New Testament Jews Understanding of Born Again
From Hebrew Bible to Christian Bible: Jews, Christians and the Give-and-take of God
In his didactics, Jesus often quoted the Jewish Scriptures; after his decease, his followers turned to them for clues to the meaning of his life and message. Biblical scholar Mark Hamilton discusses the history of these ancient texts and their significance for early on Christians and their Jewish contemporaries.
Mark Hamilton is currently writing a PhD dissertation at Harvard Academy called 'The Torso Royal: Kingship and Masculinity in Aboriginal Israel.' His article "The Past as Destiny" volition appear in the October result of the Harvard Theological Review
The Origins of the Hebrew Bible and Its Components
The sacred books that make upwardly the album modern scholars call the Hebrew Bible - and Christians phone call the Old Testament - adult over roughly a millennium; the oldest texts appear to come from the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. War songs such every bit Exodus fifteen and Judges 5 are very archaic Hebrew and celebrate Israelite victories from the fourth dimension preceding the Israelite monarchy under David and Solomon. Nevertheless, virtually of the other biblical texts are somewhat after. And they are edited works, collections of diverse sources intricately and artistically woven together.
The five books of Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy), for instance, traditionally are ascribed to Moses. But past the eighteenth century, many European scholars noticed problems with that assumption. Non only does Deuteronomy end with an account of Moses' decease (a tough assignment for whatsoever writer to describe his or her own demise), but the entire Pentateuch shows anomalies of mode that are hard to explain if merely one author is involved.
By the nineteenth century, most scholars agreed that the Pentateuch consisted of four sources woven together. This notion of iv sources came to exist known as the Documentary Hypothesis, and, in various forms, it has been the prevailing theory for the by two hundred years. Israel thus created four contained strains of literature about its own origins, all drawing on oral tradition in varying degrees, and each developed over time. They were combined together to class our Pentateuch sometime in the 6th century BCE.
By this time, many of the other biblical books were coming together. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings form what scholars call a "Deuteronomistic History" (because the work'south theology is heavily influenced by Deuteronomy), a history of the Israelite states over a five-hundred-year period. This work contains much of historical value, but it besides operates on the footing of a historical and theological theory: i.e., that God has given State of israel its land, that Israel periodically sins, suffers punishment, repents, and so is rescued from foreign invasion. This bike of sin and redemption shapes the piece of work'south style of writing history and gives it a powerful religious dimension, so that even when the sources behind the biblical books are "secular" accounts in which God is far in the background, the theology of the overall work places history in the service of theology. The last edition of the Deuteronomistic History, the ane in our Bible, comes from the sixth century BCE, the fourth dimension of the Babylonian Exile. In this context, it offers an caption for Israel'south poor status and implicitly a reason to hope for the future.
Another section of the Hebrew Bible consists of the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the twelve "pocket-size," i.e., brief, prophets). Here once again, it's important to understand how these developed. In the volume of Isaiah, from which Jesus quotes, the original Isaiah of Jerusalem lived in the 8th century BCE in Jerusalem, and much of Isa 6-10 clearly reflects the political and social events of his time. Some other part of the book, nonetheless, comes from a prophet who lived two hundred years after: Isaiah 40-55, famous in the New Attestation (early Christians thought the suffering retainer of Isaiah 53 was Jesus) and prominent in Handel's Messiah, speaks of the Western farsi king Cyrus the Great (d. 530 BCE), and then the text must come from that time. Other parts of the book of Isaiah are fifty-fifty afterwards, and the unabridged book was advisedly edited together, possibly by the fifth or fourth century BCE. The extraordinary poetry of the volume offers the reader hope in a God who controls historical events and seeks to return his people Israel to their own land.
In improver to the prophets, the Hebrew Bible contains what Jews ofttimes call the "Writings," or the Hagiographa, hymns and philosophical discourses, love poems and charming tales. These include Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (or Qoheleth), Vocal of Songs, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. These books were the last completed and the final to exist received as Scripture, although parts of them may be very ancient indeed. The books of Psalms, for instance, contains many hymns from Israelite temple worship from the monarchic menstruation, i.e., earlier the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE; songs such as Psalm 29 may exist borrowed from the Canaanites, while Psalm 104 closely resembles Egyptian hymns. In its electric current grade, the 150 psalms fall into v "books," modeled on the 5 books of the Pentateuch.
