Jonah and Jesus, Repentance and Resurrection

During an Ash Wednesday service last week, the pastor brought up the notion of signs in the Old Testament and spoke of Jonah. This got me thinking about Christ's discussion of Jonah's fish challenges as "the only sign given to this evil generation." Matthew saw this as important enough to mention two separate times. (Matthew 12:59, Matthew 16:4, and Luke provides it in Luke 11:29-30.) The relevance of Jonah may also be linked to Jesus' stress on Peter's lineage, which the gospel writers pass along "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah." (Matthew 16:17, John 1:42, John 21:15-17.) Note how in Matthew's gospel this note on Peter follows nearly immediately the proclamation to the crowds about Jonah and Nineveh.

For decades I had assumed that the only relevance of this passage is that Jesus was in the ground and rose on the 3rd day as Jonah was in the "great fish" for the same length of time. It just seemed like Jesus was predicting His own resurrection and the gospel writers were providing evidence that this resurrection was a sign from God.

However, that seems now like a rather naive view. Jesus' resurrection would be recognized as a sign of God regardless of whether it was predicted to the masses, and there are plenty of other instances where the gospel writers indicate to their audiences that Jesus' resurrection was foretold. Also, the version given in Luke 11:30 suggests a closer connection between the sign of Jonah and the sign of Jesus.

As I thought about this, two separate points came to mind. If Jesus' resurrection is a sign like Jonah's, what would that mean, especially to a Jewish audience who fully understood Jonah's whole story?

The first connection is clear (though it was actually the second one I thought of). Jonah was sent to call Nineveh to repentance [c.f. Luke 11:32]. The story of Jonah is interesting because it shows that simple repentance has authentic value even when done by a people who have no notion of Christ whatsoever. Nineveh was not in Judah. They were neither cognizant of nor had any portion of the promised salvation for the Jews. The repentance they showed was based only on a belief that the God who sent Jonah was real and a hope that if they showed humility toward God and changed their ways to do works pleasing to God, then maybe God would relent.

This is important because most evangelists today suggest that repentance has no effectual value in itself. (Repentance is portrayed as a by-product and not directly dispositive toward how we are judged by God.) Similarly, it is highly suggested that it is impossible to do works pleasing to God without faith in Christ. The story of Jonah in Nineveh disproves both assertions.

The second way in which Jesus' resurrection is linked to Jonah is subtler. It is the first one that came to me, partially because of something the pastor had mentioned. The story of Jonah shows the value of repentance in two ways. One is the effect that Nineveh's repentance had on God. The second is the effect of Jonah's own repentance inside the fish, which led to his own deliverance.

What struck me about this aspect of the story is the possibility (perhaps tenuous) that one can draw a connection between resurrection and repentance. When the evangelists of the New Testament speak of the value of being in Christ, they speak of three things:

1. Being delivered from the physical wrath that will come against the world when Christ returns. (C.f. Matthew 24:22, which makes no sense at all if the Final Judgment were in view rather than deliverance from the physical destruction of the last days.)
2. The "baptism of repentance" (the holy spirit). (c.f. Acts 5:31, Acts 11:18, Acts 13:24, Acts 26:20 and many other places)
3. The resurrection of the body, which is their full inheritance when their "adoption is complete." (c.f. Romans 8:23)

Paul's letters show that these last two items are really just stages of a two-part glorification. We are given the spirit today that strengthens our will to do God's works, though our flesh still fights against this. Then, in the next age, we will receive a renewed body that no longer pushes us against God.

The specific repentance that we receive from Christ is a renewal of the spirit (c.f Hebrews 6:6) that Paul links to both Christ's own resurrection and our future one in Romans 6-8. That particular discussion is worthy of its own blog post.

Sacrifices in the Old Testament

I recently began another excursion through the Bible, with an eye toward a deeper look at the soteriological topics that piqued my interest beginning in Winter '01 (I think), and upon reaching Leviticus I spent a good deal of effort trying to work the various sacrifices into a single, cohesive structure; a goal I had sought off-and-on for quite some time. This was very important to me because it was my hope that a genuine, self-consistent understanding of these sacrifices would shed light on Christ's work. Too often the reverse occurs, someone has a certain view on Christ's work and goes back to find some isolated bits that match it when taken out of context.

