Two
Testaments in One Bible:
How
Do the Old and New Testaments Interrelate?[1]
Jostein dna
(Professor emeritus of New Testament, VID Specialized
University, Norway)
Abstract: The article presents and discusses its topic, Two Testaments
in One Bible , in four parts.
Part 1. The
Jewish Bible. The canonization of
the Jewish Bible took place gradually in the post-exilic era, first the Law
(Torah), second the Prophets (Nebi im), and, finally,
in the period between the first and second Jewish revolts (AD 66 135), the
Writings (Ketubim). Applying the initial letters of
the Hebrew designations of the three parts, the Hebrew Bible is called Tanakh.
From the third century BC the biblical books were gradually translated into
Greek. The Greek version, commonly called the Septuagint, contains more books
than the Hebrew Bible. After the Septuagint had enjoyed recognition in the
Greek speaking diaspora on the same level as the Hebrew Bible for a long
period, it fell into disregard during the second century AD. Since then the Tanakh alone has been the authoritative biblical
canon in Judaism.
Part 2. The Christian Bible. Jesus and the apostles read the Holy Scriptures in
Hebrew, but because of their missionary outreach beyond Judea and Galilee, the
early Christians predominantly used the pre-existing Greek translation of the
Bible, the Septuagint, for preaching and teaching. Both due to its higher
number of books (especially the wisdom books Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon) and
thanks to its salvation-historical compositional outline, with the prophetic
books at the end, the Septuagint corresponded well to the early Christians
understanding of the Christ event as the continuation and peak of revelation
history. Gradually, the books that recount the story of Jesus Christ (the
Gospels) and the books that communicate faith in Christ and elaborate what it
means to live one s life as a follower of him (the Letters) were collected and
given equal authority to as the Holy Scriptures shared with and inherited from
the Jews. These two collections, called the Old Testament and the New
Testament, were connected and united in the two-part Christian canon.
Part 3. Tradition-historical
developments as expressions of revelation history. The relationship between the
testaments seen from the Old Testament as point of
departure. With
regard to how different theological traditions developed, the transition
from the Old Testament to the New Testament does not frequently mark a unique,
divisive point in the tradition-historical process. Within the long Old
Testament period, for example at the transition from the pre-exilic to the
exilic and post-exilic eras, corresponding major or minor transformations in
the tradition-historical developments did occur. The
article employs the Zion tradition as a paradigmatic example of a theological
tradition that underwent a long, transformative development in many stages and
through various currents from David s conquest of Jerusalem in the tenth
century BC until its reception in Jesus ministry and theological expositions
in the New Testament.
Part 4. The reception of the Old Testament in the New
Testament. The relationship between the testaments seen from the New Testament. All New Testament authors regard the Old Testament as
Holy Scripture that they quote and allude to extensively. The New Testament
shares a common language of faith with the Old Testament, applied in order to express the shared confession of the one true
God, the Father of Jesus Christ. For a paradigmatic description of how the New
Testament applies Old Testament traditions and texts for expressing and
elaborating the Christ event, the article describes how the evangelists Mark
and Matthew drew upon the Old Testament tradition of the righteous sufferer in
Psalm 22 to describe the passion of Jesus, and how the Letter to the Hebrews
drew upon the priesthood of Melchizedek and the promise of a new covenant for
the exposition of Jesus ministry.
Conclusion. The
early Christians never regarded the Old Testament as obsolete. The New
Testament understands itself as a continuation of the Old Testament, testifying
to the culmination and fulfilment in the Christ event of the history of
revelation. The Old Testament is the indispensable first part of the Christian Bible..
This article is a published version of three lectures that I held at
Mekane Yesus Seminary in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 8 10 November 2023, on the
invitation of this institution s Gudina Tumsa Research Center.[2]
The issue of how the two parts of the Christian Bible, the Old Testament and
the New Testament, relate to each other, has accompanied and challenged
theology ever since the Ancient Church. There are many historical,
denominational and systematic aspects involved in the topic Two Testaments in
One Bible: How Do the Old and New Testaments Interrelate? , and we can think of
various ways in which to proceed in presenting and discussing them.[3]
I have chosen a fourfold structure for my exposition:
Part 1. The
Jewish Bible
Part 2. The
Christian Bible[4]
Part 3.
Tradition-historical developments as expressions of revelation history: The
relationship between the testaments seen from the Old Testament as point of
departure.
Part 4. The
reception of the Old Testament in the New Testament: The relationship between
the testaments seen from the New Testament.
The collection of Holy Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament
are also sacred, canonical scriptures in Judaism. It is easy to understand why
our Jewish friends do not apply the same designation as Christians do. The
reason why we Christians label the first part of our Bibles as the Old
Testament is that it is followed by a second part called the New Testament. The
Greek word for testament is diathēkē,
which also has the meaning covenant . Thus, the designations Old and New
Testaments are prompted by the distinctions in 2 Corinthians 3:1 18 and Hebrews
8:6 7 between old and new covenant, respectively, between first and second
covenant.[5]
In this presentation I will repeatedly emphasize that the designation Old
Testament does not imply a negative verdict on these Scriptures for being
outdated. Nevertheless, the name Old Testament might be perceived as a
derogatory designation, and as Christians we must accept without reservation
that Jews use other names. They recognize and respect this collection of
writings as Holy Scripture, without viewing and accepting the New Testament as
its organic successor and fulfilment. When there is no follow-up in a New
Testament, there is, of course, no need, no reason and no justification for
speaking about an Old Testament.
The most common designation of these Holy Scriptures among Jews is Tanakh.
This name is a so-called acronym, i.e., a word formed from the initial letters
of the three Hebrew words Torah, meaning the Law, Nebi im,
meaning the Prophets, and Ketubim, meaning the
Writings. These three entities the Law, the Prophets and the Writings are
the names of the three parts into which Jews divide the books of the Hebrew
Bible. These group designations were already used at the time of the New
Testament. Jesus and some of the New Testament authors repeatedly speak about
the Law and the Prophets as a collective reference to the Holy Scriptures. I
will mention two examples: The first is taken from Jesus Sermon on the Mount,
Matthew 7:12: In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for
this is the law and the prophets. [6]
I take the second example from the apostle Paul, Romans 3:21: [ ] the
righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the law and the
prophets. [7]
In the New Testament we find only one example of a tripartite formula that
corresponds to the Jewish designation Tanakh; however, the Psalms
replace the Ketubim as the third element. The
Psalms represent the largest and perhaps most prominent book among the
Writings, the Ketubim. The tripartite formula
is found at the end of the Gospel of Luke when the risen Christ encounters the
disciples and speaks to them: [ ] These are my words that I spoke to you while
I was still with you that everything written about me in the law of Moses,
the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44).
In modern
biblical scholarship it has become common to speak about the Tanakh as
the Hebrew Bible. This name reflects the fact that Hebrew is the language in
which the included books were originally written. To be accurate we can specify
that two of the books, Ezra and Daniel, are written partly in Hebrew and partly
in the related Semitic language Aramaic (Ezra 4:8 6:18; 7:12 26; Dan
2:4 7:28), and that there are a few Aramaic phrases also appearing in other
books (Jer 10:11; Gen 31:47).
The sequence of the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible, the Law, the
Prophets and the Writings, corresponds to the chronological order of their
canonization. The words canon and canonization are derived from the Greek
word kanōn which, at the outset, means a
rod used by craftsmen to keep a thing straight or to measure it. Figuratively, kanōn means that which is measured in the sense
of a rule or a standard, and the word is used with this meaning in Galatians
6:16. Applied to Holy Scriptures, canon is the designation of the books which
are recognized by a religious community as genuine and normative in defining
the religious truth, that is, as their rule. The related word canonization
refers to the historical process through which specific texts acquire the
position as canon.
The Law,
encompassing the first five books in the Bible, referred to as the Pentateuch
or the five books of Moses, was recognized as canon among the Jews in Judea in
the post-exilic period, perhaps already in the fifth century BC.[8]
This was followed by the canonization of the Prophets perhaps as early as the
third century BC or early in the second century BC (see Sir 44 49).[9]
What might be surprising is the fact that the part of the Hebrew Bible called
the Prophets comprises not only what Christians regard as prophetic books, that
is, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor prophets from Hosea to
Malachi. In fact, the part Nebi im, the
Prophets, also includes the books Joshua, Judges, 1 2 Samuel and 1 2 Kings,
books that we Christians normally consider to be simply historical books.
With
canonical status established for the Law and the Prophets long before the birth
of Christ and the transition from the era before Christ to after Christ, it is
not surprising that the phrase the Law and the Prophets appears repeatedly in
the New Testament as a collective reference to the recognized, normative Holy
Scriptures. However, as already mentioned, there is only one example in the New
Testament for a tripartite reference to the canon, and the third element in
this one example, to be found in Luke 24:44, is not the broad term Ketubim, the Writings, but the Psalms. There is
disagreement among scholars regarding when the third part of the Hebrew Bible
reached canonical status as the Law and the Prophets had done at an earlier
stage. Some claim that the Ketubim were also
established as canonical in the pre-Christian era.[10] The Ketubim
comprise the remaining books of the Hebrew Bible, beyond the five books of the
Pentateuch and the 21 books of the Prophets. Hence, the Ketubim
include the following books: Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, the Song of Songs,
Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and 1 2 Chronicles.
However, other scholars, with whom I agree, consider the fact that the complete
tripartite reference Tanakh occurs neither in Jewish nor in early
Christian sources in the first century AD[11] as an indication that the
canonical process of the Hebrew Bible was ongoing, and had not yet come to an
established end at the time of Jesus and the apostles. The exact extent of the
content of the third part, the Ketubim, must
have been fixed during the period between the first Jewish revolt against Rome
in the years AD 66 70 ( 74) and the second revolt in the years 132 135.
It is time
for a first conclusion with some essential implications for the relationship
between the Old and New Testaments: The final canonization of the Hebrew Bible
occurred after most of the New Testament writings had been written. Hence,
there is no time gap between the two testaments; on the contrary, their
formations overlap. Although it is rather common among scholars to speak about
an intertestamental period from about 200 BC to AD 100 and to call Jewish
writings that originated during this period intertestamental writings, the
implied idea in such talk is nevertheless misleading and erroneous.
For a more complete comprehension of the relationship between the
testaments we must now direct our attention to the Greek translation of the
Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint.[12] After the military
campaigns of Alexander the Great and the succeeding foundation of the
Hellenistic kingdoms towards the end of the fourth century BC, Greek became lingua
franca, that is, the common international language spoken and written
throughout the entire Mediterranean world. During the Hellenistic period many
Jewish diaspora communities were founded both along the southern coast of the
Mediterranean Sea in North Africa and in Southern Europe. These Jewish
communities were predominantly Greek-speaking, and as a
consequence there was a need for Greek translations of the Jewish Holy
Scriptures. First, the Law (the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch) was
translated from Hebrew into Greek in the third century BC. Next, the Prophets,
Psalms and Daniel were translated in the second century BC. However, it was not
until the beginning of the second century AD that all biblical books were
translated.
Not only
the books belonging to the Hebrew Bible Tanakh, but also some further
Jewish writings from the period after Ezra and Nehemiah were included in the
Septuagint. Some of these additional books, for example Sirach from
approximately 180 BC and 1 Maccabees from around 100 BC, had first been written
in Hebrew and were subsequently translated into Greek. Other additional books
which were included in the Septuagint were composed in Greek and, hence, did
not undergo a translation process before they were included in the Greek Bible.
This applies to the book called Wisdom of Solomon and to 2 Maccabees.[13]
Jesus spoke
and taught in Aramaic and Hebrew. However, as we learn from Acts 6, there were
already many Greek-speaking believers in the mother church in Jerusalem, and,
therefore, there was a need for the stories about Jesus and his teaching to be
translated into Greek from the very beginning. Many of the apostles and other
leading figures in the first generation of Christians were bilingual and used both
the Semitic languages Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek in their
proclamation. As soon as the early mission expanded beyond Judea and Galilee,
Greek became the dominant or even the only operative language. On this
background, it is no surprise that all of the New
Testament books are written in Greek.
A further
consequence of these circumstances is that the early Christian missionaries and
teachers used the already existing Greek translation of the Old Testament when
they read from the Holy Scriptures and referred to them. In the New Testament
we observe that most quotations from the Old Testament are cited according to
the Septuagint. There are also some deviations from the Septuagint which prove
that the New Testament authors also related to the Hebrew version of the Bible
and translated the text afresh into Greek or at least independently of the
Septuagint. Nevertheless, in spite of such competence,
the general tendency among the New Testament authors is to read and quote the
Holy Scriptures according to the Septuagint.
Let me summarize and conclude regarding the fixation and delimitation of
the Jewish Bible. The final definition of the content of the Tanakh is
the result of a long canonical process that ended some time
between the two Jewish revolts against Rome in AD 66 70 and 132 135. There are
different ways of counting the books in the Hebrew Bible depending on whether
for example 1 2 Samuel, 1 2 Kings and 1 2 Chronicles are counted as two books
or only one. Towards the end of the first century AD the Jewish historian
Josephus states that there are 22 canonical texts (Against Apion 1.39 41)[14] whereas the Jewish
apocalyptic book 4 Ezra speaks of 24 books (14:18 47).
4 Ezra
14:44 47:
(44) So during the forty days ninety-four books were written.
(45) And when the forty days ended, the Most High
spoke to me, saying: Make public the twenty-four [omitted in some
versions] books that you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy read
them; (46) but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give
them to the wise among your people. (47) For in them is the spring of
understanding, fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge. And I did so.[15]
The
analysis of these numbers shows that they refer exactly to the books that are
contained in modern editions of the Hebrew Bible, counted as 36 or 39 books,
depending on whether the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles are counted as
one or as two books. In most Christian Bibles Samuel, Kings and Chronicles are
counted as two books each so that the total number of books in the Old
Testament is 39. As we will see later in this article, there are differences
among the denominations regarding whether they restrict their editions of the
Old Testament to these 39 books only or whether they include more books. As for
now, we will limit ourselves to the 39 books which are identical with the
content of the Jewish Bible. Although there is an accurate correspondence
regarding the inclusion of these books, their order within the canon differs.
In the Hebrew Bible, the order is set corresponding to the three parts of the Tanakh,
that is, first the books of the Torah, the Law; second the books of the Nebi im, the Prophets; and third the books of the Ketubim, the Writings. If we take the division of 39
books as our basis, this means that the first part, the Law, contains five
books, the second part, the Prophets, contains 21 books, and the third part,
the Writings, contains 13 books.
During the period when the Holy Scriptures were gradually translated
into Greek from the third century BC onwards, these new Greek versions of the
Scriptures were met with enthusiasm and were highly regarded. Indeed, among the
Greek-speaking diaspora Jews the Greek versions were recognized as inspired
holy writ on the same level as the original Hebrew versions.[16]
From the way New Testament authors interact with the Septuagint we can infer
that the Jewish believers in Jesus Christ shared this full recognition of the
Greek translation of the Holy Scriptures. However, by the second century AD the
Septuagint was increasingly perceived to be the Bible of the Christians, to
which they successfully appealed for scriptural proofs. As a
consequence, scepticism towards the Septuagint increased among Jews, and
during the second century AD new Greek translations, associated with the names
Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus, were produced. These new Greek versions
replaced the Septuagint in the Greek-speaking Jewish synagogues from the second
century AD onwards. Although these efforts were undertaken in
order to let Jews with insufficient knowledge of Hebrew still have
access to the Holy Scriptures in Greek, gradually, as rabbinic Judaism
developed, a more exclusive position emerged that recognized the Bible only in
the original Hebrew as the sole authoritative version of the Holy Scriptures.
Hence, with regard to both the language and the
content of the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, represented by the so-called
Masoretic manuscript tradition, became the only and exclusive version. This
outcome of the canonical process is upheld until the present. One remarkable
consequence is that the Holy Scriptures are recited in Hebrew in synagogues all
over the world irrespective of the level of knowledge of biblical Hebrew among
people attending the synagogal services. In most cases the rabbis give their
sermons and elaborate on and explain the biblical text in the local native
language, but nevertheless, only the original texts in Hebrew (and some
passages in Aramaic) are recognized as canonical. The historical fact that, in
the period after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the failing of
the Jewish revolts, the leading centres of Jewish studies in Palestine and
Babylon used Hebrew and Aramaic, as reflected in the collections of the
Mishnah, the Tosefta and the Talmud, were decisive for
this historical development.
The Tanakh canon of the Hebrew Bible is oriented towards the Law
and the keeping of the Law as its central message. Because 1 2 Chronicles are
placed as the last books in the third division, the Writings, 2 Chronicles 36
appears as the end of the Bible. This means that the final event recounted in
the Bible is the declaration of the Persian king Cyrus that God has
commissioned him to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem that the Babylonian king
had destroyed some decades before. The very last verse, 2 Chron 36:23, says:
Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all
the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at
Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the
Lord his God be with him! Let him go up. Any Jew who read this in the first
and second centuries AD, would have known that the declared intention of King
Cyrus materialized in the construction of the so-called Second Temple, raised
from 520 to 515 BC. Hence, the Tanakh ends with a reference to the
temple as the site where many of the commandments in the Law, in particular those about different sacrifices, were to be
practised. After the destruction of the Second Temple in the year AD 70, the
end of the Tanakh might have triggered hopes that once again a temple
would be built in Jerusalem. Concentration on the Law and the recognition of
observance of the Law as a valid replacement of the sacrifices in the temple were
what became the lasting solution to the crisis that hit Judaism when the temple
was destroyed and the temple cult came to an end. The
long-established practice in Jewish diaspora communities, with the synagogue as
the place to assemble for prayer and teaching, now became the regular religious
practice among Jews. The Law was subjected to a detailed, meticulous study, as
documented in the collections of the Mishnah and the Talmud. The emphasis on
the study of the Law and on its observance is reflected in the Tanakh
canon, where parts two and three, the Prophets and the Writings, are perceived
to a high degree as comments and expositions of the first part, the Law.
