Category: Bible History

Did God Punish Jesus on the Cross?

Penal substitution is a theory of the atonement that says God literally punished Jesus on the Cross.

This theory is problematic because one cannot justly punish an innocent person, and Jesus was innocent. Therefore, for God to literally punish him would be unjust.

In a previous post, I discussed how this view relates to other theories of the atonement. In this post, we’ll take a look at a proposed basis in Scripture for penal substitution.

 

A Scriptural Basis?

Advocates of penal substitution frequently appeal to the Suffering Servant described in Isaiah 52 and 53.

The Suffering Servant passage is one of a number of places in Isaiah that describes a significant servant of God, and it seems this passage offers the best chance of providing a basis for penal substitution.

From the beginning, Christians have understood this passage as a messianic prophecy, and the New Testament authors apply various parts of it to Jesus (cf. Matt. 8:17, Luke 22:37, John 12:38, Acts 8:32-33, Rom. 8:36, 10:16, 1 Pet. 2:24-25).

This makes it clear that the Suffering Servant passage is a messianic prophecy, but it doesn’t mean that it applies only to Christ.

 

The Original Suffering servant

As I discuss in another post, the literal sense of many Old Testament prophecies applies to something during or near the lifetime of the original prophet, and they then have a further fulfillment in Christ as part of the spiritual sense.

We therefore need to examine the Suffering Servant passage in its original context first, before proceeding to apply it to Christ, and this we did in a post on the original Suffering Servant.

There we explored several possibilities about who the original Suffering Servant may have been. Proposals have included the prophet himself, one of the Gentile leaders who supported the return of the Jewish people to their land, and the Jewish governor Zerubbabel, who oversaw efforts to rebuild the temple.

However, at least eight passages in Isaiah (41:8-9, 44:1-2, 21 [2 references], 45:4, 48:20, and 49:3) identify the whole nation of Israel as God’s servant, and so we focused primarily on the idea that Israel was the original Suffering Servant.

Jesus would then recapitulate and go beyond what happened to Israel the same way in the Suffering Servant passage that he did the prophetic statement found in Hosea 11:1, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (cf. Matt. 2:14-15).

 

The Issue of Language

In our post on theories of the atonement, I noted that it’s possible to use penal substitution language for what happened on the Cross—i.e., language that makes it sound as if God punished Jesus—as long as this language isn’t meant in a fully literal sense.

The latter would require God to commit the unjust act of punishing an innocent.

But if the language is being used in a non-literal or accommodated sense—one that doesn’t require punishment in the full, ordinary sense—then it can be used.

We even saw how Scripture sometimes uses punishment language in such senses.

This means that, in looking at Isaiah 52-53, we need to be sensitive to how the passage uses language. So let’s consider that issue . . .

 

How Does the Suffering Servant Passage Use Language?

It is clear that there is a great deal of non-literal language present in the text:

  • If the corporate interpretation of the Servant as Israel is correct then we have a metaphor where a whole nation is depicted as a single individual.
  • We have inanimate things (e.g., the hill Zion, the “waste places of Jerusalem”) and composite things (e.g., Jerusalem) urged to do things they would not be literally capable of doing (Isa. 52:1-2, 9).
  • The watchmen are said to “see the return of the Lord to Zion”—a literally invisible and metaphorical event (Isa. 52:8).
  • The Lord’s invisible and metaphorical arm has been shown to the Gentiles (Isa. 52:10, 53:1).
  • The ends of the earth are said to “see” the Lord’s salvation (Isa. 52:10).
  • The Lord is said to “go before” the captives and to “be your rear guard” (Isa. 52:12).
  • The Servant is said to be “exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high” (Isa. 52:13).
  • The Servant’s appearance (if it’s Israel) is said to be extremely disfigured (Isa. 52:14, 53:2).
  • The Servant is compared to “a young plant” and “a root out of dry ground” (Isa. 53:2).
  • The Servant is said to have carried griefs, sorrows, iniquities, and sin as if they were physical objects (Isa. 53:4, 11, 12).
  • God is imagined to have physically hit (“stricken, smitten,” “bruised”) the Servant (Isa. 53:4, 8, 10).
  • The Servant is said to have been physically wounded, bruised, and lashed (Isa. 53:5), which would be a non-literal description of Israel’s sufferings if the Servant is a collective entity.
  • The human speakers are compared to wandering sheep (Isa. 53:6).
  • God is said to have laid iniquity on the Servant, as if it were a physical object (Isa. 53:6).
  • The Servant is compared to a lamb and a sheep (Isa. 53:7).
  • The Servant—whether it is Israel or a literal individual—experiences a metaphorical death and burial (Isa. 53:8-9).
  • The Servant is depicted as an offering for sin—i.e., as a sacrificial animal (Isa. 53:10).
  • The will of the Lord is said to prosper in the Servant’s “hand” (Isa. 53:10).
  • The Servant is said to “see” the “travail of his soul” (Isa. 53:11).
  • The Servant is said to divide “a portion with the great” and “divide the spoil with the strong” (Isa. 53:12).
  • The Servant is said to have “poured out his soul to death,” as if the soul were a liquid and death were a container or location (Isa. 53:12).

As with many passages in the prophets, this one is filled with non-literal language.

Underlying all of this language is the concept that God has allowed the Servant to suffer, and from this he has brought about good for Israel, in its restoration to the land, and for the speakers, who have received spiritual benefits through the Servant and, in particular, the Servant’s knowledge of the Lord.

 

Applying the Text to Jesus

In Matthew’s Gospel, we see the application of Hosea 11:1 (“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”) applied to Jesus, who recapitulates Israel’s journey to and return from Egypt (Matt. 2:14-15).

If the Servant of Isaiah 52-53 is meant to be Israel in the literal sense of the text then the New Testament use of these chapters for Jesus involves the same kind of application, whereby Jesus recapitulates something Israel initially experienced.

On the other hand, if the Servant was originally meant to be a single, historical individual, this also fits with the way the New Testament applies Old Testament precedents to Jesus, for he is also depicted as the new Moses and the new David.

Either way, being aware of the amount of non-literal language in Isaiah 52-53 means that we must be careful in how literally we take this language in making the application to Jesus.

Some elements will apply to Jesus in a more literal way than they did to the original Servant:

  • Jesus is a sin offering in a more literal way than the original Servant was.
  • Jesus died in a fully literal way, unlike the Servant.

However, other elements will be less literal:

  • Jesus did not literally have offspring (children), and so the statement that the Servant “shall see his offspring” (Isa. 53:10) must be taken in a less literal, spiritual sense (e.g., as applying to Christians).
  • Jesus did not “divide the spoil with the strong” (Isa. 53:12) in the same sense as the Servant. Ordinarily, this would refer to the spoils of a battle or, at least, to material prosperity, but Jesus was poor and remained poor.

Other elements of the text will remain equally non-literal, even if they apply to Jesus in a different way:

  • Jesus does not literally carry griefs, sorrows, iniquities, and sin as if they were physical objects (Isa. 53:4, 11, 12).
  • God does not literally lay iniquity on Jesus, as if it were a physical object (Isa. 53:6).

We therefore must pay close attention to the way in which we understand the text and how it applies to Jesus.

 

Penal Substitution?

If there is to be a basis for penal substitution in this text, it will be found in the way the passage describes God’s interaction with the Servant: What does the text say God does to the Servant?

The first passage we need to look at is Isaiah 53:4-5, which reads:

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.

We have already dealt with the non-literal nature of the language about Jesus bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows.

The next line says that the speakers “esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.” Read in the natural way, this means that they thought God had done these things to the Servant, on account of the Servant’s sins (that’s why God normally strikes someone in Old Testament thought), but the reality was different, as revealed in the next line.

Instead, the Servant “was wounded for our transgressions” and “bruised for our iniquities.” The use of the passive voice here could mean that God wounded and bruised the Servant, but if so, it isn’t meant literally.

God did not physically harm Jesus. His wounds and bruises were caused by the Romans. God allowed this to happen as part of his plan, but he himself didn’t do these things. We thus don’t have a basis for saying that God literally punished Jesus.

That idea is further undermined by the fact that the text explicitly states it was on account of our sins—not the Servant’s—that these things happened.

If God allows something bad to happened to one person despite his innocence, that’s an indicator that the innocent person was not being punished in any literal sense of the word.

What about the “chastisement” the Servant receives? The Hebrew word used here, musar, means “discipline,” “chastening,” or “correction,” but the context again indicates a non-literal use. The fact Jesus was innocent meant he wasn’t being disciplined, chastened, or corrected in any literal sense.

Moving forward in the text, verse 6 says that God “laid on him the iniquity of us all.” This is more of the same non-literal language depicting Jesus as carrying our sins as if they were physical objects.

Verse 7 says “he was oppressed, and he was afflicted,” but—again—it was the Romans that literally did these things. God only allowed them as part of his plan.

Verse 8 says he was “cut off out of the land of the living” and “stricken”—things that were again literally accomplished by the Romans—with the prophet noting the reason God allowed them was as part of his plan for dealing with “the transgression of my people.”

Finally, verses 9 and 10 note the ironic contrast:

Although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; he has put him to grief.

The second part of this might be more literally translated that it was God’s will to “crush” him and that he has “made him sick.” If the latter translation is correct (and there is doubt about this), then it would not apply to Jesus in a literal way, because we have no indication he was sick.

However that may be, any literal bruising/crushing that was done to Jesus was performed by the Romans, with God only allowing it as part of his plan.

And significantly, we again have an affirmation of the Servant’s innocence paired with a statement about what God “did” to the Servant. Taking these statements together, the idea of punishment in the literal sense is thereby undermined.

I therefore conclude that the Suffering Servant passage does not give us a basis for saying that God literally punished Jesus on the Cross.

It may use language that—taken out of its historical and literary context—could suggest this, but the only literal injuries that were done to Jesus were performed by the Romans, not God, and the text goes out of its way to stress the innocence of the Servant and, by extension, Jesus.

We thus don’t have in this passage a solid basis for the idea of penal substitution—as opposed to other substitutionary theories of the atonement.

What Does “Atonement” Mean—And How Did Jesus Do It?