Proverbs also has many old parts, including one patently translated from the 2nd-millennium BCE Egyptian text the "Instructions of Amenemope" (Proverbs 22). The remaining books in this part of the Bible are somewhat later: the latest is probably Daniel, which comes from the mid-2d century.
From Many Books to the I Book
How did these diverse pieces come up to be regarded as Scripture by Jewish and, later, Christian communities? There were no committees that sabbatum down to decree what was or was not a holy book. To some degree, the process of Scripture-making, or canonization as it is often chosen (from the Greek word kanon, a "measuring rod"), involved a procedure, no longer completely understood, past which the Jewish customs decided which works reflected most clearly its vision of God. The antiquity, real or imagined, of many of the books was clearly a factor, and this is why Psalms was eventually attributed to David, and Proverbs, Vocal of Songs, and Ecclesiastes (along with, by some people, Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha) to Solomon. Notwithstanding, mere age was non enough. There had to be some way in which the Jewish community could identify its own religious experiences in the sacred books.
This occurred, at to the lowest degree in function, through an elaborate procedure of biblical interpretation. Just reading a text involves interpretation. Interpretative choices are made even in picking up today's newspaper; one must know the literary conventions that distinguish a news written report, for example, from an op-ed slice. The claiming becomes much more intense when ane reads highly artistic texts from a different time and place, such as the Bible.
The earliest examples of interpretation nosotros have appear in the Bible itself. Zechariah reinterprets Ezekiel, Jeremiah oft refers to Hosea and Micah, and Chronicles substantially rewrites Kings. These reinterpretations are in themselves evidence that the older books were already becoming authoritative, canonical, even as the younger ones were yet being written.
But some of the oldest extensive reinterpretations of our Bible come from the third or second centuries BCE. For case, the book of Jubilees is a rewriting of Genesis, now arranged in 50-year periods ending in a year of jubilee, or a fourth dimension for forgiveness of debts. A related work is the Genesis Apocryphon, also a rewriting of Genesis. Ezekiel the Tragedian wrote a play in Greek based on the life of Moses. And the Essenes, the sect that produced the Expressionless Bounding main Scrolls, equanimous commentaries (peshers) on various biblical books: fragments of those on Habakkuk, Hosea, and Psalms survive. From the get-go century BCE or so, come boosted psalms attributed to David and the Letter of Aristeas (about the miraculous translating of the Bible into Greek), amidst others. And during the life of Jesus himself, Philo of Alexandria wrote extensive emblematic commentaries on the Pentateuch, all with a view toward making the Bible respectable to philosophers influenced by Plato.
Despite their dandy variety of outlook and interests, all of these works shared certain common views. They all believed the writer of the Bible was God, that it was therefore a perfect book, that it had strong moral agendas and that information technology was abidingly relevant. Interpretation had to show how information technology was relevant to irresolute situations. They also thought the Bible to exist cryptic, a puzzle requiring piecing together. The mental gymnastics required to brand the old texts always new is one of the keen contributions of this era to the history of Judaism and Christianity, and therefore Western civilization itself.
An instance of interpretation: Genesis eleven
Genesis 11 is the story of how humans soon afterwards the Alluvion built a city centered around a tower "with its height in the heavens." The purpose of the Tower of Boom-boom was to permit its builders to "make a proper noun" for themselves. God, in a pique of anger, alters the builders' languages and so that they cannot understand each other. In its original class, the story is an caption of why non anybody speaks Hebrew, equally well as a comment on the huge temple-towers (ziggurats) of Mesopotamian cities.
For later interpreters, however, this story cried out for explanation. Why was God afraid of these people? How high was the belfry? Who led the structure, and did anyone voice objections? What did the builders await to practise when they reached the heavens? What moral lessons should one learn from the story?
