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Ed Gallagher

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Reflections on Scripture and culture. edmongallagher.substack.com

1D AGO

Gospel of Life, Introduction

Buy the book at 21st Century Christian. 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

12 min
2D AGO

Three Buckets of Forgiveness

This essay is based on a sermon I preached several weeks ago. The video for the sermon is at the end of this post. I have continued to think about these issues, and I’m sure I’m not done thinking about them. Perhaps this way of approaching the subject of Christian forgiveness will be helpful to people. To err is human, to forgive divine. —Alexander Pope There’s an episode of the TV show Blue Bloods called “Bad Company” (season 5, episode 18—find it on Disney+) that has an amazing scene, one that has stuck in my mind for years now. There’s a young woman named Sarah Grant who is angry at a man named Donald Berry. She has good reason to be angry. Donald Berry is in prison and will never get out because of what he did to Sarah’s family perhaps fifteen years earlier. I’ll let you use your imagination about the crime, or watch the episode. The scene I mentioned takes place in the prison, when Sarah visits this man, who wants to talk to her to explain that he is sorry, that he was diagnosed only in prison as a paranoid schizophrenic, that he has now found God, that he is a different person from what he was. He says that he has tried to end his life a number of times. And Sarah Grant’s response to all this is to say that if he’s really sorry for what he did, he should try suicide again and get it right this time. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. That’s the end of the scene and the storyline. We never hear from these people again. I remember watching that scene for the first time, years ago, and thinking, “Wow! What are we supposed to get out of this? What were the producers of this show wanting to say?” And I’m not sure. That scene reminds me of Natalie Maines. Forgive, sounds good.Forget, I’m not sure I could.They say time heals everything,But I’m still waiting Lloyd Vogel is a bit like Sarah Grant. He is angry at a man who treated his family poorly, and he doesn’t want to get over his anger. He has good reason to be angry, not as good as Sarah Grant has, but still pretty good. Lloyd is angry at his father, Jerry, because perhaps twenty years earlier, when Lloyd’s parents were married and Lloyd’s mom got sick, Jerry left, abandoned the family, couldn’t handle the pressure of family life, especially with a sick wife. Lloyd’s mom died when Lloyd was, I dunno, twelve years old maybe, and Lloyd spent the next twenty years pursuing his career and hating his father. I’m describing to you the backstory of the wonderful movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), the one where Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers—which, by the way, is not a kids movie. After Lloyd Vogel developed a relationship with Mr. Rogers, and learned from him about dealing with anger, he had a dream of his sick mom, and he went up to her bedside, and she said to him, “I know you’re hanging on to this anger, this hatred, for my sake. You think your anger toward your dad is honoring me.” And she says to him, “I don’t need it.” Look, I haven’t ruined the movie for you; you ought to watch it. And if you haven’t seen it in the past six months, you ought to watch it again. It’s good. You can watch it with your kids in the room; they’ll just be bored. But you won’t be. Now I’m about to ruin the movie for you. Not really, because you knew it had to happen: Lloyd reconciles with his father. There is forgiveness. He manages to do what Sarah Grant could not do. Earlier Lloyd was angry, bitter, and when he manages to release that anger and forgive his dad, he himself feels liberated, joyful. What’s that that they say? —that holding onto a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. Letting go of the anger is good for you. I can understand why Sarah Grant is angry, but I can also say that it’s bad for her, that she would be better off releasing her anger and forgiving this murderer. I don’t mean that they should be best friends, or even have any sort of relationship at all. But he asked for her forgiveness, and she should offer it. That’s the Christian way. Forgiveness and Reconciliation But if Sarah Grant is not going to have a relationship with the person who harmed her family, is that really forgiveness? To what extent does forgiveness involve reconciliation? I’ve got three answers, three buckets of forgiveness, three different categories by which to measure the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation. Sometimes forgiveness entails a complete restoration of a relationship, and sometimes it doesn’t. The third bucket of forgiveness I’m not actually sure should be called forgiveness as the Bible talks about forgiveness, but we’ll get to that. These are my buckets, not God’s buckets. I