I think that we as Christians are obliged to show respect for the Hebrew
Bible. This implies, first, that we treat all text passages in the biblical
books with due humility and recognize that they reflect social, cultural and
religious contexts prior to any Christian reception and interpretation. It is
the task of the biblical scholar to analyse and interpret the Old Testament
texts historically, to demonstrate their uniqueness and protect them from being
anachronistically appropriated and exploited. However, it would be a misplaced
respect if we limited ourselves only to historical-critical analyses and
interpretations of individual text passages and biblical books. Our treatment
of the biblical texts must also account for the tradition-historical processes
that these texts were part of throughout the centuries and for their position
and role within the Bible as a whole. This second point of due respect has to
do with the Tanakh as canon. We must understand and recognize that the
first part of our own Bible, which we share with our Jewish friends, is not
only our, but also their treasured inheritance. As such the
Hebrew Bible found a legitimate succession in the rabbinic tradition, reflected
not only in the halakhic corpora of the Mishnah and the Talmud, but also in the
Aramaic, interpretative translations called Targums and in the commentary
literature, Midrash.
I have already stated something about the Christian Bible, either
indirectly or by implication. We have observed that Jesus and his disciples,
who were all Jews, read and accepted the Law, the Prophets and the Writings as
the inspired word of God. Jesus death on the cross and his resurrection did
not change anything in this respect; his followers who gathered as his church
and as the church of God continued to read and teach the Scriptures, seeing
Christ and his resurrection as the organic continuation and fulfilment of the
testimony in the Holy Scriptures. Due to the historical circumstances Greek
quickly became the dominant language used in the early church, and for this
reason the Septuagint was the version of the Holy Scriptures predominantly
read, proclaimed and taught in mission and teaching.
The Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint differ from one another not
only with regard to the language, but also with regard
to the number of books included and the order of these books. The Septuagint is
not divided into the three parts of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.
Instead, the compositional or editorial principle is a division into four
groups of books: First, laws; second, histories or historical books; third,
poetic books; and fourth, prophecies or prophetic books.[17] When it comes to the higher
number of books, I have already listed them above (see n.
13). These additional books in the Septuagint are commonly called Apocrypha or
deuterocanonical books. Depending on their content, they are distributed among
the different groups, so that for example 1 2 Maccabees are placed in the
second group of historical books and Sirach and Wisdom are placed among the
poetic books.
Whereas the
Hebrew Tanakh canon in its divisions is oriented towards the Law as its
centre, the Septuagint order expresses a salvation-historical process instead.
A consequence of placing the prophetic books at the end in the collection of
Holy Scriptures is that they orientate the reader towards the future. Many of
the prophets speak about how God will act in the future, both in judgment and
for salvation. This structural composition of the Holy Scriptures clearly
expresses an openness towards the future. They entail an implicit expectation
that there will be something more to tell and that there will be a continuation
of testifying to what the God of Israel is doing in the world and for his
people.
Like all other contemporary Jews Jesus and the apostles read, studied
and explained the Holy Scriptures. It was not a surprise that they turned to
the Scriptures in order to learn truth and in order to
interpret what was going on in the world, but, on the contrary, exactly what
was expected and seen as a matter of course. The New Testament contains many
examples of this practice, and I will mention two of them.
First, the
Third Evangelist tells in Luke 4:16 30 that Jesus visits his home village of
Nazareth and attends the service in the synagogue on the sabbath day. There he
is invited to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he reads the
passage found in 61:1 2: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has
anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release
to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go
free, to proclaim the year of the Lord s favour (Luke 4:18 19). After the
reading, with the eyes of all in the synagogue fixed on him, Jesus began to
speak: Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing (v. 21). Later
on, when Jesus was challenged by the disciples of John the Baptist to state
clearly whether he was the Messiah or whether they should wait for someone
else, Jesus again hinted at these verses and other verses in the book of
Isaiah, and combined them with his own healing and preaching ministry: Go and
tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame
walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor
have good news brought to them (Luke 7:22).[18]
Second, in
his speech on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:14 36), the apostle Peter quoted
extensively from the Scriptures in order to explain
what had already taken place seven weeks earlier in the resurrection of Jesus
during Passover, and what was happening now during the Feast of Weeks. He cited
from the prophet Joel 3:1 5 (ET 2:28 32) in vv. 16 21, from Psalm 16:8 11
(quoted according to LXX Ps 15:8 11) in vv. 25 28, and he also made references
to other Old Testament texts like Psalms 110 and 132 (see vv. 30, 34 35).
Altogether
the New Testament contains about 80 quotations from the Law, about 80
quotations from the Prophets and about 55 quotations from the Psalms.[19]
Thus, the way in which the early Christians interacted with the Holy Scriptures
is clearly documented. For them as Jews in the first century AD it was neither
coincidental nor accidental that they read and interpreted the Holy Scriptures;
it was rather a matter of course.
Jesus was recognized by his followers and disciples as their teacher.
They listened carefully to his words, memorized them and treasured them. Soon
after Jesus death and resurrection, when the disciples began to proclaim him
as the Messiah and the Lord, they related what Jesus had done, and they
presented the message and teaching of Jesus to people. One example of how the
life of Jesus was communicated to people in the early mission, is Peter s
speech to the people assembled in the house of the God-fearing Roman officer
Cornelius in Caesarea, recounted in Acts 10:34 43. This speech appears as a
summary of the Gospel of Mark. In Mark as well as in the longer synoptic
Gospels of Matthew and Luke and in the Gospel of John the treasured memories of
Jesus words and deeds, which at the beginning had been transmitted orally, are
written down. Thanks to the Gospels, Jesus ministry was communicated to people
who had never encountered him face to face and, gradually, to subsequent
generations born after his ministry.
Other
written documents that communicate faith in Jesus and elaborate what it means
to live one s life as a follower of Jesus are the letters authored by apostles
and missionaries like Paul, Peter, John, James and Jude. We are particularly
well informed about how Paul operated. In the Acts of the Apostles Luke reports
extensively about Paul s three missionary journeys as well as his imprisonment
in Jerusalem, Caesarea and Rome. Further, 13 of Paul s letters have been
preserved, and some of them for example his First Letter to the
Thessalonians, his First Letter to the Corinthians and his Letter to the Romans
can be neatly plotted chronologically into the narrative of Paul s mission in
Acts: 1 Thessalonians was written in the year 50 while Paul resided in Corinth
during the second missionary journey; 1 Corinthians was written in the year 54
or 55 while Paul resided in Ephesus during the third missionary journey; Romans
was written in the year 56 or 57 during Paul s new three-month visit to Corinth
at the end of the third missionary journey, shortly before he travelled to
Jerusalem, where he was imprisoned. As we can see from Colossians 4:16, Paul
wanted his letters to be handed on to other Christian communities, as well:
[W]hen this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of
the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea. After
Paul s death in the 60s all his letters, originally addressed to individual
churches or persons, were brought together and united in a collection, commonly
referred to as the corpus Paulinum, and 2
Peter 3:15 16 testifies to this phenomenon when it refers to the collection of
Pauline letters: So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to
the wisdom given to him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There
are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable
twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.
Documentation of the memories of Jesus words and deeds in the Gospels
and the writing of letters by missionaries and apostles with information and
instruction sent to churches in need of such communication constitute the first
phase of the canonical process that finally led to the collection of writings
called the New Testament. We are in the fortunate position that a number of early Christian texts from the first half of the
second century AD have been preserved; these books are commonly referred to as
the Apostolic Fathers. In this collection we find writings like The Teaching of
the Apostles, in short called Didache; 1 2 Letters of Clement and altogether
seven letters by Ignatius, bishop in Antioch, written around 110 during his
travel to Rome where he expected to be martyred.[20] In the Apostolic Fathers we
observe how Old Testament quotations and references to sayings of Jesus and to
formulations in Paul s Letters are juxtaposed, appearing side by side in the
text as theologically normative statements. Hence, the Apostolic Fathers
demonstrate how the New Testament canonical process is progressing; gradually,
quotations and references from the Gospels and from the Apostolic Letters
appear on a par with Old Testament quotations, as is plain from the following
examples.
1 Clement
13.1 2:
(1) [ ] Let
us do that which is written, for the Holy Spirit says, Let not the wise man
boast himself in his wisdom, nor the strong man in his strength, nor the rich
man in his riches, but he that boasts let him boast in the Lord, to seek him
out and to do judgment and righteousness , especially remembering the words of
the Lord Jesus which he spoke when he was teaching gentleness and
longsuffering. (2) For he spoke thus: Be merciful, that you may obtain mercy.
Forgive, that you may be forgiven. As you do, so shall it be done unto you. As
you give, so shall it be given unto you. As you judge, so shall you be judged.
As you are kind, so shall kindness be shown you. With what measure you mete, it
shall be measured to you. [21]
2 Clement
14.2:
Now I
imagine that you are not ignorant that the living Church is the body of
Christ . For the scripture says, God made man male and female ; the male is
Christ, the female is the Church. And moreover the
books [i.e. the Old Testament books] and the Apostles declare that the Church
belongs not to the present, but has existed from the beginning; for she was
spiritual, as was also our Jesus, but he was made manifest in the last days
that he might save us.[22]
1 Clement
49.5:
Love unites
us to God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love bears all things, is
long-suffering in all things. There is nothing base, nothing haughty in love;
love admits no schism, love makes no sedition, love does all things in concord.[23]
As the Gospels and the Letters gained a generally recognized position in
all churches during the first half of the second century AD, the balance
between the long-esteemed Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament and these new
documents testifying to the divine revelation in the person and life of Jesus
and in the gospel message was suddenly challenged.
Around AD 140 Marcion, son of a bishop and himself a rich shipowner, initiated
a controversy in the church in Rome. He claimed that Jewish legalism was about
to obscure the gospel. In his opinion, the church must reject the Jewish Bible,
the Old Testament, because it represented this threatening Jewish legalism.
According to Marcion such legalism had already influenced and infiltrated the
texts about Jesus and the gospel. For this reason, it was necessary to
scrutinize the Gospels and the Letters and wipe out the intruded legalistic
elements. Marcion s crusade against the Old Testament and its alleged legalism
was rejected in Rome, and he was expelled from the community. In AD 144 Marcion
founded his own church with no Old Testament and only with a version of the
Gospel of Luke revised by him in an anti-Jewish direction and ten similarly
reworked letters of Paul as the new canon.
Marcion s challenge prompted a more conscious and defined position in
the church regarding its canon. In addition, the parallel development of
Gnostic influences in some regions and the morally rigid Montanist movement
intensified the need for such clarifications in the so-called catholic churches
which were led by bishops loyal to their predecessors, who were originally
ordained by the apostles.
The outcome
of the disputes in the second century was, on the one hand, a firm confirmation
of the Old Testament in the form of the Greek Septuagint as the word of God
and, on the other hand, an increasingly clearly defined New Testament canon.
The criteria for being accepted and recognized as authoritative were
apostolicity, orthodoxy and consensus among the churches. Apostolicity means
that the writings had to be written by apostles, like Paul, Peter, John and
Matthew, but this principle also included authors who had been direct disciples
or co-workers of some of the apostles, like Mark in his relation to Peter and
Luke in his relation to Paul. By AD 200 the core of our New Testament was
firmly established and recognized in all Christian churches. The core comprised
the following: the four Gospels, 13 or 14 Pauline Letters the variation in
numbers depends on whether the Letter to the Hebrews was considered as written
by Paul or not further, Acts of the Apostles, Peter s First Letter and John s
First Letter.
The extent
of precisely those 27 books which our New Testament comprises, was confirmed in
the fourth and at the very beginning of the fifth century AD. For the church in
the East the Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of Bishop Athanasius in Alexandria,
written on the occasion of Easter AD 367, witnesses
the recognition of the New Testament with 27 books. In the Western church the
synod in Carthage 397 and the letter from the Roman bishop, Pope Innocent I, to
the bishop in Toulouse in the year 405 confirm the establishment and
recognition of all 27 books as New Testament canon.
As the Christian faith spread to more and more nations, the sacred texts
were translated into new languages. As early as during the second century New
Testament texts were translated into Latin, Syriac and Coptic. However, there
was never any doubt that Greek was the original language of the New Testament
and, thus, that any translations must be based on the Greek text as their
source.
When it
came to the corresponding translation of the Old Testament, the question of the
source language appeared to be much more complicated and controversial. It was
natural to use the Septuagint as long as the church
operated in a setting where Greek was the common language. But as soon as other
languages were involved, the question was whether the translation should be
made on the basis of the Septuagint or, rather, on the
basis of Hebrew, which was the language from which the Septuagint had been
translated. A paradigmatic case is the discussion between the church fathers
Augustine and Jerome at the turn of the fifth century AD regarding the
translation of the Old Testament into Latin. Whereas Augustine favoured the
Septuagint, Jerome was convinced that he did right in translating the Old
Testament from the Hebrew. As a consequence, the Latin
Bible, the Vulgate, which soon acquired the position as the official and
authorized Bible in the Western Catholic Church, is based on the Hebrew Bible.
In this way the Vulgate is not dependent on the Septuagint, but rather appears
as its parallel. However, the Vulgate does not limit its content to the 39
books of the Tanakh, but includes the additional deuterocanonical books
of the Septuagint, translated from Greek, and the Vulgate also follows the
Septuagint s order of the books with the prophetic books at the end.
The next
time in history when the questions of the source language and the content of
the Old Testament became a burning issue was during the Reformation in Europe
in the sixteenth century. By this time the Latin Vulgate had been the one
exclusive form of the Bible in Europe for centuries. One concern of highest
priority for the reformers was to give the public access to the Bible, and the
invention of printing in the preceding century had suddenly made mass
production of books possible. If the population at large should gain access to
the biblical texts, it was necessary to translate the Bible into the
vernaculars. The reformer Martin Luther s translation of the Bible into German
is generally seen as a brilliant achievement.[24] The New Testament books
were, of course, translated from Greek, but what about the Old Testament?
Luther did as Jerome more than one thousand years earlier; he decided to
translate from the Hebrew Bible, not from the Greek Septuagint. Because of the
total dominance of Latin as the language of the church in Europe, the knowledge
of Hebrew had by this time practically been lost. When the so-called
Renaissance humanists from the fifteenth century onwards gradually took an
interest in returning to antiquity, they had to turn to the learned in the
synagogue and study with them in order to learn Hebrew
afresh and be able to read the biblical texts. The reformers not only obtained
the source text of the Old Testament from the synagogue, but they also took
over the Tanakh canon from the synagogue. Thus, the Reformation Bibles
removed the so-called Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books that had always been
part of the Christian Old Testament. This was done with varying rigour. In his
German Bible of 1534 Martin Luther still included the Apocrypha in a separate
section between the Old Testament books and the New Testament books and stated
in the title of this section: The Apocrypha. That is, Books which are not to
be esteemed like the Holy Scriptures, and yet which are useful and good to
read. [25]
Reformed
Protestantism went further in diminishing or even degrading the position of the
Apocrypha. We can cite the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith ( I.3) as an
example: The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration,
are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in
the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings. [26]
As described above, the evangelists and the teachers in the early church
and the New Testament authors embraced the Greek Bible of the Septuagint with
its larger range of books than the Hebrew Tanakh.
We can
observe an emphasis on the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms from the Old
Testament references in the New Testament. However, we can also observe that
the New Testament authors related to the so-called Apocrypha and sometimes
quote from them as Scripture. The most explicit occurrences are quotations or
echoes from Sirach, for example the reception of Sirach 4:1 in Mark 10:19 and
of Sirach 5:11 in James 1:19.[27]
In some cases New Testament authors combine phrases from different biblical
books among which can be Apocrypha. One example of such conflated quotations is
2 Timothy 2:19, where the author cites from Numbers 16:5, Sirach 17:26 and
Isaiah 26:13.
In addition
to including direct quotations or borrowed phrases from individual verses, New
Testament authors argue and expose certain theological issues on the basis of how biblical traditions have developed
beyond the frames and limitations of the Tanakh. For example, Paul s
description of Gentile idolatry and the corruption of all morals that goes hand
in hand with it in Romans 1:18 32 is closely related to the criticism and
exposition in Wisdom of Solomon 13:1 14:31. In particular, from a tradition-historical
perspective New Testament high Christology, as expressed in the prologue to the
Gospel of John, John 1:1 18, and in the Christ hymn in Colossians 1:15 20,
obviously has its background in wisdom theology the way it developed in early
Judaism (see, especially, Sir 24 and Wis 6:12 9:18).
