Inspiration

A short post today, largely inspired by Ambrose’s response to my last post. If you recall, I spent most of my last post insisting that we should only loosely assign the category of authorship to these biblical texts. Although some – say, the letter to the Romans – were almost certainly written by the person (and only that person) who claims authorship, most almost certainly were not. And even texts like  Romans survived for decades after Paul’s death before any standard text was finalized. So it’s not like Paul had any kind of final editorial review and proofread of what is now published in his name. And Ambrose wondered, quite reasonably, in his comment whether the messiness and unreliability of these texts can call our belief in them into some question. In other words, if we read a newspaper article, but we could show that the author wasn’t who she claimed she was, and that in fact that the article had passed from editor to editor and writer to writer before finally being put to paper, we would have little reason to trust anything written there as reliable. So why should we trust these biblical texts, the composition of which in most cases have followed an analogous path?

The key to this is in understanding inspiration – or, rather, in coming to a new understanding of inspiration. Typically, I think when we think of inspiration, we think of a writer sitting with a pad of paper (or these days, with a computer I guess) and then – presto! chango! – an idea or a phrase or a words or lots of words bubble to the surface of the writer’s brain and all of it spills out onto the page. Anybody’s who’s written much knows that writing almost never looks like this, but anyway: this is what we think of. A spirit enters the author, and a message comes out. When we think of poets writing, it’s the spirit of poetry maybe that takes over a writer’s mind and heart. And when we think of the biblical authors, it’s the spirit of God. Indeed, that word ‘inspiration’ means something like this: in-spirit-ing. The spirit comes in.

Obviously, the model of authorship I’ve described in previous posts defies this. Even if somebody like Paul did have an experience like this when writing his letters, the letters we have today have been edited and redacted and combined and altered in ways we can’t be sure of. So how can we call them inspired? In other words, how is the ‘spirit-in’ them?

I think we need to think of in-spiriting not as an occurrence enjoyed by a single author, but as a process engaged in by communities of people. The bible isn’t full of the spirit because one author twenty-five hundred years ago was filled with magic and then spilled his pen all over some ancient page as a result of his spiritual fulness. The bible, rather, is full of the spirit because those first pages were pored over by the people of God – all the people of God – over years and years, for centuries even. It doesn’t make a text less inspired because it’s the work of more than one person. Indeed, we might say that the work is more inspired, because this message has been passed and filtered and adapted and blessed by all kinds of and generations of God’s people. The spirit of God is alive in the church, remember. We gathered people, collected around these texts, reading and sharing and interpreting and struggling with them, we together (every so often) glean some kernel of truth or some inspired nugget of wisdom. This is not because Paul or Isaiah was full of the spirit several hundred years ago – or not only because of they were. It’s because we’re full of the spirit today, it’s because the spirit is with us, and has always been with us, was with the people who listened to Isaiah and Paul, with the folks who edited and altered and added to Isaiah and Paul. And that spirit continues to be with us in our interpretations of Isaiah and Paul, et al., today. If to be inspired means to be filled with the spirit, then it happens as often in the full messiness of all God’s gathered people as anywhere else, since that’s where the spirit chooses to dwell.

Happy reading,

Matt

Ancient authorship and Isaiah

I mentioned in the previous post that 1 Timothy was probably not written by Paul, but by somebody else, even though the letter claims to have been written by Paul. I mentioned then that ancient ideas of authorship were different than our own, since to write something under somebody else’s name in our own day would be some sort of reverse plagiarism at best, or a flat lie at worst. I don’t want to overstate things here; I think the author of 1 Timothy was consciously using Paul’s name to attach some authority to his ideas. But I also want us to think more broadly about the idea of authorship, with the example of Isaiah to help us.

We’ve been making our way through Isaiah, which we’re now just over halfway through. Indeed, just yesterday we moved out of Proto-Isaiah or First Isaiah, which ends at chapter 39. Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah, stretches from chapter 40 to 55, whereas Trito or Third Isaiah concludes the book.

Wait a minute, you’re saying: in my bible, there’s just Isaiah, not first, second, and third Isaiah. That’s right. There’s just one book in our bibles, but modern scholars who’ve read the text closely can discern three different strands of authorship/editing. They make this conclusion because: for one, the style of the Hebrew changes in noticeable ways in each of these three sections; secondly, Isaiah’s name stops being mentioned after chapter 39; and lastly – and most importantly – the destruction of Jersusalem, which is foretold in chapters 1-39, seems already to have been happened after chapter 39. The historical perspective of this central event changes (and changes further after chapter 55, when it seems the Jewish exiles have been returned to Jerusalem).

