Category: Bible

A reader writes:

Being starved for Catholic radio out here in the Bay Area, I find myself turning to an Evangelical radio station during my commute. Today, I heard a commenter saying something like this: that it was clear that the old testament writers didn’t believe in an immortal soul. The bible teaches we will be raised from the dead to everlasting life, but it doesn’t mean that our souls are immortal, that is, that our souls are alive while our body is dead.  This is an idea that is more common in Greek philosophy, he explains, but is not biblical.

Have you ever heard this theory bandied about? How would you respond to that?

There are a number of different groups that have variations on this idea. The Jehovah’s Witnesses (who are not Protestant or even Christian), for example, hold a physicalistic understanding of the spirit that basically precludes its existence between death and resurrection (meaning that there are serious questions about wheter you are still you at the resurrection). That view is not common in Protestant circles, however.

More common in Protestant circles is the idea of "soul sleep," which is that you do have a soul that continues to exist between death and resurrection but that it does not have conscious experience in the interim and is thus "asleep." Luther seems to have held this view, as do Seventh-Day Adventists and a few other groups, but it has been quite uncommon.

MORE INFO ON THESE TWO VIEWS HERE.

I can’t tell from what you said whether the gentleman you heard on the radio was saying that the Old Testament writers didn’t believe in an immortal soul or whether he was saying that it is untrue that there is an immortal soul.

These two positions are not the same. One could hold that the Old Testament authors did not believe in the immortality of the soul because this doctrine had not yet been revealed but–since it has been revealed in the New Testament–we now know what they didn’t.

If he meant this latter position then I would say he at least has part of a leg to stand on. The idea of the afterlife is not sharply defined in the Old Testament, and it is not clear what most Jews believed about the afterlife at this time. Indeed, they may not all have believed the same thing. The Old Testament spends very little time discussing the afterlife; it is focused primarily on salvation from dangers in this life rather than salvation from hell after this life, so we don’t have enough data to draw firm conclusions about the particulars of how the afterlife was conceived in this period.

We do have enough data, however, to establish that at least some Jews (and almost certainly the great majority) did at least acknowledge the existence of the afterlife.

For example, the fact that, when various patriarchs die, they are regularly said to be "gathered to their people" suggests a reunion with those who have died. That phrase is a little ambiguous, though, but here is something that is not: If belief in an afterlife was not common among the Jewish people then God wouldn’t have had to warn them against using mediums and spiritists to call up the dead.

There also is at least one passage in which the fate of a particular figure is prophecied and it describes the descent of his soul and its encounter with other souls, who recognize who it, is described. That occurs in the prophets, so one could interpret it non-literally, but one passage that is not vulnerable to this objection is the situation in which Saul has the witch of Endor summon up the spirit of the departed Samuel.

I know that there have been some (more out of a desire to say you can’t call up the dead than anything else) who have speculated that it was a demon impersonating Samuel, but this is not the way the text depicts the situation. The text presents it straightforwardly, as if the witch really did call up Samuel’s spirit (presumably by a kind of divine dispensation, since Samuel immediately prophesies Saul’s doom, which then comes to pass).

Whether or not it really was Samuel’s spirit, the passage attests to Israelite belief in the afterlife–and not just any kind of afterlife, but on in which the soul continues to exist between death and resurrection. If that’s not what you believe then there’s not point in trying to contact a dead guy.

So if the gentleman you heard on the radio was saying denying the presence in the Old Testament of belief in this kind of afterlife then he was overstating matters. It would be more defensible to say that the concept of the afterlife was not clearly defined in this age and that there may have been some Jews who did not accept it (just as some Jews did not accept the exclusive worship of God), but to say that the idea is foreign to the Old Testament is simply inaccurate.

If the gentleman was going further and saying that we do not have souls that exist between death and resurrection then he will have insuperable problems when it comes to the New Testament, because Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man clearly envisions conscious human souls in the intermediate state. The fact that this is a parable also is not an issue, for even if there was not a specific Lazarus and a specific rich man who had this experience (something that is likely), Jesus’ parables nevertheless are populated by things from the real world. They are about kings and merchants and fields and farmers and servants and sums of money and other things–like conscious, departed human souls–that really exist.

Even if he wanted to be truculent on this one, he’d also have to face the book of Revelation, which unambiguously depicts departed human souls, before the resurrection, worshipping God and talking with him in the intermediate state.

The idea that we don’t exist or are not conscious between death and resurrection simply is not tenable.

