Origen on the Passover Not Being a Type of Christ's Passion

I recently read the church father Origen's "Treatise on the Passover", as it is translated and annotated by Robert J. Daly, S.J.  In this post, I'll be drawing from Daly's comments and some of what Origen says in his treatise to discuss Origen's rejection of the idea that the Passover was a type of Jesus Christ's passion.

Origen didn't believe that the Passover was a type of Jesus Christ's passion?  That's somewhat unusual for a Christian, isn't it?

Maybe, but Daly says that, in Origen's mind, there were differences between the Passover and the passion of the Christ.  First of all, the Passover lamb was offered by people who were holy, whereas Jesus Christ was killed by criminals and the sinful.  Second, according to Origen, the roasting of the lamb is fulfilled in the Christian life, not in Christ's passion.  Daly states that, for Origen, "the Christians, who have the true circumcision, eat the flesh (=Word of God), which is now possible because it has been roasted with the fire of the Holy Spirit" (pages 98-99).  Origen contrasts these true Christians with the Jews, who symbolically "eat the flesh raw, following only the letter of Scripture", and heretics, who symbolically cook the flesh with water rather than roasting it in that they "mix strange doctrine with the Scripture" (Daly's words on pages 98-99).  For Origen, the roasted lamb relates to how Christians partake of the Word of God, not Christ's passion.  And, third, Origen believed that Jesus regarded the serpent lifted up in Numbers 21, not the Passover, as the type of his passion.

Origen also takes care to clarify that the pascha (Greek for Passover) does not have its name because it relates to Christ's pathos, or suffering.  Rather, according to Origen, the feast in Hebrew is called fas, which has the meaning of "passage."  I like what Origen says on page 27: "And should one of us in conversation with Hebrew people too rashly mention that the passover takes its name from the suffering of the Savior, he would be ridiculed by them as one totally ignorant of the meaning of the word."  A know-it-all Christian being taken to school by a Jew who tells him that he doesn't know what he's talking about.  I love it!

So the Passover means a passage.  How does that relate to Origen's understanding of the festival?  On page 101, Daly says that Origen's spiritual interpretation of the Passover is that Christ passed over to his Father (presumably after his resurrection), and that souls are saved through Christ (which may mean that they pass into a state of salvation).

I'm hesitant to say, however, that the sacrifice of Christ has nothing to do with Origen's interpretation of the Passover festival, for Origen mentions it in his treatise, and he appeals to I Corinthians 5:7, which affirms that "Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed" (page 28).  Origen may be against limiting the Passover to the passion, as Daly says on page 87: "His apparent concern [is] to counteract an excessively narrow interpretation of the passover in terms of the passion..."

Questioning and Seeking Deeper Things

I finished Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan.  This will be somewhat of a rambling post.  It will have a degree of structure, but it will also take tangents.

Pagels refers to a statement by Tertullian that Christians asking questions is dangerous, for that can lead to heresy.  Questions that Tertullian did not care for pertained to the origin of evil, why God allows evil, and the origin of human beings.  Tertullian knew that detractors would object that Jesus encouraged people to ask, seek, and knock (Matthew 7:7), but Tertullian's response was that the purpose of seeking is to find, namely, to believe in Christianity.  So why not accept Christianity at the outset, he wondered, rather than continuing to ask questions, which displays dissatisfaction with the answers that the faith provides?

Tertullian's stance will probably shock a lot of my readers, as it shocked me, a person who likes to question and who does not care for the authoritarianism of conservative Christianity.  But I can see a degree of value in Tertullian's sentiment, not because I am concerned about "heresy", but rather because I think that there is something to be said for settling down with a belief system, rather than continuing to search.

At the same time, even when settling down, I'd like to learn and to grow, otherwise I'd be bored.  And, according to Pagels, Gnostic Christians sought something deeper and more profound within Christianity than the forgiveness of sins, for they held that it was also about finding the divine within.  I can see the attraction in that.  It would be nice to believe in more than "I'm a sinner and I need forgiveness", to think that I have some hidden value or am on an adventure of discovering who I truly am.

Now for a couple of tangents.  First of all, using as a launch-pad Tertullian's concern that people will ask questions about the origins of evil, I'd like to note that Pagels a couple of times in this book refers to early Christian views on providence and the source of evil.  Justin Martyr did not believe that God caused affliction but rather that Satan did so.  Tatian, according to Pagels, "allows for accident in the natural world, including disasters, for which, he says, God offers solace but seldom miraculous intervention" (page xv1).  And Origen also shied away from attributing the suffering of innocent people to God's will.  Some problems he believed were "accidental byproducts" of providence (page 141); other problems were due to the free choice of people and supernatural beings.  Origen held, for instance, that demons and evil angels often instigated human evil and natural disasters.  But Pagels says that later Christians had a stronger view of God's providence.

Second, my impression of Pagels' discussion of Gnostic Christianity is that she treats it as a reaction to mainstream Christianity----that some were seeking deeper things in Christian writings.  This is particularly true in her discussion of Valentinus.  At the same time, she also appears to believe that Christianity was quite diverse early on, and she says that an edition of the Gospel of Thomas predated what became the canonical Gospels (though she agrees that there were additions to the Gospel of Thomas that came later).  But does she truly believe that the historical Jesus could have been a proponent of finding the divine within?

Celibacy and Women

I finished The Cambridge History of Christianity: Constantine to c. 600.  On pages 671-672, Marilyn Dunn refers to Origen's view that differences in gender "were temporary and insignificant in the vast cycle of regeneration and renewal".  There were consequences as monastics adopted this view.  First, this view challenged "prevalent philosophical and scientific views of female inferiority or incompleteness."  Second, monasticism attracted Roman aristocratic women.  These women angered their families by embracing lifetime celibacy, thereby forgoing marriage and the corresponding "property strategies".

Jerome did not agree with Origen's view, but he did concur that celibacy was superior.  Jerome said there was a hierarchy in which "virgins would be rewarded one hundredfold, widows sixtyfold and the married only thirtyfold" (Dunn's words on page 673).

There is debate about whether early Christianity's commitment to celibacy hurt or helped women.  An argument on the "hurt" side is that Christian men resisting their sexual urges led to a stigmatization of the object of their attraction, women.  An argument on the "help" side is that celibacy enabled women to transcend the gender roles of their society.

Church Fathers (and Marcion) on the Resurrection Body of Jesus

I finished Robert Grant's Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought.  In this post, I'll focus on the interpretation of I Corinthians 15:50 by Irenaeus and Tertullian, and also the interpretation of Luke 24:39 by Marcion and Origen.  The issue is the nature of Jesus' resurrection body: Was it physical or spiritual?

1.  I Corinthians 15:50 states (in the KJV): "Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption."  In I Corinthians 15, Paul says that people rise from the dead with spiritual bodies, and there were many who argued that Christ's resurrection body had no human flesh, for the risen Christ was a spirit.  But there were also many Christians who held that Christ's body was physical and had flesh.  How did they interpret I Corinthians 15:50, which affirms that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God?

The approach of Irenaeus was to regard the "flesh and blood" of I Corinthians 15:50 as allegorical for carnal, sinful actions, since Paul often associates the flesh with sin.  The idea of I Corinthians 15:50, for Irenaeus, was not that our resurrection bodies would lack flesh, but rather that we would not sin after our resurrection.  And Tertullian essentially goes the same route.

I am not convinced by this interpretation of I Corinthians 15:50, for a significant topic of I Corinthians 15 is the nature of the resurrection body, not sin.  At the same time, I am open to the argument that Paul in I Corinthians 15:50 was not excluding all flesh and blood from the Kingdom, but rather was saying that our current, corruptible flesh would not be part of our resurrection bodies.  But what about incorruptible flesh?

2.  Luke 24:39 states: "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have."  In this passage, the risen Jesus denies that he is a spirit and points to his flesh and bones as proof for that.  

Marcion rejected the notion that Jesus rose with a body of human flesh for two reasons.  First, like a lot of Gnostics, Marcion maintained that the material world was evil and was created by a lower-being, and so he disassociated the body of the risen Jesus from materiality.  Second, Jesus in Luke 20:36 likens the resurrected to angels, and Marcion believes that means that the resurrected will have spirit bodies, like angels do.

How, then, does Marcion interpret Luke 24:39?  Essentially, he rewrites it to say: "See my hands and feet, that it is I; for a spirit does not have bones such as you see me having."  Tertullian interprets Marcion to be saying that the risen Jesus in Luke 24:39 is affirming that he was a spirit (even though it seems to me that Marcion is saying that the risen Jesus had bones, which spirits do not have).  Tertullian finds that to be nonsensical.  Grant notes something else that's interesting: Although Marcion thought that Jesus' resurrection body was spiritual, later Marcionites still believed that the risen Jesus ate, for they justified their eating of fish and not flesh by appealing to the risen Jesus eating fish in Luke 24:42-43.

Origen also leaned in the direction of the risen Christ having a spiritual body.  Grant states on page 259: "[Origen's] position is rendered precarious by his insistence that the risen Jesus had a body which could eat.  He believes, however, that had the Lord appeared with his glorified body he could not have been seen.  It was necessary for him to give at least the appearance of his wounds."  Origen's position is essentially that of the Armstrongites, who believed that Jesus' resurrection was spiritual and not physical: that Jesus in Luke 24 was merely appearing to his disciples in a fleshly form, since they would not be able to see the risen Jesus in his full glory, for that would kill them, plus Jesus wanted to show them that it was really him whom they were seeing.  Sometimes, though, Origen said that Jesus' resurrection body was somewhere between body and soul, according to Grant.

