Archive for category Ancient History
Luke Slighting the Rulers of His Day
Posted by Erik in Ancient History, History, Reading on January 20, 2012
Luke slights rulers he does not care for. He does it a lot actually. As I have been reading and researching through Luke, I have noticed this tendency.
It is especially evident in chapter 3 of Luke’s gospel when he is describing the rulers of John the Baptist and Jesus’ day.
1. Luke always refer to the Herodian kings as Herod (except Philip, the tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis). This causes all kinds of confusion in history since Luke was our primary source for anything about the Herodians and the reason we even call them Herodians in the first place. Although the Herod who ruled Galilee in Jesus’ time was called Antipater by everyone, including his subjects, Luke calls him Herod. It is almost like some of the aristocrats of Victorian British society who always referred to their butler as Joseph, no matter what his real name was. It saved them the trouble of having to learn the name of the new guy.
So, if you’re Herod the Great or Herod Antipas or Herod Archelaus, it doesn’t matter to Luke. To Luke, they’re all interchangeable as the male lead in a long-running soap opera is today.
2. He refers to whoever the ruler of Abilene was at the time of John the Baptist’s ministry as Lysanias. The actual Lysanias died before Jesus was born, and the last known ruler of the area was his son Zenodorus. After Zenodorus’ death in 20 BCE, the region was placed under the rule of the Herodians. Luke seems to be mocking the ruler by calling him by his greater ancestor’s name.
Of course, this might have actually been the guy’s name, but to even list him seems a slight since he couldn’t have actually ruled anything. Luke heaps indignity on the Herodians and Lysanian rulers alike. After all, their insignificant principalities had no place being mentioned in the same breath as Tiberius Caesar.
3. Then there are the Jewish high priests. Luke adamantly refuses to write the name Joseph b. Caiaphas (Yosef b. Kayaffa in Hebrew) correctly. Instead he refers to him by his father’s name Caiaphas and always – always groups him with his father-in-law Annas.
According to Josephus, Caiaphas is something of a puppet in Annas’ hands. He does his father-in-law’s bidding. While he appears in Matthew and John’s gospels as one of many involved in Jesus’ trial. Luke does not even give him that much of a mention. Caiaphas is just a way marker for dating Jesus’ story.
The insult couldn’t be greater. Luke basically says, “There was this yokel ruler who thought he was something but couldn’t even live up to his dad’s reputation. He was just his father-in-law’s yes man.”
4. And in chapter 2, Luke writes of Quirinius being governor of Syria when Jesus was born, but Publius Sulpicius Quirinius was not the titular governor (legatus) of the province at the time. Although Quirinius would assume the post in 6 CE, at the time of Jesus’ birth the governor was Publius Quinctilius Varus – a bumbling politician who would later get himself and three Roman legions killed at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.
This is actually a slight on Varus, not Quirinius; but the principle still applies. Luke ignores Varus entirely, which is exactly what Caesar wished he could have done. At the time, Quirinius was governor of Dalmatia but Caesar sent him to Syria to find out why it was taking nine years for Varus to complete a census only done once every ten years. So, Luke insults Varus. Not that it mattered to Varus. He had died decades before, but you get the idea.
(I know. I know. I like Latin names. I can’t help it.)
Luke intentionally slights these men. He holds them in contempt. Of course, one could certainly understand it. They aren’t exactly a bumper crop of geniuses and dignitaries. These people are epic failures of leaders.
Not surprisingly however Luke is very careful to give Tiberius Caesar his proper title, and the same applies with Pontius Pilate. These were men held in high regard, for the most part, by the Romans. Tiberius was a successful, acclaimed commander and leader, even if he was something of a mediocre emperor; and Pilate was something of a brute (he massacred people on at least two occasions) but he was respected.
I can’t even tell you how awesome it is when you find something like this hidden among all the overly-religious interpretations you have endured all your life. It is endlessly humorous when you strip away all the pomp and circumstance we heap on the Scriptures and see the humanity beneath.
That is all.
Genre: Epistle
Posted by Erik in Ancient History, Church, General, History on January 18, 2012
The final genre I am going to write about is epistle. I think that by and large, the church gets the reading of an epistle pretty close to right. In a way, that is the problem with how we read everything else. We tend to apply the interpretation schemes we use for epistles to everything else.
