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Ed Gallagher

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Reflections on Scripture and culture. edmongallagher.substack.com

1d ago

Gospel of Life, Chapter 5, The Samaritan Woman

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14 min
2d ago

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
4d ago

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

38 min
Jun 3

Gospel of Life, Chapter 2, Introducing the

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18 min
May 30

Gospel of Life, Chapter 1, Introducing Jesus

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15 min
May 28

The Minor Prophets in the Septuagint

The Minor Prophets were translated into Greek probably sometime in the second century BC, probably either in Egypt or Palestine, and apparently all by a single translator. (See Tov 2019: 130–31.) The same translator was perhaps also responsible for the Greek translation of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The translation is quite close to the traditional Hebrew text (the Masoretic Text; Tov 2019: 132). The standard Greek edition of this translation was produced by Joseph Ziegler in 1943 and updated by Felix Albrecht a couple years ago. (For an English translation, see here.) Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. There are six majuscule manuscripts preserving the Minor Prophets. * the Freer Codex (W), third century AD (information; some images) * Codex Vaticanus (B), fourth century (images) * Codex Sinaiticus (S), fourth century (info and images) * Codex Alexandrinus (A), fifth century (images of a facsimile) * Codex Marchalianus (Q), sixth century (images) * Codex Venetus (V), eighth century (Vatican section images; Venetian section) There are some commentaries on the Septuagint Minor Prophets—a few volumes of Brill’s Septuagint Commentary Series and then a few volumes of the French series La Bible d’Alexandrie. Sequence The sequence of books in the Minor Prophets differs between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. The difference affects only the first six books. The sequence in the English Bible is based on the Masoretic text, so the sequence likely familiar to you is not the LXX sequence. * Masoretic Text: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah * LXX: Hosea, Amos Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah The first LXX manuscript that attests this order is the first LXX manuscript that we have (except for the Naḥal Ḥever scroll [DJD edition], which presents a Greek translation of the Minor Prophets revised toward the Hebrew text, possibly including the sequence of books)—yet, it is a third century AD manuscript, so we can still wonder whether the sequence of books in the Codex W reflects the original LXX sequence or whether it was itself altered at some point before this manuscript. At any rate, most Greek manuscripts of the Minor Prophets reflect this “LXX sequence,” but not all. Several ancient commentaries reflect the Masoretic sequence: the commentaries by Theodore and Theodoret. But, then again, these are both Aniochene authors, and the Antiochene Greek manuscripts also reflect the Masoretic sequence. The LXX sequence is reflected in the commentary by Cyril of Alexandria. And the LXX order also appears in 5 Ezra 1:39–40 and an aberrant sequence in Martyrdom of Isaiah 4.22 and the Lives of the Prophets. Jennifer Dines (2012: 367) suggests that Origen may be responsible for the popularization within Christianity of a ‘Greek’ order that arose among Egyptian Jews. One Book? As I mentioned, LXX scholars seem agreed that the translation of all twelve Minor Prophets was produced by a single translator, which suggests that the twelve were seen as a single collection at the time of the translation. On the other hand, LXX manuscripts—at least the ones I’ve looked at—seem to treat the individual prophets as their own book (as pointed out by Dogniez, pdf, p. 307). The following image shows Codex Sinaiticus, the end of Joel and the beginning of Obadiah. Note that Joel (ΙΩΗΛ), at the bottom of the left column (signaling the end of the book), has a Δ under it, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, showing that it is the fourth in a group of books (according to the Greek order). Obadiah (ΑΒΔΙΟΥ) then, at the top of the right column, is labeled with an epsilon (ε), the fifth letter. Presumably this numbering suggests that the Twelve Prophets belong together in some way. On the other hand, the end of a book and the beginning of the next looks like the division between books, not parts of a book. This next image shows Codex Vaticanus, the translation between Amos and Micah. Again, Micah is labeled with a gamma (Γ), the third letter of the Greek alphabet, showing that it belongs in a sequence of books, but the beginning of Micah sure does look like the start of a new book. The end of Malachi and the start of Isaiah in Codex Vaticanus looks exactly the same, as the next image shows. So, does the LXX present the Minor Prophets as a single book, or as a group of twelve books? I’d lean toward the idea that it’s a group of twelve books in the LXX, at least in these LXX manuscripts. One more thing on this point: one of the ways in which scholars sometimes argue that the twelve Minor Prophets should be considered a single book is because of some catchwords linking the end of one book with the beginning of the next. (I’ll talk a little more about this phenomenon in a later post; but for now see here and here.) Modern proposals for such catchwords are usually based on the sequence in the Masoretic Text. There are probably some scholarly proposals for catchwords based on the LXX sequence, but I’m not familiar with those proposals, and—initially, at least—it would seem that the LXX sequence messes up the catchwords. So, again, I would lean toward seeing the weight of the LXX evidence as against the idea that the Minor Prophets are presented to readers as a single book. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

18 min

Reflections on Scripture and culture. edmongallagher.substack.com

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