Origen tended to interpret passages that imply a physical resurrection in an allegorical sense.  Ezekiel 37 presents the resurrection of bones, but Origen views those bones in reference to sin, for Jesus in Matthew 23:27 calls sinners "tombs full of bones and all uncleanness."  Jesus in Matthew 8:12 says that there will be gnashing of teeth in Gehenna, but Origen does not take this literally because he feels that to do so would be absurd: teeth are for eating, and why would people eat in Gehenna?  Origen, like Irenaeus and Tertullian on the other side, employs an allegorical, spiritual interpretation for passages that appear to contradict his position.

Miracle-Less Gospels; Jesus the Magician?; Divinization

I finished Howard Clark Kee's Miracle in the Early Christian World.  I have three items.

1.  On page 292, Kee states that the Bultmann school liked the Gnostic Gospels (including the Gospel of Thomas) and upheld them as the oldest sources for us to access the historical Jesus because these Gospels consist largely of sayings and they lack miracles, which the Bultmann school deemed to be embarrassing.  Rudolph Bultmann himself, after all, asked how we in the modern age can believe in miracles!  I like the concept of a Gospel that relies on teachings and sayings, rather than things that are hard to believe.  At the same time, many of the New Testament scholars whom I have read deem the Gnostic Gospels to be late (in that they appear to assume the synoptic Gospels) and inauthentic in terms of what the historical Jesus was like.  I have to admit, however, that I have not read much Karen King or Elaine Pagels.

2.  On pages 268-271, Kee talks about Celsus' criticisms of Jesus' miracles, and Origen's response to those criticisms.  Celsus essentially states that Jesus was a magician who did his "miracles" in alliance with demons.  Celsus compares Jesus with "sorcerers who profess to do wonderful miracles...who for a few obols make known their sacred lore in the middle of the marketplace and drive demons out of men and blow away diseases and invoke the souls of heroes" (quotation of Celsus on page 268).

Origen responds that this was not so because (1.) a magician would not try to instill in people a teaching about the fear of God, and (2.) Christianity opposed magic.  Origen acknowledged that miracles might occur among the Greeks (Contra Celsum 5.57), but he said that the fact that sorcerers invoke Jesus' name shows that the name has power (Contra Celsum 2.49).  Origen also affirmed that the resurrection of Jesus surpassed previous miracles, even though the risen Jesus did not appear publicly as Celsus would have liked, but rather he appeared only to the spiritually-worthy who were prepared to see him (Contra Celsum 2.61-63).

On pages 211-212, Kee discusses Morton Smith's book, Jesus the Magician.  Smith argued that Jesus was a magician who ate flesh, drank blood, and participated in "nocturnal lustrations in the nude with his circle of male followers" (Kee's summary).  But Smith contends that Jesus' role as a magician has been obscured under subsequent layers of redaction, as the Christian editor made Jesus into a miracle worker like figures in the Hebrew Bible.

Was Jesus a magician?  At the moment, I am skeptical about Jesus eating flesh, drinking blood, or engaging in those "nocturnal lustrations" that Smith talks about.  But there are occasions when Jesus heals through certain rituals, such as spitting on a blind man's eyes (Mark 8:23) and anointing a blind man's eyes with clay he made out of spit and dirt (John 9:6).  Are these acts of magic?  Why perform a ritual, when Jesus can heal by word?

3.  In an excursus, Kee talks about human beings becoming divine.  He quotes Plato's statement in Republic 6.500.C-D that "the lover of wisdom by keeping company with the divine and orderly becomes himself divine and orderly in so far as it is possible for a human being" (page 298).  Kee also refers to Aristotle's principle that a man with political insight be followed as a god among men, for whom no law exists.  This interested me because it gave me insight into divinization in the ancient world: that a person in this life can become divine through wisdom.

Harrowing One’s Own Hell: Evagrius on Lazarus and the Rich Man

I finished Frank Schaeffer’s Patience with God last night. Basically, his argument was that we find God in people’s love for each other, or something like that.

I was intrigued by pages 216-217, in which Frank quotes Evagrius’ Commentary on the Proverbs. Evagrius is discussing Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31). In this parable, the rich man wears fancy clothes and lives sumptuously, whereas the poor man Lazarus sits at the gate, desiring the rich man’s crumbs, as the dogs lick his sores. The two of them die, and Lazarus is taken to the comforts of Abraham’s bosom, whereas the rich man goes to Hades. As the rich man experiences torment, he asks Abraham to have mercy on him, and to send Lazarus to dip his finger in water and to cool the rich man’s tongue. Abraham answers “no”, saying that there’s a gulf between Abraham’s bosom and Hades, and no one can pass from one to the other.

The rich man then asks Abraham to send Lazarus to his (the rich man’s) five brothers, so Lazarus can warn them to avoid Hades, a place of torment. If they see a man risen from the dead, the rich man figures, then they will repent. Abraham responds that the five brothers have Moses and the prophets to instruct and to warn them. If these brothers won’t believe Moses and the prophets, then they won’t repent after seeing someone rise from the dead.

Evagrius states the following:

There was a time when evil did not exist, and there will be a time when it no longer exists; but there was never a time when virtue did not exist and there will never be a time when it does not exist. For the seeds of virtue are indestructible. And I am convinced by the rich man almost but not completely given over to every evil who was condemned to hell because of his evil, and who felt compassion for his brothers, for to have pity is a very beautiful seed of virtue.

Frank interprets Evagrius to mean the following:

Evagrius discovers a seed of virtue in the rich man’s compassion for his brothers. According to Evagrius, the rich man’s situation is not as dire as it might seem. He’s dead; he’s in Hell, but wait, that’s not the end of it. Evagrius writes a postscript. Since the rich man showed pity for his brothers—in other words, he felt and expressed love—there is a way out. Virtue, says Evagrius, will outlast evil. The Law of Love prevails.

Even the rich man who lived his life mired in injustice will find salvation. His hell will turn to paradise because there will come a time when evil “no longer exists,” which, given Evagrius’s thinking, means that someday Hell will turn into Heaven for the rich man, because if there is suffering anywhere, then evil will still exist and will have outlasted virtue.

The rich man’s perception that he is in Hell derives from the gulf between him and God. This gulf was placed there by the rich man’s lack of charity, which turned him into someone who cut himself off from love.

When he was alive on earth, the rich man was selfish, for he failed to help the poor man Lazarus. In Hades, however, the rich man begins to care about other people, for he wants to help his brothers avoid the torments of Hades. For Evagrius, this was a seed of virtue within the rich man, something that could grow and transform his torment in Hades into the paradise of heaven. Moreover, since God’s plan is to eliminate evil one day, Evagrius believes that the rich man’s suffering will eventually come to an end, for the suffering of any human being is evil.

Evagrius appears to combine universalism with a notion that C.S. Lewis expressed over a millennium after him: that the door to hell is locked from the inside. Evagrius may combine the two ideas in that he sees the torments of Hades as God’s way of instilling compassion for others into the rich man, for pain can lead us to sympathize and empathize with other people.

So who was Evagrius? I assume that the Evagrius Frank is talking about is Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth century Christian monk and ascetic, who influenced such patristic luminaries as Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Cassius, and Theophilus of Alexandria (see here). Evagrius and Origen were condemned in a sixth century church council, yet the influence of their writings was strong.

It’s interesting how there was an openness to universalism in the early centuries of the Christian church. I’m not suggesting that all (or even most) Christians shared it. But there were prominent Christian teachers who were universalists.

Origen and Pagan Exegesis

I read my friend’s notes on Origen today. He said that Origen, in his interpretation of Scripture, followed the techniques of pagan exegesis in six ways: text-criticism, explanation of words, explanation of points or facts, metrical and stylistic criticism, identification of the person speaking in the text, and clarifying the Bible with the Bible (the pagans did this with Homer).

But is this distinctly pagan? It sounds like the sort of exegesis that many interpreters do.

Eddie; Decent; Anti-Oppression Psalms; Homeric "Errors"; Imminent; Inductive; Flashing Light

1. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, page 154:

Dale Carnegie says that our backgrounds have influenced how we’ve turned out. If we had the same body, temperament, mind, environment, and experiences as Al Capone, Carnegie states, then we would have turned out just as he did. Carnegie also says that the “only reason…that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes.” His conclusion is that we shouldn’t look down on people who are “irritated, bigoted, [or] unreasoning”, but we should pity them, for we could have ended up just as they are, had we had their backgrounds.

This reminds me of last Sunday’s Desperate Housewives, which was about Eddie, the strangler of Fairview. The conclusion of the narrator, the late Mary Alice Young, is that monsters are created by other monsters. Eddie had a bad mother. She was a drunk, and she told Eddie throughout his life that she did not want him. She also made fun of him, telling him that the only woman he’d ever get was one who was blind or inflatable.

Add to this Eddie’s frustration with the opposite sex. He could never get a woman, and many women in his life (his mother, Gabby, Susan, Danielle Van de Camp, the girls at his school) rejected him. He didn’t just want sex, for he desired a relationship, a woman who would love him. After Bree told him that he’d some day find a woman who would say “yes” to him, he went to a prostitute on a street-corner. When she says “yes”, he gives her a bouquet of flowers, and she laughs him to scorn. And so she becomes Eddie’s first victim.

One can understand how Eddie became as he was, and I certainly have compassion and empathy for this fictional character. One of the themes of Desperate Housewives is that we should not judge other people, for we all have skeletons in our closets, and we’ve done our share of sin, sometimes with good intentions. But what are the implications of this? Should a court let Eddie off-the-hook because he had a hard life? Is there a way for us to be compassionate, without compromising our moral standards and the well-being of society?

2. Robert Heinlein, Sixth Column, page 154:

“…you are too soft and mush-headed for this job. You apparently think that the United States can win this war without anyone getting hurt—you don’t even have the guts to watch a traitor die.”