I was unable to get the various sacrifices and their meanings to fit together. The fact that the ritual conducted after someone was found to be healed of skin disease included a "sin" and "guilt" sacrifice was particularly hard to fit into frameworks that otherwise looked to make some sense. This ritual may be quite important to fully understand because it is the only one that abstractly matches the key "Day of Atonement" ritual. (Two birds, one dies, the other flies free.)

I decided to break off reading and investigate what others had written on the topic. Two books I found particularly helpful were Milgrom's commentary on Leviticus (Continental Commentary Series) and Purification Offerings in the Priestly Literature: Its meaning and function by Kiuchi. Interestingly, Milgrom also could not make any sense of the bird rite and chalked it up to a Pagan holdover that the priests felt compelled to keep. That's "higher criticism" for you.

Anyways, I certainly did not go into this study seeking information about animal cruelty, but the books made some key observations that had flown under my radar. I'm relaying them here in case they have also alluded y'all.

A. The sacrificial system was intimately woven into a larger cultic law (more on this in "C" below), and should be considered in context.Abstractly, the set of large land animals the tribes of Jacob could eat was determined by two questions: Does it chew the cud? Is it's hoof split? However, for all practical purposes, the requirements meant that the tribes could only ranch 3 types of animals. Everything but goat, sheet, and ox was more or less off limits. (There were a very restricted set of wild animals, like the gazelle, that were also allowed.) Thus, the food laws (and the general value of these animals) greatly limited ranching. Also, the relative value of these animals meant that the typical person ate almost no ranched quadrupeds, eating red meat only a few times a year. [They did have domesticated birds and fish.]

B. It must be recognized that the "sacrifices" of these animals do not match what we might think of sacrifice. In fact, "sacrifice" is perhaps not even the best word to capture what is going on here. It focuses on the notion of "loss" or "payment." Contrary to what many might make of these texts, that is not where the value of these animals lay. The focus of these sacrifices (to the extent that we can speak in general terms) was in the cleansing power of the blood.  The connotation of "sacrifice" might lead us to believe that the animals were simply destroyed or wasted without any practical value being gained (much as some might consider recreational hunting today). However, this is not the case. For the vast majority of sacrifices, only the fat was burned up. The rest of the meat was eaten, either by the priests or the person who brought the sacrifice.

[I reiterate here a point I have made before: outside the Day of Atonement (and perhaps the bird-rite) scape-goat, there is no transfer of sin going on in these sacrifices. If the animals received the sin of those who brought them, they would have defiled the temple and altar on which they were sacrificed. The scape-goat, of course, was not brought into the temple, nor killed as part of the rite. Jewish theologians note a key difference in the "laying of hands" ceremony done by the priest for the scape-goat offering as compared to others. One theory claims that the two-hand version done on the scape-goat represents transfer of sin/guilt/iniquity but that the one-hand version done in other sacrifices (including those that have nothing to do with sin) are a marking of sorts, so that the good done by the animal, or the favor it found in God's eyes, was credited to the one who marked it by the laying of a hand. So Ibn Ezra.]

C. The idea in point B actually works in reverse as well. Not only were (most) sacrifices eaten, but all of these ranched animals had to be "sacrificed" before they could be legally eaten! This is a key and amazing point that is easy to miss. It might be better to term these sacrifices as "consecrations," because they represented the only way any of the animals could be eaten. If an Israelite killed a sheep for food, but did not bring the sheep to the temple to be "sacrificed," then he was liable for murder. [See Leviticus 17:3 ff].

This redoubled the effect mentioned in A. It reduced the actual amount of ranching and killing that occurred by adding to the expense involved in raising animals for food. In some sense you could consider the temple sacrifice as a type of tax on eating meat, because anytime someone slaughtered an animal for food, they had to give some of it to the priests.