To answer these questions and others, Jubilees 10 says that the builders worked for 43 years (50 years of the Jubilee period minus the mystical number seven) and congenital a structure one and a half miles high! Their purpose was to enter into heaven itself. Pseudo-Philo'southward Biblical Antiquities (start century CE) adds a story about Abraham, a model of courage, refusing to cooperate with the builders and and so being thrown into a fiery furnace, much like the three young men in Daniel 3. God sends an earthquake to destroy the furnace, and and then he changes both the builders' languages and their advent, so that no one can recognize even his or her ain brother. Other traditions think that the builders of the tower were either giants (Pseudo-Eupolemus), or were humans led by the mighty hunter and city-builder Nimrod mentioned in Genesis 10 (Josephus). Each interpreter imaginatively builds on some chance give-and-take or phrase in the biblical text to try to answer reasonable questions about it. Meanwhile, the outset-century philosopher and biblical interpreter writes an entire book on this chapter, which he interprets as an allegory about human being morality: the builders represent greed and venality.
The Book and the Once and Coming Messiah
Like their Jewish predecessors and Jewish contemporaries, early Christians believed that the Hebrew Bible was God's book, and therefore a book that should bandage light on current events and moral conundrums. For Christians, of course, the well-nigh important effect was the true import of Jesus and the story of his life, expiry, and resurrection. Since they believed him to be the messiah ("all-powerful one"), God's savior and the harbinger of a new and perfect age, they sought to find mention of him in the Hebrew Bible itself. This is why so much of the story of Jesus in the gospels quotes the Bible.
This move was non without precedent. The Expressionless Body of water customs too believed that the prophets had predicted their movement and their leader, the Instructor of Righteousness, equally well as the political events of their fourth dimension. They go so far every bit to claim that the prophets did not know what they were maxim, but God, the true author of the text, used them to speak of the (to them) distant future.
Christians, however, had a different set of questions than the Expressionless Sea sect, and and then they found different texts to cite. Whatsoever texts that refer to a time of a future deliverance, or the coming of a future king, were fair game. So the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 becomes the suffering Jesus of the gospels. And Luke's quotation from Isaiah 61 becomes a reference to Jesus's ministry of healing and reconciliation. Yet in every instance, as far as we can tell, the Christian reading comes afterward the fact. That is, they first believed in Jesus and and then tried to find his life in Scripture. They and then could shape their telling of stories about his life to fit the scriptures. This process may seem very circular, but given their assumptions -- namely, that Jesus is central to God's programme, that God spoke through prophets who might non understand their own words, and that the Bible was a cryptic puzzle needing solving -- this belief in prophecy and fulfillment is not incomprehensible. So Luke can take Jesus say, "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your presence!" Jesus saw himself as the deliverer that the prophets had foreseen long earlier. When his followers drew the same conclusion, they could then retain the aboriginal Scriptures, transforming them into something new, a Christian Bible.
Bible Etymology
The English word "Bible" is from the Greek phrase ta biblia, "the books," an expression Hellenistic Jews used to draw their sacred books several centuries before the time of Jesus. Christians adopted the phrase "Erstwhile Attestation" to refer to these sacred books they shared with Jews.
Jews called the same books Miqra, "Scripture," or the Tanakh, an acronym for the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible: T orah ("instructions" or less accurately "the law"), Northward eviim ("prophets"), and K ethuvim ("writings," including Psalms, Proverbs, and several other books). Modern scholars often use the term "Hebrew Bible" to avert the confessional terms Old Testament and Tanakh.
Equally for the New Attestation, its electric current twenty-seven book grade derives from the fourth century CE, even though the constituent parts come from the first century. Christians did not agree on the verbal extent of the New Testament for several centuries.
For Further Reading
Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997).
Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Erstwhile Attestation Pseudepigrapha. (2 vols.; Garden City: Doubleday, 1985).
Kugel, James. The Bible every bit It Was. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Idem. In Potiphar's House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts. (Cambridge: Harvard Academy Press, 1990).
Leiman, Sid. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture. (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976).
Levenson, Jon. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1985).
Noth, Martin. A History of Pentateuchal Traditions. (1948; trans. by Bernhard Anderson; Atlanta: Scholars, 1981).
Vermes, Geza, ed. The Dead Ocean Scrolls in English. (3d ed.; New York: Penguin, 1987).
Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/first/scriptures.html
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