At the time
of the New Testament the exact delimitation of the Septuagint was still not
fixed. As a consequence, there was not yet any clear
border line between those writings that later obtained the position as Old
Testament Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books (included in the Septuagint and
the Vulgate) and other early Jewish writings, later commonly classified as Old
Testament Pseudepigrapha.[28]
The pseudepigraphal book 1 Enoch is especially well represented in early
Christianity. The Nestle-Aland edition of the Greek New Testament has
registered more than one hundred allusions to or echoes from 1 Enoch in the New
Testament books, and there is even one occurrence of a direct quotation.[29]
The discovery of Aramaic fragments from all parts of the book except the
Similitudes or Parables of Enoch (1 Enoch 37 71) among the Dead Sea Scrolls
proves that the original language was Aramaic. Further, a Greek translation of
parts of the book is known from various manuscripts, but a complete version is
only preserved in Ethiopic, and for this reason 1 Enoch has frequently been
referred to as the Ethiopic book of Enoch . This version of the book is
included in the biblical canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Starting from
the quotation of 1 Enoch 1:9 in Jude 14 15, classified by the New Testament
author as a prophecy, Bruk Ayele Asale has offered an
excellent and informative presentation of 1 Enoch as Christian Scripture.[30]
From a
tradition-historical and canonical perspective it is unfortunate that most
Protestant churches have reduced the first part of the Christian Bible to the
books of the Tanakh. However, there are ways in which this canon
deficiency can be compensated for. It is crucial how New Testament scholars
operate. Exegetes must recognize that the New Testament authors did not
distinguish with any vigour between what post-exilic Jewish writings they were
allowed to relate to as witnesses of the biblical tradition process and what
writings were excluded from such status. Correspondingly, they must identify
such links between New Testament texts and early Jewish books like Sirach,
Wisdom of Solomon and 1 Enoch and expose how these books are received and
appropriated in the New Testament texts.
Although the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles is based on the Hebrew
Bible as the source text and with regard to the
included books, these Bibles, nevertheless, have not adopted the division of
the books into the three parts of the Tanakh. Protestant Bibles stick to
the order that was established in the Septuagint and continued in the Vulgate,
with the prophetic books as the fourth and last section. Whereas the twelve
so-called Minor Prophets from Hosea to Malachi are normally placed before the
longer books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the Septuagint, this order has
been reversed both in the Vulgate and in Protestant Bibles. As
a consequence, the final Old Testament book in Protestant Bibles is the
prophet Malachi. Malachi ends with a prophecy of the return of the famous
prophet Elijah, prior to the Day of the Lord. Let me quote the last two verses
with this prophecy, Mal 3:23 24 (ET 4:5 6): Lo, I will send you the prophet
Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts
of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so
that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.
I have
already touched upon the general effect of the compositional principle of
letting the prophetic books constitute the final part of the Old Testament.
This effect is an openness towards a future where the prophecies will be
fulfilled. If we apply this general canonical principle to the specific oracle
that closes the Old Testament if Malachi is the last book, we encounter the
expectation that the prophet Elijah will return from the heavens, to where he
had ascended in a chariot of fire (see 2 Kings 2:11), and that he will help
reconcile parents and children to each other and by this rescue them and the
land from God s judgment. In the New Testament we observe a vivid awareness of
this very prophecy and how it found its fulfilment. When asked by his disciples,
Jesus identified John the Baptist as the returning Elijah (Matt 17:10 13 par.
Mark 9:11 13).[31]
The Old Testament is an indispensable part of the Christian Bible. The
New Testament never intended to supersede it, only to confirm, continue and
fulfil it by giving testimony about Jesus Christ as the Messiah and Saviour
both for Jews and non-Jews. The New Testament authors not only quote and allude
frequently to Old Testaments texts, the very language of faith, by which the
gospel about Jesus is expressed in the New Testament, is taken from the Old
Testament. In fact, the two-part Christian Bible,
consisting of the Septuagint with its salvation-historical structure and the
New Testament,
pictures a comprehensive way through salvation
history that the one God has traveled with Israel and
the world and will continue to travel until the end. When the Septuagint
apocryphal books are included, the picture becomes even more clear than without
them. God s way leads from creation to the election of Israel and the
revelation at Mount Sinai. From there the people of God are led to Jerusalem
and Mount Zion, Israel s prayers and wisdom are presented, and the prophets
point forward to the New Testament fulfillment. The
Gospels make it clear that the incarnation and the story of Jesus Christ
climaxing in his cross and resurrection precede the church s faith and provide
its foundation. The ministry of the apostles called by Jesus and newly
commissioned after Easter stands under the missionary mandate to proclaim God s
good news about Jesus Christ throughout the whole world [ ] to Jews and
Gentiles. At the end, the book of Revelation portrays the present and future
work of establishing the kingdom through the risen Christ.[32]
It is common knowledge that the Old Testament spans a long period of
time. It is very complicated to date and chronologically order everything that
precedes the settlement of the Israelite tribes in Canaan. If for this reason
we restrict ourselves to the period from approximately 1200 BC, we still have to work with more than one thousand years prior to the
New Testament era. It is obvious that there were many changes and developments
during so many years. Over the years the historical circumstances varied a lot
both in Israel, in the region with close neighbouring nations like Edom, Moab
and Syria and with regard to the international empires
like Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, the Hellenistic kingdoms and, finally,
Rome. The various books in the Old Testament originated at different times, and
many of them underwent a long compositional process
before they reached their final form. Many of the books interact with earlier
traditions that have already existed for a long time, integrate these
traditions in a new context and develop them further.
Those who
consider the Old and the New Testaments to be very different and remote from
one another, tend to underestimate or overlook the changes that occurred during
the long formation process of the Old Testament. There are, of course,
differences and contrasts between the Old and the New Testaments. Nevertheless,
it might be that for example the exile in Babylon in the sixth century BC had a
profound impact on theological developments similar to
the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament had. Thus, it may be
arbitrary to claim a deep, divisive break between the Old and the New
Testaments if one at the same time ignores the profound shifts and changes in
the traditions during the long Old Testament period.
Personally,
I am convinced that there exists an indispensable
connection and unity between the Old Testament and the New Testament. This
connection and unity can be demonstrated from both sides. From the side of the
Old Testament the connection appears and materializes in the form of tradition-historical developments that do not stop at the
border between the testaments; rather, they continue into the New Testament and
come to a climax and fulfilment there. In this third part of the article I will try to show this. In the fourth part, I will
try to demonstrate the connection and unity from the New Testament side.
Instead of speaking in general and perhaps rather abstract terms about
these tradition-historical developments, I have chosen one such central
tradition that is capable and well suited for presenting this perspective on
the relation between the Old and the New Testaments. My choice is the so-called
Zion tradition, that I have worked on in my own research.[33]
Zion was originally the name of the mountain ridge where King Solomon
built the First Temple, simply called Mount Zion (Ps 78:68 69). In the course
of later development the meaning of the term was
expanded to become the designation of the whole city of Jerusalem or even of
the people of Israel (see Lam 2:6 8; Isa 51:16; Zech 2:11 [ET 2:7]; 8:2 3).
Hence, in the Bible Zion frequently alternates with Jerusalem, with a slight
tendency of emphasizing theological rather than political or geographical
aspects connected to this city.
A promise of settlement in the land of Canaan accompanies the biblical
narrative from Abraham and the other patriarchs onwards throughout the entire
exodus story, without any special focus on Jerusalem or Zion. The first time we
encounter this promise of possession of land is in Genesis 12:7: Then the Lord
appeared to Abram, and said, To your offspring I will give this land. [34]
After the conquest of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, the book that
carries his name notes in 21:43 that the promise of land is now fulfilled:
Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to their ancestors
that he would give them; and having taken possession of it, they settled
there. As already mentioned, there is no explicit reference to Jerusalem or
Zion in this story of the land. As we learn from the next book in the Old
Testament, the book of Judges, there were actually a
number of cities or regions that the Israelite tribes did not invade and
control, and among these were Jerusalem, where the Jebusites were living (Josh
15:63; Judg 1:21). It was not until two hundred years
later, when David had been anointed king of all Israel, that he conquered
Jerusalem with his personal troops and made it the new capital of the kingdom
(see 2 Sam 5:6 9). Hence, compared to other parts of the land of Israel,
Jerusalem became an integrated part of Israelite soil and history at a late or
a delayed point of time.
Jerusalem already had a long and rich history when it suddenly became
the capital and centre for the entire people, during the reign of King David.
We see a few glimpses of this in the Bible. The first one is the somewhat
puzzling story about King Melchizedek as early as the time of Abraham in
Genesis 14. Melchizedek resided in Salem, which seems to be a shortened form of
Jerusalem (see Ps 76:3 [ET 76:2]), and he was priest of El Eljon, God Most High. Melchizedek blessed Abraham with
the following words: Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and
earth (Gen 14:19). When David moved from Hebron to Jerusalem, he was
accompanied by a number of men who already had leading positions in Israel, for
example the army commander Joab son of Zeruiah (2 Sam 8:16; 20:23) and the
priest Ahimelech son of Abiathar (2 Sam 8:17).[35] However, new men also
suddenly appear in the story, like the priest Zadok (2 Sam 8:17), who soon
seems to have taken up the leading position among the priests. In later history
he was referred to as the father and founder of the Zadokite priests, who qualified
for the highest position as high priests in the temple.[36] We cannot know for sure,
but it seems likely that Zadok had been a priest in Jerusalem of the god known
as El Eljon, God Most High, prior to David s
conquest, and that he sided with the new owner of the city, David, and was
accepted by him. That David did not simply reject and crush the existing
religious traditions in Jerusalem can be seen from the last story in 2 Samuel,
recounting that David bought what is called the threshing-floor of Araunah, the
Jebusite, for building an altar to the Lord (see 2 Sam 24:18 25). This
threshing-floor was located to the north of David s city and is probably close
to the site on which David s son Solomon built the First Temple some years
later.
On this
background it seems likely that a kind of fusion or contextualisation took
place when David and his people moved into Jerusalem. Instead of negating and
wiping out the local traditions of the god known as God Most High, these
so-called Zion traditions were appropriated, cleansed and combined with the
unique religious tradition of the Israelites. In the Old Testament we see, on
the one hand, a complete rejection of some local religious traditions and
practices in Canaan, for example of the cults of Baal and Asherah, because they
were absolutely incompatible with the worship of the
Lord. But, on the other hand, we observe in the case of Melchizedek and Zadok
in Jerusalem that the god they call El Eljon can be identified as the God of Israel, and
for this reason the local Zion traditions were not rejected, but, rather,
integrated as an enrichment into the religious traditions of Israel
because the Lord himself sanctioned such a procedure.
Psalm 132, one of the Psalms of Ascent, is an excellent text to start
from in order to grasp the central content of the Zion
tradition and for understanding how it was combined with and integrated into
Israel s unique religious heritage. This psalm opens with commending David for
his commitment to bringing the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem (see 2 Sam
6). This is namely the right place for the ark, seen as the Lord s footstool (Pss 99:5; 132:7 8), to be located.
Ps
132:13 18:
God s
election of Zion and of David are interconnected. I think Psalm 132 helps us
see that what comes first is Zion, and, as a consequence,
its earthly owner, David, is also the subject of God s election. Although
Jerusalem became the capital of the kingdom, it is, nevertheless, repeatedly
called the city of David in the biblical texts, referring to the fact that
Jerusalem was not conquered by the army of the tribes of Israel, but by David
himself and his personal troops.[37]
Furthermore, the election of David and his descendants is also expressly
confirmed in Psalm 132:
(11) The
Lord swore to David a sure oath from which he will not turn back: One of the
sons of your body I will set on your throne. (12) If your sons keep my covenant
and my decrees that I shall teach them, their sons also, for evermore, shall
sit on your throne.
David
intended to build a house for the Lord in Jerusalem, a temple where the ark of
the covenant could be placed. However, through the prophet Nathan God told
David that this task had to be left to his son (2 Sam 7). The temple was
finally built during the reign of David s son Solomon. 1 Kings 6 and 7 tell in
detail about the construction of the temple, and the following chapter 8
relates the dedication of the temple.
1 Kings 8:6, 10 11:
(6) Then the priests brought the ark of the
covenant of the Lord to its place, in the inner sanctuary of the house, in the
most holy place, underneath the wings of the cherubim. [ ] (10) And when the
priests came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord, (11)
so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the
glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.
After the Lord had made Zion his holy abode, Zion soon took up a central position in the Psalms of Israel. There are references to Zion in different kinds of psalms, for example individual thanksgiving psalms (Ps 9:10 12 [ET 9:9 11]), royal psalms (Ps 20:2 3 [ET 20:1 2]) and individual lament psalms (Ps 26:8: O Lord, I love the house in which you dwell, and the place where your glory abides ). Some psalms dwell on Zion as such as their theme, and it is common to refer to this group of psalms as Zion psalms (Pss 46; 48; 76; 84; 87; 122).
Ps 46:5 6, 8 (ET 46:4 5, 7):
(5 [4]) There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. (6 [5]) God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns. [ ] (8 [7]) The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Ps 48:13 15 (ET 48:12 14):
(13 [12]) Walk about Zion, go all around it, count its towers, (14 [13]) consider well its ramparts; go through its citadels, that you may tell the next generation (15 [14]) that this is God, our God for ever and ever. He will be our guide for ever.
Ps 87:1 3:
(1) On the holy mountain stands the city he founded; (2) the Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob. (3) Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God. Selah.
We
encounter the Zion tradition in the Prophets as well as in the Psalms. The
prophet Isaiah operated in Jerusalem in the second half of the eighth century
BC, a period of political crises and much turmoil. The small kingdoms along the
eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea became victims of the aggressive
expansionist policies of the Assyrian empire. In order to
withstand Assyrian expansion, the kingdoms in the region had to cooperate
closely, with united armies.
Whereas in
733 BC Rezin and Pekah, the kings in Damascus and in the northern kingdom,
Israel,[38]
decided to rebel against the Assyrians, King Ahaz of Judah, seated in
Jerusalem, hesitated and did not dare to join the rebellion against the
powerful Assyrians.[39]
Because Rezin and Pekah needed to build a stronger alliance in order to have
any chance of success, they wanted to force Judah to join their alliance, and
at some time during the years 733/732 BC they prepared a military attack
against Jerusalem with the aim of substituting someone called the son of Tabeel
for Ahaz as new king, who would then join the alliance of the neighbouring
kingdoms opposing the Assyrian empire. The book of Isaiah tells how this
incident frightened Judah and Jerusalem: When the house of David heard that
Aram [i.e. Damascus] had allied itself with Ephraim [i.e. the northern kingdom,
Israel], the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of
the forest shake before the wind (Isa 7:2).
In this
situation the Lord asked the prophet Isaiah to go to the king and say to him:
Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because
of these two smouldering stumps of firebrands (7:4), that is, the two
attacking kings. The prophet Isaiah appeals to the Zion tradition: Trust the
Lord, have faith in him because he will protect Jerusalem and Zion.[40]
This message is repeated a number of times throughout
the book of Isaiah, for example in Isa 14:32 and 31:5.[41]
King Ahaz
turned down the message brought to him by the prophet Isaiah. Instead of
putting his trust in the Lord s promise to protect Jerusalem and its people, he
decided to solve the crisis by taking political steps. He understood that the
small kingdoms in the region would not manage to stand against the Assyrians
even if they built an alliance, and therefore he decided to approach the
Assyrian king, Tiglath-pileser, and declare his
loyalty and ask for his protection against the attacking neighbours Syria and
Israel (see 2 Kings 16:7). These tactics worked out; the Assyrian king accepted
Ahaz s submission and loyalty and marched up against the Syrian capital
Damascus, took it, crushed the local kingdom and made it an Assyrian province.
King Ahaz of Jerusalem hurried to Damascus to meet King Tiglath-pileser to show him due respect and veneration. Ahaz
observed an altar in the Assyrian camp at Damascus, and he immediately
commanded the priests at the temple in Jerusalem to construct an exact copy of
this altar. The new Assyrian-inspired altar supplanted the earlier altar which
was removed to a less prominent position within the temple area. King Ahaz also
made other changes inside the temple, and the historian behind the books of
Kings ends his report with the note: He did this because of the king of
Assyria (2 Kings 16:18).
Later in
his long career as a prophet in Jerusalem, Isaiah saw that king and people were
tempted to seek help from the strong nation in the south, Egypt, as a
protection against the Assyrian empire which continued to expand and put
heavier and heavier burdens on small vasal kingdoms like the kingdom of Judah.
In the view of the prophet, the attempts to make such political alliances
instead of trusting the promises of the Lord regarding Zion were again futile
(see Isa 30:1 5 and 31:1 3).
We have now seen examples of how the king and the people did not trust
promises rooted in the Zion tradition and instead sought to overcome dangers by
declaring their loyalty to political powers. The history of Judah also contains
examples of how the inhabitants in Jerusalem, instead of neglecting and
rejecting the Zion tradition, invoked it in a seemingly humble and pious way.
However, the appeal to the wonderful descriptions of Zion s inviolability,
found in the Psalms, and the claim to be safe in Zion, turns out to be a misuse
and an exploitation of the Zion traditions when the people involved at the same
time transgressed severely against the commandments of the Lord. Pre-exilic
prophets in Judah and Jerusalem exposed such misuse and perversion of the Zion
traditions whenever people claimed refuge in the secure city, Jerusalem, while
at the same time being unwilling to live in accordance with the will of the
Lord. Zion was no guarantee of protection for disobedient Israel. On the
contrary, in such circumstances God would rather destroy the temple, the city
and the people. The most conspicuous example of a judgment prophecy based on
the Zion tradition is the prophet Jeremiah s temple speech at the beginning of
the reign of King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah (Jer 26:1), that is ca. 608
BC. God s command to the prophet is recounted in Jeremiah 26:2 6 and the speech
itself is presented in Jeremiah 7:1 15.
