EASTER QUINTET ON THE CHURCH’S DAWN// Part V// The New Testament as Jewish scripture

It would be an error to treat the Christian story as merely the gradual sedimentation of various Greek philosophies narrowing and ossifying the range of interpretations that could be legitimately extrapolated from the actions of a Jewish theanthropos. Such a treatment has a long history and is based mainly on the schadenfreude secular scholarship has gleaned from caricaturing theological resolutions as the products of Roman political theatre, and celebrating the religion practised by Judaeans in the first century as identical to Rabbinic Judaism, which in reality emerged in the fifth century.

At most it can be said that while theology suffered agonistic dynamics, answers often had a small mat on which their gymnastics could land due to the necessity of grounding them in Jewish literary traditions, which for all their vastness formed a tradition of values of approaches constrained by historical events and beliefs. Moreover, appropriately contextualised, Christianity should be acknowledged as one of the Second Temple Judaisms with Rabbinic Judaism as a later reaction.

To see the truth in such claims, however, means understanding the Jewish traditions that run like rivers through the New Testament, not to mention being much more sensitive to the state of Jewish theolog(ies) in the Second Temple period. Moreover, it means abandoning the mindset that the mainframe of the faith evolved under Hellenic stewardship. The notion that God could manifest on earth but then His truths were improved upon by older, wiser followers centuries later is highly improbable: the Orthodox Church celebrates Church Fathers for plumbing the depths and attaining a continuity with what the apostles had meant or intended, not for improving the message. Debunking law versus love

Marcionite tendencies plague liberal strains of Christianity yet nowhere in Paul’s description of his new role as an apostle does he invalidate the Torah and its commandments. On the contrary, he defended himself against accusations of doing away with the law (Acts 21:20). In Romans 3:31, for example, he refuted the dichotomy of law versus gospel by declaring the law’s establishment rather than its nullification.

Paul does not preach freedom from the Torah. He argues that Christ is the giver of the Torah and also the One by whom and through whom it is properly applied. The target of Paul’s ire was not the Torah but those Jews who placed trust in belonging to Abraham’s descendants, hence his decision to highlight the fact that Ishmael (Gal. 4:21) and Esau (Rom. 9:6) had been descendants too, and that Christ was the font of all promises made to Israel, and later to all peoples (Gal. 4:7).

The contrast is supposed to be one of the law i.e. divine law, which includes its spirit and comes through Christ, against the laws of sin and death which had come from Man [‘s poor decisions], as articulated in Rom. 8:2. The correct framing is not a legal versus an extralegal condition but rather the celebration of a mankind that has embraced divine law to the extent he heeds what is written on hearts and therefore occurs through actions intuitively (Jer. 31/38:33). Under such circumstances the flesh stops adhering to laws wrought to constrain it after the events in Eden and adheres to the law’s spirit (Joel 2:28) i.e. the truth that should have governed it before the Fall. In short, the New Covenant not as freedom from law but as the freedom to cooperate with the Spirit that forged law.

The faith as a repository for Judaism(s) discarded by Rabbis

Paul lived during the earliest period of the Merkabah (chariot) mysticism which developed within the Second Temple world. This mystical element, which would later be pruned from Judaism, survived conceptually within Christianity (as a solo spiritual practice it died out in the tenth century though elements persist in the kabbalistic tradition). The school celebrates Yahweh’s throne-chariot in the vision of Ezekiel, which was carried in flight by an ox, lion, eagle and human. Such a vision became the paradigm by which contemporary visions were interpreted. Merkabah mysticism involved meditating on the vision in the hope of discerning insights. Narratives often featured a series of heavens, which settled on seven, and the recitation of the Shema (the central Jewish prayer based on Deut. 6:4).

There are several indications that Paul was familiar with the Merkabah group, especially 2 Cor. 12:1 where Paul described rising to a third heaven before paradise. From apostolic times, Christ’s Ascension was understood within the context of heavenly ascents and the throne-chariot of God. Hence Orthodox iconography’s portrayal of Christ, when enthroned, as resting on the four living creatures of Ezekiel’s vision. Furthermore, the idea that contemplative prayer involving the recital of Shema might provide divine visions embedded itself in Orthodoxy as traditions that would later become known as the Jesus prayer.

The Trinity as Old Testament wisdom

The most common assumption about the Trinity is that it was a tardy development, usually pinned to the Arian controversy, that marked a dramatic departure from Judaism. Yet Jews had for centuries believed that the God of Israel existed in multiple hypostases. Yahweh was One but He was also capable of existing in different persons. The New Testament may give some of these hypostases official titles (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) but as a clarification of ancient dynamics rather than an innovation. In brief, older scriptures foreshadowed the Trinity, which was only framed in explicit terms at a late stage (Nicaea, 325) when the Church felt forced to formally define the three as coeternal/consubstantial divine persons. What follows are some of the terms that indicated that the scriptures worked towards a trinitarian understanding of the theotes (god-head).