Most basic theological terms come from Greek or Latin, but one sprang from English: atonement.

Here, the –ment suffix is used to refer to the result of something, like amazement is the result of something that amazes. Atonement, therefore, is the result of an action that atones.

So where does “atone” come from? It’s a contraction of the phrase “at one.” By making atonement for mankind, Jesus made it so that God and man are no longer separated. They are now “at one”—or reconciled with each other.

If we were to pick a contemporary word that expresses the same idea as atonement, the word reconciliation would be a good choice.

 

How Did Jesus Atone for Us?

Scripture uses a number of images to explain what Jesus did for us. This is not surprising. Given the infinite richness of the divine mystery, it would be surprising if a single image could fully convey what he did on our behalf.

For example, one image that Jesus himself uses is that of a ransom. He states that he came “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

However, the primary image that the New Testament uses is sacrifice: Jesus’ death on the Cross served as a sacrifice to reconcile us with God.

Thus Paul states that “Christ, our paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5:7), and Hebrew says that “when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God” (Heb. 10:12).

Biblically, the primary theory of the atonement is one of sacrifice.

However, precisely because Christ’s death on the Cross did not need to be repeated, Christians discontinued the practice of animal sacrifices, which were otherwise practiced everywhere among Jews and pagans.

A consequence of this was that Christians began to lose an intuitive understanding of animal sacrifices, and so they began to seek other ways of explaining what Jesus did for us.

Over the centuries, many alternative “theories of the atonement” have been proposed, and many of them contain elements of truth. Just as the New Testament uses different images to convey what Jesus did, different theories of the atonement can often be understood in harmony with each other.

 

Christ Our Substitute

Some theories of the atonement involve the concept of substitution. It is the idea that, by dying on the Cross, Jesus in some sense substituted for us: He did something we otherwise would have had to do for ourselves (and were incapable of doing).

Sometimes, the substitution idea is referred to using the term vicarious, which means the same thing. A vicar (Latin, vicarius) is a substitute.

The question is in what way did Jesus substitute for us?

One theory, proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury, is that he satisfied God’s justice by restoring the honor of God, which man has offended by sin.

Since on this view Christ satisfied God on our behalf (i.e., vicariously), theories of this nature are sometimes called vicarious satisfaction theories.

 

A Problem Case?

Not all theories of the atonement are free from problems. One theory that has recently come in for criticism is known as penal substitution. This idea was proposed by John Calvin, and the theory has been common in Calvinist circles.

Penal substitution can be conceived of as one type of vicarious satisfaction theory, but it needs to be distinguished from the others.

What makes it distinct is that it sees Christ as satisfying God by being punished on our behalf.

At least if we take the idea of punishment literally, penal substitution seems to propose an injustice on God’s part.

One cannot justly punish an innocent person, and since Jesus was an innocent—for “he committed no sin; no guile was found on his lips” (1 Peter 2:22)—God could not justly punish him.

I don’t have a document of the Church’s Magisterium that weighs in on this idea one way or another, but along with many others I find the argument against penal substitution—understood literally—to be convincing.

 

Non-Literal Language

Although I don’t see how God could literally punish Jesus on the Cross, this doesn’t mean one could never use punishment language in connection with the atonement.

There’s a great deal of flexibility in language, and metaphor abounds when we are dealing with spiritual realities, including the atonement.

Thus when Jesus describes what he did for us as a “ransom” (Greek, lutron = “price of release,” “ransom payment”), he didn’t mean that he literally was going to offer a sum of money on our behalf. He’s using a metaphor, as is evident from the fact that he says he will “give his life as a ransom for many.”

Since Christ suffered on our behalf, and punishment involves suffering, I think it is possible to use punishment language in connection with the Cross—as long as one does not literally understand God to be committing the unjust act of punishing the all-innocent Jesus.

In that case, the punishment language would have to be understood in a non-literal or accommodated way.

Thus Aquinas acknowledges that one can speak of a person voluntarily taking on the “punishment” of another, as when one voluntarily pays a fine on someone’s behalf, but this is only punishment in a qualified sense.

It isn’t punishment in the full, normal sense because the person who pays the fine is innocent, and so paying the fine voluntarily doesn’t have a penal character:

If we speak of that satisfactory punishment, which one takes upon oneself voluntarily, one may bear another’s punishment, in so far as they are, in some way, one, as stated above (Article 7). If, however, we speak of punishment inflicted on account of sin, inasmuch as it is penal, then each one is punished for his own sin only, because the sinful act is something personal (ST I-II:87:8).

 

Non-Literal Punishment Language in the Bible

It is important to note that punishment language is sometimes used in non-literal or accommodated ways, because Scripture sometimes does so. Consider this passage:

The Lord is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation (Num. 14:18; cf. Exod. 20:5, 34:6-7, Deut. 5:9; Jer. 32:18).

Taken without any qualification, this could be understood to mean that God punishes the descendants of sinners down to the third and fourth generation, even if they are innocents.

That would be unjust, and Ezekiel has an extended discussion in which he points out that God will not punish children for what their fathers have done (Ezek. 18:1-30), saying:

The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself (Ezek. 18:20).

Passages that seem to suggest otherwise must therefore be understood in a different sense.

A clue to that sense is found in Exodus 20:5 and Deuteronomy 5:9, which state that God will visit “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me”—i.e., the children will be punished if they follow in the footsteps of their fathers in opposing God, but otherwise they will not.

Any negative consequences children experience because of the actions of their parents will thus not have the character of punishment—unless the children reaffirm and repeat the sins of their ancestors.

Thus the Israelites whose sin of idolatry led to the Babylonian Exile experienced the Exile as a punishment in the proper sense. However, the righteous of Israel who were taken into Exile, as well as innocent children born in Exile, were not being punished for the sins of others, though they did experience negative consequences as a result of others’ actions.

What can we learn about divine punishment and the atonement Jesus made for us? That will be the subject of our next post.

The Original Suffering Servant

Isaiah 52 and 53 famously describe a mysterious figure that scholars have dubbed the “Suffering Servant.”

The parallels between the Servant and Jesus are striking, and the New Testament authors see Jesus as fulfilling the role of the Suffering Servant—as have Christians ever since.

The Suffering Servant passage is a case of genuine messianic prophecy. However, prophecy often works on more than one level.

As we covered in a previous post, various prophecies have a fulfillment in the Old Testament itself, and then a second, additional fulfillment in Jesus.

Often the first fulfillment is found in the original, literal sense of the text, and the fulfillment in Christ belongs to its greater, spiritual sense.

This raises a question: Did the Suffering Servant passage have a fulfillment in the Old Testament era? Was there an original Suffering Servant who foreshadowed Jesus? If so, who was this Servant?

Let’s take a look at Isaiah 52 and 53 and see what they might reveal . . .

 

The Suffering Servant in Context

Much of the book of Isaiah deals with the Babylonian Exile, and Isaiah 52 begins with a word of encouragement for the Jewish captives who are experiencing the Exile.

This word is initially addressed to Jerusalem itself, which is captive and filled with the uncircumcised and the unclean. God indicates that this situation will end (Isa. 52:1-2). He will turn again to his people and deliver them (Isa. 52:6).

We then read the famous statement, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings” (Isa. 52:7). In its original context, this statement has to do with the end of the Babylonian Exile.

The Lord is thus returning to Zion, and “the waste places of Jerusalem” are to rejoice “for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations” that have oppressed them (Isa. 52:7-10).

Consequently, the Jewish captives in Babylon are told, “Depart, depart, go out from there, touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of her, purify yourselves, you who bear the vessels of the Lord. . . . for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard” (Isa. 52:11-12).

 

“Behold, My Servant”

At this point the Servant enters the narrative, and we are told, “Behold, my servant shall prosper, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high” (Isa. 52:13).

In our previous post, we looked at the different “servants” of the Lord identified in Isaiah.

In the present context, at the end of the Babylonian Exile, who is the Servant?

Various proposals have been made, including individuals such as:

  • Isaiah himself, or the author of this section of Isaiah (sometimes called Deutero-Isaiah)—note that Isaiah is called God’s servant in Isaiah 20:2.
  • One of the rulers who supported the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its temple (Cyrus, Darius, or Artaxerxes)—note that Cyrus is called God’s “shepherd” in Isaiah 44:28 and his “anointed” or “messiah” in Isaiah 45:1.
  • The post-Exilic Jewish governor Zerubbabel
  • Another significant individual from this period

These interpretations are possible, but a view that deserves special consideration is that the entire nation of Israel may be the Servant here:

  • Isaiah explicitly identifies Israel as God’s servant at least eight times. A typical example is in Isaiah 41:8, which speaks of “you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen.”
  • Isaiah has identified Israel as God’s servant quite recently, throughout chapters 41-49 (cf. 41:8-9, 44:1-2, 21 [2 references], 45:4, 48:20, and 49:3).
  • The subject under discussion in chapter 52 is the return of Israel to its land.
  • It is common in the Old Testament for an entire nation to be spoken of as if it is a single man, based on the way patriarchs represented an entire people.

This is also a common interpretation of the Servant in Jewish circles.

Therefore, let’s explore the text on the theory that its literal sense originally envisioned the Servant as Israel and then see what we can make of it.

 

God Testifies to the Suffering Servant

Isaiah 52:13-15, God himself speaks concerning the Servant. In v. 13, he states that the servant “shall prosper” and “be exalted and lifted up” and “shall be very high.” This would correspond to the much improved state of God’s people as he joyously restores them to their land to rebuild Jerusalem and its temple.

In verse 14, we have a description of the way in which the Servant formerly appeared: “many were astonished at him—his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men.” This would correspond to the disfigured state of God’s people in exile, after being conquered by their enemies.

But now in verse 15 the nation’s miraculous restoration will provoke a different kind of amazement, so the Servant shall “startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him.” The nations have not have had the benefit of Isaiah’s prophecies, so “that which has not been told them they shall see, and that which they have not heard they shall understand” as God’s people are brought back to their land.