What is an epistle? It is a letter sent from a person in authority to those under his authority.
Epistles are not exhaustive theological treatises although they often contain a lot of theology.
An epistle is a carefully thought out, well-developed letter of information and command. Often they were written in response to specific questions, which makes reading them sometimes a challenge because we do not have the questions before us. This is particularly true of 1 & 2 Corinthians, which are clearly pointed responses to questions we never heard asked.
How do we read epistles?
First of all, read them for internal consistency. Don’t spend all your time trying to make connections to other epistles or other portions of Scripture unless the author makes a clear connection. (Galatians is a book that has a lot of clear connections made.) Instead, read the epistle as a stand-alone letter first.
Then, consult other epistles.</b< If there a passage that seems easily misunderstood or could have multiple meanings, keep it in mind when you read other epistles. You will be surprised how often the Scriptures interpret themselves.
Most importantly, read them understanding that the authors were placed in authority over the church by Jesus himself. The apostles develop the themes of the church in the epistles. Jesus did the work of salvation; and the apostles struggle to apply that work to the church’s life.
Remember also that the epistles do, to a certain extent, involve a dialogue – a give-and-take as the apostles worked through the ramifications of Jesus’ work and teachings. It is important to let these ideas be worked out. Be dogmatic about the body of work as a whole, but don’t be dogmatic on specific, isolated passages that seem to be inconsistent with the rest.
Genre: Gospel
Posted by Erik in Ancient History, Church, General, History on January 17, 2012
There are four gospels in the Christian Scriptures. There were dozens of others circulated for the first couple centuries after Jesus, but only four stood up to the scrutiny of the early believers.
Gospel is not modern biography. While scholars have shown that the gospels all conform to what the ancients would have considered bios or “life”, they are not what we consider biography. A gospel reports the events of a portion of a person’s life, but it does not tend to do so in a scientific, orderly manner.
Gospel is a form of teaching. The ancient church would recite the gospel regularly as part of their worship. Which gospel depended largely on where the congregation was, geographically and culturally. If you think of a gospel as a teaching document, moving the reader from one point to another and ultimately to a concluding, culminating idea, then they make far more sense. The individual writers placed events in different places because (1) most of these things probably occurred more than once in Jesus’ life and (2) the placement fits with the overarching theme of the gospel.
Each gospel has a unique audience. Matthew is written to the Semitic peoples of southwest Asia – Palestine, Syria, etc. Mark is written to the western Roman Empire. Luke writes to the Greek “barbarians” and demonstrates the universal nature of Jesus’ resurrection. John answers specific heresies late in the first century. Each has a focus.
Every gospel builds to the resurrection of Jesus. Anything that happens before that is part of the build up. Other than the resurrection, the details can be flexible. This is something our modern sensibilities struggle with. That doesn’t make them false or “oral tradition.” It makes them true to their time.
How do you read a gospel? Read it as if it is accurate, because it is. Read Jesus’ words as truth, because they are. But always keep the resurrection in focus. It is the key to understanding anything and everything in the gospels. People reading/hearing the gospels would have already heard of the resurrection. They would be consciously reading it that way.
Genre: Apocalyptic Literature
Posted by Erik in Ancient History, Church, General, History on January 16, 2012
There is no more confusing genre in the Scriptures than the apocalyptic literature. In a literal sense, an apocalypse is the unveiling of the future. We have charged the word with violent overtones in our culture, although originally the word did not have a negative meaning at all. It simply means “unveiling” or “uncovering.”
In the Hebrew Scriptures, there are a lot of apocalyptic texts, mostly revolving around the fall of Samaria (722 BCE) and Jerusalem (586 BCE). As the Hebrew state was collapsing, the caste of prophets such as Ezekiel and Jeremiah were responsible for speaking for YHWH in explaining why the collapse was happening.
The tradition was continued throughout the period between the close of the Hebrew Scriptures and the beginning of Christian literature, and it reaches something of a crescendo in the last book of the Bible – the Revelation.