This reminds me of last night’s V, which was an excellent episode on so many levels. I’m thinking of the scene in which some of the sympathizers of the Fifth Column—the aliens who are resisting the attempts of their fellow aliens to take over the earth—have captured and tied up a man who has killed on behalf of the evil, invading aliens. His reason was that the aliens healed his daughter of paralysis, and he felt that someone needed to fight for them, since they were pacifists (in his mind). A torturer among the Fifth Column sympathizers wants to beat this guy up to get information out of him about the location of Fifth Column members, so he can help them out. Before he proceeds to torture the captive, he says, “It is now time for all decent people to leave the room!” The priest, played by Joel Gretsch, then leaves the room. Earlier, the priest told the torturer not to beat the captive up.

The torturer had no self-delusion that he was a decent man. He knew he was scum, and he wanted to use that attribute for his cause. He had resigned himself to being a scum years ago!

This quote from Heinlein also reminded me of a conservative statement that often got on my nerves, even when I supported the war in Iraq. Whenever a liberal would point out the innocent casualties and disastrous consequences of the war, a conservative would blithely blow that point off with “War is hell.” Yes, war is hell, which is why we should try to avoid it if there are other ways to deal with the problem.

3. Erhard Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part I with an Introduction to Cultic Poetry, pages 31-32:

Gerstenberger narrates that the Israelite monarchy created a feudalism through the centralization of economic and military interests, and that this feudalism “ruthlessly exploited the small landowners and the agrarian and urban proletariat”. The stratification between rich and poor continued into Israel’s post-exilic period, as Nehemiah 5:1-13 indicates. In Israel’s pre-exilic period, there were “group chiefs and ritual experts who attended the needs of the individual and the family.” They included men of God, prophets, and priests of local sanctuaries. (I see such figures in II Kings!) These “lower ranks of the prophetic and sacerdotal hierarchy assumed responsibilities in counseling persons and groups in distress.” According to Gerstenberger, they were the ones who composed the Psalms that ranted against the oppression of the poor.

I often wondered who would compose those sorts of Psalms. Would the establishment? Why would the establishment acknowledge the existence of social ills under its auspices? I’m glad that Gerstenberger attempted some answer to this question that has baffled me.

4. R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, page 166:

To the scientific rationalistic mind of Eratosthenes the unrealities in Homeric geography were obvious. He did not blame the poet; the fault was in the interpreters who made the fundamental mistake of identifying epic localities with certain places in the Mediterranean and supposing that Homer made it his business to teach people geography or anything else such as theology, ethics, or military tactics. Homer’s geographical passages, for instance the wanderings of Odysseus, were to be regarded as purely imaginary; the aim of the poet was there and elsewhere not to instruct but to give pleasure.

At first, I thought that Eratosthenes was trying to argue as some Christians do when they are confronted with “errors” in the Bible: “The Bible’s not a history or science book, but its intention is to teach us how to live, and to bring us closer to God.” But Eratosthenes doesn’t believe that Homer intended to teach people about theology and ethics, so that impression of mine goes out the window! He seems to contend that Homer is just great literature. That’s how some people today treat the Bible: “Why worry about whether it’s factually accurate or inaccurate? It has good stories!” The stories definitely draw me to the Bible. They have since I was a child who read Bible story books, listened to Bible story tapes, and watched Superbook. But I also see the Bible as a guide on how to live and become closer to God.

5. R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event, page 342:

Words of our Lord apparently suggesting a Second Coming to take place very soon [Origen] explains away: ‘Henceforth ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power’ (Matt. 26:64) does not in his view imply a return of Christ in the near future, for in the first place Christ’s disciples saw him ‘sitting at the right hand of power’ when they saw him risen from the dead, and in the second place an immense period of time is only a day in God’s sight anyway.

I’ve wondered how church fathers dealt with passages in which Jesus appears to say that his second coming is near. Well, now I know how one church father dealt with them! I don’t find his first argument about Matthew 26:64 all that convincing, for Jesus was talking in that verse to the Jewish leaders, not his disciples. But N.T. Wright and many preterists have contended that the Jewish leaders did see Jesus sit on the right hand of power, with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. That event confirmed to them that Jesus had authority and judgment, or so the argument runs. I don’t know. Rabbinic Judaism didn’t conclude that from this event! Neither did Josephus. I doubt that conclusion was in the minds of the Jews experiencing it.

6. Richard Sarason, A History of the Mishnaic Law of Agriculture: A Study of Tractate Demai, page 20:

Each formal unit must be analyzed on its own terms, and not forced to conform to an a priori literary theory of the document. My work therefore strives to be rigorously inductive.

I like that. I’d prefer to read a writing that has a thesis and proceeds from there, since it’s easier on me, the reader. But an inductive approach is probably better because it allows the texts to speak for themselves, rather than hammering them into a neat thesis. I once voiced that opinion to a DePauw Honor Scholar class, to laughter: “I think reality’s too complex to reduce to a thesis.” At the same time, it’s okay (in my opinion) to ask a question, and to look for answers. That can produce a neat paper. But there are all sorts of approaches.

7. Ken Pulliam had some good posts last week: Did Paul Hallucinate on the Road to Damascus?–Part One and Did Paul Hallucinate on the Road to Damascus?–Part Two. His conclusion was that Saul of Tarsus and the people with him may have seen a solar flare, and that Saul hallucinated the voice of Jesus, as a result of his inner conflict over the message of Christianity and his persecution of Christians (his kicking of the goads, to refer to Acts 26:14). Ken referred to psychological studies to argue that such was within the realm of possibility. Ken also had a post before that, Are Religious Experiences Evidence for God?, where he refers to studies indicating that the inner peace that comes from religious exercises (i.e., prayer, meditation) has a natural explanation, meaning we don’t have to attribute it to the supernatural.

I thought of Ken’s posts as I watched My Name Is Bill W. yesterday, and I also recalled the CBS movie that was on Sunday night, When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story. Bill Wilson was the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and his wife, Lois, started Al-Anon, which helps the families of alcoholics. In both movies, the character of Bill Wilson talks about seeing a light in his hospital room and feeling a sense of peace washing all over him. Whereas, before that event, he continually promised to stop drinking and ended up breaking his promise, that event placed him on a solid ground of sobriety. He still needed to build on that ground, however. He couldn’t rely on an out-of-the-ordinary experience in his past, for he had to take the necessary action to keep sober: reach out to other alcoholics, rely on a higher power, take a moral inventory, let go of resentment, make restitution, etc.

In My Name Is Bill W., Bill is explaining his Saul of Tarsus experience to his doctor, William Silkworth, who wrote the “Doctor’s Opinion” in the Big Book. Silkworth says that he cannot account for Bill’s experience from a scientific perspective, but at least Bill is in a better place than he was yesterday.

Nowadays, there are scientists who contend that they can account for such an experience from a scientific perspective. Perhaps so. But, in my humble opinion, Bill was still in a better place than he was before his “flashing light” experience, as was the apostle Paul.

Unloaded Questions; Outsider’s Test; Thank You; Smart Guy; Reason for Origen’s Universalism; Allowed This Time; Self-Acceptance

1. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, page 136:

Carnegie quotes Dr. Overstreet, who states: “It often seems as if people get a sense of their own importance by antagonizing at the outset. The radical comes into a conference with his conservative brethren; and immediately he must make them furious! What, as a matter of fact, is the good of it? If he simply does it to get some pleasure out of it for himself, he may be pardoned. But if he expects to achieve something, he is only psychologically stupid.”

This describes me in a nut-shell: I love to challenge the mindset of the status quo. At DePauw and Harvard, I was a conservative! In conservative Christian settings, I was a liberal. But Dale Carnegie exhorts us to find common ground with another person and to ask her questions to which she can answer “yes”, leading her towards our point-of-view. This is what Socrates did: he didn’t march up to a person and say “This is the way it is.” Rather, he asked questions.

Many people who try to practice this approach don’t do it all that well, in my opinion, because their questions are loaded and ideologically biased. “And which political party is more pro-American—the Republicans or the Democrats?”, a person once asked me, expecting me to answer “Republican.” That’s not an effective use of the Socratic method, unless you know for sure that the person you’re asking the question will answer “Republican”!

But I think that it’s appropriate to ask people about what we consider the weaknesses in their positions, to see how they handle them. For example: “President Obama, what do you think about all this debt?” That’s not a loaded question. His policy was to do deficit spending in order to get our economy out of its economic hole. What’s his view on the debt that such a policy created? I’m sure it has crossed his mind! He’s a smart man!

2. Robert Heinlein, Sixth Column, page 116:

“…All religions look equally silly from the outside…Sorry! I don’t mean to tread on anybody’s toes…Take any religious mystery, any theological proposition: expressed in ordinary terms it will read like sheer nonsense to the outsider, from the ritualistic, symbolic eating of human flesh and blood practiced by all the Christian sects to the outright cannibalism practiced by some savages.”

This is the “outsider’s test of faith” that atheists talk about. See Ken Pulliam’s summary of John Loftus’ discussion of this test here. The idea is that we’re supposed to step outside of our religion and take a look at it as if we were outsiders, the same way that we would evaluate a religion that is not our own. The conclusion Loftus wants us to reach is that it’s all nonsense!

I have some sympathy for the “outsider’s test of faith”, for I’m sick of Christians who apply their razor-sharp reasoning to other religions—to show that they’re silly or irrational or immoral in comparison with Christianity—and yet they give a free pass to their own faith. Either they say “Just have faith, for God knows more than we do” when they’re discussing the problematic aspects of Christianity, or they offer apologetic “answers” that not everyone finds convincing.

At the same time, I’m open to a degree of mystery, so I don’t automatically blow something off just because it doesn’t make complete sense to me. Believing in a good God with all of the evil that exists in the world is an example.

Interestingly, the “outsider’s test of Christianity” runs counter to some of the things that I’ve learned about the academic study of religion. Not completely, mind you, for, when we apply (say) an anthropological analysis to a religion, we are acting as detached outsiders, looking at it from the perspective of a field of study. But I was also encouraged to try to understand a religion from the perspective of its practitioners—to try to enter into their mindset. And this would apply to any religion.

