Book Write-Up: The Book of Acts in Its Diaspora Setting, by Irina Levinskaya

Irina Levinskaya.  The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting, Volume 5: The Book of Acts in Its Diaspora Setting.  Grand Rapids, William B.Eerdmans/Carlisle: The Paternoster Press, 1996.

This book is the fifth volume of a series about the historical context of the Book of Acts.  Russian scholar Irina Levinskaya is the author of this particular volume.  Levinskaya narrates in her preface that she had an interest in the New Testament as a student of the classics at St. Petersburg University, but one of her professors discouraged her from that particular field of study.  Levinskaya speculates that this was because the professor “had spent ten years of his life in one of Stalin’s camps and ten years in exile”, and thus he was “especially careful” in what he recommended to his students, out of concern for their well-being (page vii).  In the course of her studies, Levinskaya came across the cult of the Most High God in the ancient Bosporan Kingdom in Crimea and the Taman peninsula.  Because that cult was considered pagan, she felt free to study it under Communist auspices, which had no problem with paganism.  She concluded, however, that this cult was influenced by Judaism and appeared similar to the phenomenon of the God-fearers in the Book of Acts: the God-fearers were Gentiles who did not fully convert to Judaism yet worshiped the God of Israel.  Her interest in the Book of Acts was kindled!

Levinskaya participates in scholarly discussions about ancient Jewish proselytism and the God-fearers.  On the issue of Jewish proselytism, she sides with Martin Goodman’s view that the Jews in the first century C.E. welcomed converts but lacked an active missionary program, which would explain why the Book of Acts does not mention it.  What about Jesus’ statement in Matthew 23:15 that the scribes and Pharisees travel by sea and land in search of converts?  Does that not demonstrate that Jews had an active missionary program in the first century C.E.?  According to Levinskaya, it does not.  She believes that Matthew 23:15 was saying that the Pharisees were trying to convert other Jews to Pharisaism, not Gentiles to Judaism.  Levinskaya argues that the Greek term proselutos can have a broader meaning than a Gentile convert to Judaism and can mean someone coming to something from something else (since proselutos is from the Greek word proserchomai, to come to).  Christians used the term to refer to converts to Christianity, and Acts 13:43 contains the odd statement that God-fearing proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas.  The reason that this statement in Acts 13:43 is odd is that God-fearers and proselytes are supposed to be different: God-fearers worship God without circumcision or a formal conversion to Judaism, whereas proselytes are Gentiles who have converted to Judaism.  How can one be a God-fearer and a proselyte at the same time, in the Book of Acts?  According to Levinskaya, the proselytes in Acts 13:43 are not Gentile converts to Judaism, but rather they are Gentile God-fearers who are interested in coming to Christianity.

On the issue of the God-fearers, there is scholarly debate about whether there were such people in antiquity.  Some maintain that they were a literary device in Acts designed to set the stage for the Gentiles coming to Christianity.  There are inscriptions that use labels that several scholars believe pertain to God-fearers, but detractors argue that these labels may refer to especially pious Jews, not Gentiles who worship the God of Israel.  Levinskaya sides with the view that God-fearers actually existed in antiquity.  On page 81, she notes a second century C.E. altar in Pamphylia, which contains the inscription “For the truthful and not-handmade god (in fulfillment of) a vow” (in whatever translation Levinskaya is using).  She does not believe that the altar is Jewish or Christian because it is an altar: her point here may be that Jews and Christians ordinarily did not set up altars.  And she does not believe that the altar is pagan because its vocabulary is not what Gentiles ordinarily used.  Her belief is that this altar to the “not-handmade god” is that of God-fearers, Gentiles who worshiped the God of Israel.  Overall, she argues that the cult of the Most High God in antiquity was a God-fearing phenomenon.  While Zeus was called most high, the cult that she is discussing does not mention Zeus, plus it differs from the Zeus cult.

Levinskaya discusses other issues as well, such as the question of whether synagogues were independent of each other or part of a single group.  She seems to side with the former.

This is an informative book.  Personally, I do not rule out that Jews may have had an active missionary enterprise in the first century C.E., on account of various pieces of ancient evidence (i.e., Josephus).  I am also not entirely convinced by Levinskaya’s argument that proselutos in Matthew 23:15 meant converts to Pharisaism, for it so often has the technical meaning of conversion to Judaism, and I believe that the Christians later adopted that term to refer to converts to their own sect.  On the topic of the God-fearers, I am open to their historical existence, and I find Levinskaya’s discussion of altars and cults to the Most High God to be interesting and important.

Luke the Maverick?

In The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Bart Ehrman argues that Luke-Acts does not believe that Jesus died to atone for people's sins.  Jesus' death in Luke-Acts is significant in another way, according to Ehrman.  

Ehrman makes a variety of arguments to support this claim: that Luke in drawing from Mark's Gospel omits Mark's view of Jesus' death as a sacrifice that brings atonement (Mark 10:45; 15:39); that there are New Testament manuscripts that lack the part of Luke 22:19-20 about Jesus giving his body and shedding his blood for people; etc.  Remember the veil of the Temple that rips from top to bottom at Jesus' death?  According to Ehrman, Mark and Luke interpret that incident in different ways.  Mark probably sees it as indicative of atonement, that people now have access to God through the death of Jesus.  Luke, by contrast, seems to regard it as a sign of God's judgment on Israel and her religious institution for preferring darkness rather than light.  Ehrman notes that, in Mark, the veil rips after Jesus' death, whereas Luke depicts it as ripping before Jesus gives up the ghost (Luke 23:45).  In Luke, Ehrman argues, God is demonstrating during Jesus' crucifixion his displeasure at what Israel is doing.

What, then, is the significance of Jesus' death in Luke-Acts, according to Ehrman?  Ehrman states on page 201: "The death of Jesus in Luke-Acts is not a death that effects an atoning sacrifice.  It is the death of a righteous martyr who has suffered from miscarried justice, whose innocence is vindicated by God at the resurrection."  What about Acts 20:28, which affirms that Jesus bought the church with his own blood?  First of all, Ehrman notes that the text can actually mean that Jesus acquired the church with his blood, not necessarily that he bought it.  Second, Ehrman on page 202 explains how he thinks that Jesus would acquire the church with his blood, according to Luke-Acts: "The blood of Jesus produces the church because it brings the cognizance of guilt that leads to repentance."  On page 203, Ehrman applies this insight to Acts 20:28: "...Paul states his relief at being guiltless of 'the blood' of the Ephesian elders----meaning that he fulfilled his obligation to preach to them his message of salvation, a message that can save them from the coming judgment.  Only if his hearers repent when confronted with Jesus' blood will they be saved from spilling their own."  This sounds somewhat (but not entirely) like the moral-influence view of the atonement, which states that Jesus' death was not something that objectively cleansed us of our culpability for our sin, but rather was something that was intended to influence us on a subjective level: Jesus' death would encourage us to turn to God.  The moral-influence view said that Jesus' death would show us how much God loved us and melt our hearts to turn to God, whereas Ehrman's interpretation of Luke-Acts is that Jesus' death (and subsequent exaltation) would make people feel guilty and thus repent.  But both are subjective models for the atonement.

I think that Ehrman is on to something.  In Luke 23:48, we read (in the KJV) that, after Jesus' death and the centurion's confession that Jesus was innocent, "all the people that came together to that sight, beholding the things which were done, smote their breasts, and returned."  The idea here may be that people repented out of guilt when they saw the death of Jesus, as they realized that they put to death an innocent man.  Moreover, Ehrman does well to note the lack of references to blood atonement in Luke-Acts.  I remember reading an article by a scholar named Henry Cadbury that made that same sort of point, but what I learned in reading Ehrman is that there are actual manuscripts that don't have anything about Jesus giving his body and shedding his blood for people in Luke 22:19-20.

But there is a question that I have: How could Jesus' death make everyone feel guilty, when not everyone was directly involved in Jesus' crucifixion?  If Jesus did not die for my sins, indicating that I'm not really part of the picture, then why should I feel guilty about his death?  Is it because of collective guilt: that, in a sense, the Israelites and the Gentiles who participated in Jesus' crucifixion represented all Jews and Gentiles, or they displayed how we would act if we were in their shoes?  (It would be like what some Christians say about why Adam's guilt is imputed to us: God knows that we would have done the same sin as Adam had we been in his shoes!)  Are all people supposed to somehow see themselves in the story of Jesus' crucifixion?