Hebrew apocalypse is somewhat different from Christian apocalypse, but the rules I am going to lay out generally work with both.
When reading apocalyptic literature, remember the following:
1. The imagery is deeply rooted in what was current events. The prophets did not invent images. They used existing imagery that their hearers would understand. For example, in the Revelation there is an image of God in chapter 4. The image is borrowed directly from the coronation of a new Caesar. It is magnified and placed in a heavenly context, but the hallmarks are unmistakeable.
2. Judgment in apocalypse serves the purpose of restoration. Everyone focuses on the terrible judgments often listed in apocalyptic literature but they rarely see that it is secondary to the restoration and preservation of God’s people. Sin must be expunged and the people of God identified and redeemed. Don’t read apocalypse as destructive. Read it as reconstructive.
3. Apocalypse is contemporary, not set in the future. Futurism is wildly popular in many Christian circles. The Left Behind books of the 1990′s are great evidence of that fanatical obsession with the coming doom. When the prophets wrote, they were not looking far into the future unless they specifically SAY they are looking far into the future.
Human beings seem to have this judgment-driven obsession with the near future smackdown God is going to lay on whoever happens to be their enemies at the time. This isn’t restricted to the Bible. It is pretty much everywhere.
Don’t be fooled. The Scriptures are about the redemption of mankind and the restoration of Eden, not the complete and total annihilation of everything. Read the apocalyptic literature with hope in your heart, not despair and anger. It will change the way you view things (and demonstrate just how silly much of the apocalyptic fervor of people like Harold Camping really is).
Genre: The Law
Posted by Erik in Ancient History, Church, General, History on January 13, 2012
Of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), a large proportion is legal code. Leviticus in particular focuses on a lot of “do this” and “don’t do that”.
When reading these codes, you must remember that they were the “Law of the Land” and not simply moral codes we can allegorize at our convenience. You are quite literally reading the legal code of Israel.
Exodus-Numbers contain a number of laws that are quite similar to other legal codes we know from the late Bronze Age (13th-11th century BCE) while Deuteronomy is more in tune with Iron Age Palestine (7th century BCE). Deuteronomy is essentially a reiteration of the older code in a different context, probably done during the reign of the Judahite king Josiah.
There are also smaller portions of legal code contained in books like Ezra-Nehemiah, although these are Babylonian and Persian codes, not Hebrew ones.
How do we read these law codes? First and foremost, we read them as what they are – ancient laws. They are not meant to form our legal opinions today, and they certainly cannot be picked apart for convenient proofs of a position.
The law codes include some pretty extreme things – like executing children for disobedience (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) and being allowed to rape a teenage girl as long as you compensate her father (Deuteronomy 22:28-29 – that we definitely do not practice today. They also contain some pretty good advice – don’t eat undercooked meat, put a rail on staircases – that we can accept as just common sense.
How do you read law codes?
That’s a great question.
Too often, we try to over spiritualize everything in the Bible because – well, it’s in the Bible. The law codes are exactly what they sound like they are. We can read them and appreciate them as a window into the lives and well-being of the people of Israel.
On a second level, we can read them and see that some of the imagery in the law codes was consciously fulfilled in Jesus’ life. He “fulfilled” the Law, completing the images that it left half-explained. A good key to reading the Law is to read the book of Hebrews. It is a very Jewish book of the Christian Scriptures, drawing connections throughout the Law to Jesus himself.
Genre: Narrative
Hebrew narrative is generally poetic in nature, but it is not true poetry. It sets up poetry, but it has a different feel and rhythm.
Often narrative sets the scenes between poetic portions. So, for example, we have a narrative passage that introduces and connects the various poetic portions of the Exodus story. (YHWH’s words to Moses on Mt. Sinai are poetic, while his journey there is not.)
Narrative informs us, but it does not offer us normative teaching. When you read a narrative, and the Scriptures say so-and-so did such-and-such, that does not mean you should do the same. This sounds like common sense, but I cannot begin to tell you how many times people cite narrative as telling them how to live. (Joshua 1 is a favorite.)
