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Ed Gallagher

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Reflections on Scripture and culture. edmongallagher.substack.com

1d ago

The Apostle Who Lived

But now the time has come to go away. I go to die, and you to live; but which of us goes to the better lot, is known to none but God. —Socrates To live is Christ and to die is gain. —Paul One time Peter got put in prison in Jerusalem during the time of Passover. The story is told in Acts 12. The year was probably AD 44. The text says that it was King Herod who put him in prison. Now, there are various Herods mentioned in the New Testament. This Herod in Acts 12 is not the most famous Herod, the one who killed the babies of Bethlehem (Matt 2:16). That was Herod the Great, the first in the line of Herods. Our Herod in Acts 12 is called Herod Agrippa, and he is the grandson of Herod the Great. Later on in Acts, Paul will meet another king whom the biblical text calls Agrippa (Acts 25–26), who is the son of the Herod Agrippa in Acts 12. Historians call the father Herod Agrippa I and the son Herod Agrippa II. Herod Agrippa I put Peter in prison with the plan to execute him after Passover and the days of unleavened bread (Acts 12:4). But on the night before the scheduled execution, an angel showed up in the prison and set Peter free. God sent an angel to save Peter’s life, to rescue him from certain death. Our God can do things like that. Once Peter was out of the prison, he went to the house of Mary, mother of John Mark, where the church had gathered to pray on Peter’s behalf. You remember what happened next. Peter knocked on the door and announced that he had been released. Rhoda the servant was so excited to tell everyone that she forgot to let Peter in. Nobody believed Rhoda; they thought it must have been his angel (Acts 12:15), whatever that means. When Peter finally got into the house, he reported about his escape and left. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. We know what year all this happened because of the next event narrated in the chapter: Herod Agrippa I died. According to Josephus, Agrippa I died in the year AD 44. (Of course, Josephus does not use our dating system; see the report of Agrippa’s reign at Antiquities 19.351–52.) The story Luke tells about this death contains the memorable and potentially confusing wording that the king “was eaten by worms and breathed his last” (Acts 12:23). We sometimes say that once a person has died, he becomes worm food, but Acts says that the worms were eating Agrippa before he died. Of course, that sometimes happens. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described something similar about Queen Pheretima in Libya in the sixth century BC: “she died a horrible death, her body seething with worms while she was still alive” (4.205). According to Luke, the judgment of God came upon this King Herod for his arrogance, illustrated in his futile attempt to kill one of the Lord’s apostles. Acts 12 is a story of liberation. It shows us the power of God, who is able to rescue from death. This story encourages us as readers to recognize that a hopeless situation is brimming with hope as long as we trust in the God who loves us and can cause everything to work out for our benefit (Rom 8:28). This story is not the only time that Peter had seen the Lord rescue someone from death. During his ministry in Galilee, Jesus sometimes raised up people who had already died. One time there was a synagogue leader named Jairus who approached Jesus asking for help for his sick daughter. By the time Jesus got to Jairus’ house, the report was already circulating about the girl’s death. Jesus’ response to this report? “Do not fear, only believe” (Mark 5:36). Jesus went into the girl’s room and simply said, “Talitha cum” (5:41)—and she got up! Peter was there, he heard those words from Jesus’ mouth, he saw the girl rise and eat. Do you remember who else was in that room at the time? Aside from the girl’s parents, it was only Peter, James, and John. We sometimes see this trio of apostles granted special privileges, not enjoyed by the other apostles. These were the three on the mount of transfiguration, who witnessed Jesus glowing and talking with Moses and Elijah (Mark 9:2–8). Later, in what seems like the moment of Jesus’ greatest need, it was Peter and James and John with him in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 15:32–42). While all twelve apostles had their mission from Jesus, it seems like the Big Three were an especially important group with an unusually intimate relationship with Jesus. Peter, the rock (John 1:42). James and John, the sons of thunder (Mark 3:17). No doubt Jesus had big plans for these three special apostles, some sort of special project. The Gospels record some stories that involve just James and John without Peter. It was these two brothers who suggested to Jesus that they could call fire down from heaven against some rude