I'd like to make one more point: it seems to me that, in Ehrman's book, Luke-Acts is a rather mavericky voice in the New Testament.  I doubt that Ehrman would say this explicitly, but it's just the impression that I'm getting.  Luke-Acts is the book that causes the proto-orthodox problems and that does not go with the flow of other parts of the New Testament.  Mark at Jesus' baptism presents God acknowledging to Jesus that Jesus is God's son, whereas Luke (in earlier manuscripts) depicts God as begetting Jesus as God's son at that point, which appears consistent with adoptionism.  Mark and Paul have blood atonement, whereas Luke-Acts generally does not.  Mark depicts Jesus as experiencing agony when he is about to die, whereas Jesus in Luke is much more composed (Ehrman argues that Luke 22:44 is not authentic to Luke, and he notes the absence of this verse in early Greek manuscripts as well as elements of the Alexandrian tradition, including Clement and Origen), which may have struck some as rather docetic (Jesus only appeared human).



Don't get me wrong: Ehrman talks about how proto-orthodox scribes altered Mark, Matthew, and Hebrews, too.  Ehrman states that Mark at least appeared consistent with adoptionism (that Jesus was adopted as God's son at his baptism), whether or not Mark intended it that way.  But it just seems to me that Luke-Acts is the mavericky work in the New Testament.  Of course, some of the speeches in Luke-Acts may actually predate the book----the speeches that talk about Jesus' death without mentioning blood atonement, or that depict God as making Jesus the Christ at his resurrection.  Luke-Acts, consequently, may contain Christian voices that are even earlier.  Perhaps, very early on in the history of Christianity, there were different ideas about the significance of Jesus' death, or when Jesus became Son of God.

Paul, Christianity, and Judaism at Last Night's Bible Study

At my church's Bible study last night, we did Session 11, which is entitled "Paul's Peace Movement".  We're going through Romans: The Letter That Changed the World, with Mart De Haan & Jimmy DeYoung.

My posts on my church's Bible study are usually pretty long.  Today, however, I just want to make two points.

1.  A few people in the group said that many of the Jews in Paul's day did not like Paul's preaching to the Gentiles (see Acts 22:21-22) because they wanted to keep on being God's special people----they wanted God's blessings for themselves alone.  A problem that I have with this notion is that it seems to presume that these Jews deep-down believed in Christian concepts: that these Jews admitted that Gentiles were becoming a part of Israel through faith in Christ, they did not like that because they wanted God's blessings for themselves alone, and so they opposed Paul.  The thing is, though, that these Jews weren't Christians!  How could they be upset that Gentiles were entering Israel through faith in Christ, when they didn't even believe that Jesus was the Messiah?  If Jesus is not the Messiah, then the Gentiles are not entering Israel through faith in Christ, whatever the Gentiles or the Christian missionaries may think!

Perhaps the Jews who opposed Paul didn't like the influence of Paul's message, though: even if they did not believe that Gentiles could enter Israel through faith in Christ, they did not appreciate that Paul was proclaiming otherwise, for ideas have consequences.  A number of Jews even accused Paul of bringing Gentiles into the Temple----it wasn't enough that Paul was proclaiming false ideas, but Paul was also infringing on Judaism by bringing Gentiles into the Temple!  Was that why they were upset when Paul mentioned Gentiles in Acts 22:21?

2.  Our workbook cited passages in the Hebrew Bible about the Gentiles worshiping God.  People in the group thought that the Old Testament in these cases was predicting that Gentiles would become a part of God's people.  As I've said before, that's not necessarily true.  But I liked what my pastor read from a study Bible: that Gentiles would be drawn to the God of Israel after seeing God's activity on Israel's behalf, the greatest example of which was the Messiah, Jesus Christ.  Rather than subordinating the Hebrew Bible to Christianity (as treating the Old Testament as a document predicting the New Testament does), this approach acknowledges Christianity while (on some level) preserving the Hebrew Bible's integrity: the Hebrew Bible gets to keep the message that Israel is an important part of the Gentiles coming to God.    

Aniconic Stoics; the Beard

I finished The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine.  I have two items.

1.  On page 569, Robin Jensen states:

"Paul had been arguing in the synagogue with devout Jews and addressed his speech on the Areopagus to Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.  In contrast to traditional Roman polytheists, such groups may have been well disposed to the proclamation of a transcendent, singular and invisible god, who had neither image nor shrine.  The Stoics, for example, opposed the making of divine images, following the teachings of their founder Zeno, who was known to their opposition to temples and statues."

This makes me wonder why Paul did not get a better reception in Acts 17.  It was probably because his audience had issues with the notion of the resurrection of the dead.

2.  On pages 579-580, Jensen talks about depictions of Jesus with and without a beard.  According to Jensen, early depictions of Jesus presented him as a "beautiful and beardless youth" who healed people and performed wonders.  He looked like Apollo or savior-gods such as Dionysos, Hermes, or Orpheus.  When Jesus is depicted as a teacher or philosopher, he is often beardless, but there are rare occasions when he has a beard.  In the late fourth century, Jesus has a beard and resembles Jupiter and Neptune.  The focus at that time is on Jesus as judge and lawgiver, as well as his passion and resurrection.

Early Judaic African Christianity

For my write-up today on The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine, I'll quote what Maureen Tilley says about early African Christianity on page 386:

"The Semitic roots of Punic religion raise the question of the origins of Christianity in this region.  Unfortunately, they are unknown.  Africans never claimed a founding apostle like other churches, such as Alexandria's Mark or India's Thomas.  There was great respect for Christians at Rome, but no tradition of a foundation from that city.  In fact, Christian practice suggests alternate roots.  Most scholars connect Christianity to Jewish communities in and around Carthage.  Evidence includes Hebraisms in their Latin Bible, Tertullian's familiarity with oral traditions later enshrined in the Talmud and Mishnah, and the burial of both Jews and Christian Jews in the Gemart cemetery.  African Christianity also exhibits some of the hallmarks of the 'Jewish Christianity' of the first centuries, e.g. the apostolic decree of Acts 15:19-20 treated as normative as late as Tertullian (Apol. 9.13) and Minucius Felix (Oct. 30.6), Tertullian's knowledge that Jews knew Christians as Nazarenes, a heretical sect (Marc. 4.8), the angel-Christology of pseudo-Cyprian's De centesima (PL, supp. I, cols. 53-67), and the Christian observance of some Jewish festivals as late as 436 (fourth Council of Carthage, canon 89).  Finally, local churches were governed by a board of elders, the seniores laici ('lay elders'), similar to Jewish congregations (or possibly the Punic suffetes).  While the aggregate evidence is not conclusive, the burden of proof nonetheless is on those who would offer alternative explanations, such as a resort to a general Semitic or Punic culture."

What Tilley says is consistent with what I wrote about in my post, Tertullian, OT Law, and the "Husband of One Wife", in which I talk about Tertullian's appeal to Old Testament laws as if they were normative for Christians.  What I show in that post demonstrates that not only African Christianity did that sort of thing, but its presence in Tertullian's African Christianity is consistent with African Christianity's Judaic orientation.

Tilley's statement about the Acts 15 decision being normative in African Christianity as late as Tertullian intrigues me.  Does that mean that much of the rest of Christianity did not deem that ruling to be normative?  If not, why not?  Was it because that ruling was about how Gentile Christians should act in a manner that does not offend Jewish Christians and Jews, and that was not considered to be relevant when Christianity split from Judaism and Gentiles came to dominate Christianity?

Supersessionism; A More Ethical Acts 15:20

I started Brad Young's Paul the Jewish Theologian. I have two items:

1. On page 3, Young quotes Abraham Joshua Heschel, who talks about Christian supersessionism:

"The Christian message, which in its origins intended to be an affirmation and culmination of Judaism, became very early diverted into a repudiation and negation of Judaism; obsolescence and abrogation of Jewish faith became conviction and doctrine; the new covenant was conceived not as a new phase or disclosure but as abolition and replacement of the ancient one; theological thinking fashioned its terms in a spirit of antithesis to Judaism. Contrast and contradiction rather than acknowledgement of roots relatedness and indebtedness, became the perspective. Judaism a religion of law, Christianity a religion of grace; Judaism teaches a God of wrath, Christianity a God of love; Judaism a religion of slavish obedience, Christianity the conviction of free men; Judaism is particularism, Christianity is universalism; Judaism seeks works-righteousness, Christianity preaches faith-righteousness. The teaching of the old covenant a religion of fear, the gospel of the new covenant a religion of love..."

I thought of this passage when I read John Mayer's comments on Psalm 78:43-51 in Charles Spurgeon's Treasury of David:

"Moses wrought wonders destructive, Christ wonders preservative: he turned water into blood, Christ water into wine; he brought flies and frogs and locusts and caterpillars, destroying the fruits of the earth, and annoying it; Christ increased a little of these fruits, five loaves and a few fishes, by blessing them, so that he herewith fed five thousand men: Moses smote both men and cattle with hail, and thunder and lightning, that they died, Christ made some alive that were dead, and saved from death the diseased and sick; Moses was an instrument to bring all manner of wrath and evil angels amongst them, Christ cast out devils and did all manner of good, giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, limbs to the lame, and cleansing to the leper, and when the sea was tempestuous appeasing it; Moses slew their firstborn, thus causing an horrible cry in all the land of Egypt; Christ saveth all the firstborn, or by saving makes them so; for thus they are called, Hebrews 12:23 ."