D. Finally, once again in the vein of thinking of these rites as not being "sacrifices" in the typical use of the term, one should consider the Israelite mind when contemplating the meaning of these rites. As mentioned above, much of the point of the sacrifices lie in the cleansing effect of the blood on the sanctuary (and, perhaps, on the people who brought the sacrifice). The life of the animal was "in the blood" and by bringing the animal to the tabernacle, sacrificing it, and spilling its blood on the altar, the owner and priest were bringing the animal into communion with God. Recall that the Israelites did not have our understanding of the afterlife. At this point in time, there were two competing frameworks for thinking about the "soul." In the older of these frameworks, which may have been predominant at the time, there was no such thing as an individualized "soul." Living men were animated by the "breath of life" received from God (c.f., Adam becoming a living being when God breathed into him). Upon death, that life went back to join God.

For animals, the "life was in the blood," which is why the Israelites were not allowed to eat any blood, and the "sacrifice" rite can be viewed as returning the essence of the animal being killed to join in communion with God when its blood was dashed upon the altar to cleanse it. Thus, attempting to put these things into a modern context, one could conceive of the cultic law as essentially demanding that every rancher perform an individual funeral of sorts for every animal they killed.

Interesting translation of Genesis 45:7

Update: My wife Nancy is, to put it charitably, unconvinced that the wording here suggests that Joseph thought that Jacob's descendants would rule the world.

I ran across something odd in Genesis 45:7 today.

For my general reading, I prefer the NAB. I'm not a Catholic, but I think that on balance the NAB is the most accurate translation in general, but it does not have a reverse interlinear available [at least not in Logos, an electronic system for bible study], so I have chosen to use the NRSV as my chief reading translation as I go through the Bible again.

I noticed something strange in Genesis 45:7.  The NAB, NASB, and the NET have similar translations here:
"God sent me ahead of you to preserve you on the earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance."


But both the NRSV and the ESV, both rock-solid literal translations when not trying to bend the text to suit their politics/theology, have something different:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors.

Instead of merely "preserve you" the more literal translations have "preserve for you a remnant." I could be wrong, but this seems to speak to the notion that Jacob's progeny would rule the earth...so a remnant of all people were saved for them.
 

[Truth in Translation, a fantastic book by Jason BeDuhn has good things to say in general about the NAB, though his book focused on just one arena where theological presumptions can influence translations.]

What is the point of the Garden of Eden story?

What is the point of the Garden of Eden story?
Many Christians believe the point of the story is to explain how humanity fell into sin. While there may something to that, it must be always kept in mind that NONE of the New Testament evangelism even mentions the fall of Adam. If the Garden of Eden is a key part to the story of Christina salvation, you would never know it from reading the Gospels and the many evangelistic sermons in the book of Acts.

In fact, I claim the text makes clear in flashing neon lights what the story is about, and we only fail to see it because we have been taught to read Protestant theology into the story.

It is true that the Garden of Eden story is linked to man's mortality (which is different from his damnation), but not in the way people often are taught. Even after sinning, humanity could have had immortality had Adam eaten from the tree of the fruit of life. [Genesis 3:22] and the principal reason God kicks Adam out of the Garden is that (for whatever reason) God did not want Adam to both know the difference between good and evil and be immortal.

But the story answers other questions as well. For example, it explains why snakes have no legs [Genesis 3:14], more importantly it explains where our conscience, our ability to determine right and wrong, comes from [Genesis 3:5-7, and Genesis 3:22 again].

Most importantly, it acts as a key lead-in to Noah's story!!

Yes, I believe it is not an over-estimation to say that the single most important theme of the Garden of Eden is that it acts as a prequel to Noah's work. It does not appear that way to us because we focus on the least important aspect of Noah and miss a key point to the Garden of Eden story.

When you think of Noah, you think of the flood. And when you think of the flood story, the conclusion everyone remembers is the rainbow as a proof that God will not destroy the Earth by flood. To us Americans living in the land of plenty, where true poverty and hunger are extremely rare, the dramatic story of the flood and the destruction it wrought on the Earth is the key point. But to the Israelites/Hebrews reading the story of Noah, the flood is not the real point.