By the way, since the gentleman was Protestant he wouldn’t accept this, but it’s worth pointing out that the second book of Maccabees also has a very explicit passage on the reality and consciousness of departed souls, for Judah Maccabee receives a vision in which he learns that the departed (and unresurrected) prophet Jeremiah prays for the people of Israel. Judah also sees the soul of a departed priest in this vision.

A reader writes:

Dear Sir,

What is the Korban Rule, and why does James White make such a big deal about it when he speaks of sola scriptura?

This came up in Mark chapter 7 when some Pharisees attacked the fact that Jesus’ disciples at with unwashed hands, contrary to the tradition of the Jewish elders.

Their having made tradition an issue, Jesus turned the subject around on them by pointing to their own misuse of tradition, and he cited the korban custom just mentioned, stating that it violated the Ten Commandments, which require us to honor our parents and, by implication, support them in their old age so that they do not become financially destitude (which was the fate of almost anybody back then whose children didn’t care for them once they could no longer work).

He therefore concluded that they were "making void the word of God through your tradition" (Mark 7:13) and stated "You leave the commandment of God, and hold  fast the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8).

I haven’t read or heard specifically what James White may have been doing with this passage, but it is a staple of Protestant anti-Catholic apologetics.

The reason is that in this passage Jesus sets the korban tradition in opposition to the word of God and this is frequently taken as an indicator that all tradition is opposed to the word of God or that there is a fundamental opposition between tradition and Scripture.

It is thus common to hear Protestant ministers and apologists waxing eloquent on this passage–and even getting emotionally worked up from the pulpit or behind the microphone about how horrible a thing it is to set tradition above the word of God–and how we must therefore cling to the precious principle of sola scriptura or "by Scripture only."

The problem, of course, is that this argument commits the logical fallacy of hasty generalization.

The fact that in this passage Jesus says that particular aspects of Pharisaical tradition are contrary to God’s word does not mean that all traditions are contrary to God’s word. Nor does it say that we must use Scripture only and not Tradition. The fact that one tradition or one set of traditions must be excluded does not mean that all traditions must be excluded.

This conclusion is made even more clear when one realizes that the New Testament praises other traditions, which are in harmony with God’s word.

Thus Paul tells the Corinthians, "I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you" (1 Cor. 11:2), and he commands the Thessalonians, "So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter" (2 Thess. 2:15). He even goes so far as to order, "Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us" (2 Thess. 3:6).

Paul also seeks to ensure that the apostolic traditions would be passed down after the deaths of the apostles, and he tells Timothy, "[W]hat you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also" (2 Tim. 2:2). In this passage he refers to the first four generations of apostolic succession—his own generation, Timothy’s generation, the generation Timothy will teach, and the generation they in turn will teach.

So from the perspective of the New Testament, Pharisaical tradition was unreliable and could be contrary to the word of God (not that it always was), while apostolic Tradition was normative and binding for Christians.

By the way, you may have some difficulty making some of these points to a Protestant who is using the New International Version. That translation displays a prominent bit of translator bias when it comes to rendering the term for "tradition" in the Greek text (paradosis). Whenever the term is used in conjunction with Jewish traditions, it renders the word "tradition(s)", but when it is used in connection with apostolic tradition (as in the passages above), it mistranslates the word as "teaching(s)." The net effect is to make tradition sound bad by hiding the positive references to it and using the word in passages where it is subject to critique.

No, that’s not the title of a Lovecaft story. It’s something that you yourself may suffer from. Many people have fears of things–phobias–that they don’t know the clinical names for. Any such fear is, for that person, a nameless fear.

It sometimes happens that a person has a fear of something very, very specific, and they may thing "There can’t be a special name for this phobia," but you might be surprised.

Let’s give a name to a fear that many people have but don’t know the name of.

Yesterday was June 6, 2006, or 6/6/06.

I did a blog post about it.

The post was titled 666.

Did you find yourself scrolling down past that post quickly? Avoiding looking at it? Did it make you feel nervous?

If so, then you have

HEXAKOSIOIHEXEKONTAHEXAPHOBIA.

If you need that syllabificated, it’s

Hex-a-ko-si-oi-hex-e-kon-ta-hex-a-pho-bi-a.

And now that fear ain’t nameless anymore.