Young disagrees with the sentiment that Christianity is better than Judaism or the Old Covenant, at least in the way that Heschel says Christianity has conceptualized the issue. According to Young, we cannot say that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a God of wrath, whereas the God of the New Testament is a God of love and grace, for there are times when the God of the Hebrew Bible is loving and gracious, and there is a prominent theme of God's wrath in the New Testament. I would add that Judaism and the Hebrew Bible contain such concepts as universalism (God's love for all people), faith, and obeying God out of love (although there is also a strong particularist streak as well as an emphasis on ritual observances). Young also contends that the New Testament does not promote a lawless sort of faith, for, like elements of Second Temple Judaism, it holds that good works are an expression of faith.

I agree with Young on these points, but I also believe that the New Testament contains the roots for the Christian supersessionism that he criticizes. Paul, after all, associates the law with wrath and condemnation, while he holds that Jesus Christ has brought in a new age of grace. John 1:17 says that the law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. I don't think that Paul and John are like Marcion, who maintained that the God of the Old Testament was cruel whereas the God of the New Testament was loving. Paul and John probably felt that God had good reason to run things as he did during the old dispensation----to convict people of sin so that they'd recognize their need for Christ, to regulate their behavior and provide discipline until Christ came, etc. But now it's a new dispensation.

2. Young talks about the Codex Bezae manuscript. You can read about that here. This Codex dates to the fifth century, but Young believes that it may contain a more original version of the Jerusalem conference's decree in Acts 15. In Acts 15:20, the church decides that the only requirements for Gentile Christians will be for them to refrain from sexual immorality, not to eat meat offered to idols and animals that have been strangled, and to abstain from blood. The Codex Bexae, however, says "to abstain from pollutions of idols, from fornication, from blood[shed] and whatsoever you would that men should do to you do not to another."

I happen to like the Codex Bezae's version. A problem with the requirements for Gentiles in Acts 15:20 is that so many things are left out. As Desmond Ford has asked, does Acts 15:20 mean that Gentiles don't have to honor their parents, since "Honor your father and mother" is not one of the requirements for Gentiles? It makes more sense, therefore, for the church to have required Gentiles to obey some form of the Golden Rule.

At the same time, I'm not sure if Young is correct that the Codex Bezae has an earlier and more authentic version of the Jerusalem Conference's decision. I can understand why a manuscript would give the decision a more ethical orientation, which is what we see in the Codex Bezae. But why would one take an ethical decision and remove ethical pieces from it, such as the Golden Rule? It makes more sense to me that the former happened, not the latter.

Another point that I'd like to make is that Young, in his discussion of the Jerusalem Conference, believes that there was some diversity within the New Testament church. On page 39, Young states:

"Paul would probably view these legal requirements [in the Codex Bezae of Acts 15:20] as a maximum for the non-Jews to observe. Peter, on the other hand, would tend to view these laws as a minimum. He would hope that the new believers from pagan backgrounds would adopt more of the Jewish religious observance."

The Sadducees and Angels; the Pharisees' Lemons

For my write-up today on volume 3 of John Meier's A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, I have two items.

1. Acts 23:8 says that the Sadducees did not believe in angels or spirits. Meier finds this odd because the Sadducees accepted the written Torah, and the written Torah talks about angels. On page 380, Meier attempts to account for Acts 23:8 as follows: "Perhaps Luke is reflecting in a garbled way the idea that the Sadducees rejected the explosion of speculation about angels and demons that was current in Jewish apocalyptic, mystical, and magical circles around the turn of the era, while at least some Pharisees were open to such developments." For Meier, the Sadducees did not reject the existence of angels, but rather the speculation about angels in Jewish apocalypticism, mysticism, and magic.

2. I like what Meier says on page 395 about why the Pharisees were more influential than the Sadducees with the people, even though the Sadducees had the political power:

"Unlike the Pharisees, the Sadducees did not have a great amount of influence with the common people. Perhaps this might be explained in part by the fact that, at least during direct Roman rule, the Sadducees were accustomed to issuing orders backed up by police power, and so felt little need to rely heavily on moral suasion, exemplary living, and exact knowledge of the Scriptures, as did the Pharisees. Needless to say, the usual tension in ancient Mediterranean society between the poor common people and the rich and powerful elite played its part as well."

This has a flavor of "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade!" The Pharisees did not have much political power (though, as Meier notes elsewhere in the book, some of them had a degree of influence with Herod the Great, since they helped him out when he was a commoner). But they used that lack of political power as an opportunity.

Jesus' Death in Acts; Matthew----Jew or Gentile?

I finished Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, volume 1, and I have two:

1. S.G. Wilson states on pages 157-158: "...the soteriological significance of Jesus' death is never made explicit in the missionary speeches and is rarely apparent elsewhere in Luke-Acts. [T]he most that can be said is that 'Luke has taken over certain traditions regarding the meaning of the death of Jesus but he has not in any way developed them or drawn attention to them.' The longer reading in Luke 22:19-20 and the reference to the church as having 'been obtained by his own blood' in Acts 20:28 are not to be overlooked, and a practical theologia crucis, understood as a daily bearing of the cross modelled on the careers of Jesus and his apostles, is clearly a matter of some interest to Luke. Yet the failure of Luke to develop the positive notion of Jesus' death as an atonement, even though he is aware of it, means that there is little to counterbalance the negative emphasis on Jewish culpability. Of course, this is not necessarily a deliberate move on Luke's part, for it may well be that Paul's concentration on this theme makes him, rather than Luke, the exception in early Christianity, or that the atonement was an inner-church theme and not part of the missionary kerygma. The effect, however, whether intended or not, is that our attention is focused without distraction on the accusations against the Jews."

I found this interesting because some have argued that Luke does not believe in blood atonement and that the few passages that do refer to it are interpolations. Wilson sees those few passages as authentic, however, and he maintains that Luke knows of the notion that Jesus' death was for blood atonement but does not develop it. The result is that the Jews in Acts bear a significant amount of onus for Jesus' death, which is not even given much redeeming value in Acts. At the same time, Wilson does note that the Jews in Acts act according to the plan of God when they kill Jesus.

2. On pages 184-187, Benno Przybylski (which I will abbreviate as "BP") argues against G. Strecker's idea that a Gentile Christian was behind the final redaction of the Gospel of Matthew. Some of Strecker's arguments resemble those of John Meier and Michael Cook, who contend that Matthew was not a Jewish-Christian Gospel.

First, Strecker says that Matthew 5:43 reveals ignorance of the Jewish tradition, for it says that Jesus' audience has heard that you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Strecker states that such a concept is not in the older rabbinic tradition. BP responds, however, that it "could easily reflect teaching similar to that of the Qumran sectarians as expressed in 1QS 1.10 or 9.21."

Second, Strecker says that Matthew is unaware of Hebrew parallelism, for Matthew 21:1-9 presents Jesus riding two animals in fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9, when Zechariah 9:9 is not saying that the king will ride on both an ass and also a colt. Rather, Zechariah 9:9 is using Hebrew parallelism (repeating a thought), which means that the ass and the colt both refer to one and the same animal. The argument that Matthew does not understand Hebrew parallelism is used by John Meier and Michael Cook. But I agree with BP: the rabbis themselves took parallelism literally at times, just like Matthew. For example, BP cites Psalm 28:5, which says that "He will break them down and not build them up". This looks like parallelism because a thought is being repeated. But the rabbis believed that God did not repeat himself superfluously, and so the Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael Shirata 6 held that Psalm 28:5 refers to two separate things rather than being a repetition of one idea: "He will break them down" relates to this world, and "and not build them up" pertains to the World to Come. See my post here for more information on Matthew 21 and Zechariah 9:9.

Third, Strecker says that Matthew 12:11 contradicts Jewish law. Matthew 12:11 says that the Pharisees believed that one could pull his sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath. According to BP, "Strecker argues that according to rabbinic law the owner could feed the animal or even help it to help itself but he could not actually lift it out." But BP responds that Matthew may be going with a minority rabbinic opinion, or that popular practice was more liberal than the majority rabbinic view.

Pentecost 2009

Today is the Feast of Pentecost. For my reflections last year, see Pentecost 2008.

What's interesting is that a lot of churches are celebrating Pentecost today, not just the Armstrongites. At my Latin mass this morning, the church bulletin was about Acts 2, and the homily concerned the Holy Spirit.