Jeremiah
stands in the gate of the temple and speaks to those who pass by: Hear the
word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to
worship the Lord (Jer 7:2). The message is that the people must amend their
ways and actions, stop oppressing aliens and orphans and widows, and stop
shedding innocent blood. With a reference to the Ten Commandments God asks
rhetorically, Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make
offerings to Baal, and go after other gods (v. 9) and at the same time come
and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are
safe only to go on doing all these abominations? (v. 10). Those addressed
obviously trusted in the safety promised by the Zion tradition. However, the
prophet tells them that their mantra, This is the temple of the Lord, the
temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord (v. 4), is deceptive words in their
mouths as long as they ignore God s will. In verse 11
the Lord asks, Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of
robbers in your sight? As the spokesman of God, the prophet Jeremiah accuses
his contemporaries of relating to the temple in the same way as robbers do to
their den. The den is the safe haven of the robbers,
where they hide between their robberies. Correspondingly, his contemporaries
look to the temple as their refuge, to which they seek without stopping sinning
and violating God s commandments. In Jeremiah s speech God makes it clear that
he is not willing to accept such a misuse of his temple. He warns that he
himself will also consider the temple a den of robbers, and the consequence
will be that he will reject and destroy the temple. God reminds the listeners
that he has in fact judged and destroyed a holy sanctuary in the history of
Israel previously, namely, the temple in Shiloh, where Eli was the priest, and
the prophet Samuel grew up. Because the contemporaries of Jeremiah are as
wicked as the people at the time of the Shiloh sanctuary, therefore I will do
to the house that is called by my name, in which you trust, and to the place
that I gave to you and to your ancestors, just what I did to Shiloh (v. 14;
see also 26:4 6). As we know from history, a few years after Jeremiah held this
speech in the temple gate, the warning came true when the Babylonian army
conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the temple.
There is one more very conspicuous aspect of the Zion tradition that we
must now bring to the fore. The presence of God in the city makes Zion the true
centre of the whole world. Although the altitude of Jerusalem is 750 to 800
metres above sea level and it is by far surpassed by Mount Hermon at the border
to Lebanon, nevertheless, Psalm 48 describes Zion as the highest mountain and
locates it in the far north:
Ps 48:2 3
(ET 48:1 2):
(2 [1])
Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy
mountain, (3 [2]) beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount
Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King.
The
Israelites knew, of course, that this was not a correct geographical
description. It is a tremendous exaggeration, made in order
to express a theological and spiritual truth and ambition. Although the
other nations are not aware, the God of Israel, who has his abode in Zion and
is worshipped in the temple in Jerusalem, is actually the
creator of the whole world and is therefore its only true king and ruler. For
this reason, the Israelites claim and appropriate for their God, the Lord,
designations and epithets used by the gods of the capitals of the great
kingdoms, like Nineveh or Babylon, and transfer them to the Lord and his city.[42]
A group of psalms proclaim and confess the Lord as the king of Israel and the
whole world; in scholarship they are commonly referred to as
Yahweh-King-Psalms , namely, Psalms 47, 93 and 96 99.
Ps 99:1 3,
9:
(1) The Lord
is king; let the peoples tremble! He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake! (2) The Lord is great in Zion; he is exalted
over all the peoples. (3) Let them praise your great and awesome name. [ ] (9)
Extol the Lord our God, and worship at his holy mountain; for the Lord our God
is holy.
The aspects of Zion as the centre of the whole world and the Lord as its
king played an important role as eschatology developed. Eschatology has to do
with the future, final stage of history. When the realities and hardships
experienced by Israel and Judah in history contradicted the breathtaking
statements in the psalms that praised Zion and its king, the statements about
Zion and the kingdom of the Lord were in part transferred into the realm of
eschatology. Although the kings of the great empires and their gods seemed to
have the upper hand and triumph over Zion and the Lord, this will definitely be different at the end of the age. Then Mount
Zion will be elevated and lifted above all other mountains. The universal reign
of the Lord will become visible to everybody when all nations go up to Zion,
and the Lord establishes peace for the whole world by his instruction and
jurisdiction. This prospect for the eschatological future is proclaimed both by
the prophet Isaiah and by the prophet Micah (see 4:1 4) in parallel texts that
are almost identical.
Isa 2:2 4:
(2) In days
to come the mountain of the Lord s house shall be established as the highest of
the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it. (3) Many peoples shall come and say, Come,
let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he might teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths. For out of
Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. (4)
He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they
shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
In 587 BC a
great calamity befell the kingdom of Judah. In this year the Babylonian king
Nebuchadnezzar brought an end to the kingdom; the temple in Jerusalem was completely destroyed, and parts of the population were
deported into exile in Babylon (see 2 Kings 25; Jer 52). All of this caused a
shattering theological crisis. However, the prophet Jeremiah had warned the
inhabitants of Jerusalem that something like this would happen if they did not
change their ways and turned to the Lord in obedience to his will. The prophet
Ezekiel had also shown how the temple was desecrated and intruded by pagan
cults and that because of this the glory of the Lord had left Zion (Ezek 8 11). In the severe crisis of the destroyed temple,
the lost kingdom and the exile the prophecies of these judgment prophets actually became a vehicle to survive and overcome these
immense challenges. These prophets had prophesied the devastating catastrophe without
abandoning trust in the irrevocable and steadfast promises of God for Zion.
Jeremiah and Ezekiel prophesied a new beginning for the people of God beyond
the judgment (see Jer 30 35 and Ezek 34 39), and, in
fact, the Zion traditions even assumed increasing importance through the crisis
of the exile and in the post-exilic era. The sharp contrast between the
difficult contemporary conditions and the exuberant hopes directed towards the
city of God contributed to a more resolute eschatological profile of the Zion
traditions. In the eschatological consummation God will glorify Zion and his
temple, bring the dispersed of his people back to the land and the city, and
with them also the Gentile nations. Assembled on Zion they will all recognize
and praise the Lord as the only true God together, as revealed in Zechariah 8.
Zech 8:2 5:
(2) Thus
says the Lord of hosts: I am jealous for Zion with great jealously, and I am
jealous for her with great wrath. (3) Thus says the Lord: I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; Jerusalem
shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the Lord of hosts shall
be called the holy mountain. (4) Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old
women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand
because of their great age. (5) And the streets of the city shall be full of
boys and girls playing in its streets.
The high eschatological expectations for Zion were upheld in early
Judaism throughout the next centuries. Jewish texts from this period adhere to
and confirm the election of Zion and Jerusalem as the dwelling place of God.
God will definitely glorify the temple on Mount Zion
and bring the dispersed of Israel back in the company of the nations.
A number of
texts from the second century BC to the first century AD are
of particular interest because they state that God himself, without human
assistance, will establish the eschatological temple on Mount Zion. This
development in the Zion tradition is obviously based on the dreary experience
from the previous centuries that the historical temples in Jerusalem, built by
humans, that is the temple of Solomon as well as the Second Temple raised by
Zerubbabel in the years 520 515 BC, have fallen victims to sin and desecration.
Certain apocalyptically oriented circles in Judaism apparently inferred from
these experiences that only a divine construction would be a sufficient
guarantee that the future, eschatological temple would avoid the kind of tragic
fate which had befallen its predecessors in Jerusalem. I have picked four texts
from the second century BC as examples.
1 Enoch
90:29:[43]
I went on seeing until the Lord of the sheep brought about a new house,
greater and loftier than the first one, and set it up in the first location
which had been covered up all its pillars were new, the columns new, and the
ornaments new as well as greater than those of the first, (that is) the old
(house) which was gone. All the sheep were within it.
Jubilees 1:17:[44]
And I shall build my sanctuary in their midst, and I shall dwell with
them. And I shall be their God and they will be my
people truly and rightly.
Tobit 14:5:
[...] After
this they all will return from their exile and will rebuild Jerusalem in
splendour; and in it the temple of God will be rebuilt, just as the prophets of
Israel have said concerning it.
The Temple
Scroll from Qumran (11QTa [11Q19]) 29.9 10:[45]
(9) [...]
until the day of creation, when I shall create my temple, (10) establishing it
for myself for all days, according to the covenant which I made with Jacob at
Bethel.
I have
claimed above that there is no special reference to Zion in the tradition of
the promise of the land in Genesis and in the following books Exodus through
Joshua. Although this is true in general terms, nevertheless, this statement
must be modified and nuanced as soon as we take one particular
text into consideration.
After
Israel had been rescued from the Egyptian army at the Sea of Reeds, Moses and
the Israelites sang a song to the Lord (see Exodus 15:1 21). This song
resembles hymns in the Book of Psalms praising the Lord for his strength and
for having saved Israel (vv. 1 12). From verse 13 onwards the song anticipates
what will happen in the future when the wandering Israelites arrive in the
promised land, Canaan.
Exod
15:13 18:[46]
(13) In your
steadfast love you [Lord] led the people whom you redeemed; you guided them by
your strength to your holy abode. (14) The peoples heard, they trembled; pangs
seized the inhabitants of Philistia. (15) Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed
[ ] (17) You brought them in and planted them on the mountain of your own
possession, the place, O Lord, that you made your abode, the sanctuary, O Lord,
that your hands have established. (18) The Lord will reign for ever and ever.
The
mountain that is the Lord s possession on which he planted the Israelites is
clearly a reference to Jerusalem and Zion. What is unusual with the statement
in Exodus 15:17 is the anthropomorphistic expression that the sanctuary was
established by the Lord s own hands. From his throne in this temple the Lord
reigns as king. According to the apocalyptic world view God s royal reign will
only be established in the future. God will soon intervene and put an end to
the rule of his evil enemies. After the judgment of the Devil and his servants,
the kingdom of God will be established. The Lord will abide as king in the
temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the centre of the eschatological kingdom,
and all who inherit and enter the kingdom will worship him eternally. Hence,
the combination of the two elements of God s reign and the sanctuary in Zion
made with his own hands in Exodus 15:17 18, gave these verses the potential to
become key scriptural proof for those apocalyptically oriented circles in early
Judaism that drew a sharp dividing line between the present evil world age and
the future world of salvation for the pious and the godly.
We do in
fact have evidence for such an interpretation and application of Exodus
15:17 18 in early Judaism. The most conspicuous example is a fragmentary text
from the Dead Sea Scrolls, registered as 4Q174. In this document various Old
Testament texts, most extensively 2 Samuel 7 with God s promises to David
through the prophet Nathan, are combined and interpreted. The passage which
interests us the most runs as follows:
4Q174 (frg. 1 col. i.1 6):[47]
(2) [ ] This (refers to) the house which [he (sc.
God) will establish] for [him (sc. the people of Israel)] in the last
days, as is written in the book of (3) [Moses: The temple of] yhwh your hands will est[a]blish. yhwh shall reign for ever
and ever. This (refers to) the house into which shall not enter (4) [ for]
ever either an Ammonite, or a Moabite, or a bastard, or a foreigner, or a
proselyte, never, because his holy ones are there. (5) y[hw]h
[shall reign for] ever. He will appear over it for ever; foreigners shall not
again lay it waste as they laid waste, in the past, (6) the tem[ple
of I]srael on account of their sins.
The authors
of this text operated with an eschatological interpretation of God s kingly
reign according to which the Exodus text must be applied to the coming age of
fulfilled salvation. Then there will be a new temple on Mount Zion established
and put there by God himself. This corresponds with the phrase in the so-called
Temple Scroll, quoted above, that on the day of the new creation (see Isa
65:17 25) God shall create [his] temple, establishing it for [himself] for all
days (11QTa 29.9 10).
Priestly sections in the Pentateuch already state that the temple on
Mount Zion shall be constructed in accordance with a model or a pattern that
God shows the Israelites.
Exod
25:1, 8 9:
(1) The Lord
said to Moses: [ ] (8) And have them [sc. the Israelites] make me a sanctuary,
so that I may dwell among them. (9) In accordance with all that I show you
concerning the pattern of the tabernacle and all its furniture, so you shall
make it.
The
importance of the transcendent model for the sanctuary and all its equipment is
illustrated by the outline in Exodus. First, in Exodus 25 31, God s
instructions to Moses, based on the transcendent pattern shown to him on Mount
Sinai (see 25:40), are presented in detail, and then in chapters 35 40 the
actual execution of these instructions is recounted in the same detail.
There was a
strong focus on the celestial spheres particularly in apocalyptic circles in
early Judaism. For example, in the Qumran community there was an awareness that
their worship interacted with the worship in the heavenly sanctuary.[48]
The idea that there is a correspondence between the earthly Zion and its
heavenly counterpart as the model according to which the temple in Jerusalem
was to be constructed, led in some strains of early Judaism to the expectation
that the future, eschatological temple would actually be the heavenly sanctuary
descending upon Zion. It seems that this idea or expectation is present in the
Book of Watchers[49]
and in 4 Ezra.[50]
Whether or not 2 Baruch reflects this idea is disputed.[51]
The Zion tradition does not come to an end in the Old Testament and
early Judaism, but continues its organic development
into the New Testament.
God s kingdom was at the very centre of Jesus proclamation and
teaching, as we learn from the Synoptic Gospels. As we have seen, in the
biblical tradition the reign of God is linked to Zion and the temple. I see a
clear connection between Jesus kingdom message and his final journey from
Galilee to Jerusalem at Passover time. Jesus proclaimed the imminent coming of
the kingdom, and because people expected the kingdom to appear at Zion, this
journey definitely triggered hopes and expectations
among the people, as stated in Luke 19:11: Jesus was near Jerusalem, and many
around him supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately . Jesus
entry into Jerusalem riding on the colt confirmed such hopes and aroused their
expectations even further:
Mark
11:9 10:
(9) Then
those who went ahead [of him] and those who followed were shouting, Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! (10) Blessed is the
coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!
The
evangelists recount that upon his arrival in Jerusalem Jesus went straight to
the temple (Mark 11:11). The temple remains in focus in the dramatic events of
the following days and is also addressed in sayings of Jesus and of his
disciples. In my opinion, Jesus confrontation with the temple, expressed in
sayings and acts, can only be understood on the background of the Zion
tradition.
With an impressively wide distribution in the New Testament Gospels,
Acts and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas,[53] there are a number of sayings about the destruction and establishment
of the temple attributed to Jesus (Mark 13:2 par. Matt 24:2 and Luke 21:6; Mark
14:58 par. Matt 26:61; Mark 15:29 par. Matt 27:40; John 2:19; Acts 6:14; Gos. Thom. 71). The most detailed study of this material
known to me is the monograph Das Tempelwort Jesu,
written by the German scholar Kurt Paesler. The
result of his source- and tradition- critical analysis is that the different
attested versions originated in an authentic saying by Jesus still preserved in
Mark 13:2b: Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown
down. [54]
Hence, according to Paesler, Jesus, employing the passivum divinum,
confined himself to prophesying that God will destroy the Second Temple in
Jerusalem, built in 520 515 BC by Zerubbabel, modestly expanded during
Hasmonean rule, and in terms of Jesus life fairly recently vastly expanded
by Herod the Great (20 10 BC) and subjected to some further construction work
and embellishment ever since (see John 2:20).
The
earliest version of those sayings which consist of two parts, referring to both
destruction and (re)establishment, is reconstructed by Paesler
as, I will destroy this temple and build it . He regards it as a post-Easter
reworking of Mark 13:2b, in which the divine act of destroying the temple was
transferred to the exalted Christ and according to which the destruction would
be succeeded by the reconstruction of the sanctuary, once again an act to be
performed by the risen Lord.[55]
The most comprehensive version of the two-part saying is found in Mark 14:58:
I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will
build another, not made with hands. It contains two additional elements
compared to Paesler s reconstructed original form of
the two-part saying, first, the contrast between the present temple as made
with hands (Greek, cheiropoiētos) and
the new one as not made with hands (acheiropoiētos),
and, second, the fixation of the time of building in
three days . Paesler holds that this phrase must
refer to the resurrection of Jesus.[56] He submits the epithets
made with hands and not made with hands to a detailed examination. They are
well-known topoi from Greek and Jewish
philosophical temple criticism that, according to Paesler,
Hellenistic Jewish Christians in Jerusalem took up after they had abandoned the
atoning cult of the temple. Instead they sought
salvation in invoking the name of Jesus, and in line with this christological replacement of the temple they added the
attributes made with hands and not made with hands to the earlier version
of the temple saying.[57]
The Fourth
Evangelist operates with a christological
interpretation of the temple (cf. John 2:19 with vv. 21 22), and, thus, in this
case the temporal phrase in three days corresponds to the tradition of Jesus
resurrection on the third day. Further, the term made with hands (cheiropoiētos) is clearly used as a topos, cognate of Hellenistic philosophical temple
criticism, in Acts 7:48 and 17:24.[58] Nevertheless, neither the
application of the three days to Jesus resurrection nor the drawing of the
attributes made with hands and not made with hands out of enlightened
philosophical temple criticism are compelling deductions as such. The temporal
designation three days is a traditional expression of a very short time span
(e.g. Josh 1:11; 2 Sam 20:4; 2 Kings 20:8; Hos 6:2),
and the distinction between made with hands and not made with hands ,
attributed to the temple, corresponds perfectly to the apocalyptic tradition in
early Judaism, which contrasts the man-made temples of the past and present
with the future, eschatological temple to be established by God himself (see
above).
