Category: Bible

In an e-mail titled "Does Jesus have two given names?" a reader writes:

How does Mary and Joseph naming their infant "Jesus" square with
Isaiah’s prophecy that his name shall be Immanuel? In Matthew the
angel revealed to Joseph that Mary, "will bear a son, and you shall
call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All
this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call
his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us)." (Matt.1:21-23)

This is one of those cases where the solution lies in the nature of prophetic fulfillment.

The starting point to unraveling the mystery is to go back into the Old Testament and look at the prophecy in its original context. The passage being quoted is Isaiah 7:14, which is a famous Messianic prophecy. But in its original context, it has a different signification.

In Isaiah 7, God has sent the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz of Judea that the king of Syria and his ally, the king of the northern ten tribes (Israel) will not be able to conquer Judea. In fact–the northern kingdom of Israel is to itself be conquered (a reference to theconquest by the Assyrians and subsequent deportation that Israel suffered). To convince Ahaz that this prophecy is true, he invites the king to name a sign for God to give him, and Ahaz refuses, saying that he will not but God to the test. This was the wrong thing to say, and Isaiah responds:

"Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Imman’u-el. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. 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.

Now, there are two things about this passage that help us understand its original reference, and I’ve put them in blue.

The first is that the birth of the child is supposed to be a sign that God is giving to King Ahaz, since Ahaz refused to name a sign for himself. The purpose of this sign is to convince Ahaz that his kingdom really will not be conquered by Syria and the northern kingdom of Israel.

Ahaz reigned from appropximately 735 B.C. to 715 B.C., so it would do him no good at all if the sign were not to be fulfilled for over seven hundred years. That would (a) be long after he was dead and (b) long after the then-existing situation with Syria and Israel was over. It could scarcely serve as a sign backing up the truth of Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the situation.

This points us to look for the original fulfillment of the prophecy to be within the life of Ahaz, which ended in 715 B.C.

The second thing about the passage which helps us understand its original reference is the fact that it says before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good (i.e., avoid things that will hurt him and accept things that will help him), that the lands he is afraid of will get conquered. Now, the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians happened around 721 B.C., and it’s possible that the conquest mentioned in the prophecy is an even earlier one, which occurred in the 730s B.C.

So once again we’re pointed toward a child born in the 8th century B.C.

This child was not, in all likelihood, born of a virgin. The term that is used in Hebrew–almah–refers to a young woman. It is commonly assumed that an almah was a virgin, and the Septuagint translates it thus in Greek (parthenos), but that is not what the Hebrew requires.

This child may have literally been named Emmanuel, though not necessarily. Since "Immanuel" means "God (is) with us" and since saying that God is with us is a common idiom in the Old Testament for saying "we will be victorious" or "things will go well for us," the child’s prophetic "name" may not have been what he was literally called on a daily basis but may be taken as an expression of the fact that the child is a sign from God that God is with his people and their country will not be conquered by the alliance Ahaz feared. Or, in a third possibility, Immanuel may have been the literal name of someone who also had another name, such as was the case with kings, who took regnal names upon their accession to the throne. Thus some have speculated that Immanuel was King Hezekiah, who succeeded Ahaz and lived during the fulfillment of the prophecy. (Whether any have argued that Immanuel was Hezekiah’s birth name, I don’t know.)

However that may be, prophecy often has more than one fulfillment, and the authors of the New Testament recognized a deeper, Messianic fulfillment in the prophecy. There would come who truly was born of a Virgin and who truly was God with us, and thus Matthew sees in the prophecy of Isaiah a second, greater fulfillment in the person of Christ.

This is thus one of several passages in the New Testament that reveals that the sacred authors had a somewhat different idea of prophetic fulfillment than we tend to today. We tend to assume that, if Thing X fulfills Prophecy Y then X must be one and only fulfillment of Y, literal in all its details.

Not so to the authors of Scripture. To them, a prophecy might have multiple fulfillments, not all of which were equally primary and not all of which were equally literal. Some fulfillments might echo or reflect or correspond to the original prophecy, without its being its primary fulfillment.

That’s what we have here: A child born in Ahaz’s reign is the primary fulfillment of the prophecy, but within the spiritual sense of the text is another, grander, and later fulfillment that points to Jesus. We should not understand from Matthew’s application of this prophecy to Jesus that he was literally named Immanuel in the same sense that he was named Jesus. The application of "God with us" to Jesus is something that goes beyond being a name in the conventional sense–even in the conventional Hebrew sense–and applies to him directly as a descriptor of his Person. Jesus is literally God with us in the flesh.

What Matthew is doing, therefore, is taking a text from Isaiah and discerning within it (which is to say, within its spiritual meaning) a prophecy of a Virgin Birth leading to God Incarnate being with us.

Incidentally, here’s a tip for understanding how some New Testament fulfillments of Old Testament prophecies work: To avoid the trap of thinking that each Old Testament prophecy has one and only one fulfillment, which is the one the New Testament records, or that the New Testament fulfillment must be the primary fulfillment of the prophecy or that all the details of the New Testament fulfillment have to match those of the Old Testament prophecy, try replacing the word "fulfills" with a broader word, like "corresponds to" or "reflects" or "echoes," to reflect the broader understanding that the biblical authors had.

In a particular case, they may have meant only " . . . and this reflects what was said by Isaiah the prophet" instead of " . . . and this is the one and only literal-in-all-its-details fulfillment of what was said by Isaiah the proiphet."

A reader writes:

I was surveying commentary on the Widow’s Mite and ran across one
commentary indicatiing the most serious problem is that, while the story
can be made to relate to a number of other sayings of Jesus on trusting,
detachment, poverty, etc., it is not consistent at all with Jesus’ Corban
statement. He proclaims in Mark (7:10 -13).

Furthermore, it would seem that the only way out of these acute
difficulties is quite simply to see Jesus’ attitude to the widow’s gift as
a downright disapproval and not as an approbation. The story does not
provide a pious contrast to the conduct of the scribes in the preceding
section (as is the customary view); rather it provides a further
illustration of the ills of official devotion. 11 Jesus’ saying is not a
penetrating insight on the measuring of gifts; it is a lament, “Amen, I
tell you, she gave more than all the others.” Or, as we would say: “One
could easily fail to notice it, but there is a tragedy of the day—she put
in her whole living.” She had been taught and encouraged by religious
leaders to donate as she does, 12 and Jesus condemns the value system that
motivates her action, and he condemns the people who conditioned her to do
it.

I am interested in your commentary on these remarks.

I’m inclined to disagree with them. First, though, let’s start with the passage itself:

Mark 12
41: And he sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums.
42: And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny.
43: And he called his disciples to him, and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.
44: For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living."