didn’t find these buckets in the Bible; I just devised them from observing life. I think it’s helpful to contemplate forgiveness in these three categories, but you could come up with a few—or even many—more buckets if you think about it enough. People are complicated, and there are all kinds of situations that don’t fit neatly into these three categories, but I think these three categories do cover a lot of the ground. I’ll name these off and then talk about them: * Total Reconciliation * Partial Reconciliation * No Reconciliation Buckets 1 & 2: Total Reconciliation and Partial Reconciliation The common element for both of these categories is that the offender repents and asks for forgiveness. What distinguishes the two is the nature of the offense and whether it would wise for both parties to return to business as usual. Bucket 1, Total Reconciliation. The person repents and asks for forgiveness, and you not only forgive and welcome the person back into a relationship, but there is a complete restoration of the previous relationship. Bucket 2, Partial Reconciliation—or you could call this one: Forgiveness without trust. The person repents and asks for forgiveness, and you forgive and welcome the person back into a relationship, but there is not a complete restoration of the previous relationship. The examples I am thinking of here have to do with the nature of the sin that the person committed. Maybe the person had been the church treasurer and had embezzled funds and gambled away the money. Forgiving the person does not mean restoring them to their role as church treasurer. Maybe the person sexually abused kids in the church. Forgiving the person does not entail asking them to babysit your kids. Are there biblical examples of Bucket 1? The Parable of the Prodigal Son seems to me the most obvious. This is a picture of divine forgiveness. Literally. The Father who offers forgiveness to his prodigal son represents God. It’s a good message to us, and I think it means this: whenever God forgives, there is always total reconciliation of the relationship. Are there biblical examples of one person forgiving another person in this way? I can’t really think of any. Bucket 1 is difficult. Let me tell you why (as I think). We are perfectly fine forgiving people completely when it comes to rather minor sins, perhaps ones of which we were not even aware. Have you had the experience where someone apologizes to you for some offense, and you’re response is something along the lines of, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Person X has said something, or done something, and at the time it didn’t even register with you, but Person X soon feels bad about saying or doing that thing, and can’t sleep that night, and finally has to confess the wrongdoing. It bothered the offender but the offendee didn’t even know. And so the offendee is perfectly happy to say, “no problem, all is forgotten,” and the offendee really means it. In this case, there is a complete restoration of the relationship, but there was never really any offense to begin with. When there’s really an offense, when someone says something really nasty that does register with you, or does something harmful to your career, or to your family, and you are very much offended, in this case it’s hard to act like the father of the prodigal son. You will offer forgiveness, but it’s hard to forget, and the relationship is not quite what it was. Trust has been lost; you are more guarded around this person. Second chances. We do sometimes, in some contexts, offer second chances, but usually we think of a second chance as happening when the offendee is a boss or an authority figure, and the offender has messed up on some responsibility. “Please, give me another chance, I won’t let you down this time.” We can imagine this happening at a job, or in a sport, or maybe parent to child. Sometimes spouse to spouse. And we offer a second chance, and there is a full restoration of the previous relationship—sort of. The offendee in these cases is probably still a little wary for a while, on the lookout for the messup again. It’s hard to give second chances that entail full restoration. God does offer us full restoration, second chance upon second chance, but he also doesn’t (necessarily) protect us from the consequences of our own poor choices. There’s a lot to think through here. For people who ask for our forgiveness, we should repudiate the advice from Mr. Collins to Mr. Bennet in regard to Lydia and Wickham: You ought certainly to forgive them as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing. Leonard J. Vander Zee (pp. 119–20) tells a story about a baptism—that he cites from a story written by Ralph Wood and published in The Christian Century, Oct 21, 1992, pp. 925–26—involving a man imprisoned for sexually molesting his ten-year-old daughter, represented (by Vander Zee and Wood) as an isolated incident. The mother and daughter came to the prison to offer forgiveness, and this act of grace allowed the man emotionally to wonder