Samaritans. Sons of thunder. Jesus rolled his eyes (Luke 9:51–55). It was also James and John (Mark 10:35–40)—or, actually, their mother (Matt 20:20–28)—who asked for the best seats in the kingdom of God, on the right and left of the Messiah. This time, Jesus did not roll his eyes but asked a question: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” (Mark 10:38). James and John answered confidently, “yes, we can do that!” Did they know what they were talking about? We can be sure that they did not know the full import of their words. Jesus actually told them, “You do not know what you are asking” (10:38). But did they realize that the cup Jesus mentioned, and the baptism, had to do with suffering? I’m not sure, maybe. They may have thought that they were proclaiming their readiness to serve on the front lines in the coming war, to put themselves in dangerous situations for the kingdom of God. They probably did not realize that there would be no battle against Rome or any earthly foe. But they may have thought that they had signed up for some degree of suffering. And Jesus told them that they were right about that. “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized” (10:39). Jesus would endure suffering, and so would James and John. Acts 12 does not start with King Herod putting Peter in prison. It starts with Herod imprisoning James, the brother of John. In prison is one of the sons of thunder, one of the Big Three apostles. There is no rescue plan from God, no miraculous escape. Instead, Herod “had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword” (Acts 12:2). Peter would be saved by a miracle, but not James. Why the one and not the other? Luke does not tell us. When Peter was imprisoned, Christians gathered to pray in the house of one of their members. They asked God to spare the life of this beloved leader. Do you think that the church did the same for James? When James was taken by the authorities, do you think the Christians prayed for him, too? What did they pray? Of course, we don’t know the words of their prayer, but let me offer a suggestion by reminding you about an incident that James witnessed. One of those occasions when the Big Three were alone with Jesus was in Gethsemane. The way Mark tells the story (perhaps based on the memories of Peter; see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.15.1–2), the apostles were having trouble staying awake. It was late at night. Even if they hadn’t fallen asleep, I’m not sure they were close enough to overhear what Jesus prayed, but somehow people found out what the Lord prayed in the garden, because it’s reported in all three of the Synoptic Gospels (Matt 26:39; Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42): “Let this cup pass from me; yet not what I will, but your will be done.” Do you think it’s possible that—assuming the church gathered to pray for James after his arrest—they reflected on Jesus’ prayer in the garden? James had probably told them many times about what he witnessed that night, about his shame at falling asleep in that hour, about how he wished he had realized at the time the significance of the events he was experiencing, and about Jesus’ prayer. James had probably said that when it came to his own hour of death, he hoped he would face death in the same way Jesus did. Do you think it’s possible that the church prayed for James just as Jesus prayed in the garden, so that they asked God to let this cup pass from the apostle, if it be God’s will—and if it be not God’s will, but if rather God will that James should drink the cup to the dregs, perhaps the church prayed that James would show himself worthy of imitating Jesus through a brave and noble death. We usually recoil from death, try to prevent it by every means possible, even though we all know that it’s coming. Sometimes we encounter people who seem to stare at death and—far from recoiling at it—endeavor to die in a particular fashion. There’s a moment in the novel Dracula when Arthur Holmwood (by now, Lord Godalming) is asked to give his beloved Lucy Westenra a transfusion of blood (ch. 10). Poor Lucy has been experiencing a repeated and mysterious loss of blood. Only Abraham Van Helsing seems to have any idea of how the blood was leaving her body, and what those two tiny pinprick holes on the side of her neck might have to do with it. At any rate, she needs blood immediately, and Van Helsing asks Arthur to supply the blood. Arthur answers, “If you only knew how gladly I would die for her.” We can think of other examples. I believe that not every state has a designated state hero, but the state hero of Connecticut is a man named Nathan Hale. At age 21, he was arrested by the British as an American spy during the early period of the Revolutionary War. When he was hanged on September 22, 1776, his last words were reported as, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” There are plenty of examples of noble deaths in religion as well. Near the end of