 

Others Begin to Speak

In Isaiah 53:1, the speaker shifts from God to a group of people, who are clearly here on earth. They are likely to be identified either as (a) God’s people, who have heard the prophecies of Isaiah, or (b) the nations, who are only just now learning of them as the nation is restored. They ask:

Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? (v. 1)

Isaiah 52:10 said that the arm of the Lord had been revealed “before the eyes of all the nations,” suggesting that they are the same group that “has believed what we have heard”—in other words, the Gentiles, who have been astonished by the miraculous fall and restoration of God’s people, though they have learned about God’s plan only now (Isa. 52: 15).

 

The Speakers Amazed at the Suffering Servant

The resulting astonishment focuses on the figure of the Servant. The background for the astonishment is provided in verses 2 and 3.

As a minor nation among the great powers of the Ancient Near East, Israel would have seen to have grown up before God “like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground,” and from their perspective, Israel would have had “no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2).

Consequently, Israel “was despised and rejected” by its neighbors. Israel was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isa. 53:3).

But now, beginning in verse 4, comes the astonishing part. In the humiliation of his people’s defeat and Exile, God has done something extraordinary: He has treated Israel as a sin offering, for “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Yet that is not how it initially appeared to the Gentiles, for “we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted” (Isa. 53:4).

The reality, however, was different: Israel “was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).

The Gentiles then acknowledge their guilt, for “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way,” but the Lord has made atonement for them using his people as a sin offering, for “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6).

As a minor power in the Ancient Near East, God’s people were no match for the greater nations they faced. Their powerlessness before them is compared to the powerlessness of a sheep: “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb,” Israel “opened not his mouth” (Isa. 53:7).

Consequently, by the “oppression and judgment” of the Gentiles, Israel “was taken away” from his land, resulting in a metaphorical death as a people, for in the Exile, Israel “was cut off out of the land of the living” where God had planted them.

In this experience Israel was “stricken for the transgressions of my people” (Isa. 53:8). Although the phrase “my people” is often used by God, the speaker here is a chorus of Gentiles, and so it would mean that Israel suffered—in keeping with its role as a sin offering—for the sins of the Gentiles.

Having been taken from the Promised Land—the land of the living—Israel is buried in Exile, among the Gentiles, so that “they made his grave with the wicked,” and because of the Gentiles’ rich, opulent rulers, Israel was “with a rich man in his death.”

This experience occurred despite the fact that to the Gentiles Israel “had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth” toward them (Isa. 53:9). They were the aggressors toward God’s people, not the reverse.

All this happened because “it was the will of the Lord to bruise him” and “he has put him to grief” so that he becomes “an offering for sin.”

Yet now that the time of Israel’s restoration has come, “he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand” (Isa. 53:10). God’s people can thus look forward to new generations being born that will have long and prosperous days.

 

God Has the Final Word

The Lord begins speaking again by verse 11. As a result of his restoration, Israel “shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11a)

Further, Israel’s knowledge of the Lord and his righteous ways will now benefit the Gentiles with whom they have come in contact, for “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous.”

As Isaiah elsewhere notes, the return from Exile would bring many Gentiles who would come to worship the Lord and be “his servants” (Isa. 56:6).

Thus by the experience of Exile and the consequent enlightening of the Gentiles, Israel would “bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11b). Consequently, God declares that in restoring Israel:

I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isa. 53:12).

 

Evaluating This Interpretation

How well does this interpretation of Isaiah 52 and 53 hold up?

It’s striking that the passage would speak of Israel and its sufferings as involving a sin offering on behalf of the nations. This type of language is not used elsewhere in the Old Testament, either for Israel or others, which is one of the things that makes it such a striking case of messianic prophecy.

However, the passage also contains points that in their literal sense do not point directly to Jesus. The reference to the Servant seeing “his offspring” fits the restored Israel well, for there would be new generations born in the land. However, Jesus did not literally have offspring (children), and so this element must be spiritualized when the passage is applied to him.

If we focus on the sin offering aspect of the text, it is clear that God did not use Israel as a sin offering the fashion he did Jesus, who dealt with sin in the full and final way. However, we can see how God used Israel and its sufferings to bring spiritual benefits to the Gentiles with whom the Exile brought it into contact.

This is seen in the reference to the Servant’s knowledge of the Lord and his will, so that “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous.”

The result of this is then seen in Isaiah’s references to Gentiles coming to worship the God of Israel, keeping his sabbath, etc. (Isa. 56:6)—a phenomenon we know happened in the pre-Christian period. This is why Isaiah understands the restored temple as “a house of prayer for all the nations” (Isa. 56:7), and it is why the temple had an outer court—known as the Court of the Gentiles—that was specifically designated as a place for Gentiles to pray.

We also see the pattern in the Bible of God treating some individuals more kindly than he otherwise would because of a person who pleased him. Thus God treats Solomon more kindly than Solomon’s sins deserved because David had pleased him (1 Kings 11:31-32). Similarly, in the New Testament, St. Paul states that even Jews who opposed the gospel and became “enemies of God” are nevertheless beloved on account of the patriarchs, who had pleased God (Rom. 11:28).

We thus may understand that God would treat Gentiles more gently than their sins otherwise deserved for the sake of Israel, or at least the righteous of Israel, thus allowing them to be depicted metaphorically as a sin offering.

This metaphor may ultimately rest in the promise given to Abraham that he would become a blessing to all nations (Gen. 12:3; cf. Gal. 3:8).

These same themes would then be fulfilled in an even greater way through Jesus.

 

Individualistic Interpretations?

We have just explored Isaiah 52 and 53 in light of the idea that the literal sense of the text envisioned Israel as the original Servant of the Lord. We thus looked at a corporate interpretation, with the whole nation pictured as a single Servant, as in other passages of Isaiah.

However, individualistic interpretations are also possible. In other words, the literal sense of the text might have envisioned a single person—such as the prophet himself, one of the Gentile rulers, or the Jewish governor Zerubbabel—as the Servant.

In that case, the relevant passages would deal not with the travails of the whole nation but of the individual in question and the role his sufferings played in the restoration of God’s people to their land (the subject introduced in chapter 52).

Some of the details of the interpretation would change: Instead of it being Gentile speakers throughout the amazement section, the speakers might include Jews, and it might be their sins that the Servant metaphorically bore.

However, the fundamental message would remain the same: God used the sufferings of the Servant to bring about benefits, including spiritual benefits, for others, and the sufferings of the Servant were so extreme that he experienced a metaphorical death.

However, eventually he would be restored by the Lord so he could “see his offspring” and “prolong his days” (Isa. 53:10), so he could “see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11), and so he could receive “a portion with the great” and “divide the spoil with the strong” (Isa. 53:12).

In coming posts, we will look at how the Suffering Servant passage relates more specifically to Christ and the atonement he performed on the Cross.

The Servant(s) of God in Isaiah

The New Testament quotes three Old Testament books more than any others: Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Isaiah.

The latter is quoted, in particular, because it contains messianic prophecies that point to Jesus, and the New Testament authors record how he fulfilled them.

As Christians, we are so familiar with these passages and how the New Testament uses them that we assume they are only about Jesus:

  • “Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son and his name shall be called Emmanuel” (Isa. 7:14)? That’s Jesus.
  • “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’” (Isa. 9:6)? Definitely Jesus.
  • “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5). Jesus again.

All of these are messianic prophecies, and Jesus did fulfill them.

But the biblical concept of fulfillment is richer than we sometimes imagine.

 

Prophecy in the Bible

The biblical authors recognized Scripture as operating on multiple levels. For example, Matthew interprets the Holy Family’s flight to and return from Egypt as a fulfillment of the prophetic statement, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

But in its original context, it is obvious the “son” of God being discussed is Israel, for the full verse reads: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt, I called my son” (Hos. 11:1).

Matthew understood this. He had read the first half of the verse and knew that, on the primary, literal level, the statement applied to the nation of Israel. But he recognized that on another level it applied to Christ as the divine Son who recapitulates and fulfills the aspirations of Israel.

In the same way, it is obvious in Isaiah that on the primary, literal level the prophecy of Immanuel applied to the time of King Ahaz (732-716 B.C.). At this point, Syria had forged a military alliance with the northern kingdom of Israel that threatened to conquer Jerusalem (Isa. 7:1-2). God sent Isaiah to reassure Ahaz the alliance would not succeed (Isa. 7:3-9) and told him to name a sign that God would give him as proof (Isa. 7:10-11).

Ahaz refused to name a sign (Isa. 7:12), so God declared one: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. . . . For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted” (Isa. 7:14-16).

For this sign to be meaningful to Ahaz, it would have to be fulfilled in his own day—indeed, very quickly. It therefore points, on the primary, literal level, to a child conceived at that time (perhaps Ahaz’s son, the future King Hezekiah).

Like the other New Testament authors, Matthew recognized the biblical text as having multiple dimensions, so the prophecy was not only fulfilled in Ahaz’s day but also pointed to Christ as “Immanuel” (Hebrew, “God with us”).

 

The Literal and Spiritual Senses of the Text

In the Christian age, a way of classifying the different levels on which Scripture works was developed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:

According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church (CCC 115).

It goes on to explain the literal sense:

The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I:1:10 ad 1) (CCC 116).

Because the literal sense is the foundation of all the other senses, we need to establish it before looking at additional meanings found within the spiritual sense of the text.

The rules of exegesis (interpretation) require us to establish the literal sense by asking what a text meant in its original context—what the biblical author was trying to communicate to his audience.

Thus we discover that, in Hosea 11:1, the son of God in the literal sense of the passage was Israel, but the spiritual sense of the text includes Jesus as the ultimate Son of God.

Similarly, we discover that in Isaiah 7:14, the son to be named Immanuel was, in the literal sense of the text, a child born in Ahaz’s day, but the spiritual sense includes a reference to Jesus as the greater Immanuel or “God with us.”

 

Isaiah 53

A number of New Testament passages focus on Isaiah 53, which describes a figure known as the Servant of the Lord (or, in some scholarly publications, the Servant of Yahweh).

The identity of this figure is not immediately obvious from reading the text of Isaiah 53, as the encounter that Philip had with the Ethiopian eunuch makes clear:

Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the scripture which he was reading was this:

“As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is dumb, so he opens not his mouth.

