Evangelical Theological Society

I am again in nerdvana - nerdvana for lovers of biblical studies, that is. This year, the Evangelical Theological Society, and the Society of Biblical Literature, are holding their conventions in New Orleans. Today I listened to a few lectures, tweaked my paper (which I will present Friday, and maybe post here as well), and tried to stay awake after my all-night flight from Honolulu.

One lecture today was from Mark Strauss, who talked about the purpose of Luke-Acts. I attended this session because I will be teaching an Acts class in the spring. Mark summarized the views that have been presented on the purposes of Luke-Acts - a defense of Paul before Roman officials, an evangelistic booklet to convert god-fearers (Gentiles who were interested in Judaism), and several others. Mark suggested that the purpose that best covered all the evidence in Luke is that the purpose of Luke-Acts is to legitimize the church and defend it. Maybe I'll post his reasons later - right now my brain is too jet-lagged to type it out in any coherent manner.

Gospel of John Wordle

You can click on the picture to go to the website and get it full-size. I printed one out as a poster for my office.

You make a wordle by dumping some text into wordle.net. The size of each word is directly proportional to how many times the word occurs in the text. I made the John wordle by dumpint the entire text of the Gospel of John into wordle, and setting it to show the top 150 words. Reminds you of what the book is really about!

Writing deadlines!

I probably will not post much for the next three weeks. I have two deadlines. On Nov 15, I am submitting a chapter on "The Use of Ezekiel in John" for a forthcoming book entitled After Ezekiel: Essays on the Reception of a Difficult Prophet, edited by Paul Joyce and Andrew Mein. That chapter will be an abbreviation of my dissertation and monograph.

Then I am presenting a paper at the Evangelical Theological Society in New Orleans on Nov 20. The paper is "I am not Elijah: The Use and Non-use of Elijah/Elisha Material in the Gospel of John."

So I will be trying to grab every spare minute to finish these two papers. As we all know, when deadlines loom, suddenly everything else becomes more fascinating - answering email, blogging, even minesweeper :)... What I really need right now is a computer that has no access to internet, email, computer games, or anything else except Word and Logos!

(Hey - that's a play on words! involving the word "word"! Was it intentional or not? Sorry - ignore the babblings of someone immersed in deciding whether various allusions to the OT in the NT are real or not)

Jesus the Aleph-Tav?

A few people asked me about the nature of the errors in this video (mentioned in my last post and also viewable as a youtube video). The content of the video can also be found (more or less) in posts here and here. The basic thrust of this bizarre claim: Jesus is the logos (John 1:1), which must mean written word; Jesus is the Alpha and Omega (Rev 21:6), which is a translation from Hebrew of Jesus the Aleph and Tav; the Hebrew word et (את, aleph tav) is an untranslatable word found in Genesis 1:1; therefore Jesus' claim that he is the logos and the Alpha and Omega is actually a claim that his name is את and is written in Genesis 1:1.

I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to debunk this claim, but the cynical side of me unfortunately finds pleasure in sniping at vat-bound ichthyoids. Here is a sampling of the linguistic errors in the video:

1) Logos (λόγος) and rhema (ῥῆμα) no longer have the distinct meanings of "word as idea" and "spoken word" - they are mostly synonymous by the time of the NT (see BDAG or another reputable Greek dictionary).

2) The speaker claims that logos must mean "written word" - simply not true. Using BDAG or finding the occurrences of logos in the NT and LXX is a quick way to disprove this mistake.

3) Jesus likely could speak all three languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek), although there is some debate on this (see Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, s.v. "Languages of Palestine" by M.O. Wise).

4) There is no evidence that Revelation is "spoken in Hebrew and written in Greek." If you are very familiar with both languages, you can recognize Greek that has been translated from Hebrew, as in the LXX or in the quotations of the OT in the NT. Those marks of "translation Greek" are not found in most of Revelation, except in the quotes and allusions to the OT.

5) The worst error: the Hebrew word et (את, aleph tav) is not at all "mysterious" or "untranslatable;" in fact, I remember learning its meaning during the second week of introductory Hebrew. It is a very common word used to identify the direct object (as well as a few other less common functions). English identifies the direct object by the noun's position in the sentence; languages like Greek, Latin and German identify the direct object by changing the ending of the noun; and Hebrew marks the direct object with the word את.

Side note: I can't believe it took me this long to learn how to use Greek and Hebrew fonts in Blogger! Turns out I just cut and paste from my Logos software - I couldn't figure it out because it was too simple!

Bad Interpretation and Erasmus

For a wonderful example of the nonsense that one can spout if one knows only a little bit of Greek and Hebrew, take a look at this video at Boulders 2 Bits. It's a bit long, but painfully and unintentionally funny. By the way, the author of Boulders 2 Bits is not promoting the views in the video!

It reminded me of a story that Erasmus told about some linguistic analysis that he heard that was almost as creative and tortured. You'll make the most sense of Erasmus' story if you know just a little bit of Latin.

