Well, a new decade for us all! 'Tis the season for evaluating our pasts and for making goals for the future. In that spirit, I want to present a couple of "Top Ten" lists.
First, here is the Top Ten list of books that I have read over the past decade. It is not the top ten books written in the past decade, but rather ones that I have read. I'm not so big on reading all the new books, I like to read and re-read books that have timeless authority and that give me a larger vision of life, this world, and God's hand in the lives of his people.
So, without further ado:
10. The Rabbit Proof Fence,
Showing posts with label New Testament. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Testament. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Commentary Review
I have been missing from the website for quite some time as I prepared to write a review of a largish commentary. I sent it off a couple of days ago, I hope they will use it as I put rather more time into it than the short length of the review would suggest. Here is what took me so long.
COMMENTARY ON THE NEW TESTAMENT USE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Edited by G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson
Baker Academic (in America), Apollos (in England), 2007
This commentary on the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament is, without a doubt, the most useful reference tool that I have added to my collection since I acquired Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament some years back. Yet it would be a great shame if it were only used as a reference book.
As I read through its careful and scholarly analysis of each use the NT makes of the OT, I became increasingly aware of how very little the NT authors’ claimed that they had any new revelation to offer to the world. Yes, they had Jesus, and he was a new and more clear revelation of God, but as much as a new revelation Jesus seems to be in the NT a new hermeneutic.
Was Jesus a new revelation of God? Yes. The beginning of the letter to the Hebrews emphasizes that, and the whole New Testament seems to expound the statement. But the revelation of God in Christ set about a whole re-reading of the OT. As we consider in detail the utter reliance of the New Testament authors’ on the Old, Jesus continually provides to them a new way to understand all that the Old Testament authors have said. They now have a new lens through which to understand the act of creation (John 1, Romans 1−2, Ephesians, 1 Corinthians 15:45, and a host of others), the calling of Abraham, the slavery and redemption of Israel, etc.
The authors of the NT did not, as OT prophets had, introduce new topics with the phrase “Thus saith the LORD.” Instead, from the Gospels through the letters and Revelation, they quoted the prophets of old and explained their significance in light of the new revelation of God in Christ Jesus. Jesus was their hermeneutic for understanding the Scriptures. Therefore the importance of a work like this commentary can in no way be overstated. If we want to understand the Gospel of Jesus we must understand it in the terms in which it is presented to us and those terms are almost exclusively drawn from the Old Testament.
This prompts the question of the hermeneutical methods that the NT authors used in interpreting the OT. While they each approached Scriptural interpretation somewhat differently, there are a few constants that are worth noting. As has already been stated they read it in the light of the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus.
It is also very significant that they extensively used a typological hermeneutic. Thus the historical events of the Exodus are used throughout the NT not to give a mere illustration of how Christ is saving his people, but to actually build the theological understanding of what Jesus is doing. They can use scripture this way, not because they can proof-text their statements by saying that the Exodus story says what they are saying, but rather because they assume that the God who was at work in the exodus is the same God who is at work in redemption and at work in us. They also assume that this same God will work now in a similar pattern to which he worked then. Paul does not claim that God gave him a whole new revelation describing the salvation that came in Christ. Rather he and the other NT authors built their understanding of this ultimate act of redemption by examining the workings of God’s redemption of his people from Egypt, from Babylon, from the Philistines, and so on.
In doing this Paul and the other NT authors seem to reason that just as a good author will build up to the climax of a story with repeated foreshadowing and variations on a theme, God has been authoring the history of the world and of his people as a building up to the climax of the revelation of his Son.
Interestingly, this very typological mode of interpretation that seems to have been the bedrock of the New Testament’s understanding of history and theology is somewhat out of fashion at present.
One of the principle rules of hermeneutics that has been repeatedly hammered into theology students (especially in a Reformed context) is that we must always ask the question: What did this text mean to its original audience. For example the use of the plural form for God in the first chapter of Genesis should not be taken as a reference to the Trinity because that understanding would presumably have been foreign to its original audience. The New Testament authors however were not willing to follow this rule quite the way it is often taught these days. Examining their uses of the OT I was pleasantly surprised by how very careful they were in most cases in sticking very close to the original context to which they were alluding, generally including faithfulness to the way the texts would have been originally understood. However they emphatically did not allow themselves to be limited by that historical understanding. They worked from the older understanding by reading always through the hermeneutic of the fuller understanding that they had now gained through the recent revelation of God in Christ.