In my
opinion, there are no compelling reasons for the most comprehensive version of
the two-part temple saying in Mark 14:58 to be inauthentic. A condemnation of
the present temple, combined with the proclamation that its destruction within
a short time ( in three days ) will be followed by the establishment of a new
temple, is in complete agreement with the apocalyptic-eschatological
expectations of certain circles in contemporary Judaism. The employment of the
made with hands and not made with hands contrast in this I-saying alludes
to Exodus 15:17 and is an expression of Jesus bold claim to act on behalf of
and in the role of the Lord as the sole builder of the eschatological temple on
Mount Zion. The first part of the saying must not necessarily mean a violent
destruction of the present temple. The emphasis lies on the contrast between
the present temple and the future temple, and the substitution of the
eschatological temple for the man-made temple can also be conceived of as a
miraculous transformation. Hence, as the bringer of the imminent kingdom of
God, Jesus is also the one who will establish the sanctuary on Mount Zion,
where God will reign as king and where the nations of the world will worship
and praise him for ever and ever. The temple saying in Mark 14:58 confirms in a very obvious way the interrelation between Jesus
eschatological kingdom message and the Zion traditions.
I assume
that Jesus spoke the words transmitted in Mark 14:58 shortly after his arrival
in Jerusalem.[59]
It definitely bolstered his eschatological message
about the turning of the eras through the imminent coming of the kingdom of
God. The expectations of those followers of Jesus who supposed that the
kingdom of God was to appear immediately , as he approached Jerusalem (Luke 19:11),
were definitely intensified and heightened when they
heard his ambitious words that he intended, within a very short time span, to
build a new temple not made with hands. However, because of the negative
outcome of Jesus symbolic act in the temple, performed immediately after his
arrival in Jerusalem (Mark 11:15 17, see below), Jesus realised that the
religious leaders of the Jewish people would not accept the message conveyed
through the two-part temple saying and the temple act. As a reaction to their
lack of willingness to repent, Jesus then uttered his unconditional prediction
of destruction recorded in Mark 13:2. Hence, I also consider this saying to be
authentic and think that Mark has dated it correctly.[60]
During recent years the historicity of Jesus temple act, recounted in
all four Gospels (Mark 11:15 17; Matt 21:12 17; Luke 19:45 48; John 2:13 17),
has found increasing acceptance among scholars. In my opinion, Mark offers a
rather accurate account:
Mark
11:15 17:
(15) [ ] And
he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those
who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves; (16)
and he did not allow anybody to carry any vessel through the temple. (17) He
was teaching and saying, Is it not written, My house shall be called a house
of prayer for all the nations ? But you have made it a den of robbers. [61]
With due
consideration of the historical and architectural circumstances the event can
be reconstructed as follows: The temple market was situated in the
basilica-like hall along the southern wall of the Herodian temple complex,
extensively described by the Jewish historian Josephus and labelled by him the Royal
Stoa (Jewish Antiquities 15.411 416). Inside this hall Jesus
overturned some tables and seats belonging to the money-changers
and the sellers of doves. Further, he did not allow vessels to be moved between
the market area and the inner parts of the temple, and he began to drive some
of those who were selling and buying sacrificial items out of the market hall.
As a justification of his intervention Jesus quoted the prophecy in Isaiah
56:7b and alluded to the accusation of the prophet Jeremiah against his
contemporaries that they had made the temple a den of robbers (see Jer 7:11,
presented above).[62]
In the
temple saying, recorded in Mark 14:58, Jesus stated that he was about to
establish the new temple on the occasion of the
ushering in of the kingdom of God. This eschatological turn will necessarily
have consequences for the old temple and the cult performed there, and in my
opinion the temple act is Jesus symbolic demonstration of this fact.[63]
Let us
begin with the accompanying saying in Mark 11:17. As already stated, the
accusation that the temple has been turned into a den of robbers is an allusion
to Jeremiah 7:11. In the speech in Jeremiah 7:1 15, the prophet Jeremiah used
the metaphor den of robbers as a characterisation of the schizophrenic
practice of his contemporaries of seeking refuge and security in the temple
while they at the same time worshipped idols and disregarded God s
commandments. The premise for drawing on Jeremiah s accusation must be that
Jesus has an analogous estimation of the situation in his time. Because the
religious leaders and most of the Jewish people cling to the traditional temple
cult instead of obediently answering Jesus call for repentance and
discipleship at the threshold of the kingdom of God, the people deceive
themselves by seeking their security in a temple apparatus and order which are
no longer appropriate. Jeremiah had warned his audience that the temple of
Solomon would suffer the same fate as the sanctuary in Shiloh unless they
repented (see Jer 7:12 14). This fate befell the temple when Nebuchadnezzar
destroyed it some twenty years later. Correspondingly, Jesus implicitly warns
that the Herodian temple will also be destroyed unless the priests and the
people react properly to his words and acts by finally obeying him and
repenting.
In the
quotation from Isaiah 56:7, which precedes the allusion to Jeremiah 7:11, Jesus
points to the legitimate function of the future temple as the site for all
nations to worship the one true God.[64] Whereas the atonement cult,
as the central purpose of the old temple, becomes obsolete when the
eschatological renewal is fulfilled, the redeemed and saved of all nations will
still perform a worship of prayer and adoration. The contrasting references to
the Scripture bring the radical alternatives to the fore: a stubborn clinging
to the old will ultimately bring destruction upon the temple, whereas an
obedient response to Jesus call will prepare for the eschatological
transformation of which a new or renewed temple on Mount Zion will be a part.
Let us turn
next to the actions of Jesus reported in Mark 11:15b 16. In overturning tables
and seats and banning the carrying of vessels through the temple Jesus actually disturbed functions vital to the temple cult.
Symbolically, he stopped the handing out of doves for individual
burnt-offerings and sin-offerings (see Lev 5:7; 12:8; 14:21 23). Furthermore,
and again symbolically, he stopped the collection of the temple tax that financed
the collective atonement cult performed by the priests on behalf of all of
Israel, securing the continuous state of purity and holiness of Israel, because
these daily sacrifices appease and effect atonement between Israel and their
Father in heaven (Tosefta Sheqalim
1.6; cf. Jubilees 6:14; 50:11).[65]
Finally, he stopped the conveyance of money or sacrificial ingredients that
were agricultural (flour, oil and wine) in vessels from the market in the Royal
Stoa to the inner parts of the temple where the money was stored and the
sacrifices performed. This was again symbolic. Hence, by his actions, Jesus hit
crucial functions of the temple service, and his temple act appears as a
symbolic gesture towards disrupting the sacrificial cult. The act and the
accompanying saying correlate and completely cohere. The old atonement cult
must be brought to an end because it is inappropriate
in the eschatological era about to be ushered in, in which it will be replaced
by eternal worship performed by the redeemed from all nations.
Jesus was, of course, aware that his act and words in the temple were
very provocative. Being convinced that the decisive moment in his mission had
arrived, Jesus pushed things to extremes. The outcome would either be that the
religious leaders of Israel would finally react appropriately to his call, or
that they would firmly reject him and his message and probably seek options for
how to put an end to his activity. As we know, their reaction would soon be
seen as negative (cf. Mark 11:18, 27 33).
In this
situation Jesus drew the conclusion that the threat of destruction to the
temple, implicit in his reference to Jeremiah 7:11 in Mark 11:17, would now be
its inevitable destiny, and stated correspondingly: Not one stone will be left
here upon another; all will be thrown down (Mark 13:2, see above). If not
voluntarily abandoned as a consequence of Israel
accepting Jesus message, the obsolete atonement cult would be forcibly
abandoned when the temple was destroyed.
However, in
the case of a disobedient reaction to the call to repentance there is still a
positive message inherent in the symbolic act. The implication of Jesus attack
on the atonement cult is that it will be replaced under all circumstances, if
not by the immediate realisation of the eschatological renewal on Mount Zion,
then in a different way. The alternative is that Jesus dies vicariously as a
ransom (see Mark 10:45 par. Matt 20:28), and, as stated by him during the
Passover meal with the Twelve, that his body is given and his blood poured out
for the many (see Mark 14:22, 24). Hence, with this historical outcome of the
confrontation in the temple, Jesus was willing to offer himself and
consequently take over and substitute the sacrificial cult in the temple as the
basis for atonement.
The form of the Zion tradition which emphasizes a correspondence of some
kind between earthly Zion and transcendent, heavenly realities, known from
priestly sections in the Pentateuch, Qumran and Jewish apocalyptic circles (see
above), also appears in the New Testament. In this article it is not possible
to offer an extensive presentation and a profound analysis of this strain of
the Zion tradition; hence, we must content ourselves with some short references
and remarks.
In Romans
11:26 27 the apostle Paul applies a combined quotation of Isa 59:20 21 and 27:9
to Christ s parousia for the salvation of Israel:
Out of Zion will come the Deliverer; he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.
And this is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins. Paul s
rendering contains a conspicuous variant in the beginning of the quoted verse
Isa 59:20. The Hebrew text of this verse reads, And he will come to Zion (letsiyōn) as Reedemer ,
whereas the Septuagint reads, And the one who delivers will come for Sion s
sake (heneken Siōn).
By formulating out of Zion (ek Siōn) ,
Paul has probably looked to Psalm 50:2, Out of Zion (mitsiyōn,
rendered in the Septuagint as ek Siōn),
the perfection of beauty, God shines forth. In the same way as God s beauty
and glory shines forth and proceeds from Zion, Christ will perform his
eschatological ministry for redemption out of Zion.
While there
is no explicit reference to a heavenly Jerusalem in Paul s location of Christ s
parousia in Zion in Romans 11:26 27, he contrasts the
present Jerusalem and the Jerusalem above in the allegory of Hagar and Sarah
in Galatians 4:21 31. He identifies Hagar, the slave woman, with the covenant
from Mount Sinai that corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in
slavery with her children (v. 25). Sarah, the free woman, whose children, born
through God s promise, are also free, corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she
is free, and she is our mother (v. 26). Thus, in this text Paul contrasts
sharply the earthly Jerusalem and the heavenly Jerusalem, and the fulfilment of
the promises of being free children and heirs of Abraham is allegorically connected
to the heavenly Jerusalem.
The Letter
to the Hebrews attaches the utmost importance to the heavenly sanctuary in its
exposition of Christ s atoning ministry. Quoting God s instruction to Moses in
Exodus 25:40,[66]
the author characterizes the temple in Jerusalem as a sketch and shadow of the
heavenly one (8:5). In Hebrews 9 the earthly (see vv. 1 5) and the heavenly
sanctuaries (v. 11) and the priestly ministries performed in them are sharply
contrasted.[67]
Finally,
the heavenly Jerusalem has a prominent position in the Revelation to John.[68]
The apocalyptic drama described throughout this book culminates in the ultimate
renewal of the cosmos, and the new Jerusalem is at the very centre of this
vision (Rev 21:1 22:5):
Rev 21:1 2:
(1) Then I
saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had
passed away, and the sea was no more. (2) And I saw the holy city, the new
Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband.
According
to Revelation 21:10 the new Jerusalem is situated at a high mountain. As we
have seen, this corresponds with the biblical Zion tradition (see Ps 48:2 3 [ET
48:1 2]; Isa 2:2). Further, with the water of life and the tree of life in its
midst (22:1 2, cf. 21:6), it corresponds to the paradise of the first creation
(Gen 2). Constructed of wonderful, precious stones and metals (21:18 21), the
new Jerusalem is a temple city adorned with the materials of paradise.
Having come
down out of heaven, the new Jerusalem has God s glory and radiance (21:11, 23),[69]
and its wall, gates and streets are made of precious material as transparent as
the heavenly sea of glass (21:18, 21, see 4:6). The throne of God has been
moved from heaven (4:1 3) to the city (22:1, 3). The city is the light of the
world, by which the nations will walk (21:24) and to which they come on
pilgrimage, bringing the glory and the honour of the nations (21:25).
Only at one
point does the seer John speak about what he did not see: I saw no
temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb
(21:22).[70]
As the site of God s immediate presence the whole city is a temple. Like the
inner chamber in the temple, the holy of holies, it has a cubic shape (cf.
21:16 with 1 Kings 6:20). Whereas in Revelation 4 5 worship was only performed
by the heavenly beings, now everybody inside the city participates in the
worship (22:3b 5). Previously, only the high priest was allowed to approach
God s presence in the holy of holies once a year (see Lev 16); but now
everybody will be close to God and the Lamb continuously. What has not been
possible for mortals will now be a permanent state: They will see [God s]
face (22:4). All distance between God and his creation will have been overcome
and will have disappeared (22:5).
The transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament is marked
both by continuity and renewal. This double relationship is expressed very well
in the opening verses in the Letter to the Hebrews:
Heb
1:1 2:
(1) Long ago
God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets,
(2) but in these last days he has spoken to us by the Son, whom he
appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.
The apostle
Paul expresses his far-reaching expectation about what the Old Testament is capable of offering when he writes to the Romans: For
whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by
steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope
(Rom 15:4).
The New Testament s conscious connection to the Old Testament becomes,
of course, visible in the many quotations from and allusions to Old Testament
texts. However, [t]he New Testament s reference to
the Old Testament is [ ] not exhausted by scriptural quotations and allusions,
but extends to the very foundations of the language of faith and leaves its
mark on the entire testimony about Christ .[71] As a matter of fact, the
Old Testament, both in the original Hebrew language and in the Greek Septuagint
translation, had developed ways for testifying to the revelation of the God of
Israel and for expressing human responses in confession, prayer and lament. As
Jews the early Christian believers and the New Testament authors cherished the
Holy Scriptures as the word of God and were familiar with how they spoke. Now
they applied these same language resources for testifying to God s revelation
in Jesus Christ and for expressing their response in confession and prayer.
The shared confession of the one true God is fundamental for the unity
between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Lord s prayer Jesus
taught his disciples to pray, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name
(Matt 6:9, cf. Luke 11:2). That the one true God had revealed himself and made
his exclusive name known to Israel is of paramount importance in the Old
Testament. This was communicated to Moses out of the burning bush. When Moses
asked God, who had commissioned him to bring his people the Israelites out of
Egypt, about his name,
Exod
3:14 15:
(14) God
said to Moses, I am who I am. He said further: Thus you shall say to the
Israelites, I am has sent me to you. (15) God also
said to Moses, Thus you shall say to the Israelites, The Lord, the God of your
ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent
me to you: This is my name for ever, and this is my title for all generations.
At the
centre of biblical Israel s religious life, continued in Judaism through all
ages, stands the so-called Shema Yisrael, to be found in Deuteronomy
6:4 5, the confession of the Lord as their only God and the commandment to love
him:
Deut
6:4 5:
(4) Hear, O
Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. (5) You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
On this
background, it is no surprise that the sanctification of God s name is a very
central issue in the Old Testament. In a prophecy about hope for the future for
the house of Jacob in Isaiah 29:17 24 the prophet describes what happens when
God s people realize what God is doing. They will no longer feel ashamed, and
they will sanctify their God.[72]
However, when Israel fails in sanctifying God s name and even brings shame upon
him among the nations, God himself will sanctify his name. This is a central
point in the proclamation of the prophet Ezekiel, according to whom God
intervenes for the salvation of the house of Israel primarily for the sake of
his name on which the Israelites have brought shame.
Ezek
36:22 23:
(22) Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord
God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but
for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to
which you came. (23) I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned
among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations
shall know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I display my
holiness before their eyes.
We see how
central this issue is to Jesus, when he places the hallowing of God s name as
the first concern in the prayer he taught his disciples. As disciples of Jesus,
we are called both to be grateful human beings who hallow God s name and to ask
God that he himself shall intervene and sanctify his great name. Both these
aspects are central concerns throughout the Old Testament, taken up by Jesus
and continued in his ministry.
Further,
Jesus had and nurtured a close and intimate relationship to the one and only
God as his Father. There are abundant examples in the Gospel of John (e.g. John
5:17 18, 37, 43; 14:2, 6 7; 17:1, 5; 20:17), and the Synoptic Gospels also give
evidence to this unique relationship, as we can see in Matt 11:25 and its
parallel in Luke 10:21: I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because
you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have
revealed them to infants. In his most difficult hour, when he was distressed
and troubled in Gethsemane, Jesus spoke words from Psalms 42 and 43 to his
disciples, I am deeply grieved, even to death (see Pss
42:6, 12 [ET 42:5, 11]; 43:5). In this most distressing time Jesus addressed
God as his Father, saying: Abba, Father, for you all things are possible;
remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want (Mark 14:36,
cf. Matt 26:39).
This
unique, intimate relationship of Jesus to God is followed up in the New
Testament Letters, which repeatedly speak of God as the Father of Jesus
Christ . I have already quoted from Romans 15:4 regarding the role of the Old
Testament Scriptures as written for our instruction, and when Paul in the
following verses speaks of the effect and fruit of receiving such instruction
from the Holy Scriptures, he encourages the believers in Rome, stating: so
that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ (Rom 15:6). When short formulas of praise to God are formulated
at the beginning of more New Testament Letters, the Father-Son relation between
God and Christ is emphasized, for example in 1 Pet 1:3: Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth
into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (see
also 2 Cor 1:3; Eph 1:3; Col 1:3).
