian community began with the Old Testament, massaged Jesus's biography to make it fit, and then claimed Jesus fulfilled a prophecy. Rather, it seems that at certain critical junctures the early Christian community began with Jesus's biography, massaged the Old Testament to fit, and then claimed that Jesus fulfilled prophecy.

This is most dramatically the case with the virgin-birth stories in Matthew and Luke. The Old Testament never really claimed that the messiah would be born of a virgin, and Jews looking for the advent of the messiah in Jesus's day didn't at all expect the messiah to be born of a virgin. So it is highly unlikely that Matthew or Luke made up the story of Jesus begin virgin-born to "fulfill" non-existent prophecies.

More germane to the topic at hand, though, is the matter of Jesus's crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. As with the virgin birth, 1st century Judaism had no concept of a messiah that would be executed by the very pagan powers they expected him to overthrow. A fortiori, the Jews had no notion of a messiah who not only died ignobly at the hands of Israel's enemies but was then raised to new life in the course of on-going history. As such, it's highly unlikely that the early Christian community massaged Jesus's biography to fulfill non-existent messianic expectations. Rather, it's more likely that something actually happened regarding Jesus (i.e. the crucifixion and then the resurrection), and the early Christians were so amazed by it that they then busily set about looking for analogues in the Old Testament to make sense of the events.

It doesn't always seem this way to us today because we tend to read the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus's experiences as recorded in the New Testament. In other words, we read it anachronistically. But what I've sketched out above is, apart from the mythicist crackpots and, I think, one serious scholar, the consensus view among experts.

Sincerely,

Eugene

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Sunday, February 16,[masked]:16 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

In my remarks below, I failed to mention the obviously important point that the Resurrection itself seems to be based on a "fulfillment" claim. In Acts 2, most starkly in v. 24 ("But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power") Peter, as depicted by Luke, represents the Resurrection of Jesus as a fulfillment of Psalm [masked]:

I keep the Lord always before me;

because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices;
my body also rests secure.
For you do not give me up to Sheol,

or let your faithful one see the Pit.)

(Bible quotations: New Revised Standard Version; taken from bible.oremus.org.)

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: eric <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Sunday, February 16,[masked]:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] resurrection story

Christopher, I basically agree with what you have written below. The "suffering servant" song in Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is particularly intriguing, but a full discussion of the song would be much too long for an email. The identity of the servant has been debated for centuries among rabbis and scholars.

Eric

On 2/15/2014 6:43 PM, Christopher wrote:

Just one vague point about the Resurrection in general: If the event did not occur, the passages claiming it did were not "made up." Repeatedly, the NT authors in general and the gospel authors in particular, interpret Jesus's life and actions as fulfillment of prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures. This does not mean that they deliberately fabricated the divine character of Jesus by simply appropriating passages of the "OT" in order to create narratives that they knew to be fictional. Instead, as it has long seemed to me, they sincerely and whole-heartedly believed that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah: as a result, they believed that he must have done and experienced the things that the long-awaited Messiah, on their interpretation of the OT, would do and experience. Thus, they filled in the blanks in their knowledge of Jesus's life and death by modeling him and his experiences on what they believed the OT said about him. Probably the single most famous instance is the Christian interpretation of Jesus as the crucified "suffering servant" of Isaiah 53, who "was wounded for our transgressions" and on whom "the Lord has laid. . . the iniquity of us all." In a verse from Psalm 24, "not one of [his bones] was broken; accordingly, the soldiers at his cross did not have to break Jesus's legs when they took him down from the cross. Probably the most humorous example is Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey; or, in Mark's account, two donkeys (which must have been strange to see as well as hard to do. (Matthew's two donkeys come from his misreading of a literary device at Zechariah 9:9.)

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

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