It is not immediately clear how the widow’s mite would be a violation of Jesus’ teachings regarding the corban rule. When Jesus critiqued the use that was being made of corban, he pointed to some individuals’ use of it to circumvent the need to care for one’s parents, which is not in view here.

One could, however, construct a parallel argument to the effect that just as one owes a certain amount of money to the care of one’s parents so that they aren’t reduced to destitution, one also owes a certain amount of money to the care of oneself, and to donate this money to the temple would be wrong.

This is, indeed, something that often strikes people when they read this passage: They wonder what the widow was going to live on if, as Jesus said, she gave her whole livelihood.

It would be wrong to starve oneself to death by giving away all the money one has so that one is unable to care for oneself, but I don’t think that we can infer from this fact that Jesus disapproved of the woman’s action. The obvious interpretation of the passage is that he approved of what she was doing. The plain sense of Jesus statement that "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her
poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living" is that he is favorably comparing what the widow did compared to those who put in larger amounts but had larger amounts of money that made their gifts less sacrificial.

If needed, I can go into detail about why this is the likely interpretation, but for most readers I assume that it will be obvious that this is the natural sense of the text.

If we then accept that (a) Jesus was saying something favorable about the woman in comparison to others and (b) that it would be immoral to starve oneself to death by giving away all one’s money then that allows us to infer (c) that the woman was not starving herself to death by giving away all her money.

What might she have been doing?

Hypothetically, she might have had another source of support lined up and was expecting new money to come in soon–perhaps a small business she had or from a relative.

Or perhaps she really was at the end of her financial rope and, rather than spend her last two lepta on herself, she decided to give them to God in an act of faith, asking him to provide her with a new source of income so that she could keep living.

Or Jesus was using hyperbole.

Hyperbole–or exaggeration to make a point–is an extremely common feature of the biblical language, and my strong suspicion is that Jesus was using it here. In other words, the woman really wasn’t giving "everything she had, her whole living." Jesus uses these phrases in order to forcefully underscore the value of what she did put in relative to what she had. It wasn’t literally all that she had, but it was enough of what she did have that it made the use of hyperbole warranted when comparing what she gave to what those who were rich gave.

Incidentally, the picture above is of the front and back of a first century BC coin that is the same type as the widow used (though the pictures on the coin may have been different by the time she made her offering).

A reader writes:

I listen to a radio show called People to People and the commentator, Bob George states that we never have to ask for forgiveness because, it has already been given. We just have to give God thanks for forgiveness.

Callers confront Mr George with 1 John 1 :9 which says, If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us [our] sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Mr George states that in the Greek, the real translation would be in the “past tense” not the present, so the verse should read, “ he has been faithful to have forgiven us our sins. “

He uses this to support his claim that we do not have to ask for forgiveness since it has already been given.

Could you please shed some light on if he is right or not. In the Greek does it really use the past tense and not the present?

I haven’t heard Mr. George’s claims, so I can’t comment on them directly, but if he has said what you report then he is flatly in error.

First, Greek does not have a past tense. It has several tenses that can refer to the past: the pluperfect, perfect, imperfect, and (often) the aorist.

Here’s a so-literal-it’s-klunky-English translation of 1 John 1:9 with the relevant verbs (and one other important word) emphasized:

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just that he would forgive us the sins and would cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

The first verb in this that describes God is "is" (estin). It’s an ordinary, present-tense "is." Nothing special about it; nothing past-tensy at all. In context, it tells us that God is faithful and just, not that God has been faithful.

But John has something particular in mind when he says that God is faithful and just, so he clarifies what he means by introducing the clause beginning with "that," which I’ve put in red.

In Greek the word corresponding to "that" is hina, which is often found at the beginning of clauses where the verbs are in the subjunctive mood. That’s what we have here. The verbs in this clause aren’t in the indicative mood but the subjunctive mood, which is why I’ve translated them as "would forgive" and "would cleanse." They tell us what God would do if we confess.

Now, these two verbs are in the aorist tense, and the aorist tense usually indicates an action occurring in the past–if the aorist is in the indicative mood–but in the subjunctive mood the aorist tells you nothing about time. It just refers to the occurrence of an event without telling you whether it is past, present, or future. Since we’re in the subjunctive mood here, one cannot appeal to the aorist as showing that God has already done something.

So if Mr. George has been claiming what is reported about the Greek in this passage, he is making some elementary (first year Greek) mistakes, including not recognizing the correct tense of "is" and/or not recognizing that the aorist doesn’t point to the past in the subjunctive.

The claim that we shouldn’t ask God for forgiveness but should only thank him for receiving it is particularly absurd because Jesus built into the model prayer for his followers  the petition "forgive us our debts." That "forgive" is in the imperative mood which, in Greek, is used to ask for things (among other things), and here it is being used to ask for forgiveness.

Unless one is going to say that the Lord’s Prayer is not for Christians, you’re going to have to say that Christians have an ongoing need to ask for forgiveness.

These passages–particularly those in Acts–may refer to the Eucharist, but it is not clear to me that any of these passages, in their primary, literal signification refer to the Eucharist. The expressing "breaking bread" is a well-known idiom referring to simply eating a meal, particularly given the fact that bread was the principle constituent of diets in this period of human history–to the point that in Greek the ordinary word for bread (arton) is the same as the word for "food."

I cannot rule out the possibility that in each of these cases what is being referred to is the sharing of an ordinary meal. This is particularly the case with the one from Luke, which occurred so closely after the Crucifixion that (given that Cleopas and his companion did not recognize Jesus) it could well have been an ordinary meal rather than a celebration of the Eucharist (which Cleopas and his companion may not have been empowered to celebrate, anyway).

I thus don’t know if these texts raise the issue that you are asking about.

If they don’t, however, others do.

In 1 Corinthians 10, for example, we read:

16: The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a
participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it
not a participation in the body of Christ?
17: Because  there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all  partake of the one bread.

St. Paul clearly indicates that consuming "the bread" of the Eucharist involves "a participation in the body of Christ," so the issue of the Real Presence is not in question. He indicates that "the bread" is "the body of Christ." He is so serious about this that he warns against profaning it in the strongest terms in chapter 11:

27: Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the
Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and
blood of the Lord.
28: Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
29: For any one who eats and drinks without  discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.
30: That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. 

   

Because of these biblical usages, I do not think that Catholics should scruple at references to the consecrated elements as "bread" and "wine" as long as these are understood correctly. St. Paul uses such terminology without diminishing in any way the reality of Christ’s Presence in the sacrament–to the point that he warns people against profaning it lest they die.