No commentary can be, and this one is not, truly complete. It seems to rely almost exclusively on wording similarities to pick out the NT/OT parallels. Thus stylistic echoes are not treated, even when they are so plain as when Jesus echoed the blessing on the new couple (Be fruitful and multiply. . .) with what is sometimes called the Great Commission (. . . make disciples of all nations. . .). Nevertheless, although we may each be sorry to see some pet echo omitted, there seem few that were missed. Overall this is a masterful and scholarly work that will not be soon surpassed.
This commentary will, I’m afraid, usually be used merely as a reference book in helping pastors to prepare sermons. That is fine in its way, but it can be so much more. It is really a rather thorough examination of how the Bible does, and how we should, understand the Bible.
Edited by G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson
Baker Academic (in America), Apollos (in England), 2007
This commentary on the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament is, without a doubt, the most useful reference tool that I have added to my collection since I acquired Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament some years back. Yet it would be a great shame if it were only used as a reference book.
As I read through its careful and scholarly analysis of each use the NT makes of the OT, I became increasingly aware of how very little the NT authors’ claimed that they had any new revelation to offer to the world. Yes, they had Jesus, and he was a new and more clear revelation of God, but as much as a new revelation Jesus seems to be in the NT a new hermeneutic.
Was Jesus a new revelation of God? Yes. The beginning of the letter to the Hebrews emphasizes that, and the whole New Testament seems to expound the statement. But the revelation of God in Christ set about a whole re-reading of the OT. As we consider in detail the utter reliance of the New Testament authors’ on the Old, Jesus continually provides to them a new way to understand all that the Old Testament authors have said. They now have a new lens through which to understand the act of creation (John 1, Romans 1−2, Ephesians, 1 Corinthians 15:45, and a host of others), the calling of Abraham, the slavery and redemption of Israel, etc.
The authors of the NT did not, as OT prophets had, introduce new topics with the phrase “Thus saith the LORD.” Instead, from the Gospels through the letters and Revelation, they quoted the prophets of old and explained their significance in light of the new revelation of God in Christ Jesus. Jesus was their hermeneutic for understanding the Scriptures. Therefore the importance of a work like this commentary can in no way be overstated. If we want to understand the Gospel of Jesus we must understand it in the terms in which it is presented to us and those terms are almost exclusively drawn from the Old Testament.
This prompts the question of the hermeneutical methods that the NT authors used in interpreting the OT. While they each approached Scriptural interpretation somewhat differently, there are a few constants that are worth noting. As has already been stated they read it in the light of the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus.
It is also very significant that they extensively used a typological hermeneutic. Thus the historical events of the Exodus are used throughout the NT not to give a mere illustration of how Christ is saving his people, but to actually build the theological understanding of what Jesus is doing. They can use scripture this way, not because they can proof-text their statements by saying that the Exodus story says what they are saying, but rather because they assume that the God who was at work in the exodus is the same God who is at work in redemption and at work in us. They also assume that this same God will work now in a similar pattern to which he worked then. Paul does not claim that God gave him a whole new revelation describing the salvation that came in Christ. Rather he and the other NT authors built their understanding of this ultimate act of redemption by examining the workings of God’s redemption of his people from Egypt, from Babylon, from the Philistines, and so on.
In doing this Paul and the other NT authors seem to reason that just as a good author will build up to the climax of a story with repeated foreshadowing and variations on a theme, God has been authoring the history of the world and of his people as a building up to the climax of the revelation of his Son.
Interestingly, this very typological mode of interpretation that seems to have been the bedrock of the New Testament’s understanding of history and theology is somewhat out of fashion at present.
One of the principle rules of hermeneutics that has been repeatedly hammered into theology students (especially in a Reformed context) is that we must always ask the question: What did this text mean to its original audience. For example the use of the plural form for God in the first chapter of Genesis should not be taken as a reference to the Trinity because that understanding would presumably have been foreign to its original audience. The New Testament authors however were not willing to follow this rule quite the way it is often taught these days. Examining their uses of the OT I was pleasantly surprised by how very careful they were in most cases in sticking very close to the original context to which they were alluding, generally including faithfulness to the way the texts would have been originally understood. However they emphatically did not allow themselves to be limited by that historical understanding. They worked from the older understanding by reading always through the hermeneutic of the fuller understanding that they had now gained through the recent revelation of God in Christ.