But the “outsider’s test of faith” isn’t really about the study of religion—it’s about the evaluation of a religion to determine whether or not we should accept it. Personally, I’m not big on getting on any high horse and pronouncing all religions as “wrong”. Maybe they have something to teach us. Maybe their practitioners have experienced things that many of us haven’t! I don’t want to become a complete relativist, however, for cannibalism strikes me as cruel.

3. Erhard Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part I with an Introduction to Cultic Poetry, page 15:

“I give thee thanks” means exactly “I am handing over to you my thank offering” (see Pss. 52:11…; 57:10-11; 86:12; 118:21; 138:1-2).

This just stood out to me. Maybe it’s because the ancient Israelites had a concrete way to say “thank you” to God. I either forget to say “thank you” in my prayers, or I say it, it feels empty, and I soon forget about it. But the ancient Israelites offered an animal. Rituals solidify things, in my opinion.

4. R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, page 153:

But who is courageous enough to measure himself even as editor against the universality of Eratosthenes, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, chronographer, geographer, grammarian, and poet?

Smart guy! A jack of all trades!

You can probably tell that I’m really struggling to find interesting things in this book. I’m sure there are people who love it. It just doesn’t interest me!

5. R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event, page 335:

The fact is that universalism in Origen’s thought is a necessary conclusion from his basic premises, and not, as it is in most modern thought, a ‘larger hope’ grounded on a strong belief in God’s love and a kindly feeling toward all humanity, however degraded. In Origen’s view for God to fail in reconciling into their original state as pure spirits wholly obedient to his will any beings at all, even only one or two, would be for God, the single, simple, primal, unalterable One, to compromise himself with change and becoming and corruption. This is inconceivable, and therefore all must be saved.

I don’t entirely understand this, but it addresses a question that has come to me. Why was Origen a universalist? Was it because he believed in the love of God for all humanity and could not conceive of a good God torturing sinners in hell forever and ever? That’s a big reason that I’m drawn to universalism, but, in line with what I said in (2), my job in studying the ancients should be to figure out what they think, not project onto them what I think.

Maybe I can use some of what they think to inform my own thoughts. For example, I believe that Origen’s view that hell is a place of correction accords with my understanding of the love of God, who prefers not to throw his creation into the garbage, but deeply wants them to become righteous and reconciled with him. But was that Origen’s reason for seeing hell as a place of correction?

According to Hanson, the answer is “no”. I don’t entirely understand what Origen’s reason for believing in universalism is. It has something to do with God being one, so, apparently, in some manner, God’s creation must also be one: united with him. Origen referred to I Corinthians 15:28, which affirms that, after all things have become subjected to the Son, the Son will subject himself to the Father, making God all in all. So all will become one, in a manner of speaking.

Many Christians believe that God will be “all in all” because he will destroy or eternally punish his enemies, so what will be left will be subordinate to God. And the righteous remnant will be “all” that there is! Or perhaps the believers in eternal torment hold that the sinners in hell are subordinate to God, so God is all in all that way. In this view, everyone will be subordinate to God, but some won’t care for their state of subordination. But Origen held that all will be subordinated to God in reconciliation to him.

6. Richard Sarason, A History of the Mishnaic Law of Agriculture: A Study of Tractate Demai, page 15:

[Mishnah Demai 4] now turns to the case of purchasing produce from someone who is not deemed trustworthy. In certain well-defined circumstances we may believe his word that the produce has been tithed, and therefore need not tithe it ourselves…The major principles are as follows: We may believe someone not deemed trustworthy (1) in an emergency (as on the Sabbath, 4:1-2), or (2) when we have no sure way to verify his statement (4:5), or (3) when he testifies concerning someone else, and thus has no personal interest to be served by lying (4:6). But if two men give testimony concerning each other, we suspect collision (4:6-7).

This highlights the issue of Tractate Demai. We’re supposed to eat food after it has been tithed. The problem was that not every Jew tithed scrupulously. So Jews had to be careful about whom they bought their produce from. What if the Jewish salesman of produce did not tithe mint, dill, and cummin? You will be eating untithed produce, and God won’t like that very much!

But there are exceptions. You can eat the possibly untithed produce on the Sabbath, perhaps because you’re not allowed to perform the business of giving it back to the seller on that day, and that may be all the food that you have. Then, for the rabbis, there are ways to tell if a person is telling the truth, on the basis of his self-interest or the possibility of collusion. Christian apologists use this approach when they argue that the early Christians were telling the truth about Jesus’ resurrection: they can’t think of any motive for the early Christians to lie, especially when they were suffering persecution for their faith, and so they conclude that they were speaking the truth.

7. AA Daily Reflection, April 26: Instead of demanding that people, places, and things make me happy, I can ask God for self-acceptance.

The bad part is me to a T. I get so bent out of shape when people, places, and things are not the way I want. I even get bent out of shape when I look back and think of times in the past when they were not as I want. And so I allow the problems of yesterday to spoil my today. What I need to learn is to accept myself even when things are not as I desire—when people do not accept me, when I feel looked down on, etc. I wish I had that kind of peace.

“Find a Friend”; God’s Representative Under Limits; Relativism and Education; The New Concealed; Hiding Knowledge

1. Zosia Zaks, Life and Love: Positive Strategies for Autistic Adults, page 263:

Make a list of Buddies you can trust. If you don’t really have any friends, you can ask your parents or siblings to help you locate one or two classmates or neighbors who would be willing to do the Buddy System with you. Carry a list of the phone numbers of your Buddies. If you are all alone and somebody asks you to do something you aren’t sure about, you can always say, “Let me call my friend Tina and see if she wants to join us!” Usually if the person has bad intentions, he won’t want Tina to come and that’s a clue to get away.

According to Zosia, people with Asperger’s need some sort of social support network for their safety and growth, and they also should try to stretch their social skills (i.e., they need to learn how to ask for help). But the problem is that people with Asperger’s have difficulty creating that social support network. I feel that I don’t always see that understanding in the Aspergian community. Granted, I also don’t see it in the evangelical community, whose answer nowadays is often, “Consult a friend or accountability partner.” But I’d expect to see it in the Aspergian community.

2. Sara Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought, pages 427-428:

It has been suggested that the equation of Israel’s monarchy with the kingship of YHWH must entail the monarch’s deification and apotheosis. In fact, we see quite clearly that no such development occurs in Chronicles. The book constantly emphasizes that the king is human: he is mortal, an Israelite bound by the covenant, and one of the people. In comparison with the Former Prophets, Chronicles limits the monarch’s exclusive representative function and, at the same time, expands the role of the people so that they make an independent, significant contribution to the course of history.

God’s government by the consent of the governed. Armstrongites should study Chronicles for church government ideas!

3. R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, page 15:

It was the so-called Sophistic movement which—in Aristophanes’ [(fifth century B.C.E.)] opinion—endangered the whole structure of the traditional Greek education.

The Sophists were relativists. They didn’t believe in absolute truth, but they tried to teach students how to navigate their way through their culture. I guess we see this sort of concept today in tendencies to treat education as preparation for a vocation, rather than as a form of character development, or as instruction in truth. Does relativism undermine education? Should the purpose of education be to find the truth? If there is no truth, then what is the purpose of learning? Is it to understand the world around us, with its different ways of doing things, and to develop tolerance and understanding? And what happens if we assume that education should instruct students in absolute truth? Could that lead to indoctrination of controversial ideas, such as socialism, Marxism, etc.? I’ve had plenty of professors who had their dogmatic view of “the truth.”

4. R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event, page 199:

For [Origen], now that Christ has come, all the Scriptures are evangelical: ‘Before Christ’s coming, the law and prophets, since he who elucidates the mysteries they contain had not yet come, did not possess that promise which was contained in our definition of the Gospel. But when the Saviour came and caused the gospel to become incarnate, by the gospel he made everything, so to speak, a gospel.’

How much did the Old Testament saints understand God’s plan? There are texts that suggest that they knew God would send Jesus Christ, as well as what specifically God would do through him. John 8:56 says that Abraham saw Jesus’ day and was glad. Galatians 3:8 says that Abraham received the Gospel that the Gentiles would be justified by faith. Hebrews 11 says that Moses suffered for Christ.

Yet, there are also indications that people in the Old Testament did not know God’s plan. Ephesians 3:3-9 says that the notion that the Gentiles would be fellow-heirs with the Israelites was unknown from the beginning of the world, until it was revealed by the Spirit, perhaps in the time of Paul. Colossians 1:26-27 refers to another mystery that was previously unknown: Christ in you, the hope of glory.

In my post, Eclectic Exodus 21:22-25, Julian’s Law, Known and Unknown, Mystical Cycle, I refer to Origen’s belief that only a select few in Old Testament times knew about God’s plan, while most of Israel was ignorant of it.

The whole issue of the “mystery” is a subject that’s debated between dispensationalists and non-dispensationalists. Dispensationalists take seriously Paul’s claim that the Gentiles’ inclusion into the people of God and “Christ in you” were unknown before New Testament times. But doesn’t James in Acts 15:16-17 quote Amos 9:11-12 to show that God planned for Gentiles to enter God’s church as Gentiles, without becoming Jews? Doesn’t Paul in Romans 15 quote Old Testament passages to make the same sort of point: that Gentiles will worship the God of Israel? How do dispensationalists handle that?

My impression is that they say that Israelites in Old Testament times did not understand how these predictions would play out. Sure, they may have acknowledged that Gentiles will one day worship the God of Israel, but they did not conceive that Gentiles would be included with Jews as equals in a body of God’s people, the church. And while they realized that God would put his laws on Israelites’ hearts (Jeremiah 31:33), or imbue them with his Spirit so that they’d obey him (Ezekiel 36:27), they had no idea that the Messiah, the Son of David, would dwell in people’s hearts.