The priest said that the Holy Spirit was not about eccentric manifestations, but rather us becoming more understanding of the people around us. He was making a possible jab at Pentecostalism here, but his point inspires me to ask: What's the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer?

I once heard Ron Dart say that the Holy Spirit was not given solely to inspire and enlighten us in our personal relationship with God, for it also equips us for our Christian mission and enables us to get along with one another. This was interesting, for Dart is often quite individualistic in his conception of the Christian life.

The Armstrongite movement was not really about "feeling" God. Religious emotionalism was often mocked, as was Pentecostalism. While I agree with Dart that the Holy Spirit is not only about us feeling good in our personal relationship with God, I don't exclude feelings from the equation. In Acts 10:46, the Gentiles receive the Holy Spirit and praise God as they speak in tongues. The feeling of warmth and peace that Pentecostals get when they're baptized with the Holy Spirit is not a bad thing. It may very well be biblical!

I don't think, however, that we should judge those who are not outgoing or happy or eerily at peace. That's my problem with a lot of evangelicals! Many of them make acting happy into a legalistic requirement, as church becomes a place where people compete to show off how cheerful they are, thereby parading their (self-)righteousness. It's kind of sickening!

The Holy Spirit was indeed about mission, in that he equipped the apostles to spread the Gospel to the world. We also see in Romans 12 and I Corinthians that the Holy Spirit enables Christians to edify one another within the context of the church.

I personally don't see my life in terms of mission. Nick Norelli was commenting on his blog about Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life, and he asked us what we thought our purpose was (The Purpose Driven Life). Many commented on enjoying and serving God, but my response was, "To get through the day with some degree of happiness, not to hurt others, and to help people when I can (or the opportunity presents itself)."

I don't know what serving God means, to be honest. I really have no desire to convince people to love or believe in God, since there are many times when I cannot stand God. At the same time, I don't want to persuade people not to believe in God, since who am I to say that faith doesn't help others live good, fulfilling lives? I guess all I can do is tell my story and be honest about what I think. When that can edify people or bring them closer to God, great! But I'm not God's salesman.

Where the Holy Spirit comes into all that, I have no idea. Is the Holy Spirit responsible for whatever edifying insights I present? Maybe. At the same time, I'm reluctant to say so because that would imply that my insights are infallible, which is far from being the case. I have the same issue with those who claim that the Holy Spirit inspired them to arrive at certain interpretations of Scripture. "I don't need to know Greek, since I have the Holy Spirit guiding me," they say. In some cases, they present an off-the-wall interpretation that does violence to the Greek! I'm reluctant to attribute someone's subjective insights to the Holy Spirit--even my own! And yet, I'm equally hesitant to say that God doesn't lead, guide, and inspire his children. Christ promised not to leave us orphans, after all!

Does the Holy Spirit enable us to get along with people? He doesn't for me, I can tell you that much! But maybe I'd be worse without the Holy Spirit. I don't know.

In any case, have a happy Pentecost! I'm taking today off, which is why I didn't write about my comps reading.

LXX's Contemporizing, Sectarian Leaders, Fence Around the Law

1. Emanuel Tov, "The Septuagint," Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Martin Jan Mulder (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004) 178.

"In order that the subject matter of the translation should be understood by the readers, the LXX translators used words and terms taken from daily life in Egypt and also made actualizing changes. E.g., in Isa 9:11 'Aram on the east and the Philistines on the west' has been changed to 'Syria on the east and the Greeks on the west'. In this translation the names of the enemies of Israel in the time of the OT have been changed to conform with the situation existing during the Hellenistic period...The new enemies are the Hellenistic cities on the shore of the Mediterranean and the Seleucid kingdom in the East. In Isa 46:1 'Bel...Nebo', the last name has been changed to [Dagon]. Seelingman applies this change to a Hellenistic source which knew Dagon as a Babylonian godhead side by side with Bel."

This overlaps with what I wrote about yesterday, in Reapplied Prophecy, Marcion on Matthew 5:17, Atoning Marriage. I see here an example of how the LXX rewrites a prophecy to fit the nations of its day. It doesn't do so in a way that's totally unfaithful to the Hebrew text, however, for Aram and Syria are the same nation.

I also see that the LXX rewrote the Bible in light of the historical research of its time. There were Hellenistic sources that placed Dagon beside Bel, so the LXX interpreted Isaiah 46:1 in light of that. I'm not sure if the translator thought the Hebrew text was wrong, or if he felt he was clarifying and elucidating it.

2. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1910) 515.

"Another characteristic feature of patristic polemics is to trace heresy to mean motives, such as pride, disappointed ambition, sensual lust, and avarice. No allowance is made for different mental constitutions, educational influences, and other causes. There are, however, a few notable exceptions. Origen and Augustin admit the honesty and earnestness at least of some teachers of error."

The New Testament does the same sort of thing: it believes heretics have a bad character. Here are some examples:

Galatians 6:13: "Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh" (NRSV).

II Peter 2:1-3: "But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions. They will even deny the Master who bought them-- bringing swift destruction on themselves. Even so, many will follow their licentious ways, and because of these teachers the way of truth will be maligned. And in their greed they will exploit you with deceptive words. Their condemnation, pronounced against them long ago, has not been idle, and their destruction is not asleep."

Are false teachers necessarily bad people? I think there are many who are, since we know of religious figures who try to gain power for themselves. Moreover, II Peter may discuss a group that was antinomian--which justified its own sinful lifestyle with the claim that we don't have to keep a moral law. In that case, bad character and false doctrine tended to go hand-in-hand. Then there's the NT notion that false teachers may themselves be deceived (II Timothy 3:13).

I've been thinking about factionalism as I've read the Koran and James Crossley's Why Christianity Happened. My impression from the Koran is that it believes people should accept the message of Muhammad, the prophet of Allah. My question is, "Why?" If Muhammad's basic message was that people should believe in God and the final judgment while avoiding evil and doing good, can't one do those things without embracing the person of Muhammad? If so, then why is acceptance of Muhammad necessary?

I wonder the same thing about Jewish sects. What was so special about the Teacher of Righteousness (in Qumran)? What did he offer that was substantially different from other Judaisms of the Second Temple Period?

Can one say the same about Jesus? The New Testament often focuses on accepting the person of Jesus, since he was the one God raised from the dead (Acts 2:24, 32; 3:15, 26; 17:31). But can one accept moral principles without embracing the person of Jesus? Is Christianity the same as other religions, only it adds the person of Jesus to the mix--as Islam adds Muhammad, and Qumran had the Teacher of Righteousness?

Not exactly, for Christianity is a religion with substantial differences in terms of content. James Crossley talks about Jesus' message of repentance, and he asks why many Jewish leaders had problems with it, when they themselves believed that sinners should repent. His answer is that Jesus' idea of repentance differed from that of most Jewish leaders. For Jesus, repentance didn't mean living a life that had a lot of religious rituals. So Christianity isn't just about having a certain personality (Jesus) who leads a movement. Rather, Jesus makes the content of Christianity different, although it also has clear overlaps with other religions.

3. Jacob Neusner, Judaism's Story of Creation: Scripture, Halakhah, Aggadah (Boston: Brill, 2000) 263.

"Man showed his arrogance in adding to God's commandment concerning the tree (GR XIX:III)."

This is from Genesis Rabbah. Here's the text, from my Judaic Classics Library:

"BUT OF THE FRUIT OF THE TREE WHICH IS IN THE MIDST OF THE GARDEN, GOD HATH SAID: YE SHALL NOT EAT OF IT, NEITHER SHALL YE TOUCH IT, LEST YE DIE (III, 3). Thus it is written, Add not unto His words, lest He reprove thee, and thou be found a liar (Prov. XXX, 6). R. Hiyya taught: That means that you must not make the fence more than the principal thing, lest it fall and destroy the plants. Thus, the Holy One, blessed be He, had said, For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die (Gen. II,17); whereas she did not say thus, but, GOD HATH SAID: YE SHALL NOT EAT OF IT, NEITHER SHALL YE TOUCH IT; when he [the serpent] saw her thus lying, he took and thrust her against it. ' Have you then died? he said to her; just as you were not stricken through touching it, so will you not die when you eat it, but For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, etc. (ib. 5)."

God commanded Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When Satan tempted Eve to eat from it, Eve recited the rule with a slight addition: you can't touch the tree either. Satan proved the rule-plus-the-addition to be wrong by making Eve touch the tree, which didn't result in her death. As a result, Eve concluded that the entire command must be incorrect.

A teacher I had once drew a parallel between Adam's addition to God's command and the Jewish concept of a "fence around the law." Within Judaism, there are fences that protect the law: you don't get to the point where you violate the law because you avoid situations where you remotely can disobey it. Similarly, Adam prohibited Eve from even touching the tree, since, if she didn't touch it, she wouldn't eat from it.