What one must recognize in such usages is that they are spoken (or written) according to the language of appearances rather than the language of reality. In reality, what is before us is the Body and Blood of Christ, but according to our senses–the appearances–what is before us looks and tastes like bread and wine.

God meant for us to live with both ends of this duality, held in tension: Sensing one thing but recognizing in faith the presence of something else.

Since God expects us to live with this duality, acknowledging both the appearance and the reality, and since he did not mandate a unique mode of language to accomodate the duality but instead allowed the divinely inspired Scriptures to speak of the elements according to both aspects of the duality, we must be prepared to receive and correctly understand both kinds of expressions.

Today we have a special kind of vocabulary that we can use to express the language of appearances. Philosophers call it "phenomenological language." We use phenomenological language when we describe something according to how it appears, without addressing the question of what it is. Thus we can talk about the sun rising, without failing to recognize that the Earth is a sphere (not a flat surface above which something else rises) that actually moves around the sun instead of visa versa.

In the same way, we can phenomenologically speak of the consecrated host as "bread"–the way St. Paul does–without failing to recognize the reality of the Real Presence.

We thus must be prepared to accept either phenomenological language (the language of appearances) and ontological language (the language of realities).

Of course, some today may be unclear on the reality of the Real Presence, and when we encounter someone with such a defective understanding, we must strive to correct him.

Similarly, there are sacramental and liturgical dissents who, one suspects, refer to the Eucharist as "bread" and "wine" because they have a defective understanding of the realities this sacrament involves. It is quite understandable that one feels uncomfortable with their using such language, and it is legitimate to question them about what they mean, but the mode of language itself is not prohibited, for Scripture itself uses it.

 

One note about the passages the reader cites: Regardless of what the primary literal sense of these texts might be, the Church early on recognized a reference to the Eucharist within at least the spiritual sense of these texts, and so it is legitimate today to appeal to them in Eucharistic contexts.

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Has there yet been proof one way or another as to whether St. Matthew
the Apostle is the Matthew who wrote the Gospel of Matthew? Ray Brown
gives credence to the Apostle via Tradition but some other Matthew by
Content. B16 apparently goes with Tradition. What sayest thou??

I haven’t looked up what Ray Brown said on the subject, so I can’t really comment on that. As to B16, he uses traditional language regarding biblical authorship without intending this language to be a comment one way or another on what critical scholarship would say on the subject. A careful reading of his words in the audience on Matthew shows that he is not trying to settle the question of the authorship of Matthew. Indeed, he is trying to avoid doing so, saying:

We recall, finally, that the tradition of the early Church agrees with
attributing the authorship of the first Gospel to Matthew. This was
already the case beginning with Papias, bishop of Gerapolis in Phrygia,
about the year 130.

He wrote: "Matthew took up the Lord’s words in Hebrew, and each one
interpreted them as he could" (in Eusebius of Caesarea, "Hist. eccl.",
III, 39, 16). The historian Eusebius adds this detail: "Matthew, who
previously had preached to the Jews, when he decided to go also to
other peoples, wrote in their maternal tongue the Gospel he was
proclaiming: In this way he tried to substitute in writing what they,
whom he was leaving, lost with his departure" (Ibid., III, 24, 6).

We no longer have the Gospel written by Matthew in Hebrew or
Aramaic, but in the Greek Gospel that has come down to us we still
continue to hear, in a certain sense, the persuasive voice of the
publican Matthew who, in becoming an apostle, continues proclaiming to
us the saving mercy of God.

This is a very neutral and ambiguous statement that can mean a number of things, from the (minimalist) idea that the gospel’s treatment of the figure of Matthew allows us in a sense to hear his voice due to learning from his example to the (maximalist) idea that the Greek gospel is just a translation of Matthew’s Hebrew or Aramaic original or anywhere in the middle (e.g., the Greek gospel of Matthew builds on the Hebrew or Aramaic one as one of its sources). B16 is thus trying to honor the traditional authorship of the gospel without committing to it.

When it comes to what I would say on the question, I consider the matter less decisive than the authorship of the Pauline epistles since there is no attribution of authorship contained within the document itself, but I give very significant weight to the authorship tradition for this document in the early Church and would say that there is significant evidence (not the same as proof) that Matthew was the author.

Some have argued this based on internal considerations. For example, W. Graham Scroggie (who deals with the authorship of the gospels extensively, albeit from a Dispensationalist perspective) argues that Matthew shows a preoccupation with money (as one would expect from a tax collector) the same way Luke shows a preoccupation with healing (as one would expect from a physician).

Even more than Scroggie’s book (which is good for raw data, though I don’t always like what he does with analysis), I’d recommend the introduction to the New Testament by Donald Guthrie, who also deals extensively with authorship issues.

I do think that there are indications that Matthew was not the product of a "community" (though it certainly responds to the needs of a community, and specifically a Jewish one) and that the authorial vision of a single individual is responsible for it. Regardless of what sources this individual may have used, the book exhibits far too much literary architecture and organization to be a patchwork document assembled without a single authorial vision.

As evidence for this fact, I would point both to large-scale structures in the work, like the fact that the sayings of Jesus that are scattered in Mark and Luke tend to be gathered into collected discourses on distinct topics that are then organized chiastically as follows:

1. The Sermon on the Mount: Jesus on the Law (ch. 5-7)

2. The Evangelization Discourse: The Church’s Outer Function (ch. 10)

3. The Kingdom Parables (ch. 13)

4. The Discipline Discourse: The Church’s Inner Functions (ch. 18)

5. The Olivet Discourse: Jesus on the Prophets (ch. 23-25)

If you look within these discourses, one also finds at times intense literary structuring. The Kingdom Parables as presented in Matthew (as opposed to in Mark 4) are themselves structured as a chiast, and the Sermon on the Mount is built around recurring phrases ("Blessed are the . . . " "You have heard, but I say . . . " "When you X, do not Y . . . " etc.) so that it exhibits clear internal structure, and in the Olivet Discourse Matthew organizes material that Luke has scattered all over the place.

The result is that Matthew’s gospel, while following the general synoptic account of the ministry and passion of Christ, has been organized in such a way that the teachings are gathered up into distinct discourses that are both internally structured and arranged in an overall structure that spans the whole book.

Of particular note is the fact that Jesus is presented in the Sermon on the Mount as the new Lawgiver and in the Olivet Discourse as the fulfillment of the Prophet, so the gospel is bookended with major discourses that correspond to the Law and the Prophets.

We also have subtle recapitulations that bespeak the hand of a single author, such as the way Jesus recapitulates the Old Testament history of Israel and Moses in the first four chapters of the book before he assumes the role of Lawgiver in chapters 5-7.