No commentary can be, and this one is not, truly complete. It seems to rely almost exclusively on wording similarities to pick out the NT/OT parallels. Thus stylistic echoes are not treated, even when they are so plain as when Jesus echoed the blessing on the new couple (Be fruitful and multiply. . .) with what is sometimes called the Great Commission (. . . make disciples of all nations. . .). Nevertheless, although we may each be sorry to see some pet echo omitted, there seem few that were missed. Overall this is a masterful and scholarly work that will not be soon surpassed.
This commentary will, I’m afraid, usually be used merely as a reference book in helping pastors to prepare sermons. That is fine in its way, but it can be so much more. It is really a rather thorough examination of how the Bible does, and how we should, understand the Bible.
Friday, April 18, 2008
NT use of the OT
I grew up rather wary of our American judicial system, leaving decisions on people's guilt or innocence in the hands of a group of "their peers" as the Constitution requires. What makes those peers capable of making such decisions? Have they been educated in sifting evidence? Have they the expertise necessary to come to good decisions? What about all of the passions that get in the way of the logical thinking required in a court room drama? Are peers, that is the average Joe on the street, fit for the job?
Well a few years ago I got to sit on one of those juries and I saw the drama from the inside. We were a group of very average Joes. A professor of music, a postman, a low level medical worker, a pawn shop owner, a woman who ran a limestone mine, etc. Not legal eagles! But two days in the court and three days in deliberations convinced me that every single one of us was intensely interested in coming to the truth and in seeing justice come out. We had very different ideas of that truth and of justice, but we all worked for what we understood. In the debates I saw minds change, light bulbs come on, feelings get hurt, compromises reached and justice was done. As the foreman of the jury, I can vouch that the result was impressively just!
In short, I am much less uneasy about a jury of our peers than I formerly was because I saw how well it worked in practice. It is messy, but I think it is valid.
The analogy stops there.
For years I have been uneasy with the New Testament writer's quoting from the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament rather than from the original Hebrew version. Why did they sometimes quote from this translation, given that there are in fact small, inferential differences at many places between the original Hebrew and Aramaic Bible and the Septuagint translation?
I am reading through the Commentary on the NT use of the OT, edited by Beale and Carson to review it for a journal. (This is why I haven't written here for a while, this book is over 1100 pages.) But I have begun to see that I can put much more faith in the NT authors' scholarship and integrity than I had previously supposed.
Any seminary student in the last 150 years has had to listen to profs explain that the NT authors played fast and loose with the OT text, twisting it (and even misquoting it) to their benefit, whatever suited their need at the time. But that is OK; if the Holy Spirit guided their work, then, even if they missed the point in the original text, at least they have the stamp of HS authority on thier misinterpretation so it is Scripture now.
But as I read through this commentary on each use of the OT in the NT I am coming to vastly different conclusions. The NT authors were very careful scholars; they compared texts with the original; they were very nuanced in their thinking. And I am coming to trust the Septuagint more as a valid and very useful translation. Those seventy Jewish scholars were not Caiaphas! They were faithful true Jewish believers is YHWH and in the coming Messiah. And they were scholars who intricately sifted the evidence before they made their choices on what Greek word to use to translate the Hebrew or Aramaic.
And the NT authors sat in judgement, from their hugely greater perspective of having walked with the promised Messiah, on the Septuagint. They did not quote from it blandly, complacently, as if it were the only version they knew. They used it when useful, yes, but more than that. They used it when it was right.
In Matt 1:26 Matthew quotes from the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7:14. Matthew and the septuagint both call her a virgin, that is a sexually chaste woman. In OT parlance she has never known a man. Well, everybody knows that in the original Isaiah did not quite say that. He said "a young woman (very young but of marriagable age) would conceive and bear. . .".
Why did Matthew use this translation rather than reverting to the more strictly accurate Masoretic Text of the OT? Is the Holy Spirit puting the divine stamp of approval on a mistranslation? True, Matthew was using the Septuagint translation because it fit with the birth of Jesus as he knew it, but much more than that he evidently understood why the seventy scholars, presumably in debate like in a jury's deliberation, ended up going with a Greek word that signified more than the original Hebrew text. It seems that they quite reasonably linked this passage of the birth of a son (which in one way was fulfilled in Isaiah's life, perhaps with the birth of his own son) with the divine son spoken of in Isaiah 9:1-7 (which would require a second and greater fulfilment). Thus the birth, even two hundred years before Jesus' birth, was understood to be a supernatural birth by the translators of the Septuagint. Matthew, in quoting them, is affirming what they had surmised.
When he was less comfortable with their translations he made his own, for example in 4:15-16, or much more often he seems to have taken the Septuagint translation and modified it, usually back toward a more literal rendering of the original text. He was clearly involved in the scholarly work of comparing texts, evaluating subtle inferences, and all the tasks of careful exegesis in multiple languages.