Interestingly, the midrash doesn't say we shouldn't have fences around the law. Rather, it states that we shouldn't allow the fence to overshadow the law itself. Maybe this means that we should view the fence as a fence--it's not a divine command, but it's a boundary we can set for ourselves to avoid compromising situations.

In the Sea-Storm

Source: John Sellars, Stoicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) 66.

"According to Gellius' account, the passage from Epictetus said the following. It argued that the impressions we receive that present external objects to us are not within our control. We do not have the power to choose them; instead they force themselves on us. However, we do have the power to choose whether to assent to these impressions or not. But in a situation such as the storm at sea, the mind of even the Stoic sage will be disturbed by the sudden impressions it receives against its will. In an interesting discussion of Gellius' account, Augustine glosses this point by saying that it is as if the resulting emotion is just too quick for the mind (De Civitate Dei 9.4.2). However, although the Stoic philosopher might be briefly overcome by the force of the sudden impression, he will not give his assent to the impression. Instead he will stand firm, reject the impression that something terrible is happening, and affirm that in fact nothing bad has occurred. In contrast, the other passengers in the storm will unthinkingly assent to the impression that something terrible is indeed happening."

If a storm at sea strikes, even a Stoic will be afraid, at least for a little while. That's human nature. Sure, because life is so hard, there have been times when I've thought that I wouldn't care that much if my life were endangered. But I shake when I think about being at a high point and possibly falling. The thought of drowning scares me. So I can understand why someone would be afraid of a storm at sea. The vulnerability of a person at that moment, as a storm threatens to tear up his very ground amidst a vast body of water! I shudder to think about it.

This quote on the Stoic at sea reminds me of things I've seen in Christianity. One evangelical told me that a true Christian should have a resolute faith in God, even if he were hanging over Niagra Falls. I'm sure she'd recognize that even a strong Christian would be afraid in that sort of situation, but she'd probably go on to say that he would overcome such fear as he clung to his faith.

Acts 27 is the story of Paul in the midst of the sea-storm. An angel tells him that everything will be all right, Paul then eats before the other passengers with utter peace, and the passengers begin to take comfort. I kind of like this. The quote on Stoicism reminds me of what I see in evangelicalism: "Look at me! I'm at peace in this difficult situation. Those heathens are not. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah." But Acts 27 actually shows Paul giving encouragement and comfort to those very "heathens." He's at peace, but not only for his own sake.

But even Paul had to deal with fear, as II Corinthians 7:5 states: "For even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted in every way--disputes without and fears within" (NRSV). And he had every reason to be afraid, with all the people trying to kill him and the storms at sea he continually encountered. But he found a way to be courageous through all of his fears. What gave him strength was his realization that nothing in creation could separate him from the love of God in Jesus Christ his Lord (Romans 8:35-39). As he said to his shipmates in the midst of the storm, he belonged to God (Acts 27:23).

Moses, Peter, and Get Out of Jail Free

Source: Harold W. Attridge, "Historiography," Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 167.

"Moses, after the burning bush encounter, returns to Egypt where he is imprisoned. He miraculously escapes when, during the night, the doors of the prison miraculously open. (It was the parallel between this account and the report of the escape of Peter in Acts 12:3-17 which caught the attention of Clement of Alexandria.)"

Attridge is referring to the Jewish historian Artapanus (second century B.C.E.), who is cited by Clement of Alexandria in the Stromata (second-third centuries C.E.).

I'm not sure what Attridge has in mind here. I checked Clement's Stromata 1:23, which is where Clement refers to the story of Moses' release from prison. Clement doesn't mention Acts 12, but he does compare Moses to Peter in the sense that both killed people with the words of their mouths (Acts 5). Here's what Clement says:

"And the mystics say that he slew the Egyptian by a word only; as, certainly, Peter in the Acts is related to have slain by speech those who appropriated part of the price of the field, and lied (Acts v. 1). And so Artapanus, in his work On the Jews, relates 'that Moses, being shut up in custody by Chenephres, king of the Egyptians, on account of the people demanding to be let go from Egypt, the prison being opened by night, by the interposition of God, went forth, and reaching the palace, stood before the king as he slept, and aroused him; and that the latter, struck with what had taken place, bade Moses tell him the name of the God who had sent him; and that he, bending forward, told him in his ear; and that the king on hearing it fell speechless, but being supported by Moses, revived again.'"

Maybe Clement is saying something like "Moses and Peter are alike in such-and-such a way, but here's another example of their similarity." I don't know. I'm a little disappointed, however, because I was wondering how Clement accounted for the similarity between the two stories. I can picture modern scholars asserting that Acts copied the story of Moses' release from prison and applied it to Peter, but Clement of Alexandria wouldn't do that, even though he often accuses the pagans of plagiarizing off the Hebrews. He may just think that two similar events happened in history.

Unremarkable Agrippa

Source: H. Graetz, History of the Jews, volume II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893) 260.

"The Zealots barred the entrance of the Temple against any one belonging to the peace party, and gained over to their side the masses who had brought wood for the altar, as well as the Sicarii who made their way into the Temple through the crowd. Strengthened by the increase of numbers, the Zealots drove away their opponents and became masters of the upper town. The anger of the people was aroused against the friends of Rome, they set fire to the palaces of King Agrippa and Princess Berenice, devoting to the slaves likewise the house of the rich priest Ananias, and the public archives, among which the bonds of debtors were kept."

This quote stood out to me because it discussed Agrippa and Berenice, who also appear in Acts 25-26. It's like seeing someone on a TV show whom I recognize from another series ("Hey, that's Mrs. Landingham!"): it's just cool.

I looked at David Braund's article on Agrippa in the Anchor Bible Dictionary. Agrippa did a lot of positive things for his nation and his religion, but he took the side of the Romans when the revolt was going on. And he lived a long life as a result. According to Braund, "In Rome in a.d. 75 Agrippa was awarded the symbols of praetorian rank."

But he had some disappointments in life as well. Agrippa was about to be appointed to succeed his father, Agrippa I, but he was deemed too young and inexperienced for the position, so the Romans gave most of the power to a governor. I guess young Agrippa's role was ceremonial rather than official.

Here's one thought, which I may repeat a lot as time goes on: Agrippa was influential in his own time, but his influence did not go beyond that. Jesus and Paul, by contrast, created a current that persists to this very day. Often, a life of just seeking power and fame doesn't have a lasting effect. Neither does simply being religious, since Agrippa paid his dues to God through his support of Judaism. But a contribution to the world of ideas in an attempt to help others and glorify a cause beyond oneself can actually have a long life.

Second Degree Impure Food

Source: Sid Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (Hamden: Archon, 1976) 103-104.

According to the rabbis, a person who touches an impure object gains second degree impurity with respect to his hands. One removes such impurity through ritually washing them. Leiman states: "If the hands are not ritually washed, they in turn defile the priestly gifts (terumah) which they touch. Such priestly gifts may no longer be eaten and must be burned." Eventually, unwashed hands defiled all food that they touched, not only that of priests. This may be because the rabbis were trying to make ordinary meals an experience of the divine.

This rabbinic ritual may go back to New Testament times, since the Pharisees criticized Jesus' disciples for not washing their hands. For them, unwashed hands rendered the food defiling to the one who eats it (Matthew 15; Mark 7).

I remember reading an article from the Worldwide Church of God on clean and unclean meats. In Acts 10:14, Peter said he never ate food that was common or unclean. According to the article, the unclean meats referred to those prohibited in Leviticus 11, whereas the common ones were meats defiled through unwashed hands. That may be true, since there seems to be a distinction between common and unclean food in the verse.

Are Gentiles Under the Law?

Are Gentiles obligated to obey the Mosaic law, as Armstrongites and other Sabbatarians have argued?

Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by law!

1. Let's look first at the "yes" side. In his writings to Gentile churches, Paul often cites the Old Testament law as an authority for moral conduct. Here are some examples:

Romans 3:20: "For 'no human being will be justified in his sight' by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin" (NRSV).

Romans 8:3b-4: "[God] condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit."

Romans 13:8-10: "Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet'; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law."

I Corinthians 9:7-11: "Who at any time pays the expenses for doing military service? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock and does not get any of its milk? Do I say this on human authority? Does not the law also say the same? For it is written in the law of Moses, 'You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.' Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was indeed written for our sake, for whoever plows should plow in hope and whoever threshes should thresh in hope of a share in the crop. If we have sown spiritual good among you, is it too much if we reap your material benefits?"

I Corinthians 14:34: "[W]omen should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says."

Galatians 5:14: "For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"

Ephesians 6:1-3 (which is technically Deutero-Paul, for liberal scholars): "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 'Honor your father and mother'-- this is the first commandment with a promise: 'so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.'"

You can see that Gentiles are under the authority of the Mosaic law, for Paul quotes it as an authority on how they should live.