So what’s going on here? If this is really three different prophets, why not include three different books? The reasons, I think, are twofold. First of all, prophets – especially well-known prophets like Isaiah – would gather followers. Schools of thought would congregate around influential prophets, sort of like they do around important thinkers or pundits today. It is clear that whoever wrote second and third Isaiah was of the original Isaiah’s school, and felt they were communicating his message for a different time and situation. Though history had moved on, the message was still Isaiah’s, they thought, and so they felt no compunction about continuing to use his name. You can see something similar today when you hear people speak about being Lincoln Republicans or Jefferson Democrats. Lincoln and Jefferson would not recognize our world today, of course, nor did they have much to say about many parts of it. But people who follow these important thinkers feel their ideas can be applied to our own situation, while still being in some way attributed to them.

So: second and third Isaiah were true to the original Isaiah in a different time, so they named their teaching as original. That’s one reason for the mixed authorship, but it’s not enough, right? You wouldn’t see an article in today’s New York Times that claims to have been written by Abraham Lincoln just because it adapts and expresses Lincoln’s ideas. And this points to the second reason. Remember that almost no person at this time was literate. The work of the prophet wasn’t writing, it was speaking. Isaiah would stand up and speak to crowds, to followers, to kings, to whomever would listen. Later people compiled the prophet’s sayings and collected them into a single book. But that’s just like the kindergarten game of telephone, right? Whatever you whisper into the ear of your neighbor, by the time it gets to the end of the line of little listeners, the message has become muddied, muddled, often quite different than the original. So who would we call the author of that final message? Hard to say, right? Without the prevalence of written texts and literacy that we enjoy in our culture today, authorship was a hard concept to hold together. What the prophet said was shared with the community and then moved through and around and among that community. People would say, “I heard Isaiah said this,” or “I heard someone say that Isaiah said that,” or “I overheard somebody talking about what they heard somebody saying that Isaiah said,” and so forth. Attributing the statements directly to Isaiah was a messy business then, and so it remains one today, even though all those sayings have been put down on paper for us to read.

Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Isaiah

That doesn’t mean we should doubt the text, necessarily. Someone at some point in history collected these sayings because they meant a great deal to that community. That we can’t pin down a single author doesn’t mean the words are unimportant. On the contrary, that it was filtered through the people of God, thought through, repeated, reinforced, retold, etc., probably should emphasize the importance of these sayings, despite their ambiguous authorship. Thinking back to Paul and 1 Timothy, the problem is complicated a bit by the fact that Paul did indeed write down his letters. But they weren’t really read as written – or rather, they were usually read aloud to the gathered community. The Romans or Corinthians or whoever would get a letter from Paul, and the letter would be read publicly since so few people could read and, anyway, there was just one copy of the letter. With the reading of that letter, the same sort of jumble of interpretations and considerations would commence. The letters we have today in our bible are not original copies, written directly from the hand of Paul himself. No neof those pages, the physical papers, the original hard copies, have survived the ages. What we have left are copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies, or copies of memories that somebody remembers having been read out loud in church last week or last year or whatever. So this gets messy too.

But as I’ve said over and again on this blog, that a truth is messy doesn’t make it untrue. Indeed, it seems that the truest things – like love and goodness and kindness – are almost always a fairly messy business for us humans.

Happy reading,

Matt

Using Paul against Paul

I wanted to write a short note about some of what we read last week in 1 Timothy. You might guess the passage I’m referring to. It was the one that probably made you feel a little bit uncomfortable, as it did me:

‘The women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes, but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and holiness, with modesty.’ 1 Timothy 2:9-15.

Now, the first part of that passage doesn’t bother me so much. I wish it said that everyone should clothe themselves with good works rather than with gold and pearls, not just women. But the second part – that women must submit fully, and that no woman may teach or have authority over a man – this is not something I accept. Indeed, it’s not something any of us at St. Barnabas should accept, since our official teacher and spiritual authority – in other words, our rector – is Patti!