A point about Origen: Origen believed that the spirit led the creators of the Septuagint to add things that were not in the Hebrew version. Did he see this as a heads-up to the Jews that their Messiah was about to come, and so God made the hidden a little more explicit?

5. N.F. Marcos, The Septuagint in Context, page 206:

M. Harl has noted how Origen comments on all the difficult passages of the Bible without relinquishing the Greek system and without resorting to all the possible Hebraisms or Aramaisms of translation Greek. The fact that he does not use Hebrew to explain these passages does not mean that he does not know it, but shows that he respects the obscurity of the text, probably because it favored his tendency for allegorical and not literal explanation.

Hanson also discusses whether or not Origen knew Hebrew. He concludes that Origen knew some stuff about it, but he was far from being fluent. But Marcos seems to be saying that Origen knew more that he was letting on, because of how he saw the biblical text!

Pennywise Is Still a Stranger!; Throne of the LORD; The Right Amount of Anger; MT and LXX Working Together for Supersessionism (According to Origen)

1. Zosia Zaks, Life and Love: Positive Strategies for Autistic Adults, page 247:

Our trusting nature and our autistic way of thinking are some of the reasons why we are at greater risk [of danger]. We don’t see hidden intentions. We are likely to miss any forewarning of danger expressed nonverbally or via body language. Clues from tone of voice or posture are likely to go unnoticed. Generalizing is another problem. We may understand a large, broad rule such as, “Don’t go home with a stranger,” but may not be able to apply this to a slightly different situation such as going home with someone you just met. If you’ve met, then the other person is not a stranger, literally speaking.

Today, I watched Stephen King’s It for the umpteenth time. Near the beginning of the movie, little Georgie Denbrough encounters Pennywise the homicidal dancing clown, who lives in the sewer. Pennywise invites Georgie into the sewer, and Georgie replies, “My dad told me not to talk to strangers.” “Very wise of your dad, Georgie, very wise indeed,” Pennywise says. “I am Pennywise the dancing clown, and you’re Georgie. So now we know each other! We’re not strangers anymore! Kerrect?” “I guess so,” Georgie says, laughing. Soon thereafter, Pennywise rips off Georgie’s arm and kills him.

Zosia’s comments on “Don’t go home with a stranger” reminded me of that scene. Georgie, like some with Asperger’s, took that instruction a little too literally. He should have defined “stranger” as someone you don’t know overly well, not as someone you’ve never met.

2. Sara Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought, page 399:

In I Chronicles 29:23, Solomon is said to sit on the throne of the LORD. For Japhet, that means that he’s God’s representative on earth. The rabbis had some creative interpretations of this verse, however. For example:

“…just as God rules from one end of the world to the other and also has dominion over all kings…so did Solomon reign over the whole earth, as it says: ‘And all the kings of the earth sought the presence of Solomon’” (Exodus Rabbah 15:26…)

They really struggled with the notion that a man could sit on the throne of the LORD. I should note, though, that I-II Chronicles is like I-II Kings in its acknowledgment that there are kings over God’s people who do evil in the eyes of the LORD, so sitting on the throne of the LORD doesn’t make them infallible. But they still have the authority to function as God’s representatives, which means executing justice and defending the poor from oppression.

3. D.A. Russell, Criticism in Antiquity, page 202:

Quintilian lived in the first century C.E. He writes: Why is it that persons who grieve for a recent sorrow often appear to utter words of the highest eloquence, while anger sometimes makes even the untaught into orators? It is because of the psychological force and feeling in them.

I’m not sure how true that is in real life, but I can testify by experience that the right amount of anger eliminates my fear and makes me more prone to talk, and to talk well. If there’s too much anger, however, that’s not as much the case. But the right amount of anger does this.

4. R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event, pages 163-164:

Origen creates a Hexapla that set different versions of the Hebrew Bible side by side: the Septuagint, the Hebrew Masoretic Text, Aquila’s literal translation, and others. Did Origen believe that all of these texts were inspired? Did he make a theological point that flowed from the existence of different texts? Here’s a case that’s interesting:

[Origen] acknowledges that the LXX is inspired, inasmuch that he often regards its divergence from the Hebrew text as divinely prompted. Commenting on the verse ‘A virgin of his own people shall he take to wife’ (Lev. 21.14), Origen remarks that the Jews say that their texts do not have the phrase ‘of his own people’ though it appears in the LXX. He claims that it is by divine providence that their copies omit this phrase, because they are by their own disobedience no longer the people of Christ.

So, for Origen, the Hebrew text and the Septuagint both have what they have for a reason—in this case, to promote supersessionism (the notion that the church has replaced Israel as God’s people).

5. N.F. Marcos, The Septuagint in Context, pages 192-193:

In the synagogue the scroll continued to be used…The Church, instead, opted for the codex in the 2nd century…

So that’s when Christians started using the codex.

Good Dating Profile, Desolate, Method Writing, Origen’s God Is More Merciful Than the Mishnah’s, Theodotian

1. Zosia Zaks, Life and Love: Positive Strategies for Autistic Adults, page 195:

On writing your profile for an Internet dating site: Try to make a favorable impression. If you do nothing in life but sit in front of the television, at least talk about your favorite shows. It is O.K. to acknowledge your faults and weaknesses, but do so in a positive light. For example, instead of saying you don’t do much, say you prefer to hang out at home. Then talk about what you like to do at home—read, play with your dog, cook. Instead of saying, “I hate sports and I’m totally not athletic at all,” try, “I am more interested in reading, taking quiet walks, or playing computer games. I’m a whiz at Tetris.” Remain honest but positive when describing your personality traits. For example, instead of saying, “I have no tolerance for people interrupting me when I’m doing something,” try, “I have a very intense focus and enjoy long periods of time to concentrate on my projects.”

2. Sara Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought, page 373:

The book of Chronicles takes the account of Israel’s exile and destruction and associates these disastrous events with the tribes who lived east of the Jordan—the two and a half tribes were all sent into exile for a very long time. With respect to the land west of the Jordan, in both the northern and southern kingdoms, the effects of enemy invasions are minimized. Foreign armies come and go, but the people’s presence in the land remains uninterrupted.

I wonder what Japhet does with II Chronicles 36:21, which says that the land enjoyed land sabbaths during the seventy years of its desolation. I looked in the Scripture index, and I couldn’t find a place where she addresses this question.

3. D.A. Russell, Criticism in Antiquity, page 162:

Aristophanes’ Agathon states the following: A poet ought to have manners related to the play he’s writing. For instance: if he writes a feminine piece, his person also needs its feminine side…A masculine piece needs masculinity. And where we’re lacking, imitation then supplies the want.

There’s method acting, in which an actor tries to become the character he plays in his day-to-day life (see Good Doctors, Tension in Chronicles on Northern Israel, Generating Emotions, Hebrews Vs. Philo on Cult, MT and LXX for Jeremiah). Apparently, there’s also method writing.

4. R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event, page 140:

To the Marcionite objection to the punishment inflicted by God in the Old Testament [Origen] usually replies that such punishments were not vindictive or purely retributive but remedial and reformatory. Those who perished in the flood were given a second chance after death (I Peter 3.18-21). As for Sodom, God proposes to restore even that, for Ezekiel says, ‘And thy sisters, Sodom and her daughters, shall return to their former estate’ (Ezek. 16.55). Again, those who fell in the desert were forgiven and restored after death; Ps. 78 says ‘when he slew them, than they sought him’, which means that they sought God when they had been slain.

What’s interesting is that rabbis in Mishnah Sanhedrin 10 declare that the generation of the Flood, Sodom, and the wilderness generation have no place in the World to Come. There’s some debate on the wilderness generation, though (see here).

5. N.F. Marcos, The Septuagint in Context, pages 142-144:

Theodotian made a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The church father Irenaeus (second century C.E.) says Theodotian was a Jewish proselyte. Jerome (fourth-fifth centuries C.E.) said he was an Ebionite, a Jewish Christian with views considered heretical. Yet, the church fathers use Theodotian’s translation. Origen and Clement of Alexander quote it out of respect for church tradition, and Justin, Clement of Rome, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter of Barnabas, Hebrews, John’s Apocalypse, and the synoptics employ Theodotionic readings, primarily of the Book of Daniel. Some say that Theodotian lived in the first century C.E. Others say he revised a previous text, which the New Testament cited.

Origen the Arian?---Not This Time!, Origen on Soul Sleep

I completed Henri Crouzel’s biography of Origen yesterday. As I read, I jotted down page numbers with things I could discuss on this blog. I have ten of them! This morning, I’m not in much of a mood to write, so I’ll focus only on two topics that stood out to me:

1. One of Crouzel’s agendas is to rehabilitate Origen’s reputation, since Christians who came after Origen labelled him a heretic. According to Crouzen, some accused Origen of being an Arian, one who believed that the Word who became Jesus Christ was a creation of God. The position that became orthodox, by contrast, holds that the Word has always existed. Origen used the Greek words ktizein, ktisis, and ktisma for the Word, and these words carry the connotation of creation. Crouzel argues, however, that their meaning was much more fluid before the Trinitarian controversy, for Pope Dionysius affirmed that “The expression ektisen, as you know, does not have a single sense” (175). Consequently, ktizein can mean “create,” but it can also refer to the Son’s eternal generation from the Father, in which the Father is eternally the source of the Son. For Crouzel, Origen meant the latter, so he’s orthodox.

This stood out to me because I’ve been interested in Arianism for the past year or two, as my posts Good Nimrod, Justin the Arian?, Projecting, Tertullian the (Semi-)Arian?, and Eusebius and Arianism indicate. Proverbs 8:22 was applied in early Christian circles to the Son, who was equated with Wisdom, yet the Septuagint for that passage states that God ektisen (created) Wisdom. Is that evidence for Arianism from the Septuagint, the Bible of early Christianity? Crouzel would say, “Not so fast!”, for ektisen could have meant other things besides “create.”