This runs counter to two popular anti-law views within Protestantism. The first one states that Christ has abolished the Mosaic Torah while replacing it with a new law, the law of Christ. This is the position of the Church of Christ.

Granted, the New Testament contains a number of new laws and commands (Matthew 5-7; John 13:34; I Corinthians 9:21; Galatians 6:2), and it often exhorts believers to behave in light of Christ, without rooting its morality in the Old Testament law (Philippians 2:2-12; Ephesians 4:12; Colossians 3:13). Consequently, Sabbatarian Des Ford is wrong to deny that the New Testament is a book of legislation, for it does appear to present a new Torah for God's people.

But we have seen that Paul also appeals to the legislation of the Old Testament. In I Corinthians 9:9, he even goes so far as to call his source "the law of Moses." You can't get any clearer than that! Essentially, the law of Moses is still authoritative, but it has been supplemented with the teachings and moral example of Christ.

Another anti-law view is that God gave the Torah specifically to Israel, meaning that it's not relevant to non-Israelites. But if we're going to take that approach, then we might as well dismiss all of the Bible's authority. I can easily say, "Paul was writing to the first century church, so it doesn't apply to James Pate." We have seen that Paul treats the Torah as authoritative for Gentiles. Therefore, the argument that "God just gave those laws to Israel" doesn't really cut the mustard, in my humble opinion. Granted, God revealed his perfect will specifically to Israel, but God's standards apply to everyone, Jew and Gentile alike. And, while Paul acknowledges that the Gentiles know enough about right and wrong to be judged apart from the law (Romans 2:14-16), he is clear that the Jews alone possess the oracles of God, which enable them to know God's will and determine what is best (Romans 2:18; 3:2). Sure, the Gentiles can be moral. But the Jews are the ones with access to the "best."

2. On the "no" side, Paul says that believers "are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit" (Romans 7:6). He denies repeatedly that believers are "under the law." Armstrongites maintain that "under the law" means under the law's penalty, but that doesn't work entirely. Paul says in Galatians 4:4 that Jesus was born under the law, and Jesus was not under the law's penalty, for he was sinless. In Galatians 4:21, Paul addresses those who desire to be under the law. Why would anyone want to be under the law's penalty? And Paul states in I Corinthians 9:20, "To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law." How can Paul pretend to be under the penalty of the Torah? That makes no sense!

"Under the law" means "subject to the regulations of the Torah." As far as Paul is concerned, that's a life of slavery (Romans 7:6; Galatians 4:21-31). At the same time, being "under the law" can entail being under the law's penalty, since people do not obey it! As Paul says in Galatians 3:10, "For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.'" That's why Paul calls the Old Covenant system a ministry of condemnation (II Corinthians 3:9). Placing oneself under the legal system of the Old Testament is a dead end, in Paul's mind.

Another indicator that Gentiles don't have to obey the Mosaic Torah is Acts 15. A group of Jewish Christians wants to require the Gentile believers to be circumcised and obey the law of Moses. Sabbatarian Ron Dart has argued that the issue here is not the necessity of keeping the law, but rather whether or not people needed to observe it for salvation (see here). For Dart, one cannot earn God's forgiveness through obedience to the Torah, but one should still fulfill the law because it's God's righteous standard.

But Acts 15 doesn't seem to be about why one should observe the Torah (for justification vs. out of obedience). Rather, it appears to exempt the Gentile believers from the Torah's commands. As James says in Acts 15:28-29: "[I]t has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well." The issue at the Jerusalem conference is what Gentiles had to do, not the proper motivation for keeping the law.

Another point: Armstrongites may claim that people are not saved through obedience to the law, but that's not always how they acted! I've heard of ministers who said that people won't enter God's kingdom if they missed the Feast of Tabernacles or worked on the Sabbath. "Oh, but you don't do these things to earn God's forgiveness--you do them to obey God," they may assert. It's still a yoke of bondage, regardless of what justification one attaches to it! I can't believe that Acts 15 is saying, "You Gentiles can't earn salvation through doing the law, but you still must place yourself under its yoke, since that's what your Christian walk is all about." Such a view makes the Jerusalem conference a debate over semantics!

3. So does the New Testament teach that Gentiles have to do the Torah? It depends on how one defines "Torah." If it means that the Gentiles have to observe the ceremonies of the Old Testament in a literal sense, then the answer is "no." But if it entails that they're under the authority of the law, in the sense that they obey its moral precepts and spiritually interpret its ceremonies as shadows of Christ, then the answer is "yes."

Some may think that my explanation is slippery, in that I'm freely defining the "law of Moses" as I see fit in two different contexts. But there are times when one has to do this. Take a look at the following passages on circumcision:

I Corinthians 7:19: "Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but obeying the commandments of God is everything."

Colossians 2:11-13: "In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ;
when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses[.]"

So is circumcision essential or non-essential? It depends on what you mean by "circumcision." In I Corinthians 7:19, Paul is discussing physical circumcision, and he deems that to be non-essential for pleasing God. In Colossians 2:11-13, however, the author talks about the spiritual circumcision of the flesh (which connotes the sinful nature). That is a circumcision that believers need to have!

So do Gentiles have to obey the law? It depends on one's definition of the law!

Temporal Referents: A Decent Sabbatarian Argument

Today, I want to wrestle with a Sabbatarian, pro-holy day argument that is somewhat hard to gainsay. Even though I've been arguing against Sabbatarianism for the past couple of days, I acknowledge that it can make decent arguments every now and then.

The New Testament contains a number of Jewish temporal referents, which are indicators of time that refer to a Jewish festival or institution. For example, Acts 20:6 says that Paul left Philippi after the Days of Unleavened Bread. Acts 27:9 narrates that Paul sailed to Rome shortly after the Fast, that is, the Jewish Day of Atonement. I Corinthians 16:2 tells the Corinthian Christians to set apart a portion of their income on the first day of the week, which in the Greek is "mian sabbatou," or first of the Sabbath. In v 8 of that chapter, Paul says he will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost--the Jewish Feast of Weeks.

According to many Sabbatarians, the New Testament's use of Jewish temporal referents indicates that Gentile Christians were keeping the Sabbath and holy days. In their view, these New Testament writings were directed towards Gentiles, and they wouldn't include those kinds of temporal referents unless their recipients knew about and observed the Jewish calendar.

I'm not sure if this argument will work with Acts, since Theophilus (the recipient of Luke-Acts) could have been a Hellenistic Jew. Many Jews in the Diaspora had Greek names, plus Luke goes out of his way to demonstrate that Christianity is consistent with Judaism. Luke emphasizes over and over again that Christianity is neither contrary to the law and the prophets, nor does it encourage Jews to abandon the observance of the Torah (Luke 24:44; Acts 6:13; 18:18; 20:16; 21:20ff.; 24:14). This would makes sense if his reader were a Jewish Christian, who heard rumors that Paul was opposed to the law. And, if such were the case, then Theophilus' familiarity with Jewish temporal referents wouldn't be that surprising, nor would it indicate that Gentiles were observing Jewish institutions. In this scenario, of course Theophilus was familiar with the Jewish days, for he kept them like any good Jew.

But Paul's letter to the Corinthians is a different story, since many of the members of that church were obviously Gentile. So why would Paul use Jewish temporal referents for a Gentile audience? Here are some possibilities:

1. The Armstrongite solution is that the Corinthian church was observing the Sabbath and holy days. This possibility has a certain appeal, since temporal referents usually mean something to us when we are actually observing them. If someone tells me that an event will occur around Christmas, I can understand what he's saying, for many people around me celebrate that day. One can therefore ask: Why would Paul refer to Jewish days in a letter to a predominantly Gentile church, unless it were actually keeping them? Their surrounding culture certainly was not! And one can argue that someone in the letter's audience had to be doing so for the temporal referents to make any sense. So I can understand why many Sabbatarians conclude that the Gentile Corinthian church observed certain Jewish institutions.

But I have questions about this option. The biggest one is this: Why doesn't Paul ever discuss how to keep the Sabbath? I mean, in Armstrongite and Adventist churches, people naturally wonder what is permissible and forbidden on that day (e.g., can I wash the dishes? Can I watch a movie? Can I swim?). Rabbinic Judaism wrestled with this whole issue, which is why it had an oral law: the Bible forbade work on the Sabbath, and the Jewish people needed to know what "work" actually was, if they were to obey the commandment. And that's one thing that the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Talmud try to define. Why doesn't Paul address this sort of dilemma in his letters, especially when the Gentiles in his audience were fairly new to Sabbath-keeping?