41 min
4D AGO

St. Bernard's On the Love of God (Chapter 3)

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

11 min
MAY 20

St. Bernard's On the Love of God (Chapter 2)

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

12 min
MAY 19

The Minor Prophets in the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain much material relevant to the study of the Minor Prophets. There are eight Minor Prophets scrolls from the Dead Sea Scrolls, plus some Minor Prophets scrolls from other locations in the Judean Desert, plus some Dead Sea Scrolls that transmit commentaries on the Minor Prophets. But what do we mean by “Minor Prophets scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls”? I mean a scroll that exhibits text from the Minor Prophets but not the entirety of the Minor Prophets, not even text from every book of the Minor Prophets. Indeed, there is no Dead Sea Scroll that contains—as part of the preserved portion of a single scroll—text from every one of the Minor Prophets, all twelve. Some of these scrolls may have at one time contained all twelve prophets, most probably didn’t. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The scholarly article you should read to get up to speed is this one from 2015 by Mika Pajunen and Hanne von Weissenberg. As you probably know, there were eleven caves around Qumran in which scrolls were discovered in the 1940s and 1950s. Cave 4 contained 7 scrolls of the Minor Prophets. These were all published by Russell Fuller in DJD 15 (1997). Cave 5 contained 1 scroll of the Minor Prophets. This one was published in DJD 3 (1962). Another location, not at Qumran, produced 1 scroll of the Minor Prophets. This location is called Murabba’at, about 15 miles south of Qumran. This scroll was published in DJD 2 (1961). Moreover, a couple of the fragments from Cave 4 that were published in DJD 15 as part of one of the seven scrolls presented in that volume are now known to be pieces of different scrolls. This applies to two fragments (a Malachi fragment and a Micah fragment). Let’s classify these as two new scrolls. So now we’re up to 11 scrolls. There are more scrolls of the Minor Prophets—unprovenanced artifacts, meaning that these scrolls have made their appearance into public view in recent decades (mostly in the 21st century) and in the hands of collectors who have claimed that the fragments ultimately derive from the Qumran caves or some such. Often these fragments are proven to be forgeries, but not always. There is one Minor Prophets fragment in this category, in the Schøyen collection, a fragment of Joel, that is generally recognized (I think) as genuine—or, at least, not yet proven to be a forgery. A few other fragments of the Minor Prophets have been determined to be forgeries (see esp. ## 78, 80, 81 here). I have not yet been able to read this academic article on “Fake Dead Sea Scrolls.” Now we’ve got 12 scrolls of the Minor Prophets. Finally, there is 4Q168, published in DJD 5 (1968) under the title “Commentary on Micah (?).” The parenthetical question mark is part of the title. But all that is preserved of this scroll is biblical text, not commentary, and it could be a scroll of Micah, as suggested in DJD 39 (2002), when it is listed as a scroll of the Minor Prophets, with the name “4QMic? (or: 4QpMic?)”; that is, DJD 39 suggests two possibilities: either it is a scroll of Micah (4QMic) or it is a pesher (commentary) on Micah (4QpMic). If it’s a scroll of Micah… That makes 13 copies of some portion of the Minor Prophets. But wait, there’s more! We haven’t talked about the pesharim. Well, I did just mention one possible pesher. Pesher is a Hebrew word that means “commentary” or “interpretation.” Pesharim is the plural form of the noun. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are commentaries—pesharim—for some of the prophetic writings, including Isaiah and Psalms and several of the books of the Minor Prophets: Hosea (2 of these), Micah (1 or 2 of these), Nahum (1), Habakkuk (1), Zephaniah (2), and maybe Malachi (1, if that’s what 4Q253a is)—7–9 commentaries on 5 or 6 of the Minor Prophets. All of the pesharim were published in DJD 5. Textual Value of These Scrolls Does all this manuscript evidence for the Minor Prophets help us to arrive at a better text of the Minor Prophets than had been possible before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-twentieth century, when our Hebrew evidence was limited to the Masoretic Text? No, not really. Here is Emanuel Tov’s evaluation from 2019, for some decades now the world’s leading scholar of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The ancient Hebrew material from the Judean Desert is valuable but, as a rule, it is not of major importance for identifying presumably original readings. The Murabba‘at scroll is proto-Masoretic, and therefore the number of its divergences from MT is very small. The Qumran scrolls contain mainly secondary readings. (here, p. 130) This is the general rule when it comes to the Minor Prophets scrolls at Qumran: does not help