When we look at the passage where God makes a covenant with Noah [8:21-22] we note two blessings given to Noah. The one everyone knows (the rainbow, etc.), and another one "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the intention of his heart is evil from his youth."

Recall that in Genesis 3:17-19 the ground is cursed because of Adam's sin. Prior to this curse Adam was still expected to work in the garden and tend it [Genesis 2:15]. The curse made the work much harder. Indeed, Noah gets his name because he was appointed to reverse this curse: Genesis 5:29 reads “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.” [The Hebrew word Noah sounds like the word for "bring us relief" and there are several puns made on this in the ensuing story of the flood.]

This reference to agriculture is also found in Noah being the first person to plant a vineyard.

 In fact, Noah more than reverses the curse because not only does God remove the curse on the ground, but for the first time God allows humanity to eat animals rather than only plants. [Genesis 9:3] This is another reason why the curse on the ground was so onerous: humanity depended completely on agriculture rather than ranching.

So I think the most significant part of the Garden of Eden, at least for the original readers, was its role in the general drama of sustenance. Before the garden, no plants were cultivated because it had not rained and there was no one to tend them. Adam is made and put in the garden to tend the plants there. Adam's sin causes the ground to be cursed, making life hard. Noah gets his namesake from the hope that he will break the curse, and sure enough that is what happens. He more than breaks the curse because the ground is no longer cursed and humanity can now eat animals as well.

How very different we read the story.

Reading it again for the first time

After May I took a month or two "off" from writing and research. Then I began reading a bunch of theology texts dealing with Judaism around the time of Christ. Then I took another short break because the next thing on my agenda was starting again at Genesis 1:1.

I had postponed this for a couple reasons. First, it is obviously a big undertaking. Second, when I was doing my theology reading, I could do it anywhere I had my tablet computer. All I had to do was mark certain passages of interest. However, going through the Bible again requires more note-taking, so I use my desk-top computer in my office, so it cuts into my schedule in a different way from bedtime reading of theology texts.

But I've begun, and immediately things jumped out at me about the Garden of Eden. I try as much as I can to read the Bible with "open eyes," not making presumptions about what I'm going to read. This type of reading lets passages jump out at you that might otherwise have been overlooked because they don't fit the narrative you expect.

One thing that struck me about the Garden of Eden story is that there is no indication at all that the serpent who deceived Eve was actually Satan. In fact, a little research shows that "Satan" as a personification of evil [or at least an adversary of humanity] simply did not appear to exist in Jewish thought until many centuries later. Assuming that the Books of Moses existed [in some form] to be used for the teaching of the Israelites and their immediate progeny, we can clearly draw the conclusion that those early readers had no notion of the serpent as Satan. [Whether or not the serpent WAS Satan, a claim that gets some strong support from Rev 12:9 (and weak support from other passages), is another question entirely.]

A short proof that sinlessness is not required for heaven

A key part to Christian theology is that all of us have sinned in some way and that God, being perfect and good, must apply a standard of perfection in judgment. And that is why we need some alternate route into heaven.

A similar (and for our purposes equivalent) claim is that God cannot stand the presence of sin, and therefore the only people who can be welcome in heaven are those who are free of any sin. In other words, those who have "fallen short of the glory of God" are not welcome in the presence of God.

Here is a short proof that this belief contradicts scripture.

Jesus says that only God is good. (Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19)
If only God is good, then the angels must also fall short of "God's glory" (c.f., Romans 3:23). According to the modern Protestant understanding of sin, this makes the angels sinners. [This understanding of sin is flawed, but that is another story. Catholics have a different translation of Romans 3:23 that shines a very different light on the topic.]
If only the perfect can be in God's presence, then the angels must also be forbidden in heaven. In fact, their plight is worse than humanity's because they do not participate in the mercy shown to humankind owing to Christ's work [Hebrews 2:16]
Obviously, angels are allowed in God's presence, so we reach a contradiction. QED.