From
observation of the New Testament statements about God s holy name and the
Father-Son relationship between God and Jesus, we can see that what connects
the Old and New Testaments is more than a mere continuity of tradition. In
fact, Jesus and his witnesses establish a continuity of confession
between the two testaments. One text where this continuity is especially
transparent is Romans 4, where Paul describes Abraham as the exemplary
believer, based on the statement in Genesis 15:6: Abraham believed God, and it
was reckoned to him as righteousness , quoted by Paul in Romans 4:3. Further on
in his exposition, in verse 17, Paul describes the character of the God in whom
Abraham believed as the one who gives life to the dead and calls into
existence the things that do not exist . Hence, God is the sovereign and mighty
creator who brought the whole world into existence from nothing, simply by
speaking his word. This is described in the creation story in Genesis 1 and is
testified in Psalm 33:9: For he [the Lord] spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm. After having defined
the God Abraham believed in as the creator God who created ex nihilo,
Paul proceeds further in his exposition on the faith of Abraham:
Rom 4:23 24:
(23) Now the
words, it was reckoned to him , were written not for his sake alone, (24) but
for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus
our Lord from the dead.
Thus, in
Romans 4 Paul proceeds seamlessly from the Jewish predication about God as the
creator who can even give life to the dead, to the identification of this God
as the one who raised Jesus from the dead. The continuity of both tradition and
confession expresses most profoundly how the New Testament relates to the Old
Testament. In its own understanding the New Testament depends upon the earlier
Holy Scriptures; it belongs to and continues the process of witnessing what God
has done and still is doing in order to bring
salvation to the world and humanity that he has created, loves and cares for.
The biblical canonization process (see Parts 1 and 2, above) was
accompanied by statements that these very scriptures are inspired by God and
his Spirit. At this point the early Christians followed the general conviction
among Jews and showed the same respect and reverence as other Jews for the Holy
Scriptures as inspired. A famous example is found in Paul s address to his
young co-worker Timothy:
2 Tim
3:15 16:
(15) [ ]
from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you
for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. (16) All scripture is inspired by
God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training
in righteousness.
Another
example is how the Letter to the Hebrews introduces long quotations from the
Old Testament by identifying the Holy Spirit as the true author and speaker of
these words. This applies to a quotation from Psalm 95:7 11 (see Heb 3:7 11) and to the famous prophecy in Jer 31:31 34
about the new and different covenant (see Heb
10:15 17, quoting vv. 33 34).[73]
Regarding how the Old Testament and New Testament texts
speak about the Spirit, Peter Stuhlmacher
notes:
The decisive difference over against the Jewish
understanding of Scripture lay in the fact that for the New Testament, the
Spirit that blows through the Old Testament Scriptures was no longer only the
Spirit that communicates himself to Israel and the entire world in the Mosaic
didactic tradition, but the Spirit of the Father of Jesus Christ and of the
exalted Christ himself. Therefore the early Christian
church read the Holy Scriptures with eyes that had been opened for her by the
risen Christ and by the Spirit whom he sent.[74]
The story in Luke 24:13 35 about the two
disciples walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Easter Sunday shows us how the
disciples depended on the instruction given to them by the risen Christ in order to interpret the Holy Scriptures properly. The risen Jesus joined them on
their walk without being recognized by them. The two disciples were confused
and frustrated; their master had been crucified and buried two days earlier,
but this same morning his tomb had been found empty, and some women belonging
to the group of Jesus followers had claimed to have had a vision of angels
saying to them that Jesus was alive. At this point, the risen Jesus said to
them, Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the
prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer
these things and then enter into his glory? Then
beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things
about him in all the scriptures (vv. 25 27).
The role of
the Holy Spirit in enlightening the disciples minds is emphasized in the
Gospel of John. In his farewell discourse to the disciples in John 14 16 Jesus
promises that he and his Father will send the Spirit, called the Paraclete (the
Advocate), to them, and one of the functions of the Spirit will be to teach
them everything and remind them of all that Jesus had said to them (John
14:26). The evangelist John has integrated this aspect of the Spirit s
assistance in conveying the full understanding of the Holy Scriptures in his
gospel narrative. There are two very clear examples.
The first
one is found in John 2:13 22, the story about Jesus temple act, followed by a
dispute about the destruction and renewal of the temple. Observing how Jesus
interfered with the market activities in the temple, driving out those selling
animals for sacrifices and overturning the tables of the money-changers,
his disciples remembered that it was written, Zeal for your house will consume
me (v. 17); the biblical text the disciples remembered is Psalm 69:10 (ET
69:9). However, according to the last verse in this passage, John 2:22, it was
not until after Jesus was raised from the dead that the disciples actually understood the meaning of this scripture. Zeal for
God s house had consumed Jesus in the sense that it led to his death, but
through his resurrection Jesus had overcome those who intended to destroy him
and his mission, and thanks to the assistance of the Spirit the disciples were
now capable of understanding and believing the scripture.
The second
example we find in John 12:12 19, the story about Jesus entry into Jerusalem
on Palm Sunday. When Jesus was met by a crowd, shouting words from Psalm
118:26, Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord the
King of Israel , and, further, when Jesus found a young donkey to ride on, as
the evangelist notes is written in the prophet Zechariah 9:9, Do not be
afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey s
colt , then in John 12:16 we read the following comment regarding the
disciples: His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when
Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of
him and had been done to him.
As the Son of God, the man Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnate Logos
or Word, as we learn from the prologue in the Gospel of John: In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [ ] And the Word
became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a
father s only son, full of grace and truth (John 1:1, 14). The fact that Jesus
Christ had been pre-existent with God his Father prior to the creation of the
world is also expressed in other New Testament texts (e.g. 1 Cor 8:6, Phil 2:6
and Col 1:15 17). Already in the second century AD the Ancient Church inferred
from the doctrine of the Logos that the Old Testament Scriptures testify to a
revelation from and about the preincarnate Logos, whereas the New Testament
Scriptures testify to a revelation from and about the same Logos after he had
been born a human being, that is, had become flesh as the incarnate Logos. The
famous church father Origen expressed this idea with the following words: By
the words of Christ we do not mean those only which he taught when present in
the flesh; for also before this Christ was the Word of God in Moses and the
prophets. [75]
In 1 Corinthians 10 we find an example in the New Testament itself, prior to
the church fathers, that Christ is identified as already present during
Israel s exodus from Egypt. The rock that Moses struck to get water for the
people to drink, recounted in Exodus 17:6, is commented upon and explained by
Paul in the following way: [ ] all [our ancestors] drank the same spiritual
drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock
was Christ (1 Cor 10:4).
Next, we will direct our attention to some texts in the New Testament
that apply Old Testament traditions and texts in their exposition of central
theological issues.
My first and most extensive example will be how the Gospels of Mark and Matthew apply the Old Testament tradition of the righteous sufferer, particularly revealed in some Psalms, of which Psalm 22 is the most important, as a key resource for interpreting the passion of Jesus Christ.[76] This approach of the evangelists has a basis in Jesus himself. Jesus was crucified at nine o clock in the morning of Good Friday. After six hours on the cross, at three in the afternoon, he cried out with a loud voice: Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? This is Aramaic and means My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus words are an exact Aramaic rendering of the opening words in Psalm 22 with the Hebrew text, Eli, Eli, lama cazavtani, translated as My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? in our English Bibles (see Ps 22:2 [ET 22:1]). There is discussion among scholars whether Jesus only spoke this first sentence of Psalm 22 in his prayer at the cross or whether the evangelists imply that he spoke the whole psalm. Irrespective of the length of Jesus prayer, the evangelists were directed towards this psalm because Jesus, who knew the Book of Psalms as his own prayer book, had clothed his deep anxiety and despair in the words of the psalmist speaking in Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Psalm 22 is
a combined lament and thanksgiving psalm. In Old Testament times individuals
who were in trouble because of harassment, injustice, persecution or illness
could go to the temple, turn to God in a prayer in which they described their
suffering and worries, appeal to God for help and deliverance, and promise that
they would come back to the temple and offer a thanksgiving sacrifice and sing
a thanksgiving psalm after they have been rescued by the Lord.
An
impressive example of someone who prays a lament psalm in the temple and later
returns for thanksgiving is Hannah, the wife of Elkanah. She suffered and was
mocked because she had not borne any children. Her prayer in the temple in
Shiloh and her encounter with the priest Eli is wonderfully described in 1
Samuel 1. The Lord answered her prayer and gave her a son, Samuel. On the next
occasion when she and her husband returned to the temple, she gave thanks to
God (1 Sam 1:24 2:11).
The Book of
Psalms contains a broad variation of different kinds of psalms; indeed, lament
psalms of individuals make up the largest group. The first part of Psalm 22,
verses 1 22 (ET vv. 1 21) is such an individual lament psalm.[77]
In a typical manner, this part of the psalm text varies between sections that
describe pain and terror (vv. 2 3, 7 9, 13 19 [ET vv. 1 2, 6 8, 12 18]),
sections that praise the Lord for what he has done in the past (vv. 4 6, 10 12
[ET vv. 3 5, 9 11]), and finally an appeal to God for help and a promise to
thank him in the future (vv. 20 22 [ET vv. 19 21]).[78] In the lament sections the
psalmist describes his pain and misery. He appears as a worm and is ridiculed
and despised by the people. He is surrounded by terrible and frightening
enemies who are compared to the strong bulls of Bashan or lions or a pack of
wild dogs attacking him. He suffers severely in his body; he is dried up like a
potsherd, his tongue sticks to his jaws and his bones are visible due to
sickness and hunger. In the sections of praise the psalmist reminds God of what
he has done for him before, and, finally, the lament part of the psalm
culminates in the appeal to God to rescue him: O my help, come quickly to my
aid! Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog! Save me
from the mouth of the lion! (vv. 20b 22a [ET vv. 19b 21a]).
The last
ten verses of Psalm 22 make up the thanksgiving part. The first five verses
(vv. 23 27 [ET vv. 22 26]) are regular in the sense that they contain elements
which are typical for all thanksgiving psalms. After having been rescued by
God, the psalmist has returned to the temple where he speaks out in the
assembled congregation. He asks them to praise the Lord with him, and he tells
them how God has helped and delivered him. The psalmist declares that he will
now pay his vows. This means that he will perform his thanksgiving psalm in the midst of the congregation and offer a thanksgiving
sacrifice, of which most of the meat will be distributed among those present
for a common meal of peace and harmony, so that the poor will also satisfy
their hunger.[79]
Finally,
the last five verses in Psalm 22 stand out as unique:
Ps 22:28 32
(ET 22:27 31):
(28 [27])
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord;
and all the
families of the nations shall worship before him.
(29 [28])
For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.
(30 [29]) To
him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him
shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him.
(31 [30])
Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord,
(32 [31])
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done
it.
According
to these verses it is not only the assembled congregation in the temple
listening to the psalmist and sharing the thanksgiving meal with him who get to
hear about how God delivered him. But in addition, in verses 28 29 (ET vv.
27 28) we read that the whole contemporary world, in verse 30 (ET v. 29) the
past world, those who are dead, and in verses 31 32 (ET vv. 30 31) the future
generations get to hear about God s deliverance of the psalmist in Psalm 22,
and they praise God for this.
We return
to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, which recount that Jesus prayed with words
from Psalm 22 while he was hanging on the cross: My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me? (Mark 15:34; Matt 27:46). Irrespective of whether Jesus actually spoke the whole psalm or only the first verse, the
evangelists Mark and Matthew were directed towards this psalm when they
reflected on how to present the narrative of Jesus passion in written text.
For them Psalm 22 appeared as a model text for how to describe and express the
suffering of a just person. Wherever they observed
similarities between how Jesus was harassed, despised, mocked, mistreated and
tortured, and the afflictions that befell the psalmist they clearly noticed
these similarities. Because Matthew has in total more explicit allusions to
Psalm 22 than Mark, I will refer to the text of Matthew, chapter 27.
We start in
verse 35, when the Roman soldiers have brought Jesus to Golgotha and hang him
on the cross: And when they had crucified him, they
divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots. This corresponds to
what the psalmist speaks in verse 19 (ET v.18): They
divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots. [80]
While Jesus is hanging on the cross between two bandits, people passing by
start to humiliate him. I quote from Matthew 27:39 40:
Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, You who
would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are
the Son of God, come down from the cross. This corresponds to verse 8 (ET
v. 7) in Psalm 22: All who see me mock at me; they
make mouths at me, they shake their heads. [81] The religious leaders of
the people, the high priests, along with the scribes and the elders, appear
next in Matthew s text as those who mock the crucified Jesus. The evangelist
renders their words in verses 42 43: He saved others;
he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the
cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him
now, if he wants to, for he said, I am God s Son. These words are ironic
and mocking, and they correspond exactly to what the psalmist experienced from
his enemies: Commit your cause to the Lord; let him
deliver let him rescue the one in whom he delights! (Ps 22:9 [ET 22:8]).
We have now
observed that there are as many as four corresponding similarities between the
description of the sufferings of the psalmist in the lament part of Psalm 22
and the sufferings and humiliation experienced by Jesus at the crucifixion:
1) the division of the clothes and casting of lots (Matt 27:35 = Psalm
22:19 [ET v. 18])
2) the deriding shaking of heads (Matt 27:39 =
Psalm 22:8 [ET v. 7])
3) the ironic and mocking reference to God
(Matt 27:42 43 = Psalm 22:9 [ET v. 8])
4) the cry of Jesus (Matt 27:46 = Psalm 22:2
[ET v. 1])
Next, we
must direct our attention to the fact that Psalm 22 is a combined lament and
thanksgiving psalm. This implies that the psalm transcends the situation of
suffering and despair and includes God s deliverance and the psalmist s
thanksgiving for having been rescued by the Lord. We must presuppose that the
evangelists did not isolate the lament part of Psalm 22 from the last ten
verses of the psalm; they definitely took the whole
psalm into account when they, prompted by Jesus cry, turned to this psalm as a
biblical resource for exposing the passion of Jesus. The
exceptional ending of Psalm 22 in particular made
it a unique pre-text for expressing the universal scope and significance of the
suffering and death of Jesus Christ for the kingdom of God and the salvation of
the world. I have already indicated that the last five verses of Psalm
22 proclaim that God s intervention for the rescue of the psalmist has positive
consequences beyond all geographic and temporal borders and limitations.
First,
verses 28 and 29 (ET vv. 27 28), quoted above, declare that the God of Israel
by rescuing the psalmist from his morbid misery,
announces to the whole world that dominion belongs to him alone. In response to
this announcement all nations repent and worship the Lord, who rules over them
as king. Next, verse 30 (ET v. 29) states: To him, indeed, shall all who
sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for him. In the Old Testament lament
psalms the realm of the dead is generally seen as a place outside the area
where God can be worshipped, as expressed for example in Psalm 115:17: The
dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that go down into silence. [82]
Once again, this psalm carries out an as yet inconceivable step by including the dead as worshippers of God and thus giving
them a share of new life. Thirdly and finally, verses 31 and 32 (ET vv.
30 31), quoted above, state that God s rescue of the
psalmist from death shall be proclaimed and made known in all future
generations.
The
evangelists knew and must also have taken the last five verses of Psalm 22 into
account. Although there are no explicit allusions to these verses, there are,
nevertheless, some clear indications of their reception in Matthew and Mark.
When the Roman centurion who was in charge of the
group of soldiers who executed Jesus, watched how Jesus died, he confessed:
Truly this man was God s Son (Matt 27:54).[83] This gentile man realizes
that the crucified Jesus is not simply a despised and accursed villain, but the
Son of God. The soldier at the cross is a representative of the gentile world.
According to Psalm 22:28 29 (ET 22:27 28) the message about God s rescue of the
one who in his misery had cried to God shall reach all of humanity, and in his
statement and confession the centurion speaks on behalf of the gentile world in
fulfilment of Psalm 22. Both Mark and Matthew mention that the curtain in the
temple was torn in two, from top to bottom, in the very moment when Jesus died
(Mark 15:38; Matt 27:51a). Whereas Mark goes directly from telling
about the curtain to the confession of the Roman centurion, Matthew alone adds
a small, midrashic episode in between.
Matthew 27:51b 53:
(51b) The earth shook, and the rocks were
split. (52) The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had
fallen asleep were raised. (53) After his resurrection they came out of the
tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.
This seems
to correspond to verse 30 (ET v. 29) in Psalm 22 according to which those who
have died are also included in praising God for delivering the psalmist. When
it comes to the final point in Psalm 22, namely, that all future generations
shall get to hear about God s rescue of the psalmist, this is a task that the
evangelists themselves take responsibility for by writing their Gospels so that
people in the future even two thousand years after can read and learn what
happened to Jesus.
We can
conclude our analysis of the relation between Psalm 22 and the passion story in
the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. The desperate cry at
the beginning of the psalm, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? has its
counterpart in Jesus cry at the cross and in his death. The five last verses
in Psalm 22 have a corresponding text in Jesus resurrection. The New Testament
testifies in correspondence with Psalm 22:28 32 (ET 22:27 31) that Jesus death
and resurrection is the point in history where the kingdom of God breaks
through into our world.
We will now turn to the Letter to the Hebrews as the next example of how
New Testament authors apply Old Testament traditions and texts. This book
offers the most detailed exposition of the death of Jesus as a once for all
substitution for the atonement sacrificial cult in the old covenant.