to reconstruct a better text of the Minor Prophets. There are exceptions, and immediately after articulating the general rule Tov cites a possible exception as the reading “sword” at Habakkuk 1:17. Besides that there are other interesting readings, some of which I’ll mention in a post sometime. If the Dead Sea Scrolls don’t provide a better text for the Minor Prophets, what is the value of studying them? One answer: to learn about the development of the collection of the Minor Prophets. Minor Prophets Scrolls? Is it right to call the Cave 4 scrolls “Minor Prophets scrolls”? Sorta, but we require nuance. Certainly all of the scrolls identified as “Minor Prophets scrolls” contain biblical text from the Minor Prophets, but none of them contain all 12 of the Minor Prophets, and several of them might not ever have done so. Indeed, several of them currently preserve a single prophet of the Minor Prophets and may originally have done so, as well. * 4QXIId (4Q79) consists of two small fragments of Hosea 1:6–2:5 * 4QXIIf (4Q81) consists of four fragments of the first chapter of Jonah * 5QAmos (5Q4) contains only Amos * There is a stray fragment of Malachi that perhaps formed its own scroll (frg. 35 of 4QXIIc) * There is a Micah fragment that perhaps formed its own scroll (frg. 5 of 4QXIIf) * There is a Joel fragment in the Schøyen collection * And there is the “pesher” (4Q168) that contains only the biblical text of Micah, and therefore was possibly not a pesher but a copy of Micah. That’s 7 of the 13 (possible) scrolls of the Minor Prophets—more than half—that currently attest only a single prophetic voice. What about the other six scrolls? Half of them preserve two books each: * 4QXIIa (4Q76) Malachi, Jonah * 4QXIIb (4Q77) Zephaniah, Haggai * 4QXIIe (4Q80) Haggai, Zechariah Note that everyone seems agreed these days that 4QXIIa features an unfamiliar sequence for the books, in which Malachi is not the last book on the scroll but is followed by something. The original editor, Russell Fuller, suggested that Jonah immediately follows Malachi, but this suggestion has received some pushback. More recently Pajunen and von Weissenberg suggested that Jonah did follow Malachi, but not immediately, but something came between them. At any rate, the scroll attests a previously unknown sequence for the Minor Prophets. One scroll preserves four books. * 4QXIIc (4Q78) Hosea, Joel, Amos, Zephaniah And two scrolls preserve so many of the Minor Prophets—ten apiece—that they probably originally contained the whole collection. * 4QXIIg (4Q82): Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Zechariah. * MurXII (Mur88), the copy from Wadi Murabba’at: Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah. The Hebrew manuscripts with the largest number of attested books of the Twelve are 4QXIIg and MurXII. Manuscript 4QXIIg contains fragmentary remains of ten books. The format of this scroll differs markedly from 4Q76, and it has almost twice as many characters (corrected letter spaces) in an average line as 4Q76, and thirty or more lines per column. Manuscript MurXII has a third more letters on an average line than 4Q76 and thirty-six lines per column. These are manuscripts that may have included all or most of the books of the Twelve, and their material format attests to this. Most of the Qumran manuscripts, however, are much smaller in size, and they probably did not contain all books of the twelve. (Pajunen and von Weissenberg 2015: 750) The other thing that can be known with certainty is that Malachi was followed by another composition [in 4Q76], but most likely not directly by Jonah. Thus, there is positive evidence for an ancient scroll—one of the earliest textual witnesses—in which Malachi is not the last book in a scroll containing several prophetic books and in which it did not form the conclusion of the Twelve. Quotations Besides all this, there are quotations of the Minor Prophets in other Dead Sea Scrolls. If we wanted to do an exhaustive presentation of these quotations, I would start with the lists in this volume by Lange and Weigold—but since it mixes up allusions and quotations, we would have to check each citation to see if it really is a quotation. I am not going to put that effort into the task right now, so let me just point you to a single Dead Sea Scroll, one of the sectarian scrolls, called the Damascus Document, which was found both in the caves at Qumran and in the Cairo Genizah. It is abbreviated CD (Cairo Damascus). There are several biblical quotations in this scroll, including seven from the Minor Prophets. I have detailed these below. Book-by-Book Breakdown Here is the breakdown by biblical prophet: Hosea: 3 scrolls (4QXIIc, 4QXIId, 4QXIIg), plus 2 pesharim, plus one CD quotation (Hos 4:16 in CD col. 1) Joel: 4 scrolls, (4QXIIc, 4QXIIg, MurXII, Schøyen fragment) Amos: 4 scrolls (4QXIIc, 4QXIIg, 5QAmos, MurXII), plus two CD quotations (Amos 5:26–27; 9:11 in CD col. 7) Obadiah: 2 scrolls (4QXIIg, MurXII) Jonah: 4 scrolls (4QXIIa, 4QXIIf, 4QXIIg, MurXII) Micah: 4 scrolls