So what are we supposed to do with these troubling verses? There are two things, really. First of all, although this letter claims to be the work of the apostle Paul, almost no one who has studied the New Testament closely believes this letter is actually the writing of the apostle Paul. They believe this because we have a lot of Paul’s writings available to us, and 1 Timothy doesn’t match those writings. The style of writing is different, the language is different, the themes are different. You know how if you pick up a book or article by your favorite author, it just sounds familiar somehow? If somebody else wrote under that author’s name, you’d probably be able to tell, just because their style, syntax, word choice, etc. would be different. Well, those scholars who have read enough of Paul in the original Greek to recognize his Greek writing style don’t believe 1 Timothy could be the work of Paul himself.

In the ancient world taking up the name of another in writing was not uncommon. The ancients didn’t understand authorship in quite the way we do now (look for a post on Isaiah in the next few days which will take up this question of ancient authorship further). It’s pretty clear, therefore, that 1 Timothy is not written by Paul himself, but by somebody who wanted to use Paul’s name. So one thing you could do would be to ignore this book of the bible entirely, since it’s probably not from Paul’s own hand.

I wouldn’t recommend that necessarily, however. The bible is long and complex the work of many authors. Whether or not Paul wrote this particular letter, the letter is still part of our one bible, and so we have to take it seriously. So how do we do that, without necessarily embracing what it has to say here about the role of women in the church?

There was a professor and former dean at Harvard named Krister Stendahl, and he was famous for “using Paul against Paul” when interpreting these passages. That is, Stendahl believed that the bible is a complicated book, written by complicated people, and so we will have to make some interpretive choices when the text itself proves inconsistent. Here’s what I mean:

Let’s assume that 1 Timothy was actually written by Paul, that Paul actually said women should submit and never have authority over men. Fine: but elsewhere Paul says very different things. He says in Christ there is no male and female, he writes favorably and with great respect of several women who are disciples of Christ and his friends and traveling companions. Perhaps most startlingly, there is a woman named in Romans 16 – Junia – whom Paul (probably) calls an apostle. (The Greek phrase translates as “Junia, outstanding among the apostles” which could mean either “Junia, the best among people called apostles” or “Junia, well-regarded by the apostles.”) Being an apostle was not something Paul took lightly. He called himself one and very few others. Apostles spread the faith, they were teachers and evangelists by definition. And it’s obvious from Romans that the woman Junia was at the very least well respected by the apostles. Indeed, it’s likely that she was counted as one of them. Junia was a teacher, a leader, with authority over others, and probably over men.

So on the one hand we have this word from 1 Timothy, that women should not have authority. But then all over the rest of Paul’s writings, we hear of women with authority, of the insignificance of gender to discipleship, of Junia the apostle. Stendahl realized that, given all this evidence, there really isn’t any problem. The teaching is clear: woman can be called to leadership. That Paul writings are not entirely consistent just makes him human. Think of people you know or even of yourself. Not everything you always say is entirely consistent. Sometimes you misspeak, sometimes you say one thing and think better of it later, sometimes you’re not always consistent yourself, sometimes your friends or family have to point out to you where your thinking doesn’t make sense or where maybe you haven’t considered something fully. Why should Paul be any different? Whether he wrote 1 Timothy himself or not, this verse from 1 Timothy is clearly inconsistent with the rest of Paul’s powerful teaching. By using Paul against Paul, we can prove 1 Timothy wrong.

So, if that passage bothered you, that’s okay. It probably bothers Paul, too.

Happy reading,

Matt

It’s a tough Job, but somebody’s got to do it.

As promised, here’s a blurb about the first of the wisdom books, Job.

I love this book. I know many have trouble with it, especially with the sort of callous gambling of God with Satan at the expense of poor Job. And I find that disturbing too. And although it might be difficult to redeem this book, I’m going to try. Here’s what you should know about Job. 

Though this book was probably written down around the time of Isaiah, many scholars believe that the roots of this book are perhaps some of the oldest in the bible. There are clues in the text – some of the words used – that it comes from patriarchal or pre-patriarchal times (in other words, the time of Moses or earlier). Many scholars also believe that the long middle section, in verse, probably existed first, and someone later added on the beginning (where God gambles with Satan over Job) and the end (where God restores all Job’s wealth). 