One interesting point about the above is that the most obvious way to "fix" it is to try to better understand what makes the angel's ungoodness/imperfection/sin/falling-short-of-God's-Glory different from the same thing in humanity. At first it doesn't seem hard to claim that somehow humans sin in a qualitatively different way than angels do... and that is certainly true! But then one has to drill down on the subject of what is "sin" and what sin "counts" with respect to the topic of God's judgment and/or heaven [a question up for debate according to Romans 5:13]...and the more one tries to clarify and make distinctions there, the harder the rest of the Evangelical case becomes.... which is a subject for a different day.

Commentary on the Garden of Eden

This belief, that God judges using a standard of perfection and that God can only countenance those who are perfect, has no basis in scripture. Many people point to the story of the Garden of Eden as proof that a single failing casts you out of God's presence. However, there are 3 very powerful rebuttals to this, any one of them would be sufficient on its own to dismiss that claim:

1. Not once in any gospel or any of the evangelism shown in Acts is the Garden of Eden mentioned. If a core principle of Christian salvation relates to the sin of Adam and Eve in a singular way, you would expect the gospels and the book of Acts to talk about the Garden as much as modern Evangelicals do, but in reality NONE of the gospel writers even reference it and it shows up nowhere in Acts, which is the principal showcase of Apostolic Evangelism.
2. Contrary to what most people are taught, the explicit reason why Adam and Eve were kicked from the Garden is not because of their status of sinners. The reason God removed them from the Garden, as described explicitly in Genesis 3:22, is that God did not want them to become like the heavenly host: who are both immortal and know the difference between good and evil. Note that God says "they will be like us" if they eat the fruit from the tree of life. Thus, even the proclamation of eviction was based on humanity's coming one step closer to being like the heavenly host, not the opposite.
3. While it is true that the "fall of Adam" did lead to a spiritual death for humanity, one cannot claim that this spiritual death sufficed to prevent communion with God or entry into God's realm. The prophets were able to commune with God even though they were Adam's descendants, and Enoch and Elijah are taken up to God without ever dying (and before the death of Christ). We are told explicitly that "Enoch walked with God" and did not die. What could this possibly mean if it does not refer to his early entry into God's eternal presence? Similarly, Elijah is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind.

Avoiding "Semetary" (and reasons to believe)

Over the past few months, I've read several theology books, many of them very technical. My focus has been on the intertestamental literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Mishnah, and anything else I can find that gives more context to the Judaism prevalent during Christ's time on Earth.

Several years ago I visited a church in Charlottesville where the pastor made the remark that he referred to "Seminary" as "Semetary" because of its affect on your faith. After my recent reading, I can more fully understand his reference.

Of course, I had read scholarly theology books before in preparing the manuscript for The Gospel You've Never Heard, but they were mostly written by those on the "Sacred" side of the Theology/Sacred Theology divide. What I have read recently is more on the other side of the fence, where there is no assumption (and even a presumption against) of faith.

For example, one author I read simply dismissed point-blank that Daniel could have been written in the 5th century BC because it tells of events transpiring afterward. Now, there may or may not be solid evidence that parts of Daniel were written later, but to take as one of your reasons that true prophecy cannot occur certainly reveals your hand as someone who doesn't put much stock in the God of Abraham.

Anyway, the prevailing idea in these books is that the entire Old Testament was either written or (at least) edited and assembled around the 6th or 7th centuries BC (while Judah was in exile). That would deal a bit of a blow to a well-read Christian's faith because a much of the credibility of the Bible comes from it being a record of prophecy and prophecy realized. If all the books of the OT were written (or revised/edited/assembled) that late, then one can no longer point to the prophecies in Deuteronomy or the prophets regarding Israel's downfall as proof that there is some supernatural component to Israel's history.