All of this speaks to the authorial vision of a single individual, and that leaves us with the question: Who was that individual? We have no better, more reliable guidance on this point than the voice of tradition, and I see no reason to ascribe the gospel to anybody other than Matthew.

One reason for this–aside from the early date and weight of the tradition itself–is that it is singularly unlikely that Matthew’s name would become attached to the gospel if he were not the author. In fact, if one were looking to fictitiously attach one of the apostles’ names to a gospel in order to give it more authority, Matthew is the last person whose name you’d want to use (except Judas Iscariot, who offed himself before the gospels were written).

Why’s that?

Because not only was Matthew a non-major apostle (we know very little about him), he also is the apostle who would have had the hardest time with a Jewish audience, given that he was a tax-collector for the Romans. He was a former collaborator with the hated enemy, who became even more hated after the two Jewish Wars and the destruction of Israel and Jerusalem.

Yet Matthew’s gospel, as is clear, is the one most written for a Jewish audience. There could scarcely be anything more offputting for such an audience than having the gospel story told to them by a tax-collector/collaborator, and thus "Matthew" strikes me as a name unlikely to become attached to the most Jewish of all the gospels if he were not the author.

A reader writes:

I was wondering whether you could think of any doctrinal issue (other than the canon of scripture itself) which virtually all Christians would agree on, but which has not been spelled out by either: scripture, ecumenical council or ex cathedra papal pronouncement. 

I’m imagining that perhaps there is at least one essential Christian principal which has been established solely by Sacred Tradition.  If so, it might help non-Catholic Christians better understand the concept of Sacred Tradition. 

Doctrines that have been promulgated (or buttressed) primarily by papal pronouncements would undoubtedly be denied by many non-Catholic Christians to be essential Christian doctrine.  For some reason, some Protestants seem to accept early councils as valid (yet without thereby validating the concept of Sacred Tradition). So while the doctrine of the Trinity itself, which is not explicitly delineated in scripture, would be a pretty strong argument for (& explanation of) the concept of Sacred Tradition, I am looking for another such doctrine.   

After all, some Protestants will assent to anything (like the Trinity) that was laid out in the Nicean Creed, but will still deny the authority of Sacred Tradition. Can you think of another example of a universally agreed upon Christian doctrine which was not explicitly made clear by either scripture or ecumenical council?

I’m not sure that all of the elements named above are needed for a doctrine to help non-Catholics understand the role of apostolic Tradition. For example, while–let’s say–an Evangelical would not accept a teaching that had been defined ex cathedra because it was defined ex cathedra, if it were not stated or implied in Scripture and he nevertheless accepted it, it would be possible to point him to the extrabiblical history of belief in the doctrine and thus help him understand the value of apostolic Tradition.

Similarly, I suspect it’s not necessary to point to doctrines that no ecumenical council has addressed, just those councils to which Protestants do not appeal. If, for example, the Council of Trent had defined something extrascriptural that a Protestant accepts then he won’t accept it because Trent defined it, so his basis must be something else, and it would again be possible to point to the history of the doctrine and thus its basis in apostolic Tradition.

When it comes to those ecumenical councils to which Protestants commonly do appeal (either the first four or the first six), while they do accept in broad outlines the results of these councils, they do not attribute to the councils an infallible teaching authority. As a result, they defend the results of these councils on the grounds that their teachings are rooted at least implicitly in Scripture.

For example, the doctrine of the Trinity–as taught by I Nicaea and I Constantinople–will generally be defended by Protestants not by appealing to the authority of the councils but by appealing to the passages of Scripture which provide bases for fact that there is one God, that the Son and the Spirit are God just as the Father is, and that the three are distinct Persons. There is no single text of Scripture which puts the doctrine together, but the different aspects of the doctrine are clearly enough reflected in Scripture that the Bible may be said to imply the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

It seems to me that all that is essential to finding a doctrine that can help our Protestant brethren understand the role of Tradition is that the following conditions be met:

a) The doctrine in question is accepted by the Protestants to whom one is speaking
b) The doctrine is not stated in Scripture
c) The doctrine is not implied by Scripture
d) The doctrine has an extrabiblical history to which one can appeal as an alternative, extrascriptural basis

The canon of Scripture is a subject which, in broad outlines, meets these criteria. Actually, it would be better to formulate this as "the canon of the New Testament," since Protestants do not accept precisely the same Old Testament canon. If one focuses on the New Testament, however, it is quite clear that the reason individuals in the Protestant community today accept the books of the New Testament that they do is because these books were passed down from the early Church as having been written by the apostles or their associates and were regarded by the early Church as divinely inspired. It is thus God’s guidance of the Church’s Tradition that provides the basis for our knowledge of the canonicity of these books.

(At least, this would follow for those Protestants who do not accept the claim that the Holy Spirit enables each individual to recognize for himself which books of Scripture are inspired–a claim that is very easy to falsify in practice. It would be quite easy, for example, to write an imitation of 3rd John that sounds enough like John that a person who had not read the original document would not be able to tell, by reading the two, which was authentic and  inspired and which was not.)

When it comes to other doctrines meeting the above requirements, I would propose two which readily spring to mind: the fact that there is to be no more public revelation and the fact that there are to be no more apostles.

Neither of these is directly stated in Scripture and, while there are verses to which some may appeal in defending them, these verses fail to do so upon examination.

For instance, in connection with the claim that there is to be no more public revelation, some may be inclined to appeal to the verse in Jude that says that the faith has been once for all delivered to the saints or to the book of Hebrews’ appeal definitiveness of God’s revelation through Christ. While these passages do indeed show that the substance of the Christian faith was already revealed, they cannot show that there is to be no more public revelation unless one is prepared to say that Jude and Hebrews are not part of public revelation, in which case their statements are non-inspired and correspondingly lacking in authority.

Others have appealed to the fact that at the end of the book of Revelation it says that no one is to tamper with the contents of "this book" as proof of the idea that Scripture, and thus public revelation, is closed. However a clear-eyed reading of the passage in its context shows that this is an illusion.

Part of the illusion is generated by the fact that Revelation is placed at the end of the New Testament in its traditional canonical order. But the canonical order of the books of the New Testament does not represent the historical order in which they were written but is based on other criteria. Revelation happens to be placed at the end because it deals (at least in its final chapters) with the end of the world, but the fact that it has this subject matter doesn’t tell us when it was written. We simply don’t know with any precision when Revelation was written relative to the other books of the New Testament. Even if it can be established that Revelation was written after some of them, we can’t possibly show with any certitude that it was written after all of them. This is especially true if you accept–as I do–that Revelation was written prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which is depicted as still in existence in the book itself.