Folks may have heard about Elaine Pagels, who is most famed as the author of The Gnostic Gospels (not the Gnostic gospels themselves, but a book by the same name). She is billed as an expert in Gnosticism and early Christianity and has recently been used as the go-to gal for the MSM wanting juicy pro-heresy quotes on subjects like The Da Vinci Code and the Gospel of Judas.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE BY FR. PAUL MANKOWSKI AT THE PONTIFICAL BIBLICAL INSTITUTE ARGUING THAT ELAINE PAGELS IS  NO SCHOLAR.

EXCERPTS:

Pagels has carpentered a non-existent quotation, putatively from an ancient source, by silent suppression of relevant context, silent omission of troublesome words, and a mid-sentence shift of 34 chapters backwards through the cited text, so as deliberately to pervert the meaning of the original. While her endnote calls the quote "conflated," the word doesn’t fit even as a euphemism: what we have is not conflation but creation.

Put simply, Irenaeus did not write what Prof. Pagels wished he would have written, so she made good the defect by silently changing the text. Creativity, when applied to one’s sources, is not a compliment. She is a very naughty historian.

Or she would be, were she judged by the conventional canons of scholarship. At the post-graduate institute where I teach, and at any university with which I am familiar, for a professor or a grad student intentionally to falsify a source is a career-ending offense. Among professional scholars, witness tampering is no joke: once the charge is proven, the miscreant is dismissed from the guild and not re-admitted.

I am not calling for academic sanctions but, more simply, for clarification. Pagels should be billed accurately — not as an expert on Gnosticism or Coptic Christianity but as what she is: a lady novelist.

Ouch!

It’s nice to see Catholic news sources getting the message out there that all the "Gospel of Judas" hype is, well, hype.

HERE’S A GOOD PIECE FROM ZENIT.

AND ANOTHER FROM CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE.

One of the refreshing things about these pieces is how utterly contemptuous the experts being interviewed are about hullabaloo over the Gospel of Judas.

When asked whether the document will "shake Christistianity to its foundations," the Zenit expert replies:

Certainly not. The Gnostic gospels, of which there are many besides this one, are not Christian documents per se, since they proceed from a syncretistic sect that incorporated elements from different religions, including Christianity.

From the moment of their appearance, the Christian community rejected these documents because of their incompatibility with the Christian faith.

The CNS expert is even more blunt:

"It was junk then and it is junk now," he said.

A reader writes:

I had the TV on last night on a BBC channel (I’m in Italy right now on vacation and its one of the few English channels I have) and I saw an ad for a TV show on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot and how it could shake the foundations of Christianity and turn everything we know about Jesus upside-down (I’m paraphrasing).  Its obvious that this is shameless sensationalism in the vein of the Da Vinci Code, but I was wondering what you know about the text they are refering to?

I’ve been aware of the so-called "Gospel of Judas" for some time, and rumor is that it’ll be released by Easter.

In fact, the National Geographic Channel is going to be doing a special on it on April 9th at 8 p.m. (Eastern?), apparently.

Here’s the scoop:

In the second century there was a non-canonical work that was known as "the Gospel of Judas," and it was used by a sect of Gnostics called the Cainites who Irenaeus attacked in his work Against Heresies. According to Irenaeus,

Others [i.e., the Cainites] again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas [Against Heresies 1:31:1].

Despite being mentioned here, the Gospel of Judas was lost to history, but a copy of it (or, rather, of most of it) turned up on the antiquities market in the latter half of the 20th century. It was finally purchased and has been undergoing translation and preparation for publication in the last few years.

With Da Vinci madness in the air, I’m sure that the Gospel of Judas will be all over the airwaves and the Net once it’s finally published (possibly next week), so the time is ripe to do a heads-up on it.

It’ll all be much ado about not much, though, because this thing ain’t written by the historical Judas. It’s a second century forgery (assuming that it’s not a 20th century forgery of a forgery) that will tell us more about hte beliefs of certain Gnostics than it will about the events of Christ’s life.

It has historical value insofar as it is used to learn more about early Gnosticism. But the press’ll misrepresent the story, breathlessly wondering "What if it’s true?" when it just ain’t true. The press’ll try to press it into service as a window into the ministry of Jesus, and that’s precisely what it’s not.

So, forewarned is forearmed.

MORE FROM WIKIPEDIA.

MORE FROM A SITE DEVOTED TO WHAT IS CURRENTLY KNOWN ABOUT IT, INCLUDING TRANSLATIONS OF SOME PASSAGES.

I always get depressed when I read stories like the following one.

SCIENTISTS SPECULATE THAT FLOATING ICE COULD HAVE EXPLAINED JESUS WALKING ON WATER.