28 min
Jun 19

Juneteenth, A Holiday for White Americans, Obviously

The iniquities of the wicked ensnare them,and they are caught in the toils of their sin. (Proverbs 5:22) I have actually heard people say that Juneteenth is a holiday for only one segment of the population. But what I can’t figure out is why we would not expect Black people to celebrate? Obviously it’s a holiday for white people—or, let’s put it this way: it must be a time of celebration for those people who look back on the nineteenth-century American South and, because of their skin color, wonder whether, had they lived then and there, they would have been slave owners. Thank God we are no longer confronted with such sin! With all the potential for moral corruption around us in the 21st century, thank God he has removed that particular cause of depravity! Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. When we think about American slavery one of the things we should think about is how the slave society dulled the moral sense of the slavemasters. Slavery exerted a corrupting influence on the slavemasters. I know that the slavemaster is not the first victim of slavery to which our mind turns, and you might think it’s silly—or worse than silly—to reflect on the evils of slavery for the enslaver. I get that. There’s an episode of Little House on the Prairie in which a boy is being abused by his alcoholic father. The men of Walnut Grove get together to talk about how to help the boy, and someone says (I think it’s Doc Baker) that they should probably try to help the father. Charles Ingles responds: “I don’t care about the father, I care only about the boy.” Do you understand why Charles feels that way? That’s the way a lot of people are going to feel about slavery: Who cares about the travails of the slavemaster?! We only care about the slaves! There are a couple of reasons I want to think about the slavemasters. * Had I been born 200 years ago, I would not have been one of the slaves. * There were a lot of opponents of slavery in nineteenth-century America who wrote about the problems of slavery for slaveowners. In his first autobiography (1845), Frederick Douglass wrote about his master’s wife: “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me” (ch. 7). Sin hurts the sinner As Augustine wrote in the Confessions (3.8.16) at the end of the fourth century, talking about people who know not God: “even when they sin against you, they act wickedly against their own souls. Their iniquity speaks falsehoods to them, whether by corrupting or perverting their own nature, which you created and ordained, or by making immoderate use of licit things, or by so burning with desire for illicit things that they use them contrary to nature” (trans. Williams 2019: 39). “They act wickedly against their own souls.” That’s the theme I want to highlight in this essay, and mostly I’m going to do that by lining up quotations that demonstrate the point, quotations about the general idea—sin hurts the sinner—and then also about the specific instance under consideration here, slaveholding. First, the general idea, and it’s one that Socrates mentioned in his final speech—before being sentenced to drink the hemlock—in reference to his accuser, Meletus (and Anytus): “I think he does himself a much greater injury by doing what he is doing now—killing a man unjustly” (Plato, Apology 30d; see the discussion by Emily Wilson, pp. 46–51). The Proverbs are filled with this sort of reflection. yet they lie in wait—to kill themselves!and set an ambush—for their own lives! (Proverbs 1:18) Those who are kind reward themselves,but the cruel do themselves harm.The wicked earn no real gain,but those who sow righteousness get a true reward. (Proverbs 11:17–18) As righteousness tendeth to life:so he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death. (Proverbs 11:19) The deuterocanoical book of Wisdom, written just before the time of Jesus, mentions that “One is punished by the very things by which one sins” (Wisdom 11:16), and the other deuterocanonical wisdom book, this one called Sirach, says similarly: “One who sins does wrong to himself” (Sirach 19:4). It was not just Jews and Christians who saw this truth; the pre-classical Greek poet Hesiod asserted: “A man contrives evil for himself when he contrives evil for someone else, and an evil plan is most evil for the planner” (Works and Days 265–66; trans. Most, pp. 108–9). One more example, much more recent, written in America about 15 years before slavery was federally