Narrative tells us what happened, not how to live our lives. As the Word of God, the Scriptures present an accurate representation of events. That does not mean those events are to be emulated. Otherwise, it would be okay to commit adultery (as David did) as long as you confessed later. It would be okay to disobey God’s commands (as Elijah did) as long as you listen to him later. It would be okay to sacrifice a child, if that was the only way you could honor your promises to God.
A great example of narrative is the book of Judges. I won’t get into my thoughts on the ways Joshua and Judges overlap, but suffice to say, Judges tells us about a LOT of people doing a lot of WRONG THINGS in the name of YHWH.
So, here’s the rule with narrative: don’t form doctrine or application from it.
The Man from Earth (2007 Film)
Posted by Erik in Ancient History, History, Media, Movies and TV on January 11, 2012
It was late, and I couldn’t sleep. So as I often do, I was leafing through Netflix. I happened upon a film that intrigued me – Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth.
I had never head of Jerome Bixby, but apparently he was a major writer of episodic and short story science fiction in years past. He wrote some of the seminal episodes of the original Star Trek series: “Mirror, Mirror”, “Requiem for Methuselah.” Apparently, he is pretty influential. (So much to learn.)
In 1989, Bixby lay dying, and he dictated a screenplay from an idea he had in the 1960′s. This is how Netflix summarizes it:
…This provocative film about a professor who reveals to his colleagues that he’s actually a centuries old caveman.
It took nearly twenty years to turn the screenplay into a film, but it was finally released in 2007.
I don’t want to get into the details of the story, but essentially it revolves around a man named John Oldman. At his goodbye party with his colleagues, he reveals that he is a 14,000 year old Cro-Magnon man. The ensuing conversation plumbs the depths of anthropology, biology and even religion.
The entire film takes place within the limits of Oldman’s cabin in some non-descript mountainous region. His companions are all experts in their respective fields, which allows the dialogue to explore all kinds of different implications to Oldman’s tremendous age.
There were a couple of major blunders in the film, like Oldman talking about Columbus and mentioning, “I had a suspicion the world was round, but I still thought he might fall of the edge.” Since the entire “Columbus sailed to prove the world was round” idea dates only to Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus, it is anachronistic.
At one point, the Christian of the group around John is asked which version of the Bible she prefers. She says, “The King James of course. It is a thoroughly modern.” This was actually one of two references to the King James Bible for some reason, and one of many incorrect statements about the Scriptures. The same character says in one scene that she takes every word of the Scriptures literally, and then in another scene says she does not accept the virgin birth or pretty much any of Luke’s narrative of Christ’s birth. There are a number of statements that demonstrate the characters poor understanding of the Bible – all standard academic shlock.
(My impression was that Bixby was more than willing to dismiss the Scriptures and Christians as representative of all religious people. He seems to have an affinity for Buddhism.)
There were a few poorly researched things like that.
What was the point of the story? That was a question that kept coming up in the movie itself, and I felt it never addressed the question properly. In most ways, the film just confirmed the standard, mainstream lines about most fields, including religion and philosophy. It reminded me a lot of “No Way Out” by Jean-Paul Sartre in its setting and its accompanying resolution that life is ultimately fleeting – although the tone was quite different from Sartre’s masterpiece.
But I digress.
I return to my question. What was the point? I think that Bixby’s thesis was two-fold:
1. Human experience advances but we do not improve. Over and over, John reminds his listeners that he encountered war and death everywhere he went. People have always rejected and feared his unaging face.
2. Ultimately, joy is found in our lives. I can’t really expound this point without giving away the ending; but true joy and true pain are still experienced, even in the heart of a 14,000 year old man who should have experienced everything. John is not jaded to the human experience.
There were a lot of unexplored themes that Bixby rushed through – or the director did, I’m not sure. All in all, this movie had a great premise that could have used some revision. Most of the time, the dialogue was actually quite good – if too intellectual for most audiences – but there were also some very slopply expositional moments.
Genre: Poetry
The Old Testament was composed almost entirely in Hebrew. First and foremost, Hebrew is the language of Scripture. In other words, Hebrew is a language quite literally formed around its use in the composition of sacred writings.