That in itself is telling, I think. This book bothered people for generations and generations, so much so that at some point somebody added a beginning and a happy ending to make things turn out better for Job. But the middle section is the stuff I like. It’s not uplifting, by any means, but at least it’s authentic. At least it’s honest. Because Job is no more perplexing than life itself. We may not like that bad things happen to good ol’ Job, but that’s not half as disconcerting as the fact that bad things happen to good ol’ us, too. Proverbs irritates me, saying that God always rewards the righteous with fortune and riches, when we can look around and see that this manifestly isn’t the case. Indeed, much of my job as a minister involves looking around our church, looking at good and faithful people suffering for no justifiable reason. What I like about Job – about that middle section in general – is that it refuses to resolve this mystery. Job complains, Job cries out. His friends offer answers, but they’re exposed as wrong. There is no answer. There’s just this poor man, suffering, crying out to God, not getting any answers, and that terrible voice from the whirlwind whose answers are of little help. 

This is what life feels like sometimes. I love that Job doesn’t try to box this up and put a neat little bow on it. Well, actually, it does with the later additions of the beginning gamble and the happy ending. But if we set those aside as further signs of our need to resolve this mystery and just let this book stand alone, let Job’s words and cries stand alone, I think we’re given a really moving picture of what it means to be a person of faith, who sometimes suffers, who wants more answers, and who doesn’t like all the answers God gives. 

It’s not a happy book, but it’s an honest one; not uplifting, but authentic. And in my experience as a priest, during times of trial and difficulty, false promises of happiness and empty uplift rarely do much good. The only way forward is honesty about our plight and authentic frustration with our God. This is not blasphemy or irreverence. It’s what God expects of us, what God expects (indeed) of himself, as Jesus cried himself from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Happy (?) reading,

Matt

Wisdom

So late last week we emerged from what are known as the wisdom books. The books of the Old Testament in the Christian bible are organized under three headings: historical books (Genesis, Exodus, 1&2 Kings, 1&2 Chronicles, etc.) which tell the story of Israel; prophetic books (like Isaiah, which I’ll write more about later); and the wisdom books – Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, Song of Songs, and Sirach. A couple of these – Wisdom and Sirach – are only used in Roman Catholic bible. Protestants do not acknowledge them as fully part of the bible, so they’re not included in our list. (Anglicans, always wanting to have it both ways, call these books apocryphal or dueterocanonical, which means – basically – the bench warmer bible. They’re on the team, just not starting. But I digress.)

Originally I’d meant to write a post introducing the wisdom books. It’s a bit late for that. So, here’s a word of conclusion. The historical books and prophetic books, as I’ve noted before, are deeply related. The historical books are sort of the ‘official history’ or Israel. It’s the historical record of the nation as that nation wanted the story to be told. There’s the official story, then there’s the real story, as you all know. We don’t really trust what officials (be they in a broken, embattled place like Syria, or in a less broken, less embattled place like our country), because we know they have an interest in having the story told a certain way. Anyway, the historical books represent the ‘official’ history of Israel. When that story seems disturbing or alarming, we should ask why Israel would want the official story to disturb or alarm.

The prophetic books, which we’ve just started reading with Isaiah, are sort of the unofficial (or less official) story. Think of how Isaiah begins: “The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw in Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah” Remember those names? We heard about those people in the books of Kings, we heard their history – at least, in its official version. But this rabblerouser named Isaiah was around at the time too, and he was telling a different story. Or recall in our reading for today, when God tells Isaiah to go out and meet King Ahaz on the road and proclaim and prophesy to him. Isaiah was part of this history, this history we’ve already read, and from him we hear a different version of the story than the one we get in the official version. One of the wonderful things about the bible is that even internally it allows disagreement. It doesn’t allow the official version to stand all alone. Isaiah and the other prophets step in and provide some subversive commentary. I’ll have more to say about this in a future post.

My second favorite Isaiah.

So, that’s the historical and prophetic books. The wisdom or sapiential books have a different aim. They are less involved with the historical. The psalms do refer vaguely to historical events, but in general these books stand outside the historical story. Think of Job or the Philosopher from Ecclesiastes. When did they live? We know when Isaiah lived – during the reign of Ahaz and Hezekiah, etc., he tells us when he lived, he places us in that history because he’s commenting upon historical events. But Job and the Philosopher cannot be so placed. Proverbs doesn’t take positions on specific kings or enemies of Israel. These books (to use a big Harvard word) have a more existential focus. They’re concerned with the problems of human existence in general – how to raise children, how to cry out to God, how to argue with God, why good people suffer, what’s the meaning of it all, etc. – rather than with the particular political problems of Israel at any particular time. 