“In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken up from the earth” [cf. Isa. 53:7-8].

And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, pray, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus (Acts 8:29-35).

Philip thus correctly identified this text points to Jesus, at least in its spiritual sense. But for a complete understanding of it, we still need to ask what its literal sense was and whether it may have pointed to someone or something in addition to Jesus.

 

Servants in Isaiah

The Hebrew word for “servant” used in the key passages of Isaiah is ‘ebed. This word appears 40 times in the book, in 36 verses.

In some cases, it refers to the servants of human beings:

  • Isa. 14:2 refers to unnamed foreigners who will become the servants of Israel.
  • Isa. 24:2 refers to the slaves of human masters.
  • Isa. 36:9 and 37:24 refer to servants/subjects of the king of Assyria
  • Isa. 36:11 has several figures referring to themselves politely as “your servants” when talking with an Assyrian official
  • Isa. 37:5 refers to the servants/subjects of King Hezekiah of Judah
  • Isa. 49:7 refers to an unnamed, despised figure who is “the servant of rulers”—i.e., a subject of foreign leaders

This last servant is also likely one of the figures described as a “servant” of the Lord, which brings us to the category we are primarily interested in: those who serve God.

Many of the uses of ‘ebed in Isaiah are in the plural and refer to God’s servants collectively. This theme emerges in chapter 54 and is especially prominent in the final four chapters of the book:

  • In such passages, the servants of God seem to refer to the righteous of Israel (Isa. 54:17, 65:8, 13-15, 66:14).
  • They are expressly identified with “the tribes of your heritage” in Isa. 63:17, and with descendants of Jacob and Judah inIsa. 65:9.
  • However, Isa. 56:6 makes it clear that they also can include foreigners who come to worship God and thus become “his servants.”

We thus see that in Isaiah God actually has many servants.

 

Individual Servants

Not all uses of ‘ebed are in the plural, and there remain 22 uses which speak of individual servants of the Lord. Four of them are named:

  • The first to be named is Isaiah himself. Isa. 20:3 refers to “my servant Isaiah.”
  • The second is Eliakim son of Hilkiah (Isa. 22:20), who was a man that God called to be the chief steward of the house of David.
  • The third is David himself (Isa. 37:35).
  • And the fourth is the corporate figure of the nation of Israel/Jacob, who is named as God’s servant in multiple passages. A typical example is Isa. 41:8, which speaks of “you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen” (cf. Isa. 41:9, 44:1-2, 21 [2 references], 45:4, 48:20, and 49:3).

That leaves us still to explain 10 uses of ‘ebed. We won’t here propose definitite identifications for these passages, but we can say something about how their literal sense can be plausibly understood.

 

The Priority of Israel

Jewish interpreters tend to see the Servant of the Lord as Israel, and there are two reasons that suggest this should be our starting point in seeking to establish the literal sense of the text:

  1. Three of the four named servants are only given a single, explicit mention each, whereas Israel is named as servant multiple times.
  2. The three named servants other than Israel are all mentioned in the first part of the book, while Israel’s mentions are in the latter part, which is the location of the passages that remain to be explained (Isa. 42:1, 19 [2 references], 43:10, 44:26, 49:5-6, 50:10, 52:13, 53:11).

The logical procedure is thus to examine the remaining uses to see whether they could plausibly describe Israel or whether they more likely refer to something or someone else.

 

Servants Beside Israel?

It appears that at least some of the passages refer to a servant other than Israel. With one exception, all of the Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah 49:3 identify Israel as the servant of that verse, but just a few verses later we seem to be reading about a different servant:

And now the Lord says, who formed me from the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him,
for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord, and my God has become my strength—

he says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:5-6).

If the identification of Israel as the servant of verse 3 was in the original Hebrew text (something some scholars have disputed), then it seems that we are reading about a different servant in verses 5 and 6, since this servant has a mission to Jacob/Israel.

Who might this be? A plausible answer is Isaiah himself. He has already been named as a servant of the Lord in 20:3, and he has the prophet’s mission of calling God’s people “back to him” that they may be “gathered to him” so that God might “raise up” his people and “restore the preserved of Israel.”

If this understanding is correct, then the Ethiopian eunuch’s guess that the prophet was speaking of himself in Isaiah 53 might be correct—in the literal sense of the text, though a reference to Jesus is clearly to be found in its spiritual sense.

Isaiah, however, is not the only other possibility for an individual servant in the remaining passages. One that is sometimes proposed is Cyrus the Persian, who is described in Isa. 45:1 not with the term “servant” (‘ebed) but using the parallel term “anointed” (mashiakh or “messiah”).

Anyone anointed by the Lord is functioning as his servant toward the purpose for which he was anointed, and Cyrus was given a mission of restoring Israel and bringing them back both to their land and their God by allowing them to return and rebuild the Jerusalem temple.

God also describes Cyrus in Isaiah 44:28 as “my shepherd,” again indicating he is serving God.

Other figures—such as Cyrus’s successor Darius or the returning Jewish governor Zerubbabel—have also been proposed as God’s servant in various passages. However, these rest on more speculative reconstructions of historical circumstances, since these figures are not named in the book.

 

Conclusion

From what we have seen, there are multiple servants of the Lord described in the literal sense of the book of Isaiah—some of whom are identified by name.

In light of this, we need to approach the servant texts and ask the standard question for determining the literal sense of a passage: What would this have meant in its original context? How would the author and his audience have understood it?

After determining this to the best of our ability, we will be in a better position to explore the spiritual sense of the text, including the applications it may have to Jesus.

The Mysterious Lost Tribes of Israel – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

MYS014

The nation of Israel originally had 12 tribes, but at a certain point 10 were taken into captivity and became “lost.” Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli explore the claims and counterclaims about what happened to them, then look at the evidence from both Jewish and Christian traditions as well as historical records and DNA evidence.

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Book Technology and the Synoptic Problem

Codex – book with leaves of parchment. Christians among first to use the codex widely, by end of 1st century. Scrolls and books were very valuable.

In the ancient world there were two forms of books: the scroll and the codex.

  • As everyone knows, scrolls were long rolls that you had to roll and unroll to read. They had the pages attached side by side to make a long, continuous strip.
  • Codices, by contrast, were like modern books. They had the pages attached at a spine, allowing you to flip from one passage to another.

These two types of books amounted to different forms of “book technology.” They worked in different ways, as the ways of accessing the material (rolling vs. flipping) indicates.

Before the rise of Christianity, scrolls were by far the most popular format for books. We have almost no references to pre-Christian books being sold in codex form, and pagans and Jews used scrolls almost exclusively when they had scribes copy books for them.

By contrast, Christians were enthusiastic users of codices. This is clear from the surviving second and third century Christian manuscripts, the large majority of which are in codex form. (See Larry Hurtado’s catalogue of early Christian manuscripts.)

Scholars have debated why the codex became so popular among Christians, and they have proposed many possible reasons. However, we don’t know for sure. Codices have some advantages, but they aren’t decisive. (See Larry Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, and Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church).

The primary reason was likely cultural: Somebody in the Christian community started producing books in codex form—perhaps a very influential edition of a major Christian text (likely something that’s now part of the Bible)—and this became the expected form for books among Christians.

However that happened, the trend must have started in the first century, because it was clearly in place by the second century.

We can’t be certain, because there are other possibilities, but my guess would be that the influential codex that started the trend was one of four things:

  1. The first collection of Paul’s letters, which would have included Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and Galatians (see David Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection)
  2. The Gospel of Mark (the first Gospel to be written)
  3. The Gospel of Matthew (the most popular of the four Gospels in the early centuries)
  4. A bound edition of two, three, or four of the Gospels (something too long to fit in a single scroll)

Is there any way we can shed light on this question?

 

Book Technology and the Synoptic Problem

British scholar Alan Garrow has done a lot of work on the Synoptic Problem—the question of how Matthew, Mark, and Luke are related to each other.

He advocates the “Matthew Conflator Hypothesis” (sometimes called the Wilke Hypothesis), which holds that Mark wrote first, Luke used Mark, and then Matthew conflated Mark and Luke (as well as other sources).

This has been my preferred view for a long time, though I’m open to arguments for other positions.

You can watch Garrow’s videos arguing for this view here.

In his third video, he makes an argument that involves the scroll vs. codex issue. He points out, as have others, that when people were copying from a scroll, they tended to do so in a different way than if they were using a codex. This was because of the physical nature of the book, the ease of maintaining eye contact with the text being copied, and the ability to easily move between passages.

Scroll-users have a greater tendency than codex-users to:

  • Paraphrase rather than copy word-for-word
  • Keep the material they are copying in the same order
  • Switch between sources less often

By contrast, codex-users have a greater tendency than scroll-users to:

  • Copy word-for-word
  • Change the order of the material they are copying
  • Switch between sources

In light of this, what can we say about the Synoptic Problem?

 

What If . . . ?

See Garrow’s third video for the details, but we can say the following:

  • Luke seems to have been using a scroll of Mark
  • Matthew seems to have been using a codex of Mark
  • If Luke used Matthew, then he seems to have been using a codex of Matthew
  • If Matthew used Luke, then he seems to have been using a codex of Luke

Garrow argues that these (and other) considerations give us reason to prefer the Matthew Conflator Hypothesis because it allows Matthew to behave consistently: He operates like a codex-user when dealing with both Mark and Luke.

However, if the situation were reversed (a view known as the Farrer Hypothesis) then Luke would be inconsistent: He would operate like a scroll-user with Mark but a codex-user with Matthew.

These facts are certainly consistent with the Matthew Conflator Hypothesis, but I don’t think they provide a particularly strong reason to favor it. This seems to be the weakest part of Garrow’s case, and the arguments he advances in the other videos are much stronger. (There are also arguments that he doesn’t go into in the videos.)

 

Why Not?

So why don’t the above facts give us strong reason to favor the Matthew Conflator Hypothesis?

The reason has to do with the availability of books in scroll and codex forms. Scribes were overwhelmingly used to producing scrolls, and it is unlikely that the codex trend began with the very first Christian books and then instantly dominated the Christian book world. Indeed, Hurtado’s list shows that Christians were still using scrolls for centuries, even after the codex form became dominant.