This means that Hebrew has a unique structure and style. It is highly poetic, almost intentionally designed for uses that our own language struggles with. In English, poetry requires us to almost force the language into rhyme and rhythm. (Anyone who has had to try to compose a haiku in English knows that English is terrible for rhythmic poetry.)
In biblical Hebrew, words have specific syllabic structures and make different forms through somewhat complicated but almost ubiquitous rules. This means that rhythm and rhyme come quite naturally to the language.
As a result, the vast majority of the Old Testament is poetic in nature. It has to be because it is in Hebrew. This poetry is often lost in translation because English simply does not have the apparatus to express ideas the way Hebrew does. (In case you’re wondering, no English version does Hebrew poetry like the King James translation did. English was malleable enough at the time that the translators could bend it to conform to Hebrew. The same is not true of English today, which is why the King James translations often feel alien to us.)
Hebrew poetry employs a huge number of techniques, often rhyming ideas and cycling through images in ways we never would see in translation.
For example, consider the first chapter of Genesis. It is an intricate, carefully phrased poem. The author spins the entire poem around the number two. The entire thing is symmetrical. Watch:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1, 2 KJV)
In Hebrew, the word heaven is dual. English and most European languages lack this form, but it is used for things that are inherently two parts: like arms, eyes, legs, but also the “heavens”.
Think about all the ways that the “heavens” are dual in nature. There is a night sky and a day sky. There is a clear sky and a storm sky. There is the air we move through and the air “up there” where the birds fly. The depth of the simply grammatical form is tremendous.
Now, watch the dualities that emerge. The earth is “without form” and it is “void” – duality. There is “darkness” upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God broods upon the face of the waters (also a dual form, by the way).
The author sets up a symmetry of duals and then he presents his narrative of the earth’s origin. At first glance, it looks like a linear narrative. God creates this on day one, then this on day two, etc. But look deeper.
DAY 1: Light and Dark Day 4: Sun, moon and stars
DAY 2: Separates the waters from the sky Day 5: Forms fish and birds
DAY 3: Forms dry land Day 6: Forms land creatures
See the dualities? In the first set of days he creates habitats. On the second set, he fills them with life. And even in that, there is a duality. You can spend hours, even days and weeks just marveling over how intricately constructed the poem is. (Trust me, I have.)
So much of the Hebrew Scriptures are written with this kind of artistic flair. It is dangerous to just read the Old Testament like it is a textbook. Poetry is not just limited to the Psalms and a few passages in Genesis either. Fully 2/3 of the Hebrew Scriptures are poetic. Whole books of the prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel are poems. Poetry was the height of Hebrew composition. If it wasn’t poetic, it wasn’t worth reading. Even the levitical law has a poetic sensibility.
This is why I recoil every time someone refers to the Bible as a “User’s Manual” or “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” It is nothing of the kind. Much of the Bible cannot be read like a manual or instructions. It would be like trying to form philosophy based on reading Shelley as if he were a commentary on politics or Dante as a geology text. It simply cannot be done.
One of the hallmarks of poetry is that the individual parts fall apart if you miss the main idea. If you read poetry line-by-line and try to analyze the lines in isolation, you entirely miss the point. Poetry is not about precision. It is about emotion and connection. It is relational language at its best.
How does one read Biblical poetry? How do you recognize it as what it is?
First, read the Scriptures in large pieces rather than in snippets.
Second, don’t analyze. Receive. Let the words resonate, bounce around in your head for awhile. Don’t be afraid to not understand what you read in the specifics.
Third, read in community. In the culture that gave us the Scriptures, reading was something you did together. You discussed the ideas; you let them stand up to communal scrutiny and appreciation.
One word of warning, however. Just because it is poetry, do not think that the Scriptures were not intended to be read literally. Poetry is often far more truthful than prose. There is often more fact of the human condition in the lines of a poem than there are in the sections of a textbook.
The Modern Age’s Sins are The Ancient World’s Sins
Posted by Erik in Ancient History, Church, History on December 21, 2011
During our message on Sunday, I made mention of the problems with the modern age:
I am so tired of people telling me that the modern world is better than the ancient world. In the modern world, we have modern science; and we have modern medicine; and we have archaeology; and we have all this stuff. And in our modern world, we have killed people on a scale that the ancient world could not have fathomed. We have killed more people with our modern technology and our modern world views and our modern perspectives than the ancient Romans could have ever dreamed of killing. We want to say we are better than the early church? We want to say we understand the world better than Jesus’ first followers did?