Of course, these sorts of questions can be handled orally. I mean, not every group that observed the Sabbath wrote about the nuts and bolts of halakah. I can't find specific rules about Sabbath observance in Philo's writings, but he still kept it! Over time, a community can develop customs and traditions about what to do on its Sabbaths and festivals. They may not wrestle with halakic questions because what to do is not controversial for them: they simply go along with what they've always done. Or, alternatively, maybe the Jews in the Diaspora abode by the halakic decisions of the Judean authorities. I don't know.

Another problem I have is something I raised in my post, Sabbatarian "Paul Would Have" Arguments: We don't see much in the New Testament about the church meeting on the Sabbath and holy days. A possible exception is Acts 2, where believers gather together on the day of Pentecost. But, overall, when the early Christians honored the Sabbath and festivals, they did so within a Jewish context. Paul entered synagogues on the Sabbath day (Acts 13:14-44; 17:2). He desired to be in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost (Acts 20:16). When he got to Jerusalem, he worshipped in the temple. Why would he want to go to Jerusalem, if he could attend Pentecost services at a nearby church? Armstrongites assume that the early church had Sabbath and holy day services, just like them. But I don't see much evidence for that in the New Testament.

2. Maybe Paul uses Jewish temporal referents because there were Jews in the Corinthian church. Acts 18:1-18 depicts Paul gaining converts from a Corinthian synagogue. In parts of I Corinthians, he acknowledges that the church contains both Jews and Gentiles (I Corinthians 10:32; 12:13). I Corinthians 10:32 may contain a solution to why Paul refers to the first day of the week as "mian sabbatou" (first of the Sabbath). It says, "Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God" (NRSV).

As I argued in my post, Bacchiocchi's Argument from Silence, the early church did not want the Gentile Christians to offend their Jewish brethren. That's why they were to avoid meat offered to idols, fornication, strangled meat, and the consumption of blood: Gentiles viewed these practices as normal, but Jews deemed them to be abhorrent, even for non-Israelites. Some argue that this is the reason James says in Acts 15:21, "For in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud every sabbath in the synagogues." According to some interpreters, James is saying that there were a lot of Jews in the Diaspora, so Gentile believers needed to make sure that they didn't offend them unnecessarily!

Could that be why Paul mentions the Sabbath in I Corinthians 16:2: he'd offend a lot of Jewish Christians by referring to the days of the week according to the Greek and Roman gods? And so, as a result, he sticks with the Jews' way of labelling days--with reference to the weekly Sabbath? If that's the case, it doesn't mean that the Gentile Christians observed the Sabbath and annual holy days. Paul's simply taking into consideration those in the congregation who did: the Jewish Christians. It's something to think about!

3. There's also a possibility that Paul wanted the Corinthian church to remember the Jewish institutions, even if not every member literally observed them. All of the Corinthian Christians were heirs to the Old Testament, as they drew rich spiritual lessons from its stories and laws (see I Corinthians 9:9; 10). So when Paul exhorts the Corinthians, "[L]et us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (I Corinthians 5:8), he may not be telling them to observe the Days of Unleavened Bread in a literal sense; rather, his message is most likely that they should forsake the leaven of sin and instead pursue sincerity and truth (see vv 5-7). A lot of this passage is metaphorical, as is v 7, which calls Christ our Passover. Could Paul intend for the celebration of the festival to be a metaphor for the Christian life rather than a literal observance? That would make sense. After all, we're supposed to avoid malice and be sincere every day of the year, not only on the Days of Unleavened Bread!

The same applies to the Sabbath. When Hebrews 4:9 says that "a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God," I don't think it's talking about believers resting every Saturday. The "rest" of Hebrews 4 is much larger than that, for it encompasses the Christians' life and hope. At the same time, the Sabbath is still relevant, for the author of Hebrews appeals to it as he tries to explain a spiritual reality.

According to the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament's article on "sabbaton," the church fathers continued to refer to the days of the week according to the Sabbath, even though they didn't observe it (Didache 8:1; Martyrdom of Polycarp 8:1; 21:1, et al.). Maybe that's because they still deemed the Sabbath to be spiritually relevant to believers, recognizing that it commemorated creation, conveyed eschatalogical significance, and symbolized the spiritual life of Christians (see the long version of Ignatius to the Magnesians 9:2-4, which is slightly pro-Sabbath; the short version 9:1, which is more anti-Sabbath; Barnabas 15:5-9; Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho 12:1). Perhaps they wanted to attach biblical significance to their week, so they stuck with the Jewish labels for the days: "Sabbath," "preparation day," etc. Each week, even if they didn't observe the Sabbath literally, they got to commemorate the divine drama, which encompasses the Old and the New Testaments. And that may be why Paul mentions the Sabbath in I Corinthians 16:2.

Again, it's something to think about!

Sabbatarian "Paul Would Have" Arguments

Ron Dart was a minister in the Armstrongite Church of God, International when I was growing up. I imbibed his arguments for the Sabbath and annual holy days, and I used them in debates with a Church of Christ friend, who didn't think Christians had to observe them.

Today, I want to interact with some of Dart's arguments for the seventh-day Sabbath. As in my post, Des Ford Sabbatarian Arguments, I'll be citing a few of them from memory. But, as with Ford, many of Dart's arguments are commonplace in Sabbatarian apologetics (although Ford and Dart can be quite original at times!). Thus, I'm not only responding to him when I address them.

In Acts 13:14-44, Paul enters a synagogue in Antioch, Pisidia (which is in Asia Minor). He does so on the Sabbath day, according to his custom (see Acts 17:2). Paul gives a powerful sermon to the Jews and pious Gentiles at the synagogue, and they ask Paul to come back the next Sabbath. When Paul does so, the whole city assembles to hear God's word.

I've heard Dart and other Sabbatarians point out that Paul didn't tell the Gentiles to keep Sunday (see here). "Why do you want me to come back next Sabbath?," he could have said. "We Christians celebrate the Lord's day, which is the day after the Sabbath. Come to hear me then!"

First of all, this argument assumes that Paul was obsessed with the day of worship. And that's a problem I have with a lot of Sabbatarians: they assume that everyone is walking around with the Sabbath/Sunday controversy on the brain, just because it's one of their preoccupations. "If Christians were meeting on Sundays, then Paul would've told the Gentiles about it," their argument runs. Who says? Maybe that wasn't one of Paul's priorities at the time. There are more important things than one's day of worship, like, say, the Gospel.

Second, Paul is in the synagogue on the Sabbath. You know, I get the impression that a lot of Sabbatarians like to project their own practices onto the first century church. They envision the early church gathering together for Sabbath morning (or, in the case of Armstrongites, Sabbath afternoon) services. I once read an Armstrongite church's web site that said something like, "If you went back in time to the first century church and visited it on Sunday, you'd find you were a day late, since their services were the day before." But Acts doesn't say that Paul went to church on Saturdays. It says he went to the synagogue, which had a lot of non-believers. How many Adventists and Armstongites visit their local synagogues every Sabbath?

In From Sabbath to Lord's Day, a pro-Sunday book, one of the articles maintains that there were many Christians who went to the temple or a synagogue on the Sabbath, while they gathered together with their fellow believers on Sunday (or, more accurately, Sunday night, which was when many of them got off work). That's possible, I guess. I wonder how Adventists and Armstrongites handle this issue: If the early Christians went to the synagogues on the Sabbath, then when did they go to church? Do they think they did a double-shift every Saturday?

A similar "Paul would have" argument that Sabbatarians like to use concerns Acts 21:20-25. There, a group of Jewish-Christians says to Paul: "You see, brother, how many thousands of believers there are among the Jews, and they are all zealous for the law. They have been told about you that you teach all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. So do what we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow. Join these men, go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of their heads. Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself observe and guard the law. But as for the Gentiles who have become believers, we have sent a letter with our judgment that they should abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication" (NRSV).

And Paul accedes to their request, thereby showing the Jews that he is not opposed to their Torah. I once heard Dart argue that Paul wouldn't have done this, had he truly believed that Christ nailed the law to the cross. Rather, he would've set the Jewish believers straight, telling them that they didn't need to observe the law.

Again, who says? Maybe Paul was trying to keep the peace, instead of bringing unnecessary persecution on himself (not that he succeeded). He had Timothy circumcised before they visited the Jews of Derbe and Lystra, since Timothy had a Jewish mother (Acts 16:1-3). He didn't want to make the Jews mad, if he didn't have to do so.

I can resort to the old "I Corinthians 9:20" argument, which says that Paul was only doing the Jewish customs to win Jews to Christ. And this has some merit, for Paul says in that passage: "To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law." But Acts presents Paul as a devout Jew. Acts 18:18 says he was even under a vow, presumably a Nazirite one. I can't see how that would have been a missionary ploy! It was something between him and God.