It is thus likely that the first Gospel to be written—Mark—was originally published as a scroll, something supported by the fact that Luke seems to have used a scroll of Mark.

Further, books in this period were fantastically expensive due to the costs of materials and the hand copying that was involved. This means that, if you were an Evangelist, you would be incentivized to use whatever copy of a prior Evangelist’s Gospel you had—whether it was a scroll or a codex.

You wouldn’t be likely to undertake the expense of having the earlier Evangelist(s) re-copied into your preferred format. And even if you had a rich patron, he might not be inclined to go along with what he would see as a frivolous expense.

Nor would you be likely to slice up a scroll and convert it into a codex. That would produce a very damaged copy as you would be slicing through the joins where the individual sheets were attached, it would be hard to effectively bind them to a single spine, and the book would be extra thick since scrolls were usually written only on one side of the page.

The probability is that you would use the prior Evangelist(s) in whatever format you had.

If Luke was the last of the Synoptic Evangelists to write, the reason for his inconsistency in how he treated Mark and how he treated Matthew thus might simply be due to the fact that he had a scroll of Mark but a codex of Matthew—and he didn’t bother having Matthew recopied as a scroll before he set to work.

I’m not saying that this possibility deprives Garrow’s argument of all force. There is still some value in a scenario that allows the final Synoptic Evangelist to use his sources in a consistent manner. However, I do think the possibility substantially weakens this particular argument for the Matthew Conflator Hypothesis.

 

What Was the Influential Codex?

Can we learn anything from this about what the influential book may have been that kicked of the Christian codex trend?

It seems that we can.

Earlier I proposed four possibilities for what this book may have been:

  1. The first collection of Paul’s letters
  2. The Gospel of Mark
  3. The Gospel of Matthew
  4. A collection of more than one Gospel

Since it would have taken time for the codex trend to become established in Christian circles, it is likely that Mark—the first Gospel written—would have initially appeared as a scroll. This is supported by the fact—as Garrow points out—that Luke seems to have used a scroll of Mark. So option 2 is less likely than the others.

The facts we’ve seen also lend some extra probability to the idea that Matthew may have been the influential codex:

  • If Luke used Matthew then he apparently did so in codex form, indicating that the most popular of the four Gospels was already circulating as a codex.
  • If Matthew used codices of Mark and Luke then he may have been such a codex fan that he did have copies of them made in this form—or he may have had scrolls of them sliced up and re-bound. Either way, he would have been such a codex superfan that he likely then published his own Gospel as a codex.

Further, if Matthew was using codices of Mark and Luke, then—unless he were the kind of codex superfan we’ve just described—copies of Gospels in codex form were already in circulation, and they were probably separate copies—i.e., not bound together as a single volume. This would remove a degree of probability from option 4.

Of the four options, then, Garrow’s analysis causes both Mark and a multi-Gospel collection to lose probability as the influential codex—and Matthew to gain it.

However, Paul’s initial letter collection (Rom.-Gal.) is still a strong possibility.

And there are other options. We are not locked into these four. It could be that Mark was initially a scroll but—by Matthew’s time—it was available as a codex. Or that it was initially a codex but some people made scrolls of it because these were the more familiar book form. The same possibilities are true of Luke.

Either of these thus could have been the book that kicked off the codex trend—and there are other possibilities yet. The key work even could have been an influential work from the Old Testament (a copy of the Pentateuch?) or even an unknown work, though these possibilities are less likely.

Unless dramatic new evidence emerges, this matter will retain its mystery.

 

Is the Didache the Key to Understanding Paul’s Controversy with the Judaizers?

Didache-660x330The Didache (“Did-ah-KAY”) is a first century manual of Christian instruction, and it provides a fascinating view of life in the early Church. You can read it here.

British scholar Alan Garrow has done a lot of work on the Didache, and he has a fascinating hypothesis linking it to Paul’s controversy with the Judaizers in Acts and Galatians.

You can watch his video presenting the hypothesis here.

Key points of his hypothesis are as follows:

  1. The conference Paul has with the apostles in Galatians 2 is not the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15. Instead, it took place during the famine relief visit of Acts 11.
  2. When the council of Acts 15 occurred, the apostles wrote a lengthy document which was the original version of the Didache (it was later supplemented to form the Didache as we have it today). Luke summarizes the original version as the letter sent to the churches in Acts 15:23-29.
  3. This version of the Didache (and the one we have today) contains ambiguous statements that could be taken as requiring Gentiles to be circumcised before their deaths if they are to be saved.
  4. After Paul evangelized the Galatians, Judaizers pointed to these statements as proof that both Paul and the Jerusalem apostles expected them to be circumcised.
  5. When Paul learned of this, he wrote the epistle to the Galatians and vigorously denounced this interpretation. However, he did not explicitly address the statements in the Didache because the document was too ambiguous and could undermine his case.

I very much enjoyed Garrow’s presentation, though ultimately I do not believe his hypothesis succeeds. Let’s take a brief look at the key points.

 

The Famine Relief Visit

Many recent scholars have been inclined to link the Galatians 2 conference with the famine relief visit of Acts 11 because of the list of Paul’s activities described in Galatians 1:13-2:10:

  • Paul’s former life in Judaism (1:13-14)
  • His conversion and call (1:15-16)
  • His sojourn to Arabia and Damascus (1:17)
  • His visit “after three years” to Peter in Jerusalem (1:18-20)
  • His sojourn in Syria and Cilicia (1:21-24)
  • His visit “after fourteen years” to Jerusalem where circumcision was discussed (2:1-10)

From this catalogue, it is inferred that the two Jerusalem visits Paul mentions here were the only visits he made during this time period.

If so, then the Galatians 2 conference can’t be the Acts 15 conference because of the record of Paul’s Jerusalem visits found in Acts:

  • After Paul’s stay in Damascus, Barnabas takes him to the apostles in Jerusalem (9:27-30)
  • He and Barnabas make the famine relief visit (11:29-30)
  • He and Barnabas go to Jerusalem for the Acts 15 council (15:1-29)

If Paul’s visit “after fourteen years” is his second visit to Jerusalem following his conversion then it must be the famine relief visit.

There is a lot that can be said about this, but it all hinges on the inference that Paul had only two visits to Jerusalem in this period, and this is not clear from Galatians.

Paul does not say that he visited Jerusalem only twice. He does indicate that he was not popularly known in the churches of Judea (Gal. 1:21-24), which implies that he did not spend a lot of time there, but it does not mean that he never made a brief visit.

This is clear from the fact that he had already made a visit lasting two weeks (Gal. 1:18-20) and this did not make him popularly known in Judea.

It’s therefore quite possible that he and Barnabas made an additional, brief visit (described in only a single verse: Acts 11:30) that he doesn’t mention in Galatians because it is not relevant to the subjects he is discussing—i.e., where he got his gospel and how circumcision is not necessary for salvation.

He thus jumps to the next major event that was relevant—the Jerusalem visit that occurred “after fourteen years.”

Identifying this event with the famine relief visit of Acts 11:30 creates multiple problems with the chronology of Acts, and one of them becomes clear beginning what Luke says next:

About that time Herod the king [i.e., Herod Agrippa I] laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword; and when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter (Acts 12:1-3).

Luke then goes on to narrate Peter’s escape and Herod’s death (Acts 12:20-23).

According to Acts 12:1, the famine relief visit of 11:30 took place just before or in proximity to the events of Acts 12, which include Herod’s death.

Herod Agrippa I is commonly reckoned as having died in A.D. 44, though recent studies have indicated it was more probably in late A.D. 43 (see Daniel R. Schwartz, Agrippa I, 107-111).

Either way, this gives us an approximate time frame for the famine relief visit, and if it occurred “after fourteen years” from Paul’s conversion then Paul’s conversion (Acts 9) would have had to occur around A.D. 29 or 30.

This is too early, even on the view that the Crucifixion occurred in A.D. 30, and certainly too early on the better-established view that it took place in A.D. 33.

More could be said about the chronological problems with identifying the Galatians 2 conference with the famine relief visit, but this will suffice.

 

The Didache and the Acts 15 Letter

Garrow proposes that, after the Acts 15 council, the apostles wrote a lengthy document to be sent to the churches and that this document was the original version of the Didache.

On this view, the Didache is, in the most literal sense, what its title presents it as—“The teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles by the twelve apostles”—because the Jerusalem apostles wrote it.

Garrow points out that it would be unreasonable for Luke to repeat the whole of the Didache in his account of the Acts 15 council, so he argues that Luke summarized it as the letter found in Acts 15:23-29:

23b “The brethren, both the apostles and the elders, to the brethren who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greeting. 24 Since we have heard that some persons from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, 25 it has seemed good to us, having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, 26 men who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. 27 We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. 28 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: 29 that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”

To support his proposal, Garrow notes several themes that this letter and the Didache have in common. He’s also certainly correct that Luke would not have interrupted his narrative to reproduce the whole of the original Didache if it was before him.

But how likely is that the Acts 15 council wrote it?

The Didache is such an early document that it’s not unreasonable to hold that its original edition dates to this time period, but if the controversy was about the role of circumcision—as both Acts and Galatians indicate—would the apostles really have written such a lengthy document in response? The matter could be settled much more concisely.

Further, the content of the proposed first edition of the Didache is basic Christian instruction. As reconstructed by Garrow, it contained treatments of basic Christian morality, sacramental practice, and eschatology. Is that what the Jerusalem authorities would have written in response to a controversy about circumcision?

As Garrow notes, the Didache never mentions circumcision. It’s one thing to see how a brief letter like the one in Acts could omit the word “circumcision,” saying merely, “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things” and then not name circumcision as a requirement. However, it is very hard to imagine a document that goes on for chapter after chapter of basic Christian instruction without dealing in some clear way with circumcision, given that this was the issue that prompted the document to be written.

It seems much more likely that the Jerusalem authorities would write a more concise document that dealt directly with the issue at hand, which is what we find in Acts 15:23-29.

Lest modern readers of the New Testament be puzzled by the brevity of this letter, its length is entirely what we would expect. Letters in the ancient world—even by famous epistolary authors like Cicero—were typically written on a single sheet of papyrus (E. Randolph Richards, Paul and First-Century Letter Writing; David Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection).