31 min
MAY 17

St. Bernard's On the Love of God (Chapter 1)

Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Love of God 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

7 min
MAY 7

The Minor Prophets in Masoretic Manuscripts

The medieval Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible are called Masoretic because they contain the Masorah (“tradition”), which includes elements such as the vowel signs and notes and accent marks and, of course, the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible. The best Masoretic manuscripts that survive, and the oldest, are the Aleppo Codex (925 AD) and the Leningrad Codex (1009 AD). It is the latter, the Leningrad Codex, that serves as the base text for the standard edition of the Hebrew Bible, BHS (and its replacement, BHQ). Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Let’s take a look at how these manuscripts treat the Minor Prophets, specifically in terms of the division between the books. As we begin, it’s important to understand that in Jewish tradition—still today, and traceable to ancient times—the Minor Prophets count together as a single book of the Bible. If you ask a Jewish Rabbi today how many books are in the Jewish Bible, he (or she) will answer 24. Those 24 books are the same as the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament, just counted differently. With regard to these counting differences, the Protestant Old Testament reflects ancient Christian tradition that is still maintained in all Christian Bibles, whether Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant or whatever. Christians count the books of the Old Testament differently from Jews. There are five counting differences, and in each case Christians divide where Jews combine. * Samuel * Kings * Chronicles * Ezra-Nehemiah * Minor Prophets The first four of these biblical books are divided into two by Christians but count as a single book for Jews. The last one, the Minor Prophets, counts as twelve for Christians but one for Jews. That’s how you go from 39 books in the Protestant Old Testament to 24 books in the Jewish Bible without omitting any material. The content is the same in both cases, just calculated differently. But in the case of the Minor Prophets, the individual prophets are also distinct from each other; they are not simply different sections of the same book. And the Masoretic manuscripts show that the Minor Prophets form a single unit or biblical book but also are separate from each other. Aleppo Codex and Leningrad Codex There are interesting stories for both of these manuscripts that I won’t go into right now; I’ll provide only basic information. The Aleppo Codex—housed for centuries in a synagogue in Aleppo—is now in Jerusalem and is, unfortunately, incomplete, but most of the Minor Prophets are there. As for the Leningrad Codex, it is housed today in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, as you would expect from the name, and it is a complete manuscript, so it has the honor of being the earliest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, just over a thousand years old. The Aleppo Codex is several decades older, and is generally recognized as the superior manuscript in terms of the quality of its text, but is, alas, lacking nearly 40% of its original text. Now for some pictures. This first image shows the end of Ezekiel and the beginning of Hosea in the Aleppo Codex. Most of this page is Ezekiel, but the text of Ezekiel comes to an end in the left column near the top. (Remember, Hebrew is written right to left.) After three lines of the biblical text, there is some smaller writing, also three lines, and then a blank line, and then the text of Hosea starts. The smaller Hebrew writing between the books is a Masoretic note indicating the total number of verses in the book just completed (in this case, Ezekiel). It signals the end of a biblical book. These sorts of notes appear after ever biblical book in a Masoretic manuscript, displaying the number of verses. It’s the same thing in the Leningrad Codex. The Masoretic notes at the end of the book of Ezekiel are in the right column (i.e., the first column, reading right to left). What about between Hosea and Joel? Are there the Masoretic notes for the end of a biblical book? No, there are not. Well, there is a small version of the notes, not the full version—in keeping with the idea that a book of the Minor Prophets is not a full-fledged biblical book but it is more than a mere section of a book. Hosea comes to an end in the left column, and Joel begins in the same column. Between the two prophets, there are a few Hebrew letters. Here is a close-up of those letters. The dots above the letters indicate that the letters function as numbers here, and the number represented is 197—the number of verses in Hosea. It’s the same in the Leningrad Codex, except the number is spelled out, like “one hundred ninety seven.” Here’s an image. But the end of Malachi is treated as more than the end of just Malachi, but also the end of the