Further, the illusion is based on the idea that Scripture is a single book. This is an anachronism that would not have occurred to the original readers of the work. Books in the first century were not bound the way they are today, with the pages sewn together in a spine. This form of book is called a "codex," and it was popularized in the early centuries by Christians (presumably because of the ease with which it allows one to flip to particular Bible passages), but in the first century books were normally bound in the form of a scroll, and the New Testament was not a single book but a collection of scrolls, just as the Old Testament was.

Also, right at the beginning of Revelation John is told to write down the vision he sees "in a book," and the most natural (one might say, blindingly obvious) interpretation of the book mentioned at the end is that it is the same book. In other words, John is firs commissioned to write the vision in a book and then, at the end, a warning is given against tampering with the contents of the book John has written.

Reading these passages in light of how books were bound in he first century (indeed, the word for "book" was synonymous with the word for "scroll"), John is first told to write the vision "in a scroll" and then after he has done so there is a warning against anyone who tampers with the contents of "this scroll."

One certainly cannot derive from this the idea that there is to be no more Scripture, much less that there is to be no more public revelation.

When we turn to the question of whether there are to be any more apostles, some might appeal to the passage in Acts 1 where the Twelve select Judas’ replacement, Matthias. In this passage one of the criteria for selection is that the replement must have been a witness of Jesus’ ministry, from the time of his baptism to the time he ascended into heaven. Since no one after the first century met those requirements, it could be argued, there could be no futher apostles. But if that is a requirement for being an apostle then it would exclude two individuals who are directly called apostles in Scripture, namely Paul and Barnabas.

This passage forces us to recognize that there is a difference between The Twelve and the office of apostle in general. Scripture is not explicit on what the difference is, but from the available evidence it would appear that The Twelve were a select group who served not just as witnesses of the risen Christ (of whom there were many who weren’t ever apostles) but as witnesses specifically of his earthly ministry. You had to witness that to be one of The Twelve, but you didn’t have to be a member of The Twelve to be an apostle.

So what did you have to have to be an apostle? The term in both Greek (apostolos) and Aramaic (shlikha) signifies one that has been commissioned to act on behalf of another (like an ambassador, emissary, or legate), and it seems essential for being an apostle that one receive such a commission from Christ to function in this capacity. In the case of all of The Twelve except Matthias this commission was given directly by Christ during his earthly ministry. In the case of Matthias it was given through a special procedure used in Acts 1. And in the case of Paul it was given (apparently) through visions.

There is one point at which Paul says "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord?" and he may be referring to the incident on the Damascus Road, where Christ appeared to him and then commissioned him to preach his word to the nations. There is also the incident, in Acts 13, where the Holy Spirit directs that Paul and Barnabas bet set aside to the work to which he has called them, following which hands are laid on them.

But all this happened after Christ had ascended to heaven, and if that’s the case then there is no reason why Christ and the Holy Spirit could not have continued to appear to or speak to people and commmission them as apostles. The office didn’t have to die out in the first century. God could have kept it going. Christian history simply records that he didn’t.

(NOTE: While the bishops are sometime referred to as the successors of the apostles, this does not mean that they are themselves apostles. They’re not. They succeeded the apostles in the leadership of the Church when the apostles died out, but the two offices are distinct, as illustrated by the fact that they co-existed in the apostlic age–and by the fact that bishops generally can’t work miracles and certainly can’t write inspired books of Scripture.)

There are thus no passages in Scripture that state or imply either that public revelation is closed or that there are to be no more apostles. These are known from extrascriptural elements of apostolic Tradition that have been passed down to us.

To my mind, these–together with the canon of the New Testament–are among the more convincing doctrines known primarily by Tradition, and I would point to them in preference to some of the other suggestions that one sometimes hears (e.g., the immorality of abortion; that one can be inferred from the fact that the unborn are human and that killing innocents is wrong, both of which principles are amply attested in Scripture).

FINAL NOTE: In dealing with Protestants on this subject it often needs to be pointed out that sacred Scripture and sacred Tradition are not exclusive sources. Indeed, as something handed down to us, Scripture itself is part of sacred Tradition–its written part. Abstracting from that, though, many doctrines are known both by Scripture and by Tradition. For example, there is the fact that we are to be baptized. Christians were responding to this command before Matthew 28 was penned, and the practice of baptism was already established in the Christian community. The fact we are to be baptized is thus passed down both in written form an in the unwritten praxis of the Church, making it a fact known both by Scripture and Tradition but not only or primarily by Tradition.

A reader writes:

My roommate and I (both devout Catholics) enjoy having theological conversations.  In one of these discussions, a question arose.

We were looking at 1 John 5, and we questioned the meaning of 1 John 5:16:

"If anyone sees his brother sinning, if the sin is not deadly, he should pray to God and he will give him life. This is only for those whose sin is not deadly. There is such a thing as deadly sin, about which I do not say that you should pray" (NAB). 

It seems as though John is telling us not to pray for those in mortal sin, but this command does not seem to make sense.  Obviously repentance, even for one in mortal sin, is only possible through the grace of God given to that person.  So why would we not pray that God would continue to offer grace to a person whose sin is deadly, so that the person would come to repentance? 

Furthermore, given that we cannot judge the state of someone’s soul, we can even pray for people who died in states of objectively serious sin (for example, those who commit suicide) in the hopes that they lacked either full knowledge or full consent, or that they repented in their last moments.  Are we misunderstanding John’s meaning here, or is there a particular reason he would discourage his readers from praying for people whose sin is deadly?

This verse is notoriously difficult for people of all theological stripes to interpret, and one of the reasons for this–at least in the English-speaking world–seems to be that it does not come over into English that smoothly, leading translators to fudge a bit of what the Greek says in order to better fit the idiom of our speech John does not literally refer to someone whose sin is "not deadly." That’s an attempt (a guess, really) at what John meant by the Greek phrase he used (mE pros thanaton).

My own thought is that the verse is easier to understand if you stick with a more literal translation, and to that end let me quote the verse from a translation that I don’t often use–Young’s Literal Translation:

If any one may see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and He shall give to him life to those sinning not unto death; there is sin to death, not concerning it do I speak that he may beseech.

I also should note that the "a" in "sinning a sin" is not there in the Greek (Greek does not have an equivalent of the word "a," so the translator has to decide whether or not to add it based on the context). You could thus translate the first part of this, "If anyone sees his brother sinning sin not unto death." (You could also use "to" instead of the archaic "unto.")