The one
verse in the Old Testament that is quoted and alluded to most times in the New
Testament is Psalm 110:1: The Lord says to my lord, Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies your footstool. [85] According to the heading,
the speaker in Psalm 110 is King David, and he tells what God the Lord says to
another person whom David refers to as his lord. Hence, according to Psalm 110
David has a second lord in addition to God. This lord of David is seated at the
right hand of God. In this verse Jesus himself and then the apostles already
found a scriptural confirmation that Jesus was at the same time the Messiah,
Son of David, and the Son of God, higher than David and all his royal
successors. Whereas the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and Paul quote Psalm
110:1, it is only the Letter to the Hebrews that also quotes verse 4 of this
psalm. It happens three times: The Lord has sworn and will not change his
mind, You are a priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedek (Psalm
110:4). Again, it is God the Lord who speaks to the second lord of David, the
exalted Messiah: You are a priest for ever, according to the order of
Melchizedek (Heb 5:6; 7:17, cf. 7:21 and the
allusions in 6:20; 7:3, 11). Hence, the Holy Scriptures inform about God s
inauguration of the Messiah as a priest, indeed, as a priest according to the
order of Melchizedek. Next to Psalm 110:4, Melchizedek is only referred to once
in the Scriptures, in Genesis 14:17 20 in a spectacular sequence added to the
puzzling story about Abraham s victory over four kings in a battle north of
Damascus (see Gen 14:1 16). After Abraham s victory this man Melchizedek, king
in Salem and priest of God Most High, El Eljon,
approached Abraham, blessed him and received tithes from him. In Hebrews 7:1 3
the author combines the narrative about Melchizedek and Abraham from Genesis
and Psalm 110:4 and interprets these two texts according to well-established
rules of interpretation. The way in which Melchizedek suddenly appears on the
scene in Genesis 14 is worthy of note. He is without father, without mother,
without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life; therefore,
he resembles the Son of God and remains a priest for ever (7:3). On this basis,
the Letter to the Hebrews demonstrates throughout the next verses, 7:4 10, that
the Levitical priests who descend from Abraham are in an inferior position to
Jesus as a priest of the order of Melchizedek because it is the one in a higher
position who blesses the other one and receives tithes from him. Further, all
priests since the time of Levi have died, and their priestly ministry has come
to an end when they die. It is only the one risen from the dead, Jesus, who is
now exalted to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God, who qualifies for
a priesthood of the order of Melchizedek.
We turn to
how Hebrews explains the difference between the priestly ministry of the high
priests in the old covenant and the priestly ministry of Jesus, who is high
priest according to the order of Melchizedek. Jesus offering of himself by
dying on the cross once for all corresponds to and surpasses what happens each
year anew on yom kippur,
the Day of Atonement. Hebrews describes the priestly service in the old
covenant in 9:1 10. Only once each year, on the Day of Atonement, is the high
priest allowed to go into the inner room in the sanctuary, taking with him the
blood of goats and calves that he offers for himself and for the sins committed
unintentionally by the people. As long as the two
rooms in the sanctuary remain, there is no direct access to God, whose presence
is located at the site of atonement over the ark of the covenant between the
cherubim. Hebrews interprets the sanctuary model with two rooms or chambers in
the following way: The first room represents the Mosaic cult system from Sinai,
whereas the inner room stands for the entry into the heavenly sanctuary and
belongs to the eschatological era of salvation.
From verse
9:11 onwards, the author of Hebrews turns to describing the high priestly
ministry of Jesus likening it and contrasting it to the Levitical high priest s
ministry on the Day of Atonement. Christ must not limit himself to one annual
visit in the inner room of the earthly temple, which according to Hebrews 8:5
is only a sketch and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary. On the contrary, when
Christ came as a high priest, [ ] [he came] through the greater and perfect
tent not made with hands, that is, not of this creation (9:11, cf. v. 24). The
following similarities to the high priest on the Day of Atonement are
emphasized:
1) Jesus
entered once for all into the Holy Place, not annually (see 9:12).
3) Jesus entered with his own blood, with
himself as the sacrifice, whereas the high priests in the old covenant brought
with them the blood of goats or calves to sprinkle at the site of atonement.
The blood represents life poured out or indulged in death, and the reference to
Jesus blood here means his death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice
(9:13 14).
The way in which Jesus transcends the Israelite
high priests on the Day of Atonement is expressed at the end of chapter 9:
Heb 9:24 25, 28:
(24) For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made
by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered
into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.
(25) Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the
Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own. [ ] (28) [ ] Christ,
having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time,
not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
The outlook to Christ s return in Hebrews 9:28
brings us to a final point. The one atonement sacrifice of Jesus has a lasting
effect because he is the mediator of a new and better covenant: But Jesus has
now obtained a more excellent ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator
of a better covenant, which has been enacted through better promises (Heb 8:6). We find the classical prophecy of a new and
different covenant in Jeremiah 31:31 34. This passage is quoted in full in
Hebrews 8:8 12 and repeated in a somewhat shortened form in 10:16 17. With this
positioning of the two quotations the prophetical promise of the new covenant
encloses and frames what is said about the sacrifice of Jesus in chapter 9 and
in the first part of chapter 10. The fact that the Holy Scriptures themselves
contain such a promise of a new covenant implies in the interpretation of
Hebrews that the old covenant from Sinai will one day necessarily be obsolete.
This day has already arrived on the occasion of Jesus
death and exaltation, and for this reason the old sacrificial system in
Jerusalem is outdated. The blood of Jesus himself, brought into the sanctuary,
represents not only the atoning blood on the site of atonement at the Day of
Atonement; it is also the blood related to the inauguration of a covenant.
Hence, even the old covenant was inaugurated with blood, the author states in
9:18, and in the following verses he recounts the story from Exodus 24:3 8
about the sprinkling of blood in the inauguration of the covenant at Sinai.
Whereas the atonement sacrifice erases and ends something, the covenant
sacrifice points towards the future and remains valid in the covenant reality
that is opening, that is, the era of the new covenant. In this way the death of
Jesus embraces past and present; it marks the definitive victory over sin and
death and is the entry into salvation in the eternal kingdom of God.
In this article I have surveyed the canon history of the Jewish and
Christian Bibles. We have observed how the Jewish Bible developed gradually,
beginning with the Law, continuing with the Prophets and, finally, being
complemented by the Scriptures. From the third century BC onwards, the
formation of the Jewish Bible was a bilingual process that included the gradual
translation of the biblical books from Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek. The process
that led to the Christian Bible interconnected closely with the Jewish Bible.
Jesus and the apostles shared the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms with all
other Jews in Galilee and Judea. Beginning in the bilingual community of Jesus
followers in Jerusalem, the early church adopted the Greek version of the
Bible, the Septuagint, and cherished it as Holy Scripture on the same level as
the Hebrew Bible. The Christians very soon began to supplement the inherited
Holy Scriptures with writings that recounted the story of Jesus Christ (i.e.
the Gospels) and theologically elaborated and applied the Christ event (i.e.
the Letters). All these new books were written in Greek, the lingua franca
of the Mediterranean world, and, correspondingly, the Septuagint became the
first part of the two-part Christian canon, called the Old Testament. Because
the Greek version of the Jewish Bible encompasses more books than the Hebrew
version, consequently, the Christian Old Testament is broader than the Jewish
canon that obtained its final shape and size in early rabbinical Judaism.
The
canonical processes of the Jewish and Christian Bibles were intertwined and
mutually interdependent. The Christians inherited the Greek version of the Holy
Scriptures from the Jews, who finally distanced themselves from the Septuagint,
as it appeared and was conceived more and more as (the first part of) the
Christian Bible. Consequently, they authorized the Holy Scriptures only in the
original language Hebrew (and Aramaic) and with a reduced number of books
compared to the Septuagint as their canon, called the Tanakh.
The early
Christians never regarded the Old Testament as outdated and obsolete. Hence,
the New Testament was never intended as a substitution for the Old Testament.
On the contrary, the early Christians conceived of the New Testament as a
continuation of the earlier Holy Scriptures, in which the same language of
faith was applied in order to testify to God s
revelation in Jesus Christ and to express their response in confession and
prayer. The complete integration of the (Greek) Jewish Bible into the Christian
canon as its first part, called the Old Testament, is in no way a suspicious
undertaking or an illegal appropriation of what belongs to others. Like Jesus,
the apostles and the New Testament authors (except Luke) were all Jews
themselves, and they read the Holy Scriptures as a message that spoke to them
and enabled them to grasp and express God s contemporary work in Christ for the
redemption of humankind and the whole world.
The Greek
Jewish Bible operates with a salvation-historical outlook, oriented towards the
future. This is seen in the compositional structure of the Septuagint, with the
prophetic books at the end. Hence, the expectation that the biblical tradition
and revelation history will continue beyond the borders and frames of the
collection of the Law, the Prophets and the Scriptures, including the so-called
Apocrypha, is an intrinsic element in the Greek Jewish Bible itself. In this
article we chose the Zion tradition as an example and saw how it developed
coherently and organically beyond the Jewish Bible and continued throughout
early Judaism and in the New Testament. Further, taking the New Testament as
our point of departure, we saw two examples of how New Testament authors turned
to the Old Testament for finding theological resources for expressing and
elaborating upon central aspects of Christology and soteriology, namely, how
the evangelists Mark and Matthew drew upon the Old Testament tradition of the
righteous sufferer in Psalm 22 to describe the passion of Jesus, and how the
Letter to the Hebrews drew upon the priesthood of Melchizedek and the promise
of a new covenant for the exposition of Jesus ministry.
New
Testament exegesis and theology can only be performed and expounded on the basis of the two-part Christian canon, never
disconnected from the Old Testament. The masterpiece of my honoured New
Testament teacher Peter Stuhlmacher, Biblical
Theology of the New Testament (see n. 3), is a
paradigmatic example of what a New Testament theology written on these premises
might look like.
[1] Thanks to John Goldie MA for helpful suggestions for linguistic corrections and improvements.
[2] I want to express my gratitude to
Rev. Dr. Bruk Ayele Asale, President of Mekane Yesus
Seminary, and Rev. Dr. Tibebu Teklu Senbetu, Director
of Gudina Tumsa Research Center, for the invitation
to give this lecture during a three-week stay at Mekane Yesus Seminary. From
1993 until my retirement in September 2022 I worked at the School of Mission
and Theology, owned by the Norwegian Mission Society. (In 2016 this school
merged with some other church-oriented institutions to become VID Specialized
University.) The Norwegian Mission Society works closely with the Evangelical
Ethiopian Church Mekane Yesus and the Mekane Yesus Seminary, and I visited the
seminary in my capacity as a senior volunteer of the Norwegian Mission Society.
[3] My most important guide and reference source for the following presentation is Peter Stuhlmacher, Biblical Theology of the New Testament, translated and edited by Daniel P. Bailey with the collaboration of Jostein dna (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2018). Ever since I was Professor Stuhlmacher s assistant (wissenschaftlicher Assistent) 1988 1993 at the University of T bingen, Germany, when he published the first German edition of the first part of this book, I have cooperated closely with him in developing and expounding a biblical theology that spans and combines the Old Testament and the New Testament.
[4] Regarding Parts 1 and 2, The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible, see esp. Stuhlmacher, Biblical Theology, 5 10 (section of chapter 1, The Task and Structure of a Biblical Theology of the New Testament ), 743 71 (= chapter 40, The Formation of the Two-Part Christian Canon ).
[5] We encounter the term the
recognized scriptures of the Old Testament in Eusebius Ecclesiastical
History 4.26. Eusebius coins this expression based on a treatise of the
early bishop Melito of Sardis (ca. AD 100 180). Melito writes that he learnt
accurately the books of the Old Testament . See Kirsopp Lake, Eusebius: The
Ecclesiastical History with an English Translation. Two Volumes. LCL
(London: William Heinemann / Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1926 and 1932), 1:393.
[6] Biblical texts, including Old
Testament Apocrypha, are generally quoted from Holy Bible: New Revised
Standard Version. Catholic Edition: Anglicized Text (London: SPCK, 2015),
abbreviated NRSV.
[7] Further examples are Matt 5:17;
Luke 16:16; John 1:45. See also the expression Moses and the prophets in Luke
16:29, 31.
[8] Neh
8:1 10:40 (ET 8:1 10:39) recounts how the priest and scribe Ezra publicly read
the book of the law of Moses (8:1) in Jerusalem and it was recognized as
authoritative by the people; they committed themselves to observe and do all
the commandments of the Lord [ ]
and his ordinances and his statutes (10:30b [ET 10:29b]). This incident is
often considered as the canonization of the Law. Whether the date of Ezra s
arrival in Jerusalem in the seventh year of the reign of the Persian King
Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:1 10) relates to Artaxerxes I Longimanus (465 424 BC) or to
Artaxerxes II (405 358 BC) and, hence, is identified as 458 or as 398 BC, is an
issue of debate among scholars.
[9] Sirach is an important wisdom book written around 180 BC. The way the prophets are referred to in the section called Hymn in Honour of our ancestors (chapters 44 49; cf. 48:22; 49:7, 8, 10) shows that the Prophets had gained canonical status by this time.
[10] For an argument in favour of the complete establishment of the Jewish Tanakh canon by the second century BC, see Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress, 1993), 55 60. See the criticism in Stuhlmacher, Biblical Theology, 749.
[11] Like the New Testament (see Luke 24:44), the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran list only the Psalms (of David) explicitly in addition to the Law and the Prophets: to you we have [written] that you must understand the book of Moses [and] the book[s of the pr]ophets and Davi[d ] (4Q397). The grandson of the author of Sirach translated the book from Hebrew to Greek around 132 BC. In the prologue he added to the Greek version the translator refers to the Law and the Prophets as established and well-defined entities, that are followed by other books, respectively the other books of our fathers or the rest of the books . Such a general, vague reference to a third group of books beyond the Law and the Prophets, that is not yet clearly fixed, also appears in the writings of the Jewish author Philo of Alexandria in the first century AD: Jews are occupied with studying laws and oracles delivered through the mouth of prophets, and psalms and the other [books] (Contemplative Life 25). For these source references see Stuhlmacher, Biblical Theology, 744.
[12] Septuagint means Seventy (LXX)
and has become the common designation for the Greek translation of the Hebrew
Bible, based on the story that the translation was made by 70 or 72 Jewish
scribes. This story occurs the first time in the so-called Letter of Aristeas, according to which the Law was translated during
the reign of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II (285 247 BC). The story about the 70
or 72 translators reappears with variations both in the Jewish authors Philo
and Josephus and in many of the Christian church fathers.
[13] For more
details about Sirach see notes 9 and 11 above. For an English translation
of the Septuagint, see A New English Translation of the Septuagint and the
Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included under That Title, ed.
Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright (New York;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), abbreviation: NETS. There is an
electronic edition of NETS available at https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/. The SBL Handbook of Style for
Biblical Studies and Related Disciplines, Second Edition (Atlanta, Georgia:
SBL Press, 2014), 125, lists the following books in the entry 8.3.3
Deuterocanonical Works and Septuagint : Tobit, Judith, Additions to Esther,
Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Epistle of Jeremiah, Additions
to Daniel (comprising Prayer of Azariah, Song of the Three Young Men, Susanna,
Bel and the Dragon), 1 2 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, 3
Maccabees, 2 Esdras, 4 Maccabees.
[14] Quoted in Stuhlmacher,
Biblical Theology, 744.
[15] Quoted from The Old Testament
Pseudepigrapha. Volume 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments, ed.
James H. Charlesworth (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1983), 555.
[16] This is a warranted inference from
the way Philo (see On the Life of Moses 2.25 44) and Josephus (see Jewish
Antiquities 12.11 118) describe the translation process and the inspired
state of the Greek biblical text.
[17] For this compositional order see
NETS and the most widely used critical text edition of the Greek Septuagint: Septuaginta, edited by Alfred Rahlfs and revised by
Robert Hanhart (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,
2006).
[18] In addition to Isa 61:1 see Isa
26:19; 29:18; 35:5 6; 42:7, 18.
[19] For these numbers see Stuhlmacher, Biblical Theology, 750. A book that
analyses most of these quotations is Commentary on the New Testament Use of
the Old Testament, edited by G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker Academic; Nottingham: Apollos, 2007).
[20] For an overview of this group of
writings, see SBL Handbook of Style, 133 34, the entry 8.3.11 Apostolic
Fathers . In the series Loeb Classical Library, a Greek-English edition of the
Apostolic Fathers is published in two volumes (LCL 24 and LCL 25). The most
recent version, translated and edited by Bart D. Ehrman, appeared in 2003. I
quote with some modifications from the earlier version, The Apostolic
Fathers, with an English translation by Kirsopp Lake (London: William
Heinemann / Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1912).
[21] The first quotation is taken from
Jer 9:23 24. The quotation of the words of the Lord Jesus consists of a
combination of sayings from the Sermon on the Plain, respectively, the Sermon
on the Mount, see Luke 6:31, 36 38; Matt 5:7; 6:14 15; 7:1 2, 12. With the
introductory formula the holy word says , the author quotes from Isa 66:2 in
the following verses 3 4.
The first section in Didache,
comprising 1.1 6.3 and describing the two ways , i.e. the way of life and the
way of death, cites extensively from the Sermon on the Mount. Did 8.2 presents
the Lord s Prayer exactly the same as Matt 6:9 13.
[22] For the quoted references see Eph
1:22 23 and Gen 1:27. The statement about the manifestation of Jesus for our
salvation in the last days alludes to 1 Pet 1:20.
[23] The statement that love covers a
multitude of sins originates in Prov 10:12 and is
also alluded to in Jas 5:20 and 1 Pet 4:8. The rest of the quoted text alludes
to 1 Cor 13:4 7.
Other references to Pauline texts
are found inter alia in 1 Clem 35.5 6; 37.5 6; 47.3; 49.5, and in 36.2 5
there are extensive references to Heb 1. More
examples of quotations from and allusions to the Gospels and the Letters in the
Apostolic Fathers are presented in Stuhlmacher, Biblical
Theology, 754.