I have discussed this theme many times, but it is worth revisiting. The idea of a “Modern Age” is a fabrication created by writers in the Renaissance who wished to reconnect themselves with the ancient Greco-Roman world and bypass their own history. As early as 1469, people began referring to the period from the fall of Rome until their own day as media tempestas or “middle times” which implied that there was the ancient world, the middle age, and the new era in which they lived.
This was amplified by Enlightenment philosophers who dubbed their own time the Modern Age, borrowing the term modern which originally meant “the present” and charging it with a sense of superiority to previous ages. This flowed out of a 17th century controversy in French academia called “The Quarrel Ancients and the Moderns.” The Moderns maintained that present philosophy was superior to the ancient philosophies, and as such, all ancient thought should be rejected. The ancients on the other hand held that true wisdom embraces all ages.
There are some merits to the Modern Age (especially when the word is used in the current sense to mean “the present”.) We have developed tools that allow us to understand our universe in more detail, but one could debate whether the understanding we develop is in any way “superior” to that held by the ancients.
At the core of my criticism of the idea that our Modern Age is superior to those that came before is my belief that human intellect has not changed. Tools and technology change, but human beings are not smarter or better in our ancient world. Our ancient counterparts used their technology to kill each other, and we do the same.
Ultimately, humanity in all our modernist glory is still paleolithic. We still burn stuff and spin wheels. What is really the difference between a campfire, a medieval fireplace, a steam engine and a Saturn V rocket? They are all still fire in a controlled environment doing work. Even the power of the atom is used in power plants simply to boil water. (Most people are shocked to discover that the actual nuclear fission does not produce electricity in power plants. The reaction simply gives off tremendous energy, which is converted to heat to boil water, producing steam that spins turbines.)
Modernity has not given us a better understanding of anything. It has just helped us do the same stuff quicker. We generate heat quicker; we disseminate information quicker; and we can kill each other quicker; but we are not inherently superior to the ancients. All of our modern medicine still cannot halt death. All of our modern science has still left us befuddled as to how the universe works. We can quantify more of the activity, but we cannot define why it is active in the first place or how that activity occurs.So there it is. Modern human beings are still human beings.
Our modern faith is in no way superior to the ancient faith, and in many ways, I think it is crowded by all the excess stuff our modern world has created. Tools are great; but they’re ultimately just tools; and we’re ultimately the same race of beings we were 2,000 years ago. We have not evolved to be better. We have simply developed better ways to do essentially the same stuff.
Further Meditations on Psalm 29
Posted by Erik in Ancient History, Definitions, History on August 8, 2011
Ascribe to יהוה, O heavenly beings [sons of God],
ascribe to יהוה glory and strength.
Ascribe to יהוה the glory due his name;
worship יהוה in the splendor of holiness.The voice of יהוה is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
יהוה, over many waters.
The voice of יהוה is powerful;
the voice of יהוה is full of majesty.The voice of יהוה breaks the cedars;
יהוה breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf,
and Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of יהוה flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of יהוה shakes the wilderness;
יהוה shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of יהוה makes the deer give birth
and strips the forests bare,
and in his temple all cry, “Glory!”יהוה sits enthroned over the flood;
יהוהsits enthroned as king forever.
May יהוה give strength to his people!
May יהוה bless his people with peace
In our thinking, a voice is simply what you use to speak. In ancient Hebrew the word for voice is קול (qowl). It is a shouted voice – a voice of proclamation. The image I always have in my head is Yul Brynner as Pharaoh in The Ten Commandments.
In the film, Brynner’s character has a speaking voice and a commanding voice. When he makes commands, it is clear that he is not to be questioned – that he believes his authority is absolute.
Reading Psalm 29, it is worth remembering that this “voice of YHWH” is not simply God speaking to us as friends. It is God declaring his nature and his authority. His voice cannot be separated from his nature and existence. It shatters mountains and shakes deserts.
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