prohibited, but this example is not about slavery. It’s from the novel The Scarlet Letter (1850, ch. 14), in which a man named Roger Chillingworth has been wronged, and so he plots his revenge, and it turns out that the biggest victim of his revenge is himself. “In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office.” A devil’s office Slaveowning in the nineteenth-century American South was a devil’s office, and it turned humans into devils. Living in a slave society himself, Augustine recognized the dangers of sin, and the madness of ignoring the perils of, for instance, hating an enemy. “As if there were any greater danger from a human enemy than from the very hatred that one feels toward him! As if one did more serious harm to someone else by persecuting him than to one’s own heart by stoking one’s hostility!” (Confessions 1.18.29). In a work written after the American Revolutionary War but before the drafting of the US Constitution, Thomas Jefferson had diagnosed this problem. There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people [i.e., white Americans] produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. (Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785, Query 18) Jefferson goes on to continue describing how easy it is for the slavemaster to abuse his slave and thus train his child to do the same. The child who is thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. These are amazing sentences from Jefferson in 1785, and with the benefit of hindsight of another nearly two and half centuries of American history, they are tragic. Jefferson’s discussion continues for a few more sentences, and those sentences are well worth reading in this book—his only published book—easily accessible online. But note in the last sentence quoted above that he imagines that with all the harm to the slave entailed in the practice of American slavery, he observes that it is the slavemasters who are turned into immoral despots. You might imagine what the author of the Declaration of Independence thought about immoral despots. In an 1847 letter, Francis Wayland, an opponent of slavery, quotes this passage from Jefferson and adds the comment a bit later: “It is in accordance with the general law, that those who enslave the bodies of others, become in turn the slaves of their own passions” (see here, pp. 119–20). The English writer Charles Dickens, visiting America in 1842, published a series of Notes, near the end of which he describes the logical outcome of the training of a slavemaster (text here, near the end of ch. 17): Do we not know that the man who has been born and bred among its [= slavery’s] wrongs; who has seen in his childhood husbands obliged at the word of command to flog their wives; women, indecently compelled to hold up their own garments that men might lay the heavier stripes on their legs, driven and harried by brutal overseers in their time of travail, and becoming mothers on the field of toil, under the very lash itself; who has read in youth, and seen his virgin sisters read, descriptions of runaway men and women, and their disfigured persons [as Dickens had quoted earlier in his chapter], which could not be published elsewhere, of so much stock upon a farm, or at a show of beasts;—do we not know that that man, whenever his wrath is kindled up, will be a brutal savage? According to Jefferson, enslaving another person renders you an immoral despot. Yes, I know, he himself was a slavemaster, and among his slaves were some of his own biological children. That does not make his observation wrong; I think it gives a powerful illustration of it. According to Dickens, the slavemaster trains himself to become a brutal savage. According to the historian Douglas Foster (p. 55), it is for this reason that Alexander Campbell, the nineteenth-century religious reformer in Virginia, opposed slavery. What I’m saying is, I’m glad I won’t have to stand before God and answer questions about my record as a slavemaster. But we can continue. We have heard from some white people, including a slaveowner, Jefferson, but now we turn to some slaves, or some former (runaway) slaves. (Douglass was still legally a slave when he published his autobiography, as his freedom was not purchased until 1846.) Going back to the first autobiography of Frederick Douglass, who escaped from bondage when he was about age 20, he includes some descriptions of the moral corruption that enslavement wrought on his enslavers. When he was a young boy, he met with a kind woman, the wife o