The most normal letters in the New Testament are 2 John, 3 John, and Jude—the very letters we tend to overlook because of their brevity.

By ancient standards, Paul’s letters are literary abnormalities. By comparison, they are enormous. And it seems that under Paul’s influence the other authors of the New Testament epistles were led to copy his practice of writing theological-pastoral treatises in letter form.

But this is not what we would expect at the time of the Acts 15 council (A.D. 49), before Paul’s literary career had taken off. Instead, we would expect exactly the kind of short letter that we find in Acts.

It was common, at the time, to write only a brief letter and then have the courier(s) orally fill in any necessary context for the readers, which is precisely what we have here (“We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth”).

Further, since Paul and Barnabas figured heavily in the controversy provoking the council (Acts 15:2), we would expect the letter to make mention of them to clarify their status in the eyes of the Jerusalem authorities, as it does (“it has seemed good to us, having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ”).

Yet none of these things are in the Didache.

On Garrow’s proposal, Luke has boiled the entire original edition of the Didache down to just two verses—Acts 15:28-29—and freely composed everything else in the letter (five verses).

If Luke had taken such liberties with the apostolic decree, then he would have been subject to charges of falsification. The issue of circumcision remained a live one in Christian circles at this time (and, indeed, for several centuries in Jewish Christian circles), and it would have been much safer for him to simply summarize what the apostles said without casting it in the form of a fundamentally fictitious letter.

We are thus confronted with two hypotheses:

  1. The apostles responded to the Acts 15/Galatians 2 circumcision controversy by writing an astonishingly long treatise on basic Christian instruction that never directly addresses the controversy at hand or mentions the parties involved in it, and Luke summarized this in the form of a fundamentally fictitious letter, opening him to charges of falsification by those who favored circumcision.
  2. In keeping with the epistolary practices of the day, the apostles wrote a brief letter that addressed the central controversy, discussed the status of the participants, and sent couriers who could confirm its authenticity and supply needed context.

The latter is the more likely hypothesis.

 

The Didache’s Ambiguous Statements

Garrow points out that the Didache contains a pair of passages that could be misunderstood as implying that circumcision is necessary for salvation.

First, at the end of its section on basic moral instruction, it says:

For if you are able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect. But if you are not able, then do what you can.

Now concerning food, bear what you are able, but in any case keep strictly away from meat sacrificed to idols, for it involves the worship of dead gods (Did. 6:2-3).

Second, the end of the document gives an eschatological warning and says:

Gather together frequently, seeking the things that benefit your souls, for all the time you have believed will be of no use to you if you are not found perfect in the last time (Did. 16:2).

Garrow calls attention to the word “perfect” in these passages and argues that the first could be taken as indicating that to perfectly “bear the whole yoke of the Lord” one would need to be circumcised.

Failing to be circumcised might be acceptable at least temporarily, given the concession, “But if you are not able, then do what you can.” However, one could look at the second passage and conclude that, since one must be “found perfect in the last time” for the faith to profit you, one must be circumcised at some point.

It is not plausible to think that this is what the author(s) of the Didache meant the reader to understand. Circumcision has to be injected into the thought of the text at both points, for it is not mentioned in either of them or in their surrounding contexts.

However, Garrow does not claim that this is what the Didachist(s) meant, just that this is what the Judaizers made of the text.

 

Paul and the Judaizers

Garrow’s claim at this point is reasonable. If the Didache was in circulation prior to Galatians, Judaizers could, indeed, point to these passages in an attempt to bolster their claim that faith and baptism may be necessary but that one must go on to embrace circumcision if one wants to be ultimately saved.

They could further point to Paul’s circumcision of Timothy (Acts 16:3), which strikingly occurs in Acts just after the Jerusalem council and the delivery of its letter.

Timothy was from the Galatian city of Lystra and was well known in the neighboring city of Iconium (Acts 16:1-2), and his circumcision by Paul was publicly known. Paul performed the act so that Timothy could accompany him, “because of the Jews that were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek” (16:3).

It therefore would have been easy for the Judaizers to appeal to Paul’s circumcision of Timothy and claim that even the “apostle to the Gentiles” agreed with their view on the ultimate necessity of circumcision.

This would explain passages in Galatians that seem to indicate Paul was being portrayed as a preacher of circumcision:

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you [i.e., if we should preach a gospel of circumcision], let him be accursed (Gal. 1:8).

If I, brethren, still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? (Gal. 5:11)

Garrow’s hypothesis thus coheres very well at this point.

But do these passages provide positive evidence that the Judaizers were appealing to the Didache?

It does not seem so.

The passages we have just seen do suggest that the Judaizers were portraying Paul as acknowledging the necessity of circumcision, and they likely appealed to his circumcision of Timothy as evidence for this.

However, we don’t need to suppose that the Didache in particular was in circulation or that they appealed to it. All we need to suppose is that the idea was in the air that one needed to complete one’s conversion to Christ by circumcision, and we have good evidence that this idea was present, whether or not the Didache was in circulation.

 

Paul and the Acts 15 Letter

Paul was apoplectic when he learned what the Judaizers had been telling his Galatian converts, and he wrote his letter to them in a white hot fury.

In this epistle, Paul’s sharp elbows are at their sharpest, and he vigorously denounces the views of the Judaizers, including their own apparent misrepresentation of his own actions.

What, then, are we to make of the fact that he does not mention the document that the Acts 15 council wrote?

For Garrow, Paul does not do so because that document (the original edition of the Didache) was too ambiguous.

It’s true that the Didache contains passages the Judaizers could plausibly exploit. However, it’s not clear that a personality as forceful as Paul would refrain from taking those passages on.

After all, circumcision is nowhere mentioned in either context, and a careful exegesis of the Didache does not support the claim that it is necessary. In context, “the whole yoke of the Lord” for Gentiles is the material under discussion in chapters 1-6 of the document, and circumcision is not among the topics covered.

Paul easily could have pointed this out and insisted that his interpretation—bolstered by the other facts he mentions in Galatians—is the true one and that it authentically represents the view of the Jerusalem authorities.

Once again we must ask whether the Didache needed to be in circulation to explain why Paul doesn’t mention the document the council produced, and the answer again is negative.

If Galatians 2 does refer to Acts 15 (as the bulk of the evidence indicates) then Paul’s summary of it in the epistle makes all the essential points. He does not need to refer to the letter.

Further, he may not have had a copy of the letter with him. We know that Paul was sometimes separated from his personal library (2 Tim. 4:13), and he may have avoided discussing the letter if he couldn’t quote it exactly.

Even if he had the letter with him or was comfortable quoting it from memory, there are serious reasons why he might not want to, because the letter contained pastoral provisions as a concession to Jewish sensibilities. Specifically, it asked that Gentiles “abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity.”

While he may not have had a problem with (or a choice regarding) these items as pastoral concessions, Paul is on record stating that there is nothing wrong in principle with eating idol meat. He discusses this explicitly in 1 Corinthians 8, and he covers the same issue from another perspective in Romans 14.

It is highly probable that he would not have had a problem in principle with eating blood or strangled things in view of his comments regarding becoming all things to all men that he might win some (1 Cor. 9:22), and specifically regarding his comment that “To those outside the law I became as one outside the law . . . that I might win those outside the law” (1 Cor. 9:21).

This is further underscored by his declaration “let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink” (Col. 2:16), and by his excoriation of Peter for breaking table fellowship with Gentiles (Gal. 2:11-14).

Since the pastoral provisions of the Acts 15 letter were inconsistent with views Paul held and openly discussed with his converts, as the other letters just quoted indicate, he had ample reason not to call attention to the letter in his discussion here. Doing so would only raise the question of what status these pastoral provisions had: Were they matters of divine law that were binding on everyone or only accommodations made for the sake of harmony within the Church?

Delving into these concessions to Jewish sensibilities would have undercut Paul’s fundamental point that Gentiles only need to become Christians, not Jewish Christians, to be saved.

Further, raising the subject of the letter in his account of the council (Gal. 2:1-10) would undercut the argument he was about to make regarding Peter (Gal. 2:11-14), because the letter’s pastoral provisions would suggest to the readers that Peter might not have been wrong to withdraw from table fellowship with Gentiles.

Paul was thus incentivized to remain silent on the letter and focus instead on the points he makes about the council in verses 1-10.

 

Conclusion

Garrow has provided a fascinating discussion of the Didache and how it might have influenced first century discussions regarding the need for circumcision.

While it seems very unlikely that the Didache was produced by the Acts 15 council, it is quite possible that early versions of the document were in circulation in the mid-first century.

It also is possible, though not necessarily probable, that—either before Galatians was written or afterwards—Judaizers appealed to the document’s statements regarding perfection to bolster their argument that circumcision is necessary for salvation.

The Didache thus remains an important background document, and the light it may shed on the New Testament and its history needs to be further explored.

The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

 

dead sea scrollsThe Dead Sea is a mysterious place. Its name invokes one of the greatest mysteries—death—and there is a good reason for that.

The waters of the Dead Sea are almost ten times as salty as the ocean, preventing fish, birds, and plants from living in it. That’s why it’s called “dead.”

It’s also so salty that you can float in it even if you don’t know how to swim.

Located at the south end of the Jordan River Valley, the Dead Sea is the lowest point on any of Earth’s landmasses—being more than 1,400 feet below sea level.

It is a valuable source of chemicals, including salt, potash (potassium chloride), and asphalt (bitumen). Because of the latter, it was known in the ancient world as Lake Asphaltites.

Several ancient sources reveal that a mysterious Jewish sect known as the Essenes lived near the Dead Sea.

 

The Dead Sea and the Essenes

The Roman author Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) is one of several ancient writers who discussed the wonders of the Dead Sea and the Essenes who lived nearby.

[The Jordan River flows] towards that gloomy lake, the Dead Sea, which ultimately swallows it up, its much-praised waters mingling with the pestilential waters of the lake. . . .