And they don’t necessarily agree with one another, either. Think of Ecclesiastes, with its almost nihilist plaint, ‘all is vanity, all is vanity,’ versus Proverbs and it’s repeated promise that the God rewards the righteous, versus Job, and the fickle punishment of a righteous man. I’m going to write small blurbs about each of these books in the days to come, but you can see how the issue of these books is fundamentally different. They’re less concerned with how God helped Israel or the king (of failed to) against that particular enemy or in that particular place, and more concerned with general questions of the human condition: why are we here? why must we suffer? and so forth.

Incidentally, these divisions are peculiar to the Christian tradition. Our Jewish brothers and sisters divide their bible quite differently among the books of the Torah (or teaching, the first five books of the bible), the Nevi’im (or prophets, including Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings, and most of what we would consider the prophetic books like Isaiah and Micah, etc.), and the Ketuvim (or writings, including what we call the wisdom books plus some we consider historical, like Ruth , Nehemiah, etc.).

From the initials of these three parts – Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim – practitioners of Judaism make the name for their bible, the TNK, or, as it is pronounced, the Tanakh.

Note, however, that our Jewish brothers and sisters do not refer to any of the biblical books as “historical.” There are teachings, there are prophets, there are writings. I think often our assumption that the bible is history, simply understood, couples with our own understanding of what historical writing is or aims to be and ends up troubling our attempts to encounter this text usefully.

But that’s for another post. Just remember: whenever you bristle at some of the history written in this great, big book, try to think of what you’ve read as a teaching or a prophesy or a writing, rather than a historical report, and see if that helps.

Happy reading, 

Matt

 

Help catching up . . .

So, one confession. Though it’s nothing to confess, really. I have actually gotten behind once or twice in our reading schedule. But when I have, this link has been a big help:

http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/audio/

On this website, you can choose a chapter of the bible to listen to and catch up with your ‘reading’ while you’re making dinner or doing dishes or ironing clothes (as I have), or you can just relax with a cup of tea for a change of pace. And don’t feel any guilt about not ‘reading’ with a book in your lap. Remember that for most of the history of the bible, the people ‘reading’ it were illiterate. These were words passed by voice originally, and almost exclusively, until the last few hundred years or so and the wide expansion of literacy. In many ways, these books were meant to be heard rather than read. (Which is probably why they sometimes can be repetitive. Public speakers often repeat their main points in a way that reads as cumbersome on the page.)

Happy reading listening,

Matt

Back from hiatus

Sorry, all, for absenting myself from the blog for a while. I promise, though, that I haven’t stopped reading. I’m still plowing my way through what is now the second half of the bible. (though, to be honest, I’m not reading the psalms again. Our schedule has us repeat the psalms in this second half of the year. That wasn’t part of the deal. As far as I’m concerned, I finished the book of psalms already.) And indeed, I’ve had ideas for posts over the last couple of months that I’ve just neglected to put into words and post here. So, to get back into the swing of things, I’m just going to to a series of three or four really short posts that address some of the things we’ve been reading since my last post in early June.

The first idea I had way back in June, and that I’ll touch upon now, had to do with Chronicles and Romans. (Remember Chronicles and Romans? Oh, so long ago . . . ) The thing that’s interesting to me about these books, or at least about the fact that our schedule has us starting these books at the same time, is that they give us a strategy for reading the bible. Not because Chronicles or Romans are especially unique among books of the bible or provide some secret key to understanding the bible. Actually, it’s almost the opposite. Let me explain.

If you remember, 1&2 Chronicles were mostly summaries of what we’d already read in 1&2 Kings. It was a lot of repetition, lots of stories already told being told again. And sometimes, remember, the text would say something like, ‘and all the deeds of King Josiah, are they not written in the book of the deeds of the kings of Judah?’ or whatever. So Chronicles appeared sort of redundant, or unnecessary. And in a way, Romans was sort of the same. We’d already read the stories of Jesus in the gospels. Now here was Paul, recapping the highlights of the story for the benefit of the church in Rome. There really wasn’t new information in Paul, per se, it was the story of Jesus being told again and applied to the particular situation of Paul and of his audience in Rome.