44 min
Jun 17

Gospel of Life, Chapter 6, The Old Testament

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15 min
Jun 13

Gospel of Life, Chapter 5, The Samaritan Woman

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14 min
Jun 12

Language and Theology

God said it, I believe, that settles it. But what does it settle? Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Accepting Christian Scripture as true does not determine its meaning. Interpretation is always necessary, and the more important the theological claim, the more important it is to interpret the claim in a sensible or true way. By the way, this song is just too good not to watch, since I mentioned its title. For instance, Christians affirm that Jesus is the Son of God, but what does this mean? And, crucially, should we understand this affirmation “literally”? Is it traditional Christian theology to claim that Jesus is literally the Son of God, or is that a departure from Christian theology? What does it mean to say that Jesus is literally the Son of God? Or what about the claim that the church is the body of Christ? Does that make sense literally or only in some other way? Such questions invite reflection on the meaning of words, the meaning of meaning, and the possibilities of communication. That’s where I start, before turning to some examples of theological assertions and querying whether they should be interpreted literally. By the way, I first presented this essay in a meeting of fellow Christians, all members of the Churches of Christ, and I gave myself the task of investigating whether the claim “Jesus is literally the Son of God” makes sense—or what sense it is supposed to make. That setting intrudes itself in some of my sentences below. Words and Meaning I do believe words have meaning, and communication is possible. I have some hope that this brief essay can communicate a meaning, and that readers will be able to discern something close to the concepts that exist in the head of the author of this text—if they want to. Postmodern literary theories have taught us that texts can communicate in multiple ways and readers are involved in the business of constructing meaning with texts, but at least some times—and, I think, almost all the time—the meaning readers aim at constructing with the text is the meaning that the author intended. Authors feel justified at times in complaining that readers have misconstrued their intentions, that is, that the texts have been misinterpreted. Such complaining happens frequently when authors respond to reviews of their books: “That’s not what I meant!” Or, let me quote Pope Pius XII, who wrote in a famous encyclical in 1943, “There is no one indeed but knows that the supreme rule of interpretation is to discover and define what the writer intended to express” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 34). The good bishop then immediately undergirds his assertion by quoting Athanasius (Against the Arians 1.54). He could have quoted a number of other early Christian writers, including Augustine: “The aim of its [= divine scripture’s] readers is simply to find out the thoughts and wishes of those by whom it was written down and, through them, the will of God, which we believe these men followed as they spoke” (On Christian Doctrine 2.5.6). Let me say it again: I do believe that texts can communicate meanings, though I also recognize some of the difficulties in making such a claim. And because texts can communicate meanings, I also believe that it is possible to translate a text from one language to another. An English translation of the Bible, for instance, can communicate the same meaning as what is communicated by the biblical texts in their original languages. No, that is saying too much for translation. Let me put it this way: an English Bible can communicate an approximation of the meaning communicated by the texts in their original language—an approximation, not the same meaning, just an approximation. Greek words do not correspond perfectly with English words, just as English words do not correspond perfectly with English words. Agape means something very similar to “love,” but not exactly the same thing, just as the English word “adore” means something very similar to “love” but not exactly the same thing. Of course, the word “love” itself has various shades of meaning, depending on whether we’re talking about loving our spouse or loving God or loving ice cream. And then there’s development in language: the phrase “making love” in a movie from the 1940s was intended to communicate something different from the way the same phrase was employed in movies from the 1970s. Such variables in language have led some people to declare translation to be impossible—an overstatement, to be sure, but one that captures a significant truth. We can, with more precision, say that translation is challenging and always imprecise. And so we commonly give the Bible-study advice that you need to check your Scriptural passage in more than one translation