So I began thinking recently of reasons to believe in the historical authenticity of Jesus Christ, which inherently means confirming the authenticity of Judaism, even if it were true that the entire Old Testament was (re)written/edited/compiled at a late date. Here are reasons I thought of:

Jesus' Prooftext for the Resurrection

Jesus' proof of the resurrection of the dead based on the Torah (Matthew 22:31-32) is remarkable. The Pharisees and their progeny would later try to find clear proof of the resurrection of the dead within the Torah for centuries. It would become the foundation for Judaism. I've read other efforts by later Rabbi's to show that the "Books of Moses" prove that God will raise the dead, and they are so wispy that one has a hard time even seeing a connection at all. Jesus' response is not only remarkably powerful but also original. It is far beyond the best minds of contemporaneous Judaism. This strongly suggests Jesus was an actual, gifted Rabbi rather than an imposter that the evangelists later made into something He wasn't.

The Peculiarity of the Old Testament Prophets

If the Old Testament books were edited and assembled in 6th or 7th-century BC, then they had to be assembled by someone. Someone, or a group, had to decide which books should be considered Scripture studied as holy. Some Hebrews never accepted anything beyond Moses' Law, but some large population found the prophets worth diligently recording and studying through the ages. The thing that makes this odd [if you don't have any faith in God] is that the actual text of the prophetic books is not at all what you would expect to be chosen unless there was a VERY good reason for it.

For example, some parts of some prophets appear to contradict some parts of others. Some prophets actually speak of God BREAKING God's covenant with Israel and Judah. In other places, Jeremiah in particular, we hear of the old covenant as being forsaken and a new covenant being given. Given the sacrosanct nature of the Mosaic covenant, it seems unimaginable that Jeremiah would have been included unless Jeremiah was already known to have been a great prophet who was both powerful in his own time and accurate in his prophecies.

Another examples is that the prophets regularly blame the problems of Judah and Israel on their own kings and priests. It is odd enough that a country blames itself for its problems, but it is very strange indeed that the powers that be would allow the veneration of a set of writings that put all the blame for their errors on those in the ruling classes.

I could give more examples, but the basic point is the same: the Old Testament is simply not at all what one would expect to be chosen retrospectively by the Hebrews living in the holy land at that time unless the reliability of their authors (the prophets) was established.

Jeremiah and Daniel

Not to harp on Jeremiah some more, but there is a specific issue with Jeremiah and Daniel. The book of Jeremiah claims that Judah will be saved from the Babylonians after 70 years. [Jeremiah 25:11-12]

It is quite strange to believe that the Jews would come up with this prophecy while in exile because it didn't come true! In Daniel we find that the reason the Jews were not rescued was that they had not repented and cried out to God. One could point to this and say "First, someone wrote Jeremiah to give the Jews hope of freedom, and then when the prophecy failed, they invented Daniel to explain it."

But that is also hard to believe. You would have to believe that Jeremiah was written  AFTER the exile (otherwise he correctly prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem) and had already (within 70 years) gone from an unknown work to an accepted piece of scripture before the 70 years were up...and then you'd have to believe that Daniel was then fabricated to cover up this problem. The problem, then, is Daniel is being written near the same time that the real Daniel supposedly existed. It's hard to see how a fake Daniel gets written within the lifetime of the supposed real Daniel without people realizing it is a fake (either because Daniel never existed or because people knew that the real Daniel never wrote such a thing).  And then you'd have to say that only PART of Daniel was written during this time to avoid all the parts that correctly prophesy later events.

But if that is true, and part of Daniel was written during this time to cover up the problems in Jeremiah, then everyone would have to know Daniel very well. Indeed, it would have to be as important or moreso than Jeremiah because without Daniel, Jeremiah looks like a big lie. But if that happened, then how does all the correct prophesies of Daniel get added in later without people realizing "Hey, this isn't your dad's Daniel?"

I'm not saying that parts were not added to Daniel later on. I'm saying that if one believes that these scriptures were fabricated after the exile, the only way the 70-year prophecy in Jeremiah could be accepted is if Daniel was accepted to, and the early acceptance of Daniel makes it harder to believe that it was massively changed and added on later. [Of course, if Jeremiah was actually a true prophet who had given Judah true prophesies, then his words would be venerated regardless of the need for a "patch." Note that the Hebrews esteemed Jeremiah above Daniel, giving the former the position of a "Prophet" but putting the later into the "Writings" with the psalms, proverbs, etc.]