I think this is important because it reminds us that the bible is not one book; it’s many books bound together as one. And this is important because none of the books has exactly the same perspective or aim or agenda or intention. If you pick up any other book, almost any other book published in the last, oh, 600 years, you’ll expect that the book tells a single story from a single perspective (not story or essay collections, of course, but bear with me). You pick up The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and you read Edward Gibbon’s account of how and why Rome collapsed.

That’s how books work: they tell a story, and in the case of many books – like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – that story is meant to be exhaustive, authoritative, full and final.

But the bible’s not like that. For example, imagine if, instead of collecting all the historical evidence about the fall of Rome and coming up with an authoritative version of that story, imagine rather that Edward Gibbon had just taken all the evidence, loosely organized it, edited it modestly, and then just published that big mess of divergent accounts and different ideas without compiling and generating his own account. What if Gibbon hadn’t tried to tell the one, final story about Rome, but instead had just collated and organized all the different  versions of the story of the the fall of Rome. That would be a very hard book to read, and a hard one to pull the full and final truth from.

That’s more like what the bible is. There’s no single author, aim, or agenda to this bound volume of ancient books, no Edward Gibbon who edits and rewrites to makes things clearer and more coherent. The reason we have four gospels is that there isn’t one authoritative story of Jesus. The reason we include Paul in the bible is because he tells that story in his own way too. The reason we include Chronicles as well as Kings – as well as all the prophets, who were actually commenting upon a lot the events that we’ve read about already – is because there is no final, official version of the events during the days of the kings of Judah and Israel. The bible doesn’t aim to offer the official version. Rather than tell the one authorized story, the bible gathers all the important stories. This makes the bible messy, and many have complained about this messiness. But I think it’s something we should be glad about and appreciate too.

No two of us encounters God in the same way, and no two people would tell the story of that encounter in the same way, either. But how would one decide which story might be more true, more authoritative, more official? How would we know which story of God was better told? The bible, in all its messiness, reminds us that there has never been a time when the divine was obvious to everybody all the time. There’s never been a time when everyone felt the same about God. We’ve always had differing stories and no way to arbitrate which version should be final. The bible, in fact, reminds us that encountering God is a messy business, that it doesn’t always make sense, that it varies from person to person, place to place, soul to soul. And if the bible doesn’t always make sense (which it obviously doesn’t!) then that’s probably good. Because if it told just a simple single story, with the facts all straight and all the testimonies corroborated, then it would not really be the true story of how human relationship with God actually works, which in fact is full to brimming with confusion and misapprehension and awe and mistake. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that the bible ends up being full of things like confusion and awe and misapprehension and mistake too.

Happy reading,

Matt

Voices in the wilderness

We’re approaching the end of the books of Kings, and one of the main characters – Elisha – has just died. He and Elijah, from whom Elisha inherited his prophetic ministry, are the most prominent prophets we’ve read about so far in the bible. If you’ve had trouble following their story in the midst of all these kings with confusing names, see the video I’ve posted below. I just wanted to post a quick word about prophets.

When we think about prophets today, I think we tend to think of fortune tellers or prognosticators. The supernatural stories around Elijah and Elisha perhaps reinforce these ideas. But in fact, among the ancients, the prophet wasn’t a magical or mysterious figure, necessarily. He (or she, upon occasion) would be better compared in our world to a political adviser or commentator. Take our present political situation. The president has all sorts of advisers, some official (like the White House staff, etc.) and many unofficial (like commentators in print and on TV). These people are in the business of making predictions. They survey the policies of the president, then tell him – or us – how things are going to turn out. If you raise taxes, this will happen; if you cut them; that will. If you intervene in Syria it will have these ramifications; if you don’t, it will have those. And so forth.

The best commentators and advisers are the ones who are most often right – who see through a lot of the political distraction and can clearly discern the ramifications of policy decisions. The commentators who are often wrong just fade away, because no one listens to them.