The theory is that conditions could have been such that ice could have formed in the saltwater springs near Tabgha in the Sea of Galilee and

With such conditions, a floating patch of ice could develop above the plumes resulting from the salty springs along the lake’s western shore in Tabgha. Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found.

"We simply explain that unique freezing processes probably happened in that region only a handful of times during the last 12,000 years," said Doron Nof, a Florida State University Professor of Oceanography. "We leave to others the question of whether or not our research explains the biblical account."

Nof figures that in the last 120 centuries, the odds of such conditions on the low latitude Lake Kinneret are most likely 1-in-1,000. But during the time period when Jesus lived, such “spring ice” may have formed once every 30 to 60 years.

Yeah, right. Big deal.

There are all kinds of ways to rationalize biblical miracles–the burning bush only seemed to burn because there was a natural gas-emitting fissure that had ignited behind it, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes was really a "miracle of sharing," yadda, yadda, yadda.

Sheesh!

Look, I’m all for recognizing that not everything in Scripture is meant by the authors to be taken literally, but we can’t simply dismiss miraculous occurrences in this fashion, especially not in documents that were written as close to the historical events in question as the gospels (within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses and even by eyewitnesses).

The fact is that there are Aramaic and Greek words for "ice," and if Jesus had been walking on it, the Evangelists could have said so. Even if the ice was hard to see, Peter would have been aware of it, because he got out and stood on the water, at least momentarily.

The gospels also depict Jesus walking on the water, not standing and floating along on something.

This just isn’t the picture of the event that the Gospels give us.

Not that that’ll stop some avant garde priests from using the theory in homilies.

A reader writes:

I’ve always got the impression that the Catholic Old Testament is translated from the Septuagint, while the Protestant Bible’s Old Testament is translated from the Masoretic texts. The virtues of this being (A) that the apostles and Christ quoted mainly from the Septuagint, and (B) the Septuagint was translated from older and maybe more accurate versions of the books than what the Jews had in 70 AD. But — at least in a cursory glance, comparing with some Septuagint quotes online — aside from "a virgin shall give birth," all the cited passages in my Catholic Bibles seem to be what’s given as the Masoretic translation. Is this the case?

First a bit of terminology for those who may not be familiar: The Septuagint (LXX) is the major Greek translation of the Old Testament. It was produced between the third and first centuries B.C. and is extensively quoted in the New Testament. The great majority of times that the New Testament quotes from the Old, it’s the LXX version that is being used.

Originally, the term "Septuagint" just referred to the main Greek translation of the five books of Moses (Genesis-Deuteronomy), which were allegedly put into Greek by 70 scholars in Alexandria, Egypt. This is where the name "Septuagint" came from and why the Roman numeral for 70 (LXX) is used as an abbreviation for the translation. Over time (before the first century), it came to include all of the books of the Old Testament, including the deuterocanonicals.

The Masoretic Text (MT) is the main Hebrew edition of the Old Testament. It was prepared between the seventh and tenth centuries A.D. based on earlier Hebrew manuscripts. It does not include the deuterocanonical books.

It’s true that the LXX has an important role in Catholic translations of the Old Testament, but they generally are not straightforward translations from the LXX.

Until recently, most Catholic versions of the Old Testament were translated (primarily) from the Latin Vulgate rather than from the LXX or the MT. They might be based on the Vulgate using the LXX and the MT for purposes of comparison (e.g., to decide between disputed renderings), but the Vulgate was the base text used by most Western Catholics. (It’s different among Eastern Catholics.)

The Vulgate was based on the (pre-Masoretic) Hebrew text, the LXX, and the Old Latin Version.

It was in the 20th century that a significant number of translations started to be made from pre-Latin sources. This was encouraged by Pius XII in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu.

When this started happening, Catholic translators relied on a combination of the LXX and the MT.

The canon of the Catholic Old Testament is based on the LXX, so that’s the top level where the LXX is employed in making translations. (In the ancient world, both the LXX and the Hebrew scriptures had fuzzy boundaries about what books they included, but a few centuries after Christ the Catholic Church settled on one LXX-derived canon and in about the same timeframe the Jewish community settled on one Hebrew canon, which was later used to prepare the MT.)

Some of the books of the Catholic Old Testament seem to have been written as part of the developing LXX tradition (e.g., Wisdom, 2 Maccabees), and so there are no earlier versions. For these, Catholic translators use the LXX since there is no MT equivalent of these books.