so that you can discern different nuances of the meaning of the original language text. All of the foregoing is prolegomena. Now for the main item. Son of God Is Jesus the Son of God? Yes, of course. I am a Christian talking to Christians, and the assertion that Jesus is the Son of God is a basic Christian affirmation. According to the traditional English wording of the most well-known verse of the Bible, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. Ask the Pope or the President, Barton Stone or Alexander Campbell, and they’ll all tell you that Jesus is the Son of God. Now, if you ask what they mean by that, or in what way Jesus is the Son of God, or what implications people should derive from that status, the similarities among them will quickly evaporate. Arius believed that Jesus was the Son of God. So did Marcion. And Irenaeus and Athanasius believed it. I assume the demons believe it, just as the Epistle of James says that the demons believe other basic elements of Christian theology. Churches of Christ have traditionally followed a course of strategic ambiguity regarding the exact signification of Jesus’ divine sonship. Let me be more specific: churches of Christ have often not followed the path of mainstream Christianity in regard to some aspects of the doctrine of God. Many Christians throughout the past couple millennia have thought it very important to specify with some precision the way in which Jesus is the Son of God, to define in some detail the relationship between Jesus and the Father, to bring more exactitude to this discussion than the bare phrase “Son of God” could do. If the declaration of Jesus’ divine sonship unites followers of Athanasius with followers of Arius and followers of Marcion, then it is not a very useful declaration, it has often been thought. We need to define God as the creator of heaven and earth—thus excluding the beliefs of Marcion—and we need to draw out the implications of divine sonship as entailing that Jesus is (for example) “light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not made”—and this next bit is crucial, so I will cite the Greek of the Nicene Creed—homoousios with the Father, not homoiousios but homoousios, of the same substance—not similar, same. Many Christian groups have historically been so concerned to declare Jesus to be very God that they have recited some version of the creed every single week. Churches of Christ have traditionally not followed this practice, and have indeed left the matter open as to what exactly people mean when they declare Jesus to be Son of God. In the past few decades, however, there has been among some leaders in churches of Christ an effort to elevate a traditional doctrine of the Trinity to a fellowship issue (see Mark Powell, Brad East, Keith Stanglin; and relatedly Leonard Allen). I wonder, though, if we could ask Athanasius, or Arius, or Marcion—or whoever, the Pope or Barton Stone or Mark Powell—whether Jesus was literally the Son of God, what they would say. What does it mean for someone to be literally the son of someone else? I have two sons, and I think we would all agree that both of them are literally my sons, though one of them has inherited genetic material from me and the other one hasn’t. One of them is my biological son and the other is my adopted son, and this latter son therefore has another father who is his biological father. Is my adopted son’s biological father the literal father of my adopted son? Hmm, maybe, but I also am his literal father, and now I’m not sure what “literal” means in this context. The New Testament gives me the assurance that I myself am a son of God. According to the apostle Paul, all who are led by the Spirit are sons of God (Rom 8:14). Am I literally a son of God? Oh, man, I don’t know. If you’re making me answer, I guess I’d say “yes, I am literally a son of God.” What about Jesus? Well, if I am literally a son of God, surely Jesus also is. But, again, I’m not sure what the word “literally” accomplishes in this context. At any rate, Christians who have thought about this issue of the relationship between Jesus and the Father have succeeded in offering some substance to the phrase “Son of God” as applied to Jesus. The first thing to note is that Jesus did not become the Son of God at any time, and certainly not at the time of his birth from Mary, as if the phrase “Son of God” can apply to the Second Person of the Trinity only from two thousand years ago, but not before then. No, that is ridiculous, absurd—indeed, heretical. The Father did not become the Father at some point in history, and the Son did not become the Son. These terms—Father and Son—are clues to their eternal relationship. So, the phrase “Son of God” does not refer to his birth from Mary by the Holy Spirit. Rather, it refers to his essence, as begotten of the Father before all ages; before time, the Son was begotten of the Father, so that there was no time when the Son was not. Here, note well, we have left Arianism behind. There is, of course, no