That’s sort of how things worked in ancient Judea and Israel. There were lots of prophets, lots of people filling the king’s and the public’s ears with forecasts of how things were going to go for Israel. Most of these predictions turned out wrong – there’s the scene we had earlier in the book when most of the prophets badly advised war, remember? Even though lots of people were casting about opinions, only a few turned out right. Only a few of these folks insightfully proclaimed both the strengths and flaws of the various kings, and then came to predictive conclusions based upon these insights. These folks – these prophets – were the ones the people came to trust, and their records were preserved. Sometimes these prophets were official advisers of the king. Sometimes they were just common folk. Sometimes they were even uneducated shepherds who came in from the field to Jerusalem shouting. We’ll read their sayings later on. But their sayings were preserved because their predictions proved accurate. So, it’s not like they were magic show fortune tellers all along that everyone believed to be magic. They appear to have been able to tell the future because they saw clearly what was going on in Israel, and then made sound predictions based upon their understanding. For example, in 2007 there were a few people who predicted the economy was about to collapse and a lot who didn’t. Those few people are probably ones we’d do well to listen to now, if we want to avoid similar trouble in the future.

What’s interesting about all this, though, is that the prophets show great concern – more than we anywhere else see – for common folk and for the marginalized and oppressed in Judah and Israel. Most of what we’ve been reading in these books so far has been to do with the kings and all their high-falutin kingly things. But the prophets often proclaim the failures of Israel not just to worship God rightly (as we hear so often in these books) but also to treat people rightly, to remember the orphan, widow, stranger, foreigner, etc. Remember, these books we’re now reading (Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, etc.) were assembled and edited by the priests. So it’s no surprise we hear a lot about how much God demands right worship. But the prophets were not priests. Sometimes they were poor folk from the fields, like I said, or other Israelites from all walks of life. And for them, the plight of the poor and the needy was at least as important as the proper ways of offering worship at the temple(s). When we read the books of these common, non-elite or priestly folk later, we’ll see that their concerns are different from those of the priests and kings.

But there are glimmers of that different emphasis even here, in Kings. Notice how Elisha’s miracles tend to circulate around poor folks and poor widows. Although he and his forebear Elijah make a great deal of condemning the various kings for their religious transgressions, their greatest demands and greatest miracles are all in the service of justice – think of Naboth’s vineyard and the widows and women Elisha serves with his miraculous acts.

This is all just another sign that there were lots of voices in ancient Israel, proclaiming lots of ideas about what proper service to God might look like. We’ve been reading an account that was written by elites and priests. That doesn’t make this account unimportant, but we shouldn’t treat it as entirely objective. There are other accounts in this big book that are waiting to be read, and soon you’ll be seeing some different accounts of these various kings from the perspective of the prophets of Israel.

Happy reading,

Matt

A quick survey of Elijah and Elisha . . .

Luke part two

Because the Old Testament takes up most of our attention during this bible challenge – not only because it presents difficult and often unfamiliar readings, but also because we simply read more of it than the New – I tend to neglect our New Testament readings on this blog. So I’ve posted a fun little video below which summarizes the book of Acts, and I wanted to write a few comments here, too.

Acts in fact was written as a continuation of the gospel of Luke. In fact, it was only later that the church divided the two books and put John between them. For most early Christians, Luke and Acts were read as a single story. Indeed, today most scholars refer to them as a single book: Luke/Acts.

We don’t usually tend to think of Acts that way. In fact, I think we don’t tend to think about Acts much at all. Maybe because of the way we hear scripture at church, we think of the gospels, and of Paul’s letters, but we rarely pay much attention to that book between them, the Acts of the Apostles. If you’re like me, many of these stories of Paul and Barnabas and Silas, et al., are unfamiliar. But thinking of Acts as a continuation of the story of Luke is, I think, crucial for us a Christians and as a church.

Because the story doesn’t end with the gospel account. The story isn’t over when Jesus resurrects and ascends. In some ways, that’s only the beginning of another story, the story of Jesus’ continued ministry through the people he’s left behind, his continued ministry in the church. In Acts we see the followers of Jesus doing their darnedest to spread the good news. They make lots of mistakes along the way, but they never stop trying to spread God’s message of love to all who will listen.

Acts isn’t just the continuation of Jesus’ story; it’s also the beginning of our story, the story of our work to bring Christ to the world. Did you notice how, about halfway through the book, all of a sudden, the author shifts from writing “they did this” and “they did that” to occasionally saying “we did this” and “we did that”? Acts is about us being taken up into the story of Jesus, and about living the risen life of Jesus Christ and spreading it to others. Acts may be one of the most neglected books in the New Testament, but in many ways it’s among the most important, too.

Happy reading,

Matt