That’s clunky English, but it enables one to see what I think is the most natural interpretation of the text: John is talking about people who sin and keep on sinning until they die, with no repentance. To paraphrase the passage, what I think John is saying is this:

If somebody sees his fellow Christian sinning, but not up to the point of death, then he should pray and God will give the brother life–that is, to those who don’t keep sinning until death; there is such a thing as sinning until death, and I’m not talking about praying about that.

In all of this it is understood that the sin in question is mortal sin, and the point John is making is that as long as a person hasn’t died in mortal sin you can still pray for them and God can give them life (spiritual and/or physical).

If someone has died in mortal sin then, of course, there is no point praying for them, which is why John says what he does.

You’ll note, though, that he doesn’t say not to pray for them. He just says, "I am not saying that he should pray about that." It strikes me that John may avoid saying "Don’t pray for such people" precisely because we can’t ultimately know if someone was in mortal sin when they died. He’s just not advocating prayer for people who appeared to remain in mortal sin until they died.

This is still different than what we tend to do today–we tend to pray for everybody, even those who really STRONGLY appeared to be in mortal sin when they died (e.g., the 9/11 hijackers) because we know that there is some small chance that they weren’t–but in the New Testament era the emphasis tended to be placed on what a person’s outward behavior would indicate about their spiritual status rather than what their hypothetically possible inward state might be.

People in the New Testament recognized that the inward state of a person might not match their outward state (i.e., people who appeared to be righteous outwardly could really be sinners inwardly, and people who sinned outwardly might have diminished culpability for their actions), but there was a tendency in practice to read the outward state as a usually-reliable guide to their inward state.

Incidentally, other folks do other things with this passage, and other interpretations of it are certainly legitimate, but this is the interpretation that strikes me as the most natural.

A reader writes:

I am studying at a Catholic college and have had the opportunity to take some classes on scripture.  I have been introduced to various methodologies, such as the historical critical method, that have definately aided in my understanding of the scriptures, but there is a point where these modern methods confuse me and don’t strenghten my faith.  One area in particular is in the Pauline tradition.  Because of differences in Greek syntax in different epistles, my professor tells us that Paul probably did not write some of them.  Rather, he believes that someone using Paul’s authority wrote them, which some scholars call Pseudo Paul.  Are you familiar with this assertion?  If so, what are your thoughts on this?  Is there some validity to these claims?  Are there any pastoral repercussions of this problem?

I am indeed aware of this claim, and I am not very impressed with it. A hundred and fifty years ago, F. C. Baur was claiming that there were only four authentic Pauline epistles (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, and Galatians), and the scholarly community has concluded that he was wrong in this claim and that other epistles in addition  are authentically Pauline. There are still scholars who don’t accept the whole corpus as Pauline, but the force of the evidence has pushed scholars in the direction of greater recognition of their authenticity, and I think those who continue to deny the authenticity of some are simply resisting the evidence and/or using a flawed methodology.

I think there are several problems here:

1) The individuals making this claim are almost invariably applying a hermeneutic of suspicion to the texts. That is, they are looking for reasons to distrust biblical texts or elements of them, with the result that they inappropriately shift the burden of proof onto those who would say that when a biblical text says that it is written by Paul (that is, he identifies himself within the text itself) that one must prove that this is the case.

Such a hermeneutic of suspicion is unwarranted, particularly for persons of faith regarding their own Scriptures, as well as incompatible with the basic purpose of language, one of whose chief goals is to communicate information. Virtually the whole enterprise of language would be undercut if a hermeneutic of suspicion were applied consistently, signalling that the default setting must be a hermeneutic of trust until evidence for the contrary is produced in particular cases.

It can be warranted to assume a hermeneutic of suspicion regarding particular types of claims in particular bodies of work. For example, authorship claims in the Book of Mormon. But in that case we have multiple reasons to distrust such authorship claims–reasons that in no way apply to the Pauline epistles (e.g., they aren’t claimed to be written by someone who cannot be located in history, from a civilization that cannot be located in history, or to be composed in an unattested language on golden plates that were kept hidden in a bag while being shown to "witnesses" of their existence and then translated by a man who kept his face covered with a hat using a "peep stone" as he dictated them to others).

The pedigree of the documents in question–which is both part of Sacred Tradition and which can be evaluated in historical terms–is just too strong to warrant a hermeneutic of suspicion being applied to the authorship claims of these documents.

Looking for internal literary clues like grammar and word choice to prove or disprove Pauline authorship is also virtually useless, for several reasons:

2) The epistles in question are devoted to different subjects, which is going to force significant changes in word frequency.

3) Many of the samples are simply too short to draw any firm conclusions based on statistical analysis of word choice or grammatical usages.

4) Authors vary their styles quite considerably depending on a variety of factors, such as who they are writing for (are they friendly with their audience? do they have strained relations with them? are they intimate companions? are they about to chew somebody out? are they writing for a group or a single individual?), what venue they’re writing in, what emotional effect they’re trying to create, how their skills have developed as a writer over time, and even what mood they are in.

I suspect that the biblical critics in question are not fully sensitive to this fact because they do not write that much and, when they do, they tend to write only in one style (e.g., academic papers or treatises), on a restricted range of subjects, and (most importantly) because they never stop to apply their own authorship criteria to what they themselves have written. If they did, they’d find out that their own books and papers were written by a hodge podge of different individuals and groups with different and conflicting agendas.

Let me give some illustrations of how an author’s style can change that should be immediately apparent to many readers of JA.O, you’ll find a lot more "YEE-HAW!"s on my blog than you will in my writing for This Rock, and my writings in This Rock (because of space restrictions) will have a different style than my books and booklets. You’ll also find a lot more grammatical and spelling mistakes on the blog since I’m doing this in the evening, without a copy editor, without a proof reader, and am basically putting up first drafts that I may well have only read once and then not edited.

5) Paul used amanuenses. These were individuals who would take dictation from Paul and then write his letters, which Paul would then approve and sign (2 Thess. 3:17). We even know the name of one such individual: Tertius (Rom. 16:22), who I’m guessing based on his name was the third child (or third son) in his family.

Anyone who has ever tried to take dictation from someone knows that there is invariably a smoothing out process that is done when setting down what someone else has said, because the person will stop in mid sentence, change direction, want to scratch things out, and the secretary will inject some of his or her own style into the resulting document, even proposing things that the dictator may wish to say.

How much of the amanuensis’ style gets into the text will depend on what the author wants to allow. In some cases, the author may just give talking points and let the amanuensis virtually ghostwrite the letter, subject to the author’s final approval. (That might be the kind of thing you’d want to do, for example, if you were in prison and didn’t have much contact with your amanuensis but felt you needed to send a letter.)