I wonder how the “orthodox” side in the Nicene controversy handled ektisen in Proverbs 8:22. Crouzel states that terminology became tighter at that time, but my impression is that the orthodox would have to posit fluidity in the word in order to save it from becoming an indisputable Arian proof-text.

Crouzel’s discussion here also piqued my interest because it reminded me of a thinker I read in a historiography class. His view was that we interpret history in light of what came after, and that may give us a skewed picture of the past. That’s what Crouzel says was going on with later critics of Origen: they interpreted his use of ktizein according to their understanding of the word, in their context, shaped by the outcome of the Nicene controversy, when it could have meant something different to Origen.

2. Under my post, Hit Over the Head with Canon, Origen on the Devil’s Salvation and Soul Sleep, Byker Bob asked me for more information about the Thnetospychites, who believed that the soul died with the body and came back to life at the resurrection. It’s similar to “soul sleep” or “conditional immorality,” which is held by Armstrongites, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even some mainstream Christians. Origen opposed this position, however.

There’s more detail on Origen’s position on page 239, and, to be honest, I have to guess what he’s driving at. The source is ComJn XIII, 61 (59), 247-230. My impression of Origen’s argument is this: I Corinthians 15 says that the body must “put on” immortality, which implies that immortality is not something that’s inherent to it. But it doesn’t say that about the soul, so it must be inherently immortal.

Davies on Canon, Afterlife, an Internal Jesus (Who Gets Hungry)

I finished Philip Davies’ Scribes and Schools yesterday.

My impression of his argument is that he believes the canon of the Hebrew Bible was roughly determined in the Hasmonean Period, when Israel was eager to establish a national identity against the Hellenizers, who wanted the Jews to absorb Greek culture. For Davies, the biblical ideas of a monarch and Israelite dominance over foreign aggressors would especially resonate in the time of the Hasmoneans, after the Maccabees had defended their culture from Antiochus Epiphanes, achieved independence for their nation, and set up a priest-king as ruler. Davies acknowledges that there was a Jewish culture before the Hasmoneans rose to power, for the Maccabees were obviously fighting for certain beliefs and customs in their battles against Antiochus; he also doesn’t assume that the biblical books originated during the Hasmonean Period, for he dates the Torah to the Persian Period, when the Jews entered the “Promised Land,” established a temple state, and had to distinguish themselves from the people already in the land, issues that the Torah highlights. But Davies seems to think that the Hasmonean Period was the time when Jews consciously turned their focus on their national culture and the scribal class made decisions about which books to emphasize and preserve. They had to at that time, for Hellenizers were challenging Jewish culture with an alternative way of doing things! The Jews had to sit down and decide what their culture actually was and would be.

At the same time, not everything was set in stone, for some even after the Hasmonean Period believed that Ben Sira was inspired. Yet, Josephus acts as if the Jews had a canon of twenty-two books in his day. And, although Davies acknowledges the possibility that Jubilees may have been authoritative in certain circles of Judaism, his tendency seems to be to treat canon as somewhat official after the time of the Hasmoneans. He disputes those who argue that the Qumran Temple Scroll was intended to replace the Torah, for example, seeing it as something like Tatian’s Diatessaron, an attempt to harmonize the four Gospels. The implication is that the Jews viewed the Torah as canon, so their aim was to interpret and harmonize it, not to replace it. Davies also doesn’t associate the rabbinic disputes as to which books defile the hands (i.e., are inspired) with an attempt to determine their canonicity. For him, canonicity was roughly determined centuries before, during the Hasmonean Period.

This is my understanding of Davies’ position. I may be inaccurate in some areas, for scholars are nuanced, and it’s quite easy for me to miss what they’re getting at.

I thought about the issue of the afterlife, for some reason. In my eyes, the lack of a rigorous conception of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible has been an indication that it’s largely pre-exilic, since the nations of the ancient Near East (except for Egypt) also lacked a rigorous conception of the afterlife: people went to Sheol, and that was it! Here, the Hebrew Bible mirrors its ancient Near Eastern neighbors before Israel’s exile, meaning we should understand it against the backdrop of Akkadian and Ugaritic sources rather than Greek ones. Some have suggested that the Jews got the idea of resurrection from the Persians. If that’s the case, then it’s odd that the Torah wouldn’t explicitly mention it, if (as Davies argues) the Persian Period was when it was composed.

At the same time, there were die-hards against an afterlife even in the Hellenistic Period. Jesus Ben Sira was one of them. The Book of Ecclesiastes was another one, if it dates to the Hellenistic Period. This had puzzled me whenever I’ve sought to incorporate things into a scheme of progressive revelation, in which God reveals to his people a conception of the afterlife when he feels they are ready. A concept of the afterlife existed in the Hellenistic Period, and prominent Jewish people rejected it! Qoheleth was still puzzled about why life is so short and futile, even though there was a concept in his day that could have solved his dilemma—one that claimed there was life beyond the grave! Maybe it took a while for God’s people to become “ready” for that idea.

Now for Henri Crouzel’s Origen. As I read Crouzel yesterday, I was reminded of something a friend once told me. He was an older gentleman, and I tutored him to help him read better. He said that his pastor told him there’s a Jesus inside of every Christian, and that Jesus gets hungry, so we need to feed him by reading the Bible, going to church, etc. Origen was saying something similar. It’s an odd concept. I mean, Jesus is in heaven, so how’s he inside of every Christian? Yet, the Bible talks a lot about “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Davies on Writing and Ahura Mazda, Origen on the Dimensions of Noah's Ark

I wrote this post this morning on my Wordpress blog:

I’m at the library right now because the carpet of my apartment is being cleaned today. Why the computer I’m on has a keyboard that inclines backwards is beyond me! It’s certainly not for my benefit, I can tell you that.

Here’s my write-up for yesterday’s reading:

1. For Philip Davies’ Scribes and Schools, I got some of his take on writing in ancient Israel and the emergence of Israel’s scribal class. On page 78, he lists the evidence of writing in Israel under her monarchies. There are ostraca from Samaria that may date to the eighth century recording deliveries of wine and oil, but the area covered is “rather small (a radius of a few miles), which does not suggest a large archive or administrative staff.” There are also “precious few royal inscriptions from the area…” Although Davies is considered a biblical minimalist, he seems to suggest that there’s something to II Samuel 8:16-18, for the passage describes David’s cabinet as rather small; Chronicles, however, embellishes stuff.

This is a debate that I’ve encountered in academia. Sure, there was writing in pre-exilic Israel, but was there enough for us to suggest that Israel could produce a national literature prior to the exile? Maximalists like to date many parts of the Hebrew Bible to pre-exilic times, and the goal of some of them may be to defend their historicity, since, if the writings emerged before the exile, they are closer to the events that they discuss. Not everyone who dates stuff in the Hebrew Bible to pre-exilic times has this agenda, however, for many think that the Hebrew Bible resembles ancient Near Eastern cultures before Israel’s exile or speaks to her pre-exilic situation. There are many examples, but one that comes to mind is Baruch Halpern’s David’s Secret Demons: I-II Samuel try to defend David against charges that he’s a thug, so the books were probably written close to the time of David, since that’s the time when such charges were made.

Minimalists, however, date most of the Hebrew Bible to post-exilic times. And, on page 77, that’s when Davies dates Israel’s scribal class, which would be responsible for the production and preservation of the Hebrew Bible. He states: “The fact is…that scribal and non-scribal schools clearly existed in Judah in the Hellenistic period, and scribal schools probably grew up in the Persian period.” Before that, the scribal class (if it existed) was small. Minimalists are usually open to the possibility that the Hebrew Bible preserves some pre-exilic traditions, though, which could explain why Davies is open to the historicity of II Samuel 8:16-18.

On a different note, unrelated to the maximalist/minimalist debate that grips biblical studies, Davies makes an interesting point on page 69: Davies posits that the Achaemenid religion of Zoroaster in Persia may have viewed “Yahweh as the Judean manifestation of the one great high god Ahura Mazda.” I wonder if this explains Ezra 1:2, in which Cyrus affirms that the LORD gave him all the kingdoms of the earth. Some may say that’s biblical propaganda, and that Cyrus probably didn’t see the God of Israel as the highest god. Maybe he did, in the sense that he thought the God of Israel was a manifestation of Ahura Mazda, the high god in Zoroastrianism. Similarly, the Cyrus Cylinder ascribes to the Babylonian deity Marduk an exalted status, calling him the king of the gods. Could Cyrus have believed that Marduk was a manifestation of Ahura Mazda as well?

This is somewhat of an inclusivist, UU way of looking at things: that everyone worships the same god under a different name. But the Bible also has an exclusivist streak when it comes to Cyrus. In Isaiah 45:4, God says that Cyrus will restore Israel, even though he doesn’t know the LORD. So knowing Ahura Mazda is not the same as knowing the LORD, as far as Second Isaiah is concerned.

2. For Henri Crouzel’s Origen, something on page 63 stood out to me: Origen responds to skeptics who say not all the animals could fit on Noah’s ark. The skeptic was Apelles the Marcionite, who believed the Old Testament was bunk.

Crouzel cites Homilies on Genesis II:2, which I can’t find online. I can, however, find the other source that he cites on the Internet: Contra Celsum IV:41. See here. I’m not sure how, but basically Origen expands the dimensions of the ark. Celsus’ charge was that not all the animals could fit on the ark if it’s the size that Genesis 6:15 suggests: 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. Origen, however, says that the dimensions were bigger: “Why should we not rather admire a structure which resembled an extensive city, if its measurements be taken to mean what they are capable of meaning, so that it was nine myriads of cubits long in the base, and two thousand five hundred in breadth?” He may have thought that Noah was to start out with the dimensions of Genesis 6:15, after which he would build some more.