Angel of the Lord

A key example of how the Hebrew scriptures express the multiple divine persons is the Torah's Angel of the Lord. In the Old Testament this figure is Yahweh but also a Second Person who interacts between Yahweh and people. The first such encounter took place in the initial meeting between Moses and God when the latter revealed His name. Exodus 3:2 indicates that the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame burning within a bush. But in verse 4, when Moses approached, it was ‘God’ who called to him from the midst of the bush. A complex interaction occurred when God appeared to Gideon in Judges 6. In verse 11, the Angel of the Lord sat under an oak tree and called to Gideon, who was on the threshing floor, to tell him that the God of Israel is within him. Gideon was skeptical and in response Yahweh spoke. Though perhaps a more significant appearance is outlined in Exodus 23:20, when God told Moses He was sending an Angel before Israel to guard them and lead them into the Land of Promise. Moses is warned that Israel must listen to the Angel and not rebel as God had placed His Name in Him. Incidentally, this is the language that forms the basis of John’s Christology. In his Gospel, he repeatedly characterises the Father as being ‘in’ Christ.

Logos

The prologue of the first chapter of John’s Gospel famously refers to the Logos. It is fashionable to read his statements philosophically––an attempt by John to represent the divinity of Christ in relationship to the God of Israel. This notion is bolstered by the output of thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria who described the divine Logos as an emanation of the one true God. Other scholars look to the idea of the Logos in Stoic philosophy. According to this approach, the Church Fathers borrowed the concept of the Logos––as a reason or logic that functions as an intermediary between God and the world––and blended it into their understanding of who Christ is in a form of syncretism. In short, Christ becomes an incarnation of a divine intermediary. 

Such an interpretation, however, rests mainly on ignoring the fact that from the earliest phases of revelation the Logos/Word of the Lord (Debar Yahweh in Hebrew) has been a known entity, a divine hypostasis of Israel’s God i.e. not an abstraction. While Philo tried to integrate this figure into his philosophical system, John bore witness to the divine person.

The first explicit reference to the Word comes in Genesis 15:1. The Word of Yahweh appeared to Abraham in a vision. He saw something or someone who told him not to be afraid because ‘I am your shield.’ Abraham understood the figure to be the ‘Lord Yahweh’ (v.2). The Word promised Abraham a son and identified Himself as Yahweh, who brought Abraham out of the Ur of the Chaldaeans. Later, the Lord reveals himself to Samuel and similar encounters are found in Jeremiah 1: through his vision of the Word of the Lord, Jeremiah was called forth as a prophet to all nations (v.5).

What John seeks in his prologue is not philosophical speculation but to map the hoary divine figure onto Jesus Christ by integrating the Old Testament scriptures. He begins by identifying the Word as the agent of Creation in John 1:3, reminiscent of Ps. 33/32:6: ‘By the Word of Yahweh the heavens were made and by the breath of His mouth all their hosts.’ The terms for breath in Hebrew (ruach) and Greek (pneuma) tend to be translated as ‘spirit.’ The spirit is present in Creation in Gen.1:2, hovering over the waters. When the Fathers speak of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in Creation as mouth, word and breath they are not inventing Trinitarian analogies but interpreting scripture in the same manner as John. In the final verses of his prologue, St. John makes clear that Christ is the Word made flesh.

Wisdom 

John drew on a parallel set of traditions that understood the Second Person of God to be the Wisdom (chakmah/sophia) of God. Much of this stemmed from the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 8. The central passage has Wisdom proclaim that ‘Yahweh possessed me at the beginning of His way, from before His works… When there was no abyss I was brought forth…. When He marked out the foundation of the world I was beside him, a master craftsman, and I was His delight, rejoicing before Him day by day, always’ (8:22-30).

The verbs used in Greek (ἔκτισέν, ἐθεμελίωσέν) imply making or creating more than the woolly, poetic English and so were utilised by Arians to argue that Christ came into existence at a specific point, albeit before the rest of creation, and therefore lacked the eternal aspect of the Father. The Arian reading of Proverbs 8 is a misinterpretation, though it is easy to see where confusion stemmed from: the Hebrew verb for the 'possessed' passage above for example: קָנָה (qanah), has two roots, one meaning 'to possess' and the other meaning 'to create.' The English used to capture the Hebrew is ‘begotten,’ which despite becoming archaic is repeated throughout religious literature due to its highly specific meaning. More importantly for our purposes here, such a controversy reveals that passages were already connected to the Second Person of Yahweh and Christ in the fourth century.