But I wonder why Sabbatarians like to see the issue as a polarity. The way they frame it, either Paul believed that the Mosaic law was binding on every human being on the face of the earth, or he treated it as worthless garbage that was nailed to the cross. But could Paul have respected the Jewish laws and customs, without thinking that everyone had to observe them? Observe, the Jewish-Christians' concern was not that Paul was telling Gentiles to forsake the Mosaic law. As far as they were concerned, the Gentiles had their own set of requirements. Rather, they feared that Paul was telling the Jews not to abide by the Torah. And Paul demonstrated that this was not his goal. After all, Paul was pretty tolerant when it came to how others honored God (Romans 14). And he himself felt free to experience God through Jewish rituals.

Bacchiocchi's Argument from Silence

Seventh-Day Adventist scholar Samuele Bacchiocchi states the following in his debate with Sunday-keeper John Lewis:

"If, as you seem to assume Paul was the pioneer and promoter of Sundaykeeping, why is it that there is no echo of any controversy between Paul and the Jerusalem brethren over his abandonment of the Sabbath? As you know there was plenty of controversy over circumcision but not over the Sabbath. Why?" (see here).

Bacchiocchi uses this argument a lot. In The Sabbath and the New Testament, he says:

"...if the Gentiles were instructed by the [Jerusalem] Council to abstain from ritual acts such as eating food offered to idols, in order not to offend Jewish Christians, they could hardly have been instructed to ignore Sabbathkeeping which would have been even a greater offense to Jewish Christians. It is only the fact that Gentile Christians were already observing the Sabbath that made it unnecessary for the Jerusalem Council even to discuss it" (see here).

I have two problems with this argument:

1. Maybe Sabbath-keeping actually was controversial in the first-century church. The Jerusalem conference discussed whether or not Gentile Christians had to receive circumcision and observe the law of Moses (Acts 15:5). The Sabbath is part of the law of Moses. Therefore, the Sabbath was a topic of discussion, at least indirectly.

That's a problem I have with many Sabbatarian treatments of the Jerusalem conference: they view circumcision in isolation, as if the debate focused on whether or not Gentiles needed to undergo a painful surgical procedure. But circumcision meant much more than that in first-century Judaism. As Paul says in Galatians 5:3: "Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law" (NRSV). Circumcision meant conversion to Judaism, which obligated a person to obey the entire Mosaic Torah (including the Sabbath) in order to please God. That's why Peter asks in Acts 15:10: "Now therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear?"

2. Who says Jewish-Christians would've been offended had the church exempted Gentiles from Sabbath-keeping? Bacchiocchi acknowledges that Palestinian Judaism itself did that! He states:

"Palestinian (Hebrew) Judaism reduced the Sabbath to an exclusive Jewish ordinance linked to the origin of Israel as a nation at the time of Moses. As stated in the Book of Jubilees, 'He [God] allowed no other people or peoples to keep the Sabbath on this day, except Israel only; to it alone he granted to eat and drink and keep the Sabbath on it' (2:31)" (see here).

The requirements that the Jerusalem conference imposed on Gentiles resemble some of the Noachide laws for non-Jews. According to a prominent rabbinic tradition, Gentiles only have to observe seven rules to enter the good afterlife, including a ban on idolatry, adultery, and the consumption of blood (see here). Similarly, the Jerusalem conference exhorted Gentiles to "abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication" (Acts 15:29).

I agree with Bacchiocchi that one aim of the Jerusalem conference was to ensure that Gentile believers didn't offend their Jewish brethren. If a Gentile ate food that was offered to an idol, a Jewish-Christian might conclude he was worshipping that god (Exodus 34:15; I Corinthians 10:20-21; Revelation 2:14). Jews also thought Gentiles shouldn't eat blood (Genesis 9:4). The Jerusalem conference was telling Gentiles not to transgress the basic standards that Jews maintained for non-Israelites.

Obviously, there were universal standards that everyone could agree on, such as "thou shalt not kill" and "thou shalt not steal." The Jerusalem conference saw no need to state those prohibitions explicitly. But there were some areas in which Gentiles thought something was acceptable, whereas Jews did not. Gentiles were used to eating food offered to idols, to participating in ritual fornication, and to eating meat that hadn't been properly slaughtered. Jews viewed these activities as reprehensible, even for Gentiles. Consequently, the Jerusalem conference told Gentiles not to engage in them.

But Palestinian Judaism didn't require Gentiles to keep the Sabbath, so why would the Jerusalem conference have told them to take on Sabbath observance to avoid offending the Jewish-Christians? In this case, I think Bacchiocchi is wrestling with a problem that doesn't exist.

I realize I've criticized the argument from silence in the past, but, if the Jerusalem conference had wanted Gentiles to observe the Sabbath, wouldn't it have told them to do so? I can understand why it didn't mention some obvious universal rules (e.g., don't lie, don't kill), but the Sabbath is not in that category. Gentiles didn't think Gentiles had to keep the Sabbath. Palestinian Jews didn't think Gentiles had to keep the Sabbath. If the church thought they needed to do so, wouldn't it have clarified the matter?

Des Ford on Colossians 2:16-17

In Colossians 2:16-17, we read: "Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ" (NRSV).

On Colossians 2:16-17, Sabbatarian scholar Desmond Ford says the following:

"Colossians 2:16 is asserting that no one should be allowed to make rules and regulations for believers concerning the way in which they observed holy times. The text takes for granted the observance of the times, but it rejects ascetic practices on such times. The verse no more wipes out all Sabbath-keeping than it wipes out all eating and drinking (referred to in the same verse)" (see here).

This is actually a fairly decent argument. Obviously, Paul (or, for liberal scholars, "Paul") was addressing more than just the observance of Jewish rituals. The Colossian heresy also focused on visions, the worship of angels, asceticism, and severe treatment of the body (Colossians 2:18-23). For Paul, these things were detracting from Christ, the true source of spiritual growth (v 19).

In Des Ford's interpretation, Paul is saying something like this: "You Colossian Christians are trying to please all these angels and spirits by keeping the Jewish rituals in a certain way. But Christ's death and resurrection have disarmed such rulers and authorities (v 15). That means you don't have to act like you're their slave. You only have to believe in Christ to please God, not appease a bunch of angelic intermediaries. Plus, these Old Testament rituals point to Christ. You should keep him in mind when you keep them, not use them to make a bunch of angels happy."

For Ford, the issue was how to keep the Jewish rituals, not whether one should observe them.
Maybe. But, on the other hand, Paul could be saying: "You Colossians are keeping these days to appease the angels, but these institutions are shadows of Christ. That means you don't have to do them. So that's one more thing you're doing wrong! Not only are you fasting and worshipping angels, but you're also focusing on Jewish rituals rather than Christ. And these are days you don't even have to keep!"

In both scenarios, Paul interacts with a heresy that merges Judaism with proto-Gnostic elements.
Which is right? I think we should take into consideration two things:

First of all, the Jerusalem conference said that Gentile Christians don't need to be circumcised or observe the Mosaic law (Acts 15). I know there are Sabbatarians who will disagree with that reading, but how else can one interpret Acts 15:19-20: "Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood"?

Obviously, as far as James was concerned, the Gentile Christians didn't have to do everything that the Jews were doing, for they had their own set of requirements. Many Sabbatarians will argue that James was freeing the Gentile Christians from the ceremonial law, which doesn't include the weekly Sabbath. For them, the Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments, which is part of God's eternal moral law. But Colossians 2:16 seems to put the Sabbath in the same category as other Jewish rituals: food laws, new moons, and festivals. Sure, it's part of the Ten Commandments, but can we truly separate it from the ceremonial law? 

Second, other than Colossians 2:16, there is only one other place where the Mosaic law is called a "shadow." That's Hebrews 10:1, where the sacrifices are called a shadow of good things to come. For the author of Hebrews, the sacrifices are null and void now that Christ has fulfilled them. Can the same be said of the food laws, festivals, new moons, and Sabbath day? Do the New Testament authors compel Christians to observe "shadows"? 

Colossians makes the point that one particular Old Testament ritual has a spiritual application for Christians, not a physical one. In Colossians 2:11-13, we read: "In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses[.]"

According to this passage, Gentile Christians don't need to have their foreskin removed, for they are circumcised when they remove their sinful nature (body of flesh) through Christ. Could the author believe the same thing about the dietary laws, festivals, new moons, and Sabbath days? That, with the coming of Christ, we do these things spiritually, not necessarily in a physical sense?

It's something to think about. Personally, I'm not clear how the Jewish dietary laws foreshadow Christ. I can see how the Sabbath relates to believers' spiritual rest (Matthew 11:28-29; Hebrews 4:3, 9-10). I know that the festivals pertain to certain aspects of Christ's ministry (I Corinthians 5:7; Hebrews 9-10). And maybe the new moon has something to do with the new beginning that Christ offers us. But what's avoiding pork have to do with Jesus?