Speaking of which, I saw Evan Almighty yesterday! Critics panned it as having a simplistic spiritual message of doing random acts of kindness, but I actually liked the movie. I’d give it two-and-a-half stars out of four. I liked the story-line of Evan, a narcissistic Congressman with a vague ambition to “change the world,” who trusts in God and builds an ark, even though that looks crazy to the people around him (though you’d expect them to see the hand of God when all the animals followed Evan, or when Evan’s clothes miraculously changed in the House meeting-room!). Evan’s family also thought he was odd, but they stuck by him, and God came through in the end.

Hit Over the Head with Canon, Origen on the Devil's Salvation and Soul Sleep

I’ll be blogging through two books this week. One is Philip R. Davies’ Scribes and Scrolls: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures. The other is Henri Crouzel’s biography of Origen.

1. For Davies’ book, I’m trying to pin down his view of canon. Yesterday, I only got to page 50. My impression is that he critiques approaches that act like the content of the canon is a decision made by the larger religious community. For him, the canon is formed when a scribal school chooses to preserve certain documents, which they believe contains Israel’s heritage. So he doesn’t focus on canon as a decision made within a committee as to which books are in and out; rather, as far as he’s concerned, if the book’s been preserved through copying, then it’s part of the canon. Davies also says (though I can’t find where) that what’s important to the scribal elite may not be on the radar of most Israelites, the peasants.

I wonder if Davies believes that the scribal elite had power or influence over most Israelites, though. Here’s a provocative passage on page 11:

In Foucauldian terms, a canon itself should be seen as a locus of power, facilitating cultural hegemony. The power of the Bible, for example, is quite blatantly invoked by preachers as a means of personal authority over their congregations, or even of political authority over national constituencies. Of course, its power resides in the willingness of people to recognize its canonicity and not in any intrinsic authority that its exploiters may seek to invoke as a disquise for their own ambitions.

For Davies in this quote, canon is a way to exercise power.

Davies is considered a biblical minimalist, which means that he doesn’t believe in the historical existence of David and Solomon and dates the Bible to post-exilic times. Some have told me that biblical minimalists have an ax to grind against religion, and this quote seems to reflect that. Part of me likes the quote, though, since I’m sick of people telling me what to do by hitting me over the head with “the Bible says.” In my opinion, whether and how I follow the Bible is my own personal decision, between me and God.

2. For Crouzel’s biography of Origen, two things stood out to me: the issue of whether or not Origen believed that the devil would be saved, and soul sleep.

Crouzel’s discussion of the first topic occurs on pages 20-21. Origen’s view of the salvation of Satan is discussed in Jerome’s Apology Against Rufinus. Jerome preserves a fragment by Rufinus in which Origen “is protesting against those who attribute to him something he never said, that the devil, ‘the father of malice and perdition, and of those who are excluded from the kingdom of God’ would be saved” (Crouzel’s words). In II.19, Jerome refers to a dialogue between Origen and a Valentinian Gnostic named Candidus. Jerome summarizes it as follows: “Candidus asserts that the devil has a very evil nature which can never be saved. To that Origen replies that it is not because of his substance that the devil is destined to perish, but that he has fallen because of his own will and that he could be saved. Because of that Candidus slanders Origen by representing him as saying that the devil has a nature that must be saved, when in fact Origen refutes Candidus’ false objection.”

Crouzel reads the dialogue in light of the Valentinian belief in predestination: that “there are those who are saved and those who are damned, not by the choice of their will, but as a result of the nature with which they were created.” Origen, however, rejected the deterministic stance that the devil was destined to damnation because of his nature; rather, Origen maintained that the devil had a say in the matter, since he was keeping himself from God’s kingdom through his obstinate opposition to God. For Origen, the devil could change his mind and be saved, but he chooses damnation over life. To bring C.S. Lewis into the discussion, Origen believes that, for the devil, the door of hell is locked from the inside. Candidus misinterprets this to mean that Origen thinks the devil will be saved.

At the same time, in II.7, 12, Jerome refers to ideas of Origen that appear to coincide with the devil’s salvation. Origen interprets the fires of hell, for instance, to be pangs of conscience that God will use to cleanse everyone of sin (universalism). And Jerome labels as heresy Origen’s notion that “in the restitution of all things, when the fullness of forgiveness will have been reached, Cherubim and Seraphim, Thrones, Principalities, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Archangels and Angels, the devil, the demons and the souls of men whether Christians, Jews, or Heathen, will be of one condition and degree…”

Maybe this all comes together and makes sense in some manner, but it’s morning, so I can’t say how. I don’t entirely understand Candidus’ accusation of Origen. Does he think Origen’s saying that the devil will be saved in his state of wickedness? Origen’s universalism doesn’t teach that. It says that God will cleanse all of sin. And I wonder if Origen may have a point when he talks about the ultimate reconciliation of spirit beings to God, for Colossians 1:20 says Christ died to reconcile things in heaven and earth to God. That doesn’t exactly gel with the notion that Christ only died for humanity because he became a man, but there it is!

Regarding soul sleep, on page 32, Crouzel cites HE VI, XXXVI, whose abbreviation I cannot find. Origen tries to refute the views of the Thnetophysites, who “said that the human soul in the present circumstance dies with the body at the moment of decease and that it sees corruption with the body, but that one day, at the resurrection, it will live again with the body.” According to Crouzel, a council was convened to discuss this, and Origen converted the “deviants” to orthodoxy. I’d be interested to learn more about this, but I’ll have to save that for another day!

Pre-Origen Knowledge of Variants, Smart Animals

1. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (New York: T&T Clark, 2004) 98.

Dines is discussing the Hexapla, which was created by the Christian thinker Origen (second-third centuries C.E.). The Hexapla had six columns of Bible versions. One was the Hebrew version that is like the Masoretic Text. Another is the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Then there are other Greek translations featured, such as the ones by Aquila and Symmachus.

I found the following statement intriguing, or, more accurately, slightly unbelievable:

From what was effectively a pre-electronic database, it would have been possible to see at a glance how the LXX related to other versions, and thus to the original Hebrew (it did not occur to anyone at this time that the Hebrew underlying the LXX was sometimes different).

Okay, come to think of it, I already interacted with this issue in my post yesterday, Updating and Text Criticism in Antiquity, in which I state:

Siegert states that no attempt was made to apply [text criticism] to the Bible before Origen (second-third centuries C.E.), who compared the Hebrew version of the Bible with the Septuagint and other Greek translations. For a long time, Alexandrian Jews such as Philo simply assumed that the Septuagint and the Hebrew version of the Hebrew Bible said the exact same thing, only in different languages.

Philo (first century C.E.) actually says that in Life of Moses 2:34-40. But is Dines suggesting that people before Origen didn’t know that the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint were different, meaning the Hebrew text behind the Septuagint wasn’t always like the MT? In Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, vol. 4, Michael Brown documents that the New Testament authors referred to a variety of versions of the Hebrew Bible: the MT, the LXX, etc. (pp. 3-20). Krister Stendahl discusses the same issue in his School of St. Matthew and Its Use of the Old Testament. So, obviously, there was a notion as early as the first century that the Hebrew and the Greek versions were different. Would that imply that people before Origen realized that the Hebrew text underlying the LXX was different from the MT? Moreover, Dines refers to Irenaeus’ (c. 130-208 C.E.) statement that the LXX is superior to the new Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.

Did the NT authors believe that both the MT and the LXX were divinely-inspired? Did Irenaeus believe that there was one Hebrew text, and the LXX was the best translation of that, whereas the other translations were biased and inaccurate? Dines says something like this on p. 77. And, under my post “What’s Canonical for Us?”, Looney said that Augustine rejected the Hebrew versions of his day because he saw them as the result of poor copying, which was why there were so many variants. Augustine came after Origen, so he was aware of the variants, according to Dines’ scenario. But I’m wondering if Irenaeus years earlier rejected certain variants for the same reason that Augustine did.

2. Folker Siegert, “Early Jewish Interpretation in a Hellenistic Style,” Hebrew Bible, Old Testament: The History of Interpretation I/1: Antiquity, ed. Magne Saebo (1996) 142-143.

The synagogue service, be it by chance or not, fitted very well with Pythagorean and Stoic concepts of ‘pure’ and ‘unbloody’ worship which had developed out of philosophical criticism of religion and sacrifice. It was non-violent, bloodless, and [logikon] in every sense of the term: a cult based on verbal utterance, with reasonable meaning. It consisted of learning and prayer. The Pythagoreans, who categorically refused to kill animals, and the Stoics, who were conscious of the divine logos within them, were longing for a community to communicate with the divine. But since traditional cults were open to interpretation but not to innovation, they had to resort to more private forms of prayer and contemplation.

The part about the Pythagoreans not killing animals stood out to me. I wonder what their rationale was. Also, is this quote suggesting that the Stoics believed animals had a divine logos within them? That reminds me of something John Valade said in his post, “Leadership” in the Image of God. In discussing God’s command to humans to have dominion over the animals (Genesis 1:26), John states:

The idea of “dominion” over animals suggests that they probably also have all the necessary attributes to respond to this “dominion” appropriately. Unlike the teaching of the founder of our former denomination, this suggests that amimals are in fact intelligent.

Who knows? Genesis 3:1 says the serpent was the most subtle animal of all the land creatures that God had made. People may say, “Well, that’s because Satan was inhabiting him,” but the text says that the serpent was subtle, not Satan. Moreover, Numbers 22:28ff. says God opened the mouth of Balaam’s donkey. People say God was speaking through Balaam’s ass, but is that what the text really says? Or is it saying that God enabled the donkey to express himself in a manner that was understandable to Balaam? And the donkey was expressing his feelings as a donkey: about Balaam hitting him even though he’d been a good and faithful donkey for a long time. Could animals be intelligent?