Other books of the Catholic Old Testament were based on earlier versions in Hebrew or Aramaic but have survived primarily in the LXX (e.g., Sirach). For these Catholic translators tend to use primarily the LXX, but they may also consult the original language versions to the extent that these have been recovered by archaeology (e.g., the Hebrew version of Tobit).

Still other books are found in both the LXX and the MT. Here recent Catholic translators have tended to use the MT as their base text, using also the LXX and the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) for purposes of comparison.

The base text is just a starting point for the translators of major editions of the Old Testament, though. The goal is not to translate what is in the base text but to produce a translation that best reflects what the originals most likely said. This means going with what is in alternative sources (like the LXX and DSS) whenever it appears that the reading in the alternative source is more likely the original reading.

In some passages, it appears that what the MT has is the most original; in others it seems like the LXX or the DSS may better preserve the original.

How this gets sorted out is a complex process, but it’s part of the burden that scholars have to shoulder in an effort to get past the manuscript variation we are confronted with and try to arrive at the original readings. Scholars also disagree, coming to different conclusions or making different choices about what readings should be used. Generally they try to note major alternate readings in the footnotes.

This is not unique to Catholic scholars. Though many Protestant translations lack the deuterocanonicals, Protestant translators are confronted with the same set of questions regarding which readings best reflect the original, and so major Protestant translations of the Old Testament also use a hodge-podge approach to which text to follow in a particular passage (MT, LXX, DSS, or something else). They also generally note major alternate readings in the footnotes.

The major difference is that they let the MT control what they consider canonical.

Hope this clarifies things by muddying them!

Ja! Das ist ein Kinderbibel!

Kin-der-bi-bel!

Okay, so what’s a Kinderbibel? Well, if you think of what the German roots of the word "Kindergarten" mean and what the word "bibel" sounds like in English, you should have a pretty good clue:

It’s a Children’s Bible.

Aid To The Church In Need has produced a children’s bible called God Speaks To His Children that is now online in 20 (!) languages.

ENGLISH IS ONE OF THEM.

Now, by "children’s Bible," they don’t really mean a children’s Bible–a version of Scripture translated or annotated for kids. They mean a book of famous Bible stories with the text taken from the Bible and paraphrased for kids. But that’s not reason that the project isn’t worthy.

If y’all have or know folks who have young kids,

CHECK IT OUT.

OTHER LANGUAGES HERE. (Click on your part of the world map to see languages from your area come up.)

A reader writes:

I read your blog post "Tin-Eared Translators" but I was hoping you would address the entire phrase "angel of the Lord" as it’s used in Gn 22 (and elsewhere in the OT).   The phrase often seems to refer to God himself – for example, "you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me" (v. 12, RSV-CE).  Could you comment on the use of this phrase?  Thanks!

It’s true that "the angel of the Lord" often seems to speak with the voice of the Lord, and this has led some (particularly in Protestant circles) to speculate that the angel of the Lord is some kind of divine manifestation, such as a pre-Incarnate appearance of the Second Person of the Trinity.

Catholics generally have not gone for this piece of speculation, though it would be permitted by the Church.

A significant problem is the fact that the term "angel" is used to describe this being, and the pre-Incarnate Christ is not an angel.

It seems more likely (to me, anyway) that we are to understand the angel of the Lord speaking in the Lord’s voice the same way we would understand the messenger of a king speaking in the king’s voice. Messengers of that kind regularly would read proclamations written in the voice of the one who sent them or orally deliver messages prefixed with some tag such as "Thus says my master. . . ."

It also is not clear to me that the use of the definite article ("the" or ha- in Hebrew) is meant to indicate that there is one angel in particular who is known as the angel of the Lord (implying that he’s the Lord’s angel in a way that other angels are not). The rules in different languages about when the definite article gets used and how much weight should be put on it are not always clear. When the Old Testament says that the angel of the Lord did something, it may only mean that the angel of the Lord who happened to be there at the moment, did the thing–not that there is a unique "angel of the Lord."

That being said, there are passages in which there seems to be ambiguity about whether we’re looking at an angel or a manifestation of God himself.

St. Paul’s solution to such passages seems to be to interpret them as involving encounters with angels rather than divine manifestations. Thus he says that the Law was put in effect by angels through a mediator [Moses]  (Gal. 3:19), when if you look back in the Torah it makes it sound like God himself was there with Moses (Ex. 24:9-12).