31 min
Jun 10

Gospel of Life, Chapter 4, The "I Am" Statements

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16 min
Jun 6

Gospel of Life, Chapter 3, Signs

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14 min
Jun 4

The Minor Prophets: Twelve or One?

Should you read the Minor Prophets as if these twelve different prophetic voices together constitute a single book? I have a definite answer to this question: hmm, maybe. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a thing that scholars like to talk about—or, at least, they used to. Maybe it’s not so in fashion now to engage in scholarly arguments over the unity of the Book of the Twelve. (That’s the name scholars often use for the Minor Prophets when engaging in these discussions: the Book of the Twelve, which is an ancient name for this collection.) It became a common thing to talk about in the 1990s, but maybe the trend has waned a little by now, or the positions have become more settled. Here I’m going to talk about some of the evidence for the idea that the Book of the Twelve is, in fact, a single book, and what it might mean to read the Minor Prophets in this way, what difference it would make. It’s this last idea that leaves me a little cold, where I struggle to find a meaningful payoff. But some people seem to think it’s important or helpful to read the Twelve as essentially one, a unified collection or composition. Part of a Trend in Scholarship The pursuit of understanding the Minor Prophets as a unified collection could be seen as an instance of the recent-ish impulse to perceive larger structures in the Hebrew Bible. For most of the time that modern biblical scholarship has been practiced, since around the year 1800, most observers would say that scholars have endeavored to break things apart, to examine the sources of the books, to say, for instance, that the book of Isaiah was not all written by Isaiah but by different people. The book of Isaiah is not unified according to authorship. Same for the Pentateuch: not by Moses but by different authors. Same for even the books of the Minor Prophets: Hosea didn’t write all of Hosea, nor Amos his book, nor Micah his book, nor Zechariah his book, nor probably any of the prophets. All these books grew over the course of the centuries, supplemented by editors (or redactors), often seeking to make the ancient message meaningful to a contemporary audience. But if that’s the way the books were written, is the task of interpretation simply to undo all the supplementation, to seek out the original compositions and situate those compositions within the time of the original author? What about the actual books that we have, the book of Isaiah, or the book of Zechariah, or the Pentateuch? Were the editors who supplemented earlier writings (laws and stories and oracles and such) imbeciles, as scholars seem to have usually assumed, or were they theologians or prophets or artists with intentions about how they went about their work? Did these redactors have something to say that is worthy of scholarly pursuit and reflection? These are some of the questions that animated the work of, for instance, Brevard Childs and James Sanders and others in the 1960s and 1970s, who pioneered what Sanders called “canonical criticism” and what Childs called “the canonical approach.” Maybe these approaches or criticisms are two different things, but they are similar and a lot of people conflate them. A couple of classic texts by these scholars are Torah and Canon (1972) by Sanders, and An Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979) by Childs. The work of Childs and Sanders and others spurred people to examine the larger structures in the Hebrew Bible. Granted that Isaiah was originally written by different prophets, how did the book of Isaiah come together into its present form? These days the study of the unity of Isaiah along these lines is well-established. See, for instance, the 30-year-old book by H. G. M. Williamson, The Book Called Isaiah (1994). Another good example of this trend—an especially helpful example for comparison with the Minor Prophets—is scholarship on the book of Psalms. In his Introduction from 1979, Childs didn’t really talk about the “book” of Psalms, the overall composition, the editing principles, but one of Childs’ students, named Gerald Wilson, argued in his dissertation that there was something like a plot in the Psalter, an overall structure—even if loose—in the book of Psalms, editing principles that could still be discerned. A few years later (1993), James Nogalski published his dissertation arguing for the redactional unity of the Book of the Twelve, and this concept has been a part of the scholarly conversation ever since. Ancient Evidence for a Single Book The ancients—Jews and Christians—did often talk about the Minor Prophets as a single book. Here is a list of the basic evidence. * Sirach 49:10 * Josephus, Against Apion 1.37–42 * 4 Ezra 14:44–48 * Early Christian canon lists * The Talmud, Bava Bathra 13b and 14b * Masoretic manuscripts * Dead Sea Scrolls * Septuagint I’ll discuss