At the same time, God commanded animal sacrifices. And, when Paul applied I Corinthians 9:9 (”You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain”) to Christians, he dismissively asks, “Is it for oxen that God is concerned?” (NRSV). So there are voices in the Bible that don’t treat animals as all-that-intelligent, as far as I can see. If animals were intelligent, would God allow human beings to kill them?

Garments of Skin, Adding to Deuteronomy

1. Adam Kamesar, “The Bible Comes to the West: The Text and Interpretation of the Bible in Its Greek and Latin Forms,” Living Traditions of the Bible, ed. James E. Bowley (St. Louis: Chalice, 1999) 57.

A famous example of Origen’s use of the allegorical method, which caused much controversy a century later, is his interpretation of the “garments of skin” in Genesis 3:21. According to the biblical text, after Adam and Eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God made “garments of skin” for them to wear and expelled them from the garden of Eden. For Origen, this passage was rather crass and anthropomorphic. It simply could not be accepted that God would make clothes for Adam and Eve. So he interpreted the text along Platonic lines to the effect that originally everything was pure essence, without material existence. Platonism stressed the existence of a transcendent, nonphysical world of forms and ultimate realities beyond the material. Originally, in that mode, humans were just souls. The making of the “garments of skin” is an allegory that indicates that at a certain point humans took on bodily form, covered by skin. Origen rejected the literal sense of Scripture in that particular verse and favored an allegorical interpretation.

When I first read this, I wondered why Origen’s interpretation of Genesis 3:21 would be considered “allegorical” rather than “literal.” It apparently was, for, a few centuries earlier, Philo of Alexandria (first century C.E.) had the same sort of interpretation, and he called it “figurative,” whereas he labelled as “literal” the view that God clothed Adam and Eve with a garment made of skins (Questions and Answers on Genesis I:53). But the Hebrew of Genesis 3:21 literally reads, “And the LORD God made for Adam and Eve garments of skin, and he clothed them.” Couldn’t the “skin” be human skin rather than that of an animal, meaning God after the Fall clothed Adam and Eve with their human flesh? That would be another way to apply the Hebrew word “or.” But it’s not an allegorical interpretation, for it’s not seeking a hidden meaning behind the word. Rather, it’s a literal approach that interprets a word in a certain manner: as human skin rather than animal skin.

But many scholars agree that Philo did not know Hebrew, and Origen probably preferred the Septuagint, even though at one point he composed a Hexapla of different Bible versions. And, instead of “skin,” the Greek Septuagint uses a word that means “leather,” dermitinos. Granted, dermitinos is related to a word for ”skin,” dermatos, from which we get the word “dermatologist.” But dermitinos technically means “leather,” so, in order to arrive at their interpretations, Philo and Origen had to use allegory, interpreting the leather as a symbol for human flesh.

The view of Philo and Origen was probably rooted in the Greek view (or, more accurately, a Greek view) that prioritized mind over matter and emphasized an ascetic taming of the flesh.

2. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (New York: T&T Clark, 2004) 15.

Sometimes [the LXX translator of Deuteronomy] appears to ‘update’ his translation. In 23:18, for instance, he apparently adds initiation into the Greek mysteries to the list of forbidden practices.

The LXX of Deuteronomy 23:18 appears as follows in Brenton’s English translation. The relevant word is in bold-face:

There shall not be a harlot of the daughters of Israel, and there shall not be a fornicator of the sons of Israel; there shall not be an idolatress of the daughters of Israel, and there shall not be an initiated person of the sons of Israel.

The Hebrew merely has the following (according to the NRSV): None of the daughters of Israel shall be a temple prostitute; none of the sons of Israel shall be a temple prostitute.

According to Dines, the LXX translator added stuff to Deuteronomy to update the document, so that it could speak to Jews living in the Greek world, amidst all of its temptations. I’m not sure how the translator handled the prohibitions in Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32 on adding to the Book of Deuteronomy. He certainly translates those passages to mean “thou shalt not add to it!” Maybe he felt that he technically wasn’t adding, but was applying the ancient rules to the concerns of his day and age.

Do people of faith do that today? I’m sure that they do, though I can’t think of good examples right now. One example: the Bible’s prohibition on idolatry doesn’t speak to everyone today, since not many in the West today worship idols of wood and stone (though there are people who worship gods and goddesses). And so people apply the label “idolatry” to greed (as does Colossians 3:5), or watching too much TV, or putting anything ahead of God and religion. We’re trying to apply an ancient document to our modern concerns. Sometimes, our attempts are a stretch. At other times, they are faithful to the spirit of the biblical authors.

More on Origen and the Sabbath

N.R.M De Lange, Origen and the Jews: Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations in Third-Century Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) 93.

In my post, Origen, the Sabbath, and the Literal Sense, I quoted De Lange's discussion of an Old Testament command about the Sabbath that Origen considered impossible to fulfill: the command for Israelites not to leave their homes on the Sabbath. Origen also thinks it's impossible not to carry a burden on the Sabbath day (see Jeremiah 17:21). I asked in my post if Origen thought that God never intended the Israelites to observe the Old Testament law literally. De Lange seems to argue that Origen believes it was observed literally at some point in time, but his purpose in demonstrating the impossibility of certain Sabbath laws was to show that the spiritual meaning is what's important, not the literal ritual.

In my mind, I wondered how Origen interpreted the Old Testament laws about the Sabbath. Here is De Lange's answer:

The true Sabbath-observance consists of a complete break with worldly occupations and a total dedication to spiritual acts. Origen reinterprets the prohibitions mentioned above: 'Burdens' refers to sins, which are compared to heavy burdens in Psalm xxxvii(xxxviii).5, and fire, which is also forbidden on the Sabbath (Exodus xxxv.3), is likewise referred to evildoing, on the basis of Isaiah 1:11. As for the command to stay in one's own place, 'what is the "place" of the spiritual soul? Its place is justice, truth, wisdom, sanctification; everything which Christ is is the place of the soul'. Even so, the true observance of the Sabbath is impossible in this world, where even God does not rest on the Sabbath; the present age is the 'sixth day of creation', and the true Sabbath is the age to come.

There are two areas in which this quote interests me:

1. There appears to be a method to Origen's allegorization. I've not read everything Origen has written, but there are many times when his search for "deeper meaning" in Scripture looks rather arbitrary. For my daily writing on De Lange's book today, I was going to discuss Origen's treatment of Zechariah 9:9-10, in which he addresses the Jewish argument that Jesus didn't fulfill that passage, since Jesus didn't cut off the bow of Ephraim, as v 10 says the man riding on the donkey would do. Origen's response is to interpret "Ephraim" as something other than Ephraim--I think he said it refers to people who believe wrongly about something. For me, anything other than a literal interpretation appears to be arbitrary eisegesis.

But, in the case of the Sabbath laws, Origen actually offers Scriptural evidence for his interpretation: "burden" refers to sin because that's how it's used in a Psalm; the prohibited "fire" means evildoing because of Isaiah 1:11 (which bans hypocritical sacrifices). This is a technique that the rabbis use: you interpret the meaning of a word in a biblical passage by seeing how that word is used in other biblical passages.

One can argue that Origen's method is not full-proof, since there are plenty of places in Scripture where "burden" means burden, or "fire" means fire. But Origen can come back and say that, if a command can't really be obeyed literally, then its primary meaning must be spiritual, so one should go with the spiritual interpretation of the passage, which is supported by how other passages use particular words.

2. In a sense, Origen says that the fulfillment of the Sabbath command is yet future. I've had a debate on two separate occasions with two Sabbatarians: one is an ex-Armstrongite who's currently an independent Sabbath-keeper, and the other's an Armstrongite, or a prospective Armstrongite (he likes to quote the United Church of God). They say that we should keep the seventh-day Sabbath because it hasn't been fulfilled yet. The animal sacrifices were fulfilled when Christ shed his blood on the cross, so we don't have to do them anymore. But the Sabbath's fulfillment is still future, so we still have to keep it, in their reckoning. For these two gentlemen, the Sabbath will be fulfilled in the time of the millennium, when Christ will rule the earth after his return. That will be the seventh millennium of human history, the "rest" that Hebrews 4 exhorts us to enter.

There really isn't much Scriptural evidence for the millennium being the seventh millennium of human history. That's speculation. But many early Christian thinkers seemed to believe something along those lines. The Epistle of Barnabas has such a concept. And, while I'm not sure if Origen believed in a literal thousand year reign of Christ, he thought that the age of come was the Sabbath.

Yet, just because Barnabas and Origen believed that the Sabbath would be fulfilled in the future, that didn't mean they thought Christians should literally observe the seventh-day Sabbath. Barnabas is big on Sunday, as is Origen. And Origen tends to spiritualize the Sabbath, maintaining that it's a total dedication to spiritual acts.

Echoing Colossians 2:16, Origen doesn't think people need to keep the Sabbath because it's a shadow of things to come. But, if the thing to come hasn't come yet, does that mean we still have to keep the Sabbath, the same way the Israelites needed to sacrifice animals before Christ came and fulfilled the animal sacrifices? Or did Origen think that, in some sense, Christ at his first coming began the process of fulfilling the Sabbath, of being the object towards whom the Sabbath pointed?

In a sense, Christ brought "rest," "the Messianic age," "the kingdom of God," whatever you want to call it, only it's not in its state of completion at the present time. New Testament scholars call this the kingdom being "already but not yet." And so perhaps Christ has made it possible for us to spiritually keep the Sabbath right now, to rest in him from worldliness and sin, but we can't do so perfectly because the kingdom is not fully realized at the present moment. But it will be when Christ returns in glory.

And so perhaps Christ has begun to fulfill the Sabbath and make it spiritual, but the process will be complete when he comes back. In the meantime, do we need to keep the Sabbath literally, when the object and goal of the shadow has begun his work of fulfilling it?