book of the Twelve. As it happens, in the Aleppo Codex, the scribe started copying on a page when he had left of Malachi only a few words, so hardly any biblical text needed to be written on the page. In the image above, the larger letters show the end of the text of Malachi, five lines of text, mostly lines with just one word. On the fifth line, there is also a number (with the dots), 55, which is the number of verses in Malachi. After a few blank lines, there is then this note: “The number of verses of the book: one thousand fifty.” The “book” (sepher) in this instance is, of course, the book of the Twelve. The Leningrad Codex presents things a little differently. The text of Malachi ends at the second line in the center column. Then comes the Masoretic note indicating the number of verses for Malachi (not in Hebrew numerals but spelled out). Then we do not find the number of verses for the Twelve but rather a whole bunch of notes indicating the number of verses for each book of the Prophets, starting with Joshua, and the sections of those books. You have to flip the page to complete the list, where you find the last book of the Prophets, called Trei Asar (Armaic for 12; see the names listed at the beginning of this wikipedia article), and then the number of verses and sections. Now, there’s one more manuscript I want to mention, another early Masoretic manuscript, and this one I will present in somewhat more detail. Cairo Codex of the Prophets This manuscript, from about the year 1000 AD, contains only the Prophets section of the Hebrew Bible, i.e., the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve. The Cairo Codex is perhaps a little earlier than the Leningrad Codex but not as early as the Aleppo Codex. Location of the manuscript The whereabouts of this codex are currently unknown. It was owned for a long time, about a millennium, by the Karaite (non-rabbinic) community in Cairo, Egypt. But the situation for Jews in Egypt became fraught following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The Karaites persevered in Cairo for a few more decades. Scholars and officials were permitted to examine and photograph the codex in the early 1980s in Cairo. But, according to this 2024 article by Nadine Epstein: Sometime in the mid-1980s, the guardians of the Cairo Codex and the other remaining Karaites left Egypt for Israel. Did they leave their beloved manuscript behind, or take it with them … ? For 30 years, its whereabouts have been uncertain. “It is one of the great mysteries,” says Kurtzer. And that’s that. No one—officially—knows where it is, though in the last section of her article, Epstein quotes some Israelis who say things that make it sound like they know more than they’re letting on. But, good news! There is a digital edition available, which makes available black-and-white photos, originally taken (perhaps) in 1926. (I can’t find on the website when the photographs were originally taken, but my 1926 date comes from this article, p. 226, if I’m interpreting it correctly.) The image quality is excellent. The date of the manuscript Now, for the date of the manuscript. It is strange that the website for the digital edition takes at face value the colophon in the manuscript which supplies the date 894 or 895; for decades, as even Wikipedia knows, this date has been questioned or even outright rejected. It was long believed that the earliest dated manuscript with a colophon was the famous Prophets Codex preserved in the Karaite synagogue Moussa Dari’i in Old Cairo, with a colophon stating that the manuscript was written by Moshe ben Asher in 894/5, possibly in Tiberias, but it is now widely accepted that this colophon was copied from an earlier colophon; according to [Malachi] Beit-Arié, the manuscript was copied before 1129–30 (Codices Hebraicis 1:28). (David Stern, p. 226 n. 15) The book cited by Stern, available here for $425 and reviewed here, is unavailable to me, but a different book by Beit-Arié that contains similar information is available open access (here; see pp. 70–71). according to Beit-Arié, this Prophets Codex should be dated to ca. 1000. The article by Epstein, linked above, contains further details, with interviews of some major scholars. “I don’t think somebody changed the Codex; it wasn’t tampered with, it was the original writing of someone who wanted to attach a lot of yichus,” says Beit-Arie, using the Yiddish word for pedigree. “It was a forgery but a genuine forgery.” Stefan Reif, professor emeritus of medieval Hebrew at University of Cambridge, explains it this way: It is as if, in order to preserve the manuscript, someone copied it in its entirety in the 11th century—updating the spelling and punctuation—and included the original colophon as well. “A parallel would be finding a letter written 100 years ago and recopying it in 2016: You copy everything but you correct it and modernize it,” Reif says. “But at the end of the letter is written: ‘This was written in 1916,’ and you copy these words out, too. So it is not really a document accu