these bits of data further in a moment, and you can read other similar discussions, such as the essay by Anna Sieges in The Oxford Handbook of the Minor Prophets (2021). All this evidence indicates that the Twelve Prophets belonged together, and that when counting up the books of the Jewish Scriptures, the Twelve Prophets counted as one book, just like Isaiah counted as one book, and Proverbs counted as one book. Only the Talmud explains why the Twelve count as one, and its explanation—relating to the short length of each of the Minor Prophets—cannot be taken seriously as an explanation of how or why the Twelve came together. The reason why we can’t take it seriously in that way will become clear as we continue our discussion. Masoretic manuscripts I’ve discussed some examples of these manuscripts in another post. That post concludes this way: “The Masoretic manuscripts treat the Twelve as a biblical book, and the individual prophets in the Twelve as not a full-fledged biblical book even if more than a mere chapter.” Dead Sea Scrolls I discussed the Minor Prophets in the DSS here. The evidence is complex, more complex than scholars have often realized. It is not clear that the DSS show that the Minor Prophets were always on the same scroll. Probably not. Probably sometimes a single Minor Prophet was on a scroll by itself. There is strong evidence that one of the scrolls features a collection of Minor Prophets in a sequence that diverges from the sequence of the Masoretic Text and the LXX, which both feature Malachi at the end of the collection. The commentaries on the Minor Prophets, the pesharim, do not clearly interpret the individual prophets as a part of a collection. But, one of the DSS probably did originally contain all twelve Minor Prophets, in the traditional sequence, and another scroll not from Qumran probably did, as well. So the DSS provide evidence that the Minor Prophets were sometimes perceived to be a unit, or at least copied on a single scroll in a standard sequence, but not always. Maybe not even most of the time. Septuagint I discussed the Minor Prophets in Septuagint manuscripts here. These Greek manuscripts feature a standard sequence for the Minor Prophets, slightly divergent from the sequence of the Masoretic Text, and the individual prophets are closer to being represented as their own books, but still within a collection of Twelve, since each of the Twelve Prophets is numbered. Sirach The book of Sirach is one of the deuterocanonical/apocryphal books, in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not in the Jewish Bible or the Protestant Bible. Sirach is the Greek name for the book; in Hebrew it is called Ben Sira and its Latin name is Ecclesiasticus. It was written in Hebrew in the early second century BC, around the year 180 BC. Near the end of the same century (perhaps about 115 BC), it was translated into Greek. We have the book of Ben Sira or Sirach complete in Greek, but we do not have a complete copy in Hebrew. A few scraps in Hebrew from around the time of Jesus have been discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls and associated finds, and before that (end of the nineteenth century) more substantial Hebrew copies of Ben Sira came to light in the Cairo Geniza in Egypt. Ben Sira is a long book, filled with proverbs. Near the end it mentions the Twelve Prophets, though not the individual prophets. It says: May the bones of the Twelve Prophetssend forth new life from where they lie,for they comforted the people of Jacoband delivered them with confident hope. (Sirach 49:10 NRSV) This verse is preserved in one of the Cairo Geniza copies of Ben Sira (copy B, accessible here). Sirach is thus the earliest evidence we have that the Minor Prophets were grouped together and could be referenced collectively as the Twelve Prophets. Josephus The first-century AD Jewish historian writing in Greek, in one of his works, offers a quick overview of the books of the Jewish Scriptures. The work is called Against Apion, and it is an apologetic work arguing for the nobility of Judaism as a way of life, against a critic of Judaism named Apion. One of the things that should be considered a good point favoring Judaism, Josephus thinks, is that it has a limited number of books that it considers authoritative (Against Apion 1.37–42). The total number of authoritative books is 22, and Josephus divides these 22 into three categories: 5 books of law, 13 books of history written by prophets, and 4 books of hymns and precepts. Josephus does not, in this passage, specify the names of the books. But all modern scholars think that Josephus’s 22 books must have resembled very closely the modern Jewish Bible, which counts the books as 24. These 24 books of the modern Jewish Bible are the same as the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament, with only mechanical differences in calculations. Whereas the Protestant Bible has two books of Samuel, the Jewish Bible reckons the same material as a single book. In fact, all Christian Bibles hav

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