But he was more learned than the fishermen, we will see if John is so careful with his quotes. After all, we have all heard, and I have repeated, that the NT authors were sometimes careless in their quotes. Perhaps by the time I finish this commentary I will know not to say that any more and I will gain confidence in their hermeneutic methods-just as I gained confidence in the jury system-by seeing it in operation.
Well a few years ago I got to sit on one of those juries and I saw the drama from the inside. We were a group of very average Joes. A professor of music, a postman, a low level medical worker, a pawn shop owner, a woman who ran a limestone mine, etc. Not legal eagles! But two days in the court and three days in deliberations convinced me that every single one of us was intensely interested in coming to the truth and in seeing justice come out. We had very different ideas of that truth and of justice, but we all worked for what we understood. In the debates I saw minds change, light bulbs come on, feelings get hurt, compromises reached and justice was done. As the foreman of the jury, I can vouch that the result was impressively just!
In short, I am much less uneasy about a jury of our peers than I formerly was because I saw how well it worked in practice. It is messy, but I think it is valid.
The analogy stops there.
For years I have been uneasy with the New Testament writer's quoting from the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament rather than from the original Hebrew version. Why did they sometimes quote from this translation, given that there are in fact small, inferential differences at many places between the original Hebrew and Aramaic Bible and the Septuagint translation?
I am reading through the Commentary on the NT use of the OT, edited by Beale and Carson to review it for a journal. (This is why I haven't written here for a while, this book is over 1100 pages.) But I have begun to see that I can put much more faith in the NT authors' scholarship and integrity than I had previously supposed.
Any seminary student in the last 150 years has had to listen to profs explain that the NT authors played fast and loose with the OT text, twisting it (and even misquoting it) to their benefit, whatever suited their need at the time. But that is OK; if the Holy Spirit guided their work, then, even if they missed the point in the original text, at least they have the stamp of HS authority on thier misinterpretation so it is Scripture now.
But as I read through this commentary on each use of the OT in the NT I am coming to vastly different conclusions. The NT authors were very careful scholars; they compared texts with the original; they were very nuanced in their thinking. And I am coming to trust the Septuagint more as a valid and very useful translation. Those seventy Jewish scholars were not Caiaphas! They were faithful true Jewish believers is YHWH and in the coming Messiah. And they were scholars who intricately sifted the evidence before they made their choices on what Greek word to use to translate the Hebrew or Aramaic.
And the NT authors sat in judgement, from their hugely greater perspective of having walked with the promised Messiah, on the Septuagint. They did not quote from it blandly, complacently, as if it were the only version they knew. They used it when useful, yes, but more than that. They used it when it was right.
In Matt 1:26 Matthew quotes from the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7:14. Matthew and the septuagint both call her a virgin, that is a sexually chaste woman. In OT parlance she has never known a man. Well, everybody knows that in the original Isaiah did not quite say that. He said "a young woman (very young but of marriagable age) would conceive and bear. . .".
Why did Matthew use this translation rather than reverting to the more strictly accurate Masoretic Text of the OT? Is the Holy Spirit puting the divine stamp of approval on a mistranslation? True, Matthew was using the Septuagint translation because it fit with the birth of Jesus as he knew it, but much more than that he evidently understood why the seventy scholars, presumably in debate like in a jury's deliberation, ended up going with a Greek word that signified more than the original Hebrew text. It seems that they quite reasonably linked this passage of the birth of a son (which in one way was fulfilled in Isaiah's life, perhaps with the birth of his own son) with the divine son spoken of in Isaiah 9:1-7 (which would require a second and greater fulfilment). Thus the birth, even two hundred years before Jesus' birth, was understood to be a supernatural birth by the translators of the Septuagint. Matthew, in quoting them, is affirming what they had surmised.
When he was less comfortable with their translations he made his own, for example in 4:15-16, or much more often he seems to have taken the Septuagint translation and modified it, usually back toward a more literal rendering of the original text. He was clearly involved in the scholarly work of comparing texts, evaluating subtle inferences, and all the tasks of careful exegesis in multiple languages.
But he was more learned than the fishermen, we will see if John is so careful with his quotes. After all, we have all heard, and I have repeated, that the NT authors were sometimes careless in their quotes. Perhaps by the time I finish this commentary I will know not to say that any more and I will gain confidence in their hermeneutic methods-just as I gained confidence in the jury system-by seeing it in operation.
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