The only product of the Dead Sea is bitumen, the Greek word for which gives it its Greek name, Asphaltites. The bodies of animals do not sink in its waters, even bulls and camels floating; this has given rise to the report that nothing at all can sink in it. It is more than 100 miles long, and fully 75 miles broad at the broadest part but only 6 miles at the narrowest. On the east it is faced by Arabia of the Nomads. . . .

On the west side of the Dead Sea, but out of range of the noxious exhalations of the coast, is the solitary tribe of the Essenes, which . . . has only palm-trees for company (Natural History 5:15:71-73).

 

The Mystery Deepens

In the 1940s, the mystery surrounding the Dead Sea deepened when a teenage Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib went in search of a lost goat.

Details of exactly what happened are sketchy. It’s not even certain what year this happened, though it was sometime between 1945 and 1947.

In later accounts, edh-Dhib said that he thought the lost goat was in a cave, so he threw rocks in, hoping to startle the goat into making a noise or coming out of the cave.

Instead, he heard the sound of breaking pottery, and he decided to investigate and entered the cave and discovered clay jars containing ancient scrolls.

The local Bedouin often supplemented their income by illegally raiding archaeological sites, so the scrolls soon appeared in the local antiquities market, and in 1947 word of the scrolls began to spread among scholars.

 

The Story of the Scrolls

The Dead Sea scrolls have had a tumultuous history. In the first phase of this history, the investigation of the scrolls was hampered by events surrounding the founding of Israel and the Arab-Israeli hostilities of the time.

This led to colorful, cloak-and-dagger episodes, such as when—in late 1947—the Jewish scholar Eleazar Sukenik disguised himself as an Arab so he could safely travel from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to purchase some of the first scrolls, which were in the possession of a cobbler and part-time antiquities dealer nicknamed “Kando.”

In 1954, Sukenik’s son—the Israeli military general and scholar Yigael Yadin—had a similar transaction, in which he employed a secret intermediary using the false name “Mr. Green” (later revealed to be the American Jewish scholar Harry Orlinsky) to purchase several scrolls that had been advertised in the “miscellaneous for sale” section of the Wall Street Journal’s classified ads.

DSS_adAfter the Bedouin’s initial discovery, a survey was eventually undertaken, and scholars found ten more caves containing scrolls. Today they are numbered Caves 1 to 11.

Eventually a huge number of scrolls and scroll fragments—almost a thousand—were discovered. This number was so large that it led to the next troubled phase in the scrolls’ history.

The study of the scrolls was parceled out to a team of scholars, but some of the scholars did not process them in an efficient manner.

Although one could simply take photographs of the scrolls and publish the photographs, it was customary to allow scholars to translate, analyze, and prepare commentaries on the scrolls before publication.

For a variety of reasons—including the huge number of scrolls and fragments—some scholars didn’t do their work quickly, and decades went by without the full body of scrolls being published.

This led to rumors that the unpublished scrolls were being deliberately held back, and since some of the scholars analyzing them were Catholic, rumors began to circulate that the Vatican was suppressing the scrolls because they contained dangerous revelations that would threaten the Christian Faith.

This was one of the inspirations for the conspiracy novel The Da Vinci Code.

In a surprise twist, the impasse was finally broken in 1991 when rebel scholars frustrated with the situation made an unexpected move.

Although many of the scrolls had not been published, an exhaustive concordance of them had been. Like concordances of the Bible, this work listed each word in the scrolls, along with a snippet of its context.

The rebel scholars used a computer program to analyze the concordance and piece together the text of the unpublished scrolls by combining the concordance entries like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

In the wake of this, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California—which had a complete set of photographs of the scrolls—announced that it would allow scholars access to this material.

The embargo on the unpublished scrolls was now broken, and today all of the scrolls are available to the public. In fact, the Israeli Antiquities Authority has put them online, where they can be viewed for free at www.DeadSeaScrolls.org.il.

 

By the Numbers

Because of their fragmentary nature, statistics on the Dead Sea Scrolls have to be approximate, but it appears that the total number of texts is around 930.

The vast majority of the scrolls are parchment (animal skin prepared for writing), a small number are on papyrus (paper made from a reed that grows in Egypt), and one is inscribed on copper.

Breaking them down by the languages they are written in:

  • 790 (85%) are in Hebrew
  • 120 (13%) are in Aramaic
  • 20 (2%) are in Greek

Breaking them down by subject matter:

  • 230 (25%) are Jewish biblical texts
  • 250 (27%) are general Jewish texts
  • 350 (38%) are sectarian texts
  • 100 (11%) are unclassified

The biblical texts are books that belong to the Jewish Bible as it is understood today (i.e., the protocanonical books of Scripture).

The general Jewish texts are ones that aren’t included in the Jewish Bible, though they were read by a broad range of Jews. Examples include the deuterocanonical books of the Catholic Bible, as well as non-canonical works like Jubilees and 1 Enoch.

The sectarian writings are those that the Qumran sect produced itself and that reflect its unique views. Examples include the War Scroll, the Halakhic Letter, and the Community Rule.

The unclassified texts are ones that scholars aren’t sure about. They are not biblical texts, but it is hard to tell (often because they are too fragmentary) whether they are general Jewish texts or specifically sectarian ones.

 

Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Near the caves where the scrolls were found is an archaeological ruin known as Qumran.

Most scholars have concluded that the scrolls were placed in the caves by the people who lived at or near Qumran. For this reason, the people who wrote the scrolls are often called “the Qumran sect,” although they called themselves the yakhad (Heb., “community”).

Because ancient sources including Josephus and Pliny the Elder report that there were Essenes living by the Dead Sea at approximately the location of Qumran, the majority view among scholars is that the Qumran sect were Essenes.

If this is correct, the scrolls give us new information about the history of the Essenes.

 

Naming the Scrolls

Scholars needed a way to keep track of the huge number of manuscripts and fragments, so they developed a numbering system.

A typical designation in this system is “4Q491.” The Q stands for Qumran, and the 4 that precedes it indicates that the text was discovered in Cave 4. The designation “4Q491” thus indicates manuscript 491 from Cave 4 at Qumran.

Every text in the Dead Sea Scrolls has a designation like this, but they often have additional names based on their content.

For example, an important text at Qumran is known as “the War Scroll,” which describes an apocalyptic battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. 4Q491 is a fragment of the War Scroll, but another, longer copy was found in Cave 1. That more complete copy is sometimes called 1QWarScroll.

Biblical manuscripts typically have content-based designations in addition to their numerical ones. For example, 4Q41 is also known as 4QDeutn because it is from a copy of Deuteronomy.

 

History of the Qumran Sect

The sect appears to have originated in the early second century B.C. It existed for twenty years before a man known as the Teacher of Righteousness became its leader.

The sectarians thought Teacher of Righteousness to be divinely inspired, and he appears to have been a high ranking priest from Jerusalem—perhaps a high priest who was deposed by Jonathan Maccabeus.

The Teacher was opposed by a figure known as the Wicked Priest (often thought to be Jonathan Maccabeus), who pursued him into the desert. He was also opposed—within the Qumran sect—by a dissenter known as the Man of Lies (or the Spouter of Lies) who rejected the Teacher’s interpretation of the Jewish Law.

The fact the scrolls do not identify these figures by name has led to a great deal of speculation among scholars.

Precisely how the Qumran sect fit into the world of ancient Israel is unclear. Their legal interpretations are strikingly similar to those of the Sadducees, leading some to suggest they were an offshoot of this sect.

However, they also held theological views (including belief in the afterlife and predestination) that were rejected by the Sadducees.

The Jewish historian Josephus records that the three major Jewish sects of the time were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes and that the last was the strictest of these sects.

This fits with the picture the scrolls give of their authors. They were a radical sect that looked down on the more relaxed attitude of the Pharisees (who they referred to as “seekers after smooth things”). They also believed that the Sadducees had allowed the Jerusalem temple to become polluted, and so they refused to worship there.

Like others in the period, the Qumran sectarians expected an imminent war between the forces of light and darkness. They expected God to give them victory in this war, leading to the destruction of their enemies and an age of perpetual peace.

Instead, when the Jewish War of A.D. 66-73 occurred, the Romans were victorious and the Qumran sect disappeared from history.

 

The Scrolls and the Bible

The Dead Sea Scrolls are significant because they are a thousand years older than the next earliest copies of the Hebrew scriptures that we have, which were made by Medieval Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes.

The scrolls’ discovery demonstrated the remarkably accurate preservation of these texts.

At the same time, they contain some readings that are different from the Medieval Hebrew copies.

Sometimes these alternative readings support those found in the Septuagint—the major Greek translation of the Old Testament—and sometimes they are unique to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Today Bible translators use the Masoretic texts, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls when trying to determine the original reading of biblical passages.

 

The Scrolls and the Canon

The Dead Sea Scrolls are important for the study of the canon of the Bible. They include copies of all of the protocanonical books of the Old Testament except for Esther, whose canonicity was disputed by some Jews.

The scrolls also include copies of deuterocanonical works like Tobit, Baruch, and Sirach.

It is unclear whether the Qumran sectarians had a closed list of books they regarded as canonical or precisely which books these were.

However, the scrolls do show that they thought more books counted as Scripture than the Sadducees and Samaritans (who accepted the first five books of the Bible) and the Pharisees (who accepted the protocanonical books, roughly speaking).

It appears, for example, that the Qumran sect regarded books such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Temple Scroll as divinely inspired.

 

Notable Scrolls

Some of the most notable works among the Dead Sea Scrolls include:

The Community Rule (1QS): A manual describing how the Qumran sect was to function, including information about initiation, communal meals, etc. It is the sect’s equivalent of a monastic rule like the Rule of St. Benedict.

The Temple Scroll (11QTempleScrolla): A lengthy work describing a version of the Jerusalem temple that was never built. Written in the form of a revelation from God to Moses, it describes the sect’s ideal temple and the ceremonies that should take place in it.

The Halakhic Letter (4QMMT): A letter written to the Jerusalem priests explaining the points of Jewish law (halakhoth) that the Qumran sectarians felt separated them from the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

The War Scroll (1QWarScroll): An apocalyptic prophecy of a battle between the “sons of light” (the Qumran sect) and the “sons of darkness” (everybody else, but led initially by the Romans). It includes the military tactics that the sons of light were expected to use.