Whatever degree(s) of liberty Paul gave his amanuenses, the Holy Spirit superintended the process via divine inspiration, but the fact that he used them at all means that we should expect differences of style as he used different secretaries in different circumstances. (It’s unlikely that Tertius stuck with him for his whole career and was the one used on all of the Pauline epistles, or he’d get mentioned more.)

6) The above considerations are simply literary points that illustrate the problems in challenging the Pauline authorship of various epistles, but there is also a theological problem with doing so: Whatever is asserted by Sacred Scripture is asserted by the Holy Spirit, for the human authors wrote down all that the Holy Spirit wished and no more (Dei Verbum 11).

This means that if a document contains an authorship claim you either have to say that (a) the claim is true, (b) the claim is not an assertion of fact, or (c) that the claim is false, in which case the Christian understanding of the inspiration of Scripture is false.

The last is not an option for an orthodox Christian, which leaves you with options (a) and (b).

(b) is a possibility in particular cases. There are books of Scripture which appear to contain clues that signal the audience that the authorship claim is a literary device rather than an assertion of fact (e.g., in Wisdom or Tobit), but this is going to be very hard to maintain with the Pauline epistles.

It is not credible to claim that none of the Pauline authorship claims in Scripture are asssertions of fact. If you acknowledge any of the epistles as being written by him, and if those same books contain assertions that he wrote them (as they do) then I don’t see how you can regard the authorship claims of these books as being anything other than assertions of fact. (Paul is not going to write an epistle and claim authorship of it in the text as merely a literary device.)

That being the case, if you want to hold that a particular authorship claim is a literary device rather than an assertion of fact then you will need to produce evidence by which the original audience could have recognized the literary device for what it is (as can be done with Wisdom and Tobit).

If no such evidence can be found in the text then the text would seem to be misleading the original audience, and I don’t know how you can square that with a proper view of biblical inspiration.

I have heard no arguments as to why particular Pauline epistles should be seen as having cues in them to tell the original audience that the Pauline authorship claims in them are just literary devices, so I see no way to maintain this in the case of works in the Pauline corpus.

I thus find the whole theory a bunch of hooey.

INCIDENTALLY, HERE’S AN ESSAY BY C. S. LEWIS THAT MIGHT BE OF USE ON RELATED MATTERS.

A reader writes:

I was discussing with a Protestant the other day, refuting the notion of
"once saved always saved."  He threw out Hebrews 6:4-6 and it stumped me.
He stated that the "if they fall away" (NIV) is rhetorical, thus it must
mean you can not fall away.  The verse to me says if you lose your
salvation, you’re toast.  So regardless I’m totally confused.

He also used 1 John 1:9, stating that if you confess your sins, God will
clense you of ALL (past, present and future) unrighteousness.

Will you please explain Hebrew 6:4-6 and 1 John 1:9 in their proper
context?

Okay, let’s deal with first things first: First, here is how the NIV renders Hebrews 6:4-6:

It is impossible for those
who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who
have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.

Now: The NIV translation (which also is in the RSV) "if they fall away" is flatly erroneous. It’s not what the Greek says. Period. For purposes of comparison, here is the passage is rendered by the New American Standard Bible (not to be confused with the New American Bible), which renders the phrase in question correctly:

For in the case of those who have once been enlightened [and] have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame.

You’ll note that I’ve annotated this a bit by putting one of the words translated "and" in brackets and making three of the others blue. The one I’ve put in brackets isn’t the normal Greek word for "and"; it’s a different word (te) that can mean the same thing. The other three time the word appears it is the ordinary Greek word for "and" (kai), which is one of the most familiar words there is in Greek. In fact, after the Greek equivalent for "the," the Greek equivalent for "and" is the single most common word in the Greek New Testament.

Kai is not the normal Greek word for "if." That’s a different word entirely (ei).

Like most words, kai can be rendered more than one way in English. In addition to "and," depending on the context, it can also be rendered things like "but," "even," "also," and "too." And like with the Latin construction et X et Y, if in Greek you see the construction kai X kai Y then we’d normally render it "both X and Y" in English, so kai can also sometimes be translated "both" (in this construction, anyway).

But I am unaware of any time in the New Testament (or elsewhere) that it means "if."

Even if it could mean "if," though, it doesn’t in this case. In context we have a series of phrases being joined together by kai and the first two occurrences clearly mean "and." What’s more these occur in a sequence that begins with another word also meaning "and" (te). It is completely gratuitous to shift from the reading "and" for the final phrase to something like "if."

What we’ve got here is a sequence of items that all collectively describe a group of people: those who have (a) been enlightened and (b) tasted the heavenly gift and (c) been made partakers of the Holy Spirit and (d) have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come and (e) have fallen away.

Items (a) through (d) in the sequence clearly describe Christians. (a) probably describes acceptance of the Christian faith. (b) may well refer to the Eucharist. (c) means that they have received the Holy Spirit in Christian initiation. And (d) means they have been exposed to the Scriptures (or the word of God more widely conceived or Jesus) and the spiritual gifts of the Christian community. At least, it’s extraordinarily hard to see how this sequence could be referring to anybody but Christians.

And then the final element in the chain–(e)–tells us that they can fall away. Right there is a big problem for a number of variants of eternal security, particularly perseverance of the saints.

But a supporter of eternal security may turn around and say, "Okay, that is a problem. But the rest of the verse presents one for you as a Catholic since it says you can’t get people who fulfill (a) through (e) to repent, so if you’ve been an authentic Christian and fallen away then you’re toast. There’s no way to repent afterwards."

Well, the author of Hebrews is certainly pessimistic about the salvation of such individuals, but there are two things that need to be kept in mind:

First, the context he is talking in deals with the question of first century Jewish Christians who apostatize from the Christian faith and go back to Judaism.  In fact, the main point of the book of Hebrews is to warn Jewish Christians (the Hebrews of the title) not to abandon Christianity and go back to Judaism, which some did under persecution.

Given that–or related to that–we’re led to the second thing that needs to be kept in mind: There is a question here of what mode of language the author is using. In particular: Is he speaking technically or practically?

If he is speaking technically–offering the kind of absolute axiom that one would find in a systematic theology–then he would indeed mean that if you fall away from Christianity then you won’t repent afterwards. Your mind will be locked on evil such that you can’t (or won’t) change it, as happens with those in hell.

But normally the authors of Scripture are not speaking technically. That’s one of the reasons Scripture does not read like a systematic theology. You can’t approach a given passage with the assumption that it must be a set of exceptionless theological axioms. To do that is to commit what I’ve called the "technical statement fallacy."

Instead, you have to recognize the flexibility and partialness of the way the authors of Scripture express themselves, as well as the fact that they are often speaking in practical terms and may use expressions of speech that are hyperbolic.