[24] The New Testament 1522; the whole Bible 1534, nine more editions before Luther died in 1546.
[25] Quoted from Stuhlmacher, Biblical
Theology, 761. This applies to the Catholic (Vulgate)
Apocrypha/deuterocanonical books: Tobit, Judith, Additions to Esther, Wisdom of
Solomon, Sirach, Baruch (+ Letter of Jeremiah), 1 2 Maccabees, Additions to
Daniel.
[26] Quoted from Stuhlmacher,
Biblical Theology, 762.
[27] For an accurate analysis of these
two instances and the demonstration that the reproduction of Sir 7:30 in
Barnabas 19:2 shows that the Apostolic Fathers relate in the same way as the
New Testament authors to the Old Testament Apocrypha, see Stuhlmacher,
Biblical Theology, 750.
[28] For an overview see SBL Handbook
of Style, 125 26, the entry 8.3.4. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha . An
English translation of the most important pseudepigrapha is found in Old
Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. by James H. Charlesworth. For volume 1, see note 15 above. According to the
subtitle, volume 2 includes: Expansions of the Old Testament and Legends,
Wisdom and Philosophical Literature, Prayers, Psalms and Odes, Fragments of
Lost Judeo-Hellenistic Works.
[29] See Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th
revised edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012) Appendix III. Loci citati
vel allegati, 836 78,
875 76. The corresponding references to the alluded or echoed verses in 1 Enoch
appear throughout in the margins of the Greek text.
[30] Bruk Ayele Asale,
1 Enoch as Christian Scripture: A Study in the Reception and Appropriation
of 1 Enoch in Jude and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahǝdo
Canon (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick, 2020). A synopsis of 1 Enoch 1:9 in
Ethiopic and Greek and Jude 14 15 in Greek is found on page 33.
[31] See, further, Matt 11:14; Luke 1:17. Mal 3:1 is also applied to John the Baptist in Matt 11:10 par. Luke 7:27; Mark 1:2.
[32] Stuhlmacher,
Biblical Theology, 801.
[33] The following presentation depends
heavily on Jostein dna, The Role of Jerusalem in
the Mission of Jesus , in The Identity of Jesus: Nordic Voices, ed.
Samuel Byrskog, Tom Holm n
and Matti Kankaanniemi. WUNT 2.373 (T bingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2014), 161 80. I have surveyed and discussed the Zion tradition more
extensively in my doctoral dissertation, Jesu Kritik am Tempel (1993),
and in one of the monographies based on the doctoral thesis: Jostein dna, Jesu Stellung zum Tempel: Die Tempelaktion und das Tempelwort
als Ausdruck seiner messianischen Sendung. WUNT 2.119 (T bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000).
[34] See further references in Gen 15:7, 18 21; 24:7; 48:21 22; 50:24. The promise of land occurs in combination with the promise of abundant offspring in Gen 13:14 17; 17:1 8; 26:3 4; 28:3 4, 13 14; 35:11 12; 48:4.
[35] The priestly family of Ahimelech
had served in the sanctuary in Nob. See the story about his grandfather,
Ahimelech son of Ahitub, and his father, Abiathar, in 1 Sam 21 22. Abiathar was
the only one of his generation who survived King
Saul s massacre of the inhabitants of Nob (1 Sam 22:19 23).
[36] Zadok played a major role in
securing Solomon at the cost of Adonijah as successor of David at the throne
(see 1 Kings 1 2). 1 Kings 4:4 and 1 Chr 29:22 confirm his continued position
as priest during Solomon s reign. However, from 1 Kings 4:2 it seems that his
son, Azariah, took over the leading priestly position. In 2 Chr 31:10 he is
referred to as the chief priest, respectively as the high priest, and his
belonging to the house of Zadok as a prerequisite for holding this position is
explicitly mentioned. The unique position of the Zadokite priests as high
priests in the post-exilic period is strongly supported by the prophecies of
Ezekiel, according to which they shall serve as high priests in the future
temple because they stayed loyal to God when the rest of the nation went astray
(Ezek 40:46; 43:19; 44:15; 48:11).
[37] In 1 Sam 22:2 the number of David s
mercenaries is estimated as 400 men; according to 1 Sam 27:2 they were 600.
With these men David marched to Jerusalem (2 Sam 5:6), and after conquering it
he named it the city of David (2 Sam 5:9).
[38] After the death of king Solomon the united kingdom of the Israelite tribes was divided into a northern and a southern kingdom. During the period of the divided kingdoms, the northern kingdom was called Israel and the southern kingdom was called Judah.
[39] We have information both in 2 Kings
15:27, 29 30, 37; 16:1 20; Isa 7:1 17 and in Assyrian sources for the events
during the years 733 732 BC.
[40] This positive message about
trusting God s protection of Zion is contrasted in the prophet s famous warning
in Isa 7:9b: If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.
[41] Isa 14:32: The Lord
has founded Zion, and the needy among his people will find refuge in her. Isa
31:5: Like birds hovering overhead, so the Lord
of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it, he will spare
and rescue it.
[42] The statements that the Lord is a
great king over all the earth , respectively, the king of all the earth (Ps
47:3, 8 [ET 47:2, 7]) correspond to the Assyrian titles the great king ( arru rabu) and
the king of the whole earth ( arru ki ati). The claimed location of Zion in the far
north (Ps 48:3 [ET 48:2]) is an appropriation of the traditional idea of the
mountain of the gods in the north, as exemplified in the arrogant utterance of
the Babylonian king in Isa 14:13 14. Zion is the holy mountain that El Eljon has chosen as his abode. No other holy sites or
mountains can match it (Pss 68:16 17 [ET 68:15 16];
76:3, 5 [ET 76:2, 4]).
[43] Quoted from Old Testament
Pseudepigrapha, Vol. 1, 71. This verse belongs to the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 85 90), from ca. 164 BC. The
sheep represent the Israelites and their Lord is God. The house is the temple.
[44] Quoted from Old Testament
Pseudepigrapha, Vol. 2, 53. The
book of Jubilees is from ca. 150 BC. See also Jub
1:29.
[45] Quoted from The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. 2 Volumes, edited by Florentino Garc a Mart nez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (Leiden: Brill; Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 1997/1998), 1251.
[46] In these verses the NRSV has rendered Hebrew perfect tenses with past tenses. Nevertheless, what is recounted in vv. 13 17 are still future events seen from the crossing of the Sea of Reeds.
[47] Quoted from The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 353.
[48] See esp. Songs of the Sabbath Sacrificea [4Q400], and also the reference in the above quoted text 4Q174 to the presence of his holy ones .
[49] This book constitutes the first
part of 1 Enoch, i.e. chapters 1 36. The heavenly temple is described in
14:15 20, and its descent on Zion seems to be implied in chapters 24 26.
[50] The promise to Ezra in 13:36, And
Zion will come and be made manifest to all people, prepared and built, as you
saw the mountain carved out without hands (Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,
Vol. 1, 552), seems (on the background of the fourth vision in 9:26 10:59) to
imply the idea of the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem upon the earth.
[51] It is obvious from 2 Bar 68:5 that
this apocalypse also points to a restoration of Zion: And at that time, after
a short time, Zion will be rebuilt again, and the offerings will be restored,
and the priests will again return to their ministry. And the nations will again
come to honor it (Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,
Vol. 1, 644). Whether or not the new temple is thought of as the descending
heavenly temple, depends on how the passages 4:2 7 and 32:2 4 are interpreted and interconnected.
[52] Ever since I started to work
on my doctoral project in 1984, Jesus relation to the temple in Jerusalem has
been the most central issue in my research. In addition
to the dissertation, the monograph and the article mentioned in note 33 above,
I will add two more publications here: Jostein dna, Jesus
and the Temple , in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus. Four
Volumes. Edited by Tom Holm n and Stanley S. Porter (Leiden:
Brill, 2011), 3:2635 75; Jostein dna, Temple Act , Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels.
Second Edition (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic; Nottingham, England:
Inter-Varsity Press, 2013), 947 52. For the following sections, The temple
saying(s) of Jesus , The temple act and Jesus violent death and the Zion
tradition , I take the freedom to reproduce most of the corresponding sections
in my article, The Role of Jerusalem in the Mission of Jesus , 170 76, with
only minor adjustments.
A good independent
treatment of Jesus and the temple has been offered by my Norwegian colleague,
Sigurd Grindheim, God s Equal: What Can We Know about Jesus
Self-Understanding? LNTS 446
(London: T & T Clark, 2011). See esp. chapter 11, God s New Temple , pp.
205 18.
[53] The Gospel of Thomas belongs to the
group of writings found in The SBL Handbook of Style, entry 8.3.13 New
Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha , 135 37. It contains 114 logia, of
which approximately half have parallels in the New Testament Gospels. Logion 71
runs: Jesus says: I will (destroy this) house, and no one will be able to build
it (again) (except me). The quotation is taken from Kurt Aland, Synopsis
Quattuor Evangeliorum. 15th revised edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelgesellschaft, 1996), 517 46, 537.
[54] See Kurt Paesler, Das Tempelwort Jesu:
Die Traditionen von Tempelzerst rung und Tempelerneuerung im Neuen Testament.
FRLANT 184 (G ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 76 92, 256, 259 60.
[55] See Paesler, Das Tempelwort Jesu,
189 93.
[56] Paesler, Das Tempelwort Jesu,
167 78.
[57] Paesler, Das Tempelwort Jesu,
203 27, esp. 221 25.
[58] The transference of the temple
notion to the church (1 Cor 3:16 17; 2 Cor 6:16; Eph 2:20 22; 1 Pet 2:4 6) as
well as, consequently, the designation of all Christians as priests (1 Pet 2:5,
9; Rev 5:10) and the spiritualisation of sacrifices (Rom 12:1; Heb 13:15 16; 1 Pet 2:5) are coherent with this detachment
from physical sanctuaries as the divine abode.
[59] Mark s charge against those
witnesses who cite the alleged saying of Jesus during the nocturnal
interrogation in the palace of the high priest of giving false testimony
against him (Mark 14:57), does not mean that they simply made up a defamatory
saying and wrongly accused Jesus of having said this. The reference to a saying
of this kind among those who mocked Jesus on the cross in Mark 15:29
presupposes that Jesus uttered the temple saying in public. The
characterisation of the testimonies as false might be a reference to the fact
that they did not comply with the judicial criteria to convict the accused (see
Mark 14:59), and it definitely expresses the
evangelist s opinion that at this point in the conspiracy against him Jesus
adversaries consciously misconstrued his message to compromise and harm him as
much as possible.
[60] Secondarily, after Easter
Mark 14:58 was reinterpreted and the attributes made with hands and not made
with hands were applied to the tradition critical of physical sanctuaries as
abode of the divine: the risen Christ or, rather, the community of the
believers, was then understood to be a substitution as the temple not made
with hands for the man-made Jerusalem temple. The New
Testament references listed in footnote 58 above belong to the post-Easter
era and the exposition of Christology, ecclesiology and soteriology in this
phase of early Christian theology.
Jesus prophecy in
Mark 13:2 was fulfilled approximately forty years later, in AD 70, when Roman
troops invaded Jerusalem and burnt the temple.
[61] I have modified the NRSV
translation of v. 16 in order to obtain a more precise
rendering of the Greek.
[62] I have investigated the archaeological and architectural history of the Herodian temple in detail in Jostein dna, Jerusalemer Tempel und Tempelmarkt im 1. Jahrhundert n.Chr. ADPV 25 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 3 90; and, further, I have subjected the gospel account about the temple act of Jesus to a source- and tradition-critical analysis in dna, Jesu Stellung zum Tempel, 157 238, and discussed the historicity of the incident on pp. 300 33 therein. Shorter presentations in English can be found in Jostein dna, Temple , Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus, ed. Craig A. Evans (New York: Routledge, 2008), 630 34, and in dna, Jesus and the Temple , 2638 47, 2653 54.
[63] There are numerous interpretations of Jesus temple act, of which some ignore the Zion traditions completely and others in which certain aspects of these traditions have a part. I cannot survey the different interpretations here. See dna, Jesu Stellung zum Tempel, 334 87, and dna, Jesus and the Temple , 2654 65.
[64] Irrespective of its setting in Isa
56:3 8 and the original historical context of this text unit, by the first
century AD Isa 56:7 was generally interpreted as an oracle relating to the
eschatological temple (see dna, Jesu Stellung zum Tempel, 276 87).
[65] The money-changers
present at the temple market not only operated currency exchange, the regular
bank service needed when travellers arrived from all of the widespread diaspora
inside and outside the Roman Empire, they also collected the temple tax (see dna, Jerusalemer
Tempel, 96 118). At the time of Jesus, the daily tamid
offering (cf. Exod 29:38 42; Num 28:3 8; Mishna
Tamid) constituted the centre of the collective cult, and together with the
rites and offerings of the annual Day of Atonement (Lev 16) the tamid was considered to be
the fundamental basis for Israel s existence because of its atoning effect.
Because the temple tax gave each Jew a share in the atoning effect, it was
called a ransom (cf. Philo, On the Special Laws 1.77; Who Is the
Heir? 186, and Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra 9a).
[66] And see that you make them [sc.
the utensils for the sanctuary] according to the pattern for them, which is
being shown to you on the mountain.
[67] These aspects of the Zion tradition
are included in the broader presentation of Christology and soteriology in
Hebrews in Part 4.
[68] Based on a lecture series at SALT,
Lutheran Graduate School of Theology, Fianarantsoa,
Madagascar, in December 2009, I have written an article in three parts on The
Revelation to John , published in three issues of the magazine of this institution,
Voice of SALT / Feon Ny SALT / Voix de la SALT:
Part 1 in the issue for January March 2010, Part 2 in the issue for
April September 2010, and Part 3 in the issue for April September 2011. The
following short presentation relies on the section The New Jerusalem
(21:1 22:5) in Part 3 of this article.
[69] Compare this with the earlier
description of the heavenly throne hall in Rev 4:1 5:14, see 4:3.
[70] The Lamb is the most frequent
designation of Christ in Revelation with 28 occurrences (e.g. 21:9, 14, 23, 27;
22:1, 3). It appears the first time in the vision of the heavenly throne hall:
Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the
elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, [ ] the four living
creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb [ ]. They sing a new
song: You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were
slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God the saints from every tribe
and language and people and nation (Rev 5:6, 8, 9).
[71] Stuhlmacher, Biblical Theology, 751.
[72] Isa 29:22 23: (22) Therefore thus says the Lord, who redeemed Abraham, concerning the house of Jacob: No longer shall Jacob be ashamed, no longer shall his face grow pale. (23) For when he sees his children, the work of my hands, in his midst, they will sanctify my name; they will sanctify the Holy One of Jacob, and will stand in awe of the God of Israel.
[73] All verses of the prophecy Jer 31:31 34 are quoted in Heb 8:8 12.
[74] Stuhlmacher,
Biblical Theology, 752.
[75] Origen, First Principles,
preface; quoted from Stuhlmacher, Biblical
Theology, 752.
[76] The following presentation depends
heavily on Jostein dna, Der Psalter als Gebetsbuch Jesu nach der Darstellung
des Markus- und des Matth usevangeliums: Aspekte biblischer Theologie , Theologische
Beitr ge 41 (2010): 384 400, esp. 395 400. (ET of the title of this essay: The Book of
Psalms as Jesus Prayer Book according to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew:
Aspects of Biblical Theology .)
[77] One challenge with the translation of the Psalms into
English is that many of the psalms in English Bibles count the verses in a
different way than in the Hebrew Bible. Many of the Psalms have a heading,
counted as verse 1 in the Hebrew text, and this is followed in many
translations, e.g. in Norwegian and German Bibles. English Bibles, however,
omit the headings from the versification, with the consequence that there is a
displacement in the verse count. In Psalm 22 the heading is To the leader:
according to The Deer of the Dawn. A Psalm of David, registered as verse 1 in
the Hebrew Bible. Consequently, the next statement in the text which is the
proper beginning of the psalm, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? , is
counted as verse 2. However, when the heading is not included in verse count,
the opening cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? , is registered as
verse 1.
[78] Psalm 13 is often referred to as a
paradigmatic individual lament psalm. In this short psalm the typical elements
of lament (with a description of personal suffering and of the enemies), trust
in God (with praise of him) and a promise (of what the psalmist will do when
God has rescued him) are easy to identify.
[79] As can be seen from Psalm 116 as a
paradigmatic example, a thanksgiving psalm presented in the temple on the
occasion when the psalmist returns after having received deliverance includes a
retrospective description of the past misery that the psalmist has suffered.
When a lament psalm and a thanksgiving psalm are fused and combined in one
psalm, as exemplified in Psalm 22 and Psalm 69, the lament psalm is reproduced on the occasion of thanksgiving as the retrospective
element.
[80] See the parallel in Mark 15:24.
[81] See the parallel in Mark 15:29 30.
[82] Other examples are Pss 6:6 (ET 6:5); 30:10 (ET 30:9); 88:12 13 (ET 88:11 12).
[83] See the parallel in Mark 15:39.
[84] See chapter 29 in Stuhlmacher, Biblical Theology, 522 53, on The
Theology and Proclamation of Hebrews .
[85] See the citations in Mark 12:36
(with synoptic parallels in Matt 22:44; Luke 20:42b 43); Acts 2:34; 1 Cor
15:25; Heb 1:13. In addition to these quotations
there are numerous allusions to Ps 110:1 in the New Testament.