33 min
MAY 1

The New Birth of Freedom

In what is perhaps the most famous speech in American history, maybe the greatest speech in American history, the sixteenth president of these United States envisioned “a new birth of freedom.” Let’s consider what he meant, and how it has turned out. George Whitefield (1714–1770)—who died younger than did Abraham Lincoln, by the way—liked to tell people that they needed new birth. Whitefield was an Anglican clergyman, a Calvinist, a preacher of revivals during the Great Awakening. One story I’ve heard about him is that when asked why he so frequently preached that people had to be born again, he replied, “Because ye must be born again!” There’s a documentary about him that you can find on YouTube under the title Born Again Whitefield was right: people do need to be born again—if we take Jesus as any kind of authority. Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. (John 3:3) This is what Jesus told Nicodemus. Of course, this Jewish leader, this Pharisee, had trouble understanding what Jesus meant, and often readers—rather unsympathetically—are confused at Nicodemus’ confusion; we are astonished at his astonishment. Nicodemus himself knew that Jesus could not be talking about physical birth, and he himself rules out such an interpretation in the very next verse (John 3:4), but he can’t grasp what Jesus what getting at. Jesus used the bulk of the rest of the chapter to explain. For us, often the new birth seems so easy. Especially in light of Jesus’ explanation a couple verses later, that the new birth involves “water and spirit,” many readers think of baptism. And baptism is a piece of cake. Just get dunked under water—or, in many Christian traditions, you don’t even need to do that; just a little water on the forehead will do—and it’s all over. Voilà, new birth! Nothing could be easier. We should pause and reflect. What about normal birth, or physical birth, or what we might call the first birth? Is physical birth easy? I can report that for a father, it’s pretty easy. But I hear that for the other parties involved, it’s somewhat taxing. For both the baby and the mother, there’s a lot of yelling involved. And even for a father, after the birth, life gets somewhat difficult, no matter how much practice you have. As Jim Gaffigan said, if you want to know what it’s like to have a fourth kid, just imagine you’re drowning, and then someone hands you a baby. But back to the new birth. Is it as hard as a first birth? Well, there’s usually a lot less screaming involved. Sometimes we tell people how easy the new birth is. Just give your life over to God, apply some water, baddabing, baddaboom, and you’re done. Simple! Is it that simple? That’s not the impression made by every (any?) passage in the New Testament when describing the process of becoming a Christian. Ephesians 4 talks about taking off “the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts,” and putting on “the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (4:22–24). I think what Paul is talking about here is becoming a Christian, which he likens to changing clothes, stripping yourself of a former manner of life and clothing your self with some new behaviors. I guess you could look at that as another description of an easy process, just like we don’t give much thought to taking off our pajamas and putting on some daytime clothes. But Paul seems to have more in mind; he seems to think this is more difficult than just changing clothes, or that this process of changing clothes is going to necessitate our sustained attention, it’s going to require time and effort. After all, he is writing this letter to people who have already committed themselves to Jesus, people who are baptized, people who are Christians. But he’s telling these Christians to continue putting off the old man and putting on the new man. And he explains further what this looks like in practice. Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: Neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth. Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. (Ephesians 4:25–30) And that’s not all; Paul keeps going, describing the behaviors that the Ephesian Christians need to adopt, the new man that they need to continually put on. Consider another biblical passage about becoming a Christian, as described, again, by the apostle Paul. Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. (Romans 6:3–6) Easy enough, right? Just get baptized and you’re dead to sin. Here the old man is not just taken off but crucified. Baddabing, baddaboom, new birth! Hmm, not quite. To these Roman Christians whom he has never met, Paul writes about the new birth as a continual process of dying to sin and becoming enslaved to righteousness. It doesn’t sound very easy. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to say that it takes a lot of work on our part to get God to save us. Nope, we don’t get God to save us. He’s eager to do so. Remember the prodigal son’s father. But the new birth is not merely about salvation. That is the easy part. The harder part is becoming conformed to Christ, putting on the new man. It turns out that the new man is Christ (Gal 3:27), and the process of putting him on is a lifetime project. The new birth is not so easy after all. Now let’s return to that famous American speech. I’m not sure if the Gettysburg Address really is the most famous American speech; that honor might go to the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. (pdf, wikipedia), but that speech by MLK, delivered in 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, began with a reference to the Gettysburg Address, given in 1863. The first few words of King’s speech are “Five score years ago…,” and then he mentions the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s Lincoln’s speech (wikipedia) that I want to consider for a moment. It is a short speech, much shorter than the I Have a Dream speech. The entire thing is carved into the left wall of the Lincoln Memorial. Here’s an image. At the dedication of a cemetery at the location of an extraordinarily bloody battle, part of an extraordinarily bloody war, Lincoln guessed, hoped, “that these dead shall not have died in vain,” but rather “that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.” Given that context, it seems that this new birth of freedom was about as difficult as the new birth that Jesus mentioned to Nicodemus. Lincoln was not the only person who thought they saw in the American Civil War the hand of God. Check out these familiar words, written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861 (wikipedia). Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the LordHe is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are storedHe has loosed the fateful lightening of His terrible swift swordHis truth is marching on. Glory, glory, hallelujah! Julia Ward Howe, a fervent abolitionist, witnessed the bloodletting of the Civil War and thought she was seeing the work of God. “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” Perhaps she was right. Lincoln thought so, anyway. The Gettysburg Address is a wonderful speech, deservedly famous and revered and often memorized—I hope, still. But it is not my favorite speech by Lincoln. That would be the other one carved in granite in the Lincoln Memorial, the one on the right as you climb the steps, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural (text, wikipedia), delivered March 4, 1865, forty-two days before his assassination. In this theologically profound speech, I want ponder one passage. Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether” (Psalm 19:9). Here Lincoln imagines that the American Civil War will last until atonement is made for the sins of the past. Was he right? Sometimes later generations pay for the sins of the past. Think about the fiscal situation of the United States. The current US debt is close to $40 trillion, and the annual budget deficit is in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. I don’t know what’s going to happen to all that money, but some people think that a later generation is eventually going to have to pay for it. Saddling our children and grandchildren with enormous debt has been a great American tradition for more than a generation, and we’re not about to stop now. We imitate Hezekiah, who responded to Isaiah’s prophecy of doom in a future generation: “Is it not good, if peace and truth be in my days?” (2 Kings 20:19). (Not that we’re enjoying much peace and truth in 2026, but you can’t have eve

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