The Copper Scroll (3Q15): Unique among the Dead Sea Scrolls, this document is inscribed on a roll made of copper. It contains a list of locations where vast sums of gold and silver are said to be buried. None of the sites have ever been found, leading some to suggest it is a work of fiction. However, it seems unlikely anyone would take the trouble to inscribe a work of fiction on a difficult medium like copper, suggesting it is real. If the treasures were real, they are so vast they could only have come from the treasury in the Jerusalem temple, presumably being hidden to keep them safe from the Romans in the Jewish War of A.D. 66-73.

 

Christian Connections?

When the scrolls were discovered, attention quickly focused on what light they might shed on early Christianity, and there are a number of similarities between the Qumran sectarians and early Christians.

Both groups had a focus on prophecy and personal holiness, both had some members who practiced celibacy, and both had leaders who were called “bishop” or “overseer” (Hebrew, mebaqqer, Greek, episkopos).

This led some crackpot authors to make fanciful proposals, such as that John the Baptist was the Teacher of Righteousness, Jesus was the Wicked Priest, and St. Paul was the Spouter of Lies.

None of these are possible. Carbon dating shows that scrolls mentioning these figures were written before the New Testament era, meaning that they are too old.

Also, the early Christian attitude toward Gentiles and the Jewish law was starkly opposed to the rigorist and exclusivist view of the Qumran sectarians.

The Dead Sea Scrolls thus do not tell us anything directly about early Christianity, though they do tell us a great deal about the world in which early Christianity emerged.

 

Other Finds

Because of the mystery surrounding them, the Dead Sea Scrolls represent the most famous find of ancient literature, but there have been other major finds. Two of these are the documents of the Cairo Genizah and the Nag Hammadi texts.

The Cairo Genizah: Traditional Jewish piety forbids throwing away a manuscript that contains the name of God (YHWH), and so it became customary for synagogues to have a special place to house worn out manuscripts containing the divine name.

This place is known as a genizah—from a Hebrew word meaning “to put away” or “to hide.” Manuscripts would be stored in genizoth and then later buried.

In the 1890s, the American rabbi Solomon Schechter realized the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt contained a vast trove of important manuscripts. These were written between about A.D. 870 and 1880, and the number of texts and fragments dwarfs those found at the Dead Sea. All told, around 300,000 fragments have been recovered from the Cairo genizah.

The Nag Hammadi Texts: In 1945, an Egyptian farmer near the town of Nag Hammadi discovered a buried pottery jar that contained twelve volumes of ancient writings.

These proved to be significant because among the writings was a large collection of Gnostic documents from the fourth century. Gnosticism was a heresy that flourished from the second to the fourth centuries, but before this point the only accounts of what the Gnostics believed were found in the writings of their opponents—the Church Fathers.

As a result of the Nag Hammadi texts, scholars now have direct access to the writings of the people the Church Fathers were reacting to, allowing us to better understand many things.

 

Learning More

There are many good resources you can use to learn more about the Dead Sea Scrolls. These include:

 

 

Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World – The Lost Gospels

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Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the claims and counter-claims about the so-called Lost Gospels from both the faith and reason perspectives. Do they tell a suppressed or untold story about Jesus Christ, are they the ravings of lunatics, or something in between?

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Domitian and the Persecution That Didn’t Happen

DOMITIANIt’s common to encounter claims that the Roman emperor Domitian was a major persecutor of Christians and that he demanded divine worship, insisting on being called “Lord and God.”

It’s even common to hear these “facts” cited as important keys for determining the date and meaning of the book of Revelation, with Domitian serving as its famous “beast.”

But there’s a problem. Here are the real facts . . .

 

The Real Domitian

Domitian reigned between A.D. 81 and 96, and like all of the Roman emperors in this period, he had flaws.

Ancient authors even accuse him of being responsible for the death of his brother, Titus, who had preceded him in office.

He also angered the aristocracy, and he was eventually assassinated by court officials.

However, ancient Roman authors don’t accuse him of being the kind of monster that Caligula or Nero were.

Neither do the earliest Christian sources accuse him of instituting a major persecution of the Faith.

 

A False Narrative Develops

Biblical Archaeology Review recently ran a piece in which biblical scholar Mark Wilson looked at the origin of how the idea of a Domitianic persecution developed. He writes:

Eusebius in his Church History (CH) provides the first reference to Domitian persecuting the church.

Writing over three centuries later in the early fourth century C.E., this ancient Christian historian first quotes Melito of Sardis, who mentioned that Domitian brought slanderous accusations against Christians (CH 4.26.9).

He also cites Tertullian, who claimed that Domitian was cruel like the emperor Nero (r. 54–68 C.E.), but that Domitian was more intelligent, so he ceased his cruelty and recalled the Christians he had exiled (CH 3.20.9).

Eusebius also quotes Irenaeus, who claimed Domitian’s persecution consisted only of John’s banishment to Patmos and the exile of other Christians to the island of Pontia (CH 3.18.1, 5).

Despite these cautious statements by three earlier authors, Eusebius then spun his own alternative fact by claiming that Domitian, like Nero, had “stirred up persecution against us” (“anekinei diōgmon”; CH 3.17).

From here the tradition was enlarged by Orosius (d. 420 C.E.), who, in his History Against the Pagans, wrote that Domitian issued edicts for a general and cruel persecution (7.10.5).

Despite a lack of evidence, [Roman historian Brian] Jones observes that the tradition concerning Domitian’s persecution persists: “From a frail, almost non-existent basis, it gradually developed and grew large.”

Melito of Sardis and Irenaeus of Lyons were individuals who wrote in the late second century, less than a hundred years after Domitian’s reign, and Tertullian wrote at the end of the second and the beginning of the third centuries. They report only that he slandered Christians and exiled some. If they don’t provide evidence of a wide-scale persecution, then it’s very unlikely there was one. Furthermore:

No pagan writer of the time ever accused Domitian, as they had Nero, of persecuting Christians. Pliny [the Younger], for example, served as a lawyer under Domitian and wrote in a letter to Trajan (r. 98–117 C.E.) that he was never present at the trial of a Christian (Letters 10.96.1). This is a strange claim for one of Domitian’s former officials if Christian persecution were so prevalent.

 

“Lord and God”?

What about the claim that Domitian insisted on being worshipped as a god during his lifetime and even demanded the title “Lord and God” (Latin, Dominus et Deus)? Wilson writes:

The poet Statius (Silvae 1.6.83–84) states that Domitian rejected the title Dominus as his predecessor Augustus (the first Roman emperor) had done.

The historian Suetonius (Life of Domitian 13.2) does report that Domitian dictated a letter that began, “Our Lord and Master orders . . . ,” but it was only his sycophantic officials who began to address him in this way.

The story was again embellished by later historians to the point that Domitian is said to have ordered its use.

Jones thinks the story incredible because Domitian was known for his habitual attention to theological detail in traditional Roman worship, so he would not have adopted such inflammatory divine language.

After their deaths, the best that emperors could hope for was to be called Divus (Divine), not Deus (God).

If Domitian were such a megalomaniac who ordered worship to himself, why haven’t any inscriptions been found using this formula?

In fact, no epigraphic evidence exists attesting to Christians being forced to call him “Lord and God.”

 

The Last Refuge of a Failing Hypothesis

Wilson writes:

[Biblical scholar] Leonard Thompson notes that a more critical reading of Eusebius raises doubts about a widespread persecution of Christians under Domitian. He concludes that “most modern commentators no longer accept a Domitianic persecution of Christians.”

However, that hasn’t stopped some from trying to rescue the hypothesis:

Some writers consider Revelation as a source for a persecution by Domitian, although John never identifies a specific emperor. If so, then Revelation would be the only ancient source pointing to such a persecution.

This is a sign of a failing hypothesis: Using the very data that the hypothesis was supposed to illuminate to prop it up instead.

Revelation contains many things that are unclear, and the Domitianic hypothesis was supposed to be a historical certainty that could unlock Revelation and make its meaning clear. Instead, after we realized we don’t have evidence for a Domitianic persecution, the ambiguities in Revelation are now being used to prop up the idea that one occurred.

This is circular reasoning.

 

Breaking out of the Circle

In fact, we have good evidence that Revelation was written well before Domitian’s reign.

First, in Revelation 11:1-2, John is told:

Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample over the holy city for forty-two months.

This is an unambiguous reference to the temple in Jerusalem. It describes the temple as still in operation (“those who worship there”). But the temple was destroyed by Roman forces in August of A.D. 70, indicating that Revelation was written before this date.

Second, in Revelation 13:18, we read:

This calls for wisdom: let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number [lit., “the number of a man”], its number is six hundred and sixty-six.

A few manuscripts give the number as 616 instead of 666.

From elsewhere in Revelation, we learn that the beast is linked to a line of kings that rules the world, that it demands worship, and that it persecutes Christians. This sounds very much like the line of Roman emperors—especially Caligula and Nero, who portrayed themselves as living gods—and it so happens that both 666 and 616 are the numbers you get when you add up the letters in different ways of spelling “Nero Caesar.”

Nero—the fifth Roman emperor—reigned from A.D. 54 to 68, which suggests that he was or had been on the scene, allowing the original readers to calculate his number.

That would put the writing of Revelation sometime between A.D. 54 and 70. But can we be more specific? We can.

Third, in Revelation 17:9-10 we read:

This calls for a mind with wisdom: the seven heads [of the beast] are seven mountains on which the woman is seated; they are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come, and when he comes he must remain only a little while.

The most natural reading of this is that the kings are the line of Roman emperors, who reigned from Rome’s famous seven hills. The first five emperors were Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. These are the five who are fallen.

The “one [who] is” would be the sixth emperor—Galba—who reigned from June of 68 to January of 69.

The “other [who] has not yet come” would be the seventh emperor—Otho—and he did, indeed, reign “only a little while,” from January of 69 to April of 69—just three months.

This would put the writing of Revelation during the reign of Galba, between June of 68 and January of 69.

Once we detach Revelation from the idea of a non-existent, lethal persecution under Domitian, so much falls into place.