Furthermore, the prologue to John’s Gospel draws directly on the theme of Christ’s involvement in Creation expressed here in Proverbs. His statement that the Word was, in the beginning, with or alongside God, parallels verse 30. That all things were made by Him and without Him nothing was made that was made (Jn 1:3) draws on the portrayal of Wisdom as the master craftsman during the days of Creation. John thereby presents Christ as the logos-become-flesh in multiple senses, He is not only the figure of the Word but also the Logos as the plan and structure of all creation; He is the One in whom all created things find their origin, purpose and perfection. This is why Paul can call Him the ‘Wisdom of God’ (1 Cor. 1:24) and the one in whom ‘all things hold together’ (1 Cor. 1:17). In short, Christ came into being not from non-being but from the status of the Firstborn over all Creation.

Son of Man This title is known as the one that Christ most often applied to Himself, though fewer realise that He drew on an Old Testament tradition. The phrase ‘son of’ is a Hebrew idiom and connoted that the son was made in the image of the father: bluntly, the characteristics of a person reflected their source. Judas and the Antichrist, for example, are referred to as ‘sons of perdition’ (Jn 17:12; 2 Thess. 2:3) and Christ rebuked those who opposed Him––by ‘not holding to the truth’––as being of their father the devil (Jn 8:44). Equally, the term ‘Son of Adam’ was not just a poetic way of referring to a person but a way of reminding audiences that Adam’s traits repeated in them.  Modern readers tend to see Adam as the archetypal sinner who passed on sin. This, however, was not the primary way Adam was conventionally seen in the Second Temple period. Instead he was viewed as the one who had brought death/mortality upon the human race. To be sure, sin had brought about this effect but humanity's corruption was seen as an effect of mortality. This meant that when the ‘Son of Adam’ was used in Hebrew it almost always aimed at highlighting mankind's ignorance, frailty and weakness.

This association of Man/Adam shifted with the sixth-century BC prophet Daniel. In Daniel 7 a vision predicts of a succession of empires. At the end, he beheld a scene of judgment in which the God of Israel, Ancient of Days, sits enthroned among the divine council and passes judgment on the wickedness of these empires and all nations. As a product of that judgment, God removed the authority (exousia) from these nations but allowed them to continue to exist ‘for a time’ (7:12). Then Daniel saw one ‘like the Son of Man’ who came up before the Ancient of Days riding a cloud, to whom was given all authority that had been taken from the earthly nations, establishing for Him an eternal kingdom. In other words, a human appeared to have managed to acquire the power and glory of God who came to be known in the Second Temple period either as a hypostasis of God or as a divinised human from the past such as Enoch or David.

New Testament scholars argue about how Christ applied the title to Himself despite the fact there are several instances that clearly refer to this apocalyptic figure from Daniel. Christ refers to the Son of Man coming on clouds in judgement at the end of time in Matthew 13:41, 24:30, 25:31, and in Luke 21:27. In Mark 14, too, on trial before the Sanhedrin, Christ was asked directly if He was the Messiah (in order to frame him as a political dissident). His response went deliberately beyond what the questioner had intended, however, with Christ clarifying that He was the Son of Man who will come on the cloud of heaven in judgment (v.62). Caiaphas’ dramatic response (tearing his clothes at the insult of blasphemy) demonstrated that the Son of Man was considered a divine figure.

Yahweh’s Name

Just as the Word became the dominant way of referring to the Second Person of Yahweh, so His Name came to distinguish the Third Person and this understanding would become the basis for understanding the Holy Spirit among New Testament authors. As the Second Person had been known before the incarnation so the Spirit of God had been encountered before He was poured out on Pentecost.

A name is an intimate signifier of identity. Yahweh is composed of four consonants, the equivalent of YHWH in biblical Hebrew was not originally written with vowels. The inflected form Yahweh implies causality, as literally translated it means ‘He who causes to be.’ The Hebrew scriptures often refer to the Name of Yahweh as something that had its own power, famously in Proverbs 18:10 it protects like a fortress. In short, the Name is employed to refer to a Person that seems distinct from the first and second hypostases.

Moses is told that the angel is to be respected as Yahweh’s name had been placed in him (Ex. 23:20). Similarly, John the Baptist is told that the Spirit would descend on Christ (Jn. 1:33). Just as rebellion against the angel resulted in dire consequences for Israel, so St. Paul warned that the presence of the Holy Spirit meant that bringing its mission grief would be disastrous (Eph. 4:30). The denial of forgiveness for rebellion in the presence of the Name is attributed to the Holy Spirit by Christ Himself: every blasphemy will be forgiven except the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 12:31; Mk. 3:28-29.

God’s presence in the tabernacle and later temple was referred to in personal terms as the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, a presence also referred to as His Name. This began with the altar Moses was directed to build at Sinai, guided by the promise that wherever Yahweh placed His name, there He would bless the people (Ex. 20:24). As Israel prepared to enter the land of Canaan, Yahweh spoke of where he would place His Name (Deut. 12:5; 14:23; 16:1; 26:1). When Solomon finalised the construction of the first temple