That’s what I think is happening in this passage: The author of Hebrews isn’t making a technical statement about getting apostates to repent. He’s making a practical one, and in so doing he’s expressing himself somewhat hyperbolically.

He even signals this, after making the dramatic statement that you can’t get apostates to repent, by explaining the grounds for the assertion: They (the Jewish Christians who have gone back to Judaism) can’t be brought back to repentance because (a) they crucify Christ again to themselves (meaning: in their hearts) and (b) they openly put Christ to shame. What he means by this is that, after having been followers of Christ, they then turn their backs on him and say that he was a false Messiah who deserved what he got by being crucified (that’s how they crucify him "again . . . to themselves") and they then start publicly condemning him in the Jewish community (that’s the putting him to an open shame).

The author then, in subsequent verses, goes on to compare such people to hardened ground that won’t soak up rain, conveying the idea that they are so hard of heart at this point that you won’t be able to bring them back to repentance and faith in Christ.

Bear in mind that we’re talking about the first century, when becoming a Christian could and did result in being put out of the synagogue, shunned in Jewish society, and basically divorced from your family. If someone has braved all that and tasted all of the heavenly gifts that being a Christian has to offer and still turned his back on Christ and gone back to Judaism, saying that Jesus deserved to be crucified and talking him down in the non-Christian Jewish community to prove their restored loyalty to it then–the author of Hebrews is saying–don’t waste your time on such people. Their hearts are too hard. You won’t–practically speaking–be able to get them to turn back to Christ if they’re really that hard of heart.

Incidentally, the "don’t waste your time on these people" aspect of the passage is also indicated by the way the chapter begins, which involves the author of Hebrews saying "Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to
maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works
and of faith toward God" (6:1)–in other words, "Let’s not be detained by all of the basic, introductory elements of the Christian faith at this point. You’d have to explain a lot of this to ex-Christian Jews to lead them back to the faith, but it isn’t worth it practically speaking. You’d be better off focusing on the matters I want to move on to."

Look at the way verses 1-3 hook up with verses 4-6: The author isn’t introducing the subject of the hard hearted apostates as a subject on it’s own. It’s a justification for moving on in the discussion.

Of course, as Jesus told us, what is impossible with man is still possible with God, and so in his own way God can lead ex-Christians back to the faith–even very hard hearted ones. And human experience does show that apostates both can and do repent again and turn back to Christ, so we have evidence on that front as well that the author of Hebrews is speaking practically rather than technically. The long experience of twenty centuries shows that such reversions are possible, and the Church has recognized them and ministered God’s grace to such reverts by the sacrament of penance.

So I hope that helps you on that passage. Now, about 1 John 1:9, I can deal with this one much more succinctly: Your friend’s interpretation of "all unrighteousness" as "all the sins you have committed, you are committing, or you will commit" is unwarranted. The passage is more naturally taken to mean just "all the sins you have committed."

Otherwise Jesus would not have taught us to pray "forgive us our debts" as part of the model Christian prayer (and it does say "debts" in the Greek; "trespasses" is a clarification of what he means in the English translation). The fact we regularly pray for forgiveness means we ain’t forgiven for things we haven’t done or haven’t repented of yet. We need to be forgiven anew as we commit new sins. That’s the whole point of the clause.

Further, 1 John is written to Christians, not to people who need to come to Christ. That means that when John says " If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will  forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1:9) that he is talking to Christians about their ongoing need to confess their sins and receive God’s forgiveness and cleansing.

The passage itself thus is proof against the interpretation your friend is offering: Rather than meaning we’ll be forgiven for all our sins, including our future ones, the verse means that we have a continuing need to be forgiven as we commit new sins, and we can be assured of God’s forgiveness because he will be faithful to his promise to forgive if we confess our sins.

Which is good news for everybody–even hard hearted apostates.

A reader writes:

I once had a friend ask me why Catholics confess their
sins to a priest, using the fact that the temple
curtain was torn in two when Jesus was crucified as an
example of the fact that nothing should keep us from
confessing our sins directly to Jesus. How was this an
incorrect understanding of the tearing of the temple
curtain and what is the correct biblical
understanding?

It seems clear that the tearing of the veil at the Jerusalem temple when Christ died is meant to have symbolic significance. The question is: What significance does it have? What message is being communicated by this?

Your friend is apparently trying to read a very narrow message into the tearing of the veil: The fact that it is torn means that we should confess our sins to Jesus instead of a priest. This, or a variant on it, is a common interpretation in Protestant circles. One does periodically hear claims that because the veil was torn in two we should confess to God rather than to priests.

But is this really a plausible interpretation? Were Jews in the habit of confessing to priests prior to this point so that the original witnesses to the tearing of the veil would understand the message? If not, then this would be an anachronistic interpretation to take a controversy that arose in later centuries and try to read it back onto the gospel record of this event.

In fact, it appears that a confession of sorts that took place in the offering of sacrifices for sin (more info here from Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Church), but it is not clear to what extent the confession was viewed as being made to the priest. It was something that the penitent did as part of his bringing a sacrifice to make atonement for his sins, and the priest was in the vicinity since he had to do certain things with the animal’s blood, but the principle action seems to have been confession to God, or simply to identify the sin with the animal so as to mark out what sin its sacrifice was meant to atone for.

The dominant element in this exchange is not the confession–and thus not the thing that the original witnesses of the tearing of the veil would have thought of in seeking to interpret the event. The dominant element was the sacrifice of the animal to make atonement for sin. This is the thing the original witnesses would have used in seeking to understand the significant of the rending of the veil.

Consider it: Up to now people have been making sin offerings on the Temple Mount by taking animals there and killing them. Then, at the very moment the Lamb of God dies on Golgotha, the veil is torn in the temple.

What lesson would you take away from that as a first century Jew accustomed to making animal sacrifices for your sins?

It seems to me that the most likely interpretation is that the definitive Sacrifice has now been made and thus there is no need to continue with the animal sacrifices at the temple. At least that would be the most plausible interpretation if we seek to relate the event to the individual atonement of sins. It could also have a larger message, like the passing away of the temple cultus and the Mosaic order in general or God’s judgment on the temple and its leaders who supported the killing of the Messiah or any number of other things.

In view of this, it seems anachronistic to read the event in terms of the issue of whether one confesses to a priest.

Indeed, that subject is dealt with by Jesus in the post-resurrection accounts, where he explicitly instructs his ministers to forgive or retain sins (John 20:21-23). As I’ve often pointed out, since mosts priets aren’t telepathic, if they’re going to know about the sin and whether it should be forgiven or retained (based on your repentance or lack thereof), you’re going to need to tell them about it. Hence: confession.