"I met... another, some eighty years of age, and such a divine that you'd have sworn Scotus himself was revived in him. He... with wonderful subtlety demonstrate[d] that there lay hidden in [the letters found in the name of Jesus] whatever could be said of him; for that it was only declined with three cases, he said, it was a manifest token of the Divine Trinity; and then, that the first ended in S, the second in M, the third in U... those three letters declaring to us that he was the beginning, middle, and end (summum, medium, et ultimum) of all. Nay, the mystery was yet more abstruse; for he... split the word Jesus into two equal parts [and] left the middle letter by itself, and then told us that that letter in Hebrew was schin or sin, and that sin in the Scotch tongue, as he remembered, signified as much as sin; from whence he gathered that it was Jesus that took away the sins of the world. At which new exposition the audience were so wonderfully intent and struck with admiration, especially the theologians… ”

-Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 1515 (and the picture is from that work)

Erasmus on Greek

Miscellaneous leftover quotes from Erasmus on learning Greek:

“And, my dear Batt, I am very anxious that you should know Greek…”
-Letter to Jacob Batt, September 1500

“We can use Greek words when we wish our meaning not to be understood by all and sundry.”

“… I am paying scant regard to my very health as I help my friends; I compose for some, read to some, correct for others, and meanwhile read, compile, emend, and compose on my own account, and practise my Greek which in any case is very difficult.”
-Letter to Jacob Batt, 1500

In Epistle 23 (I am unsure of the date), Erasmus signed his name on a letter in Greek rather than Latin - a practice just about every Greek student does at some point.

The picture: Title page of the Complutensian Polyglot, 1522. Erasmus' printer heard that the Polyglot was about to go to press, and so Erasmus rushed to finish his first edition of the Greek New Testament. As a result, Erasmus' first edition is one of the few print Bibles riddled with typographical errors.

Most Popular Post: Nicodemus and the Samaritan Woman

My blog normally gets twenty to thirty hits per day. But in the last week, I have received more and more hits, until today, there are over 150 hits (according to Google Analytics).

It turns out that almost all the new hits are basically the same profile: someone googles "Nicodemus vs. the Samaritan woman" or some variation, and for some reason Google lists my post on that topic in first place.

So here's my question: are there always a hundred people per day googling about comparisons between Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, and Google just recently noticed my blog post on that topic? Or is there some reason that hundreds of people suddenly became interested in this comparison? Maybe the passage came up in some church's lectionary cycle? A new documentary on Jesus that talked about Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman?

Baptism Pictures

Daniel getting baptized last month.

Romans 7 - Christian or Pre-Christian?

Today in my undergraduate class on Paul's letters, we talked about the "I" in Romans 7:13-25. Those of you who have done some study in Romans will know that throughout Christian history, there have been several opinions about what Paul meant. The two main options are 1) Paul is referring to his own experience as a Christian, and therefore the general Christian experience; or 2) Paul is referring to the experience of a pre-Christian Jew trying to obey the Law.

Here are some of the reasons that I gave in favor of option 2:

1) This passage is an answer to the question "Did that which was good [the Law], then, become death to me?" Paul is not interested here in discussing the current Christian struggle with sin. He is interested in explaining how the OT Law was used by sin to bring death to pre-Christians (this is related to "the law of sin and death").

2) Paul knows that Christians struggle with sin. But he discusses this in Romans 8:10-14 - and he has a very different take on the struggle there.

3) Every phrase that describes the "me" of Rom 7:13-25 is used to describe non-Christians or pre-Christian Jews elsewhere in Romans; further, each of those phrases contradicts what Paul says about Christians in Romans.

7:14 "I am fleshly, sold into bondage to sin." Compare to 7:5, "we were in the flesh;" 6:18 "we were freed from sin;" 6:20 "we were slaves to sin;" 8:9 "you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit."

7:16 "I agree with the Law, that the Law is good." (often used to assert that Paul is talking about Christians.) Compare to 2:17 "If you call yourself a Jew and rely on the Law...;" 7:4 "You died to the Law."

7:19 "I practice the very evil I do not want." Compare to 6:14 "Sin will have no mastery over you."

7:23 "a different law... making me a prisoner of the law of sin." Compare to 6:22 "but now, freed from sin and enslaved to God;" 8:2 "For in Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit of life has set you free from the law of sin and death."

Finally, I argued that Paul's theology in general does not support the interpretation that 7:13-25 refers to the Christian struggle with sin. Paul's normal approach to the Christian struggle is this: because of our union with Christ, we are saints; we have transferred from death to life, from sin to righteousness, from Adam to Christ, from Law to grace, from Law to Spirit. The way to deal with ongoing sin is to recognize that sin is inconsistent with our new identity in Christ, and to act in accordance with that new identity. We are dead to sin, so we should act dead to sin.

If option 1 is correct, Paul is presenting the Christian struggle in a way that he never presents it anywhere else in his letters: he is saying that we are still sinners by nature, we are still slaves to sin, we are still trying to keep the Law, and we are still under the law of sin and death.

This is the opposite of what Paul says in the next chapter: we are not in the flesh, we are in the Spirit, we are under no obligation to the flesh, and we can put the deeds of the body to death by the power of the Spirit.

That, my friends, is good news.

The picture: The Apostle Paul, in Entschuoldigung by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, 1549.

Eutychus Allusion

I enjoyed this allusion to the story of Eutychus in Jane Eyre. My wife and I also enjoyed the Masterpiece Theater adaptation of the novel (movie poster at left).

"The Sunday evening was spent in repeating, by heart, the Church Catechism, and the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters of St. Matthew; and in listening to a long sermon, read by Miss Miller, whose irrepressible yawns attested her weariness. A frequent interlude of these performances was the enactment of the part of Eutychus by some half dozen little girls; who overpowered with sleep, would fall down, if not out of the third loft, yet off the fourth form, and be taken up half dead. The remedy was, to thrust them forward into the center of the school-room, and oblige them to stand there till the sermon was finished. Sometimes their feet failed them, and they sank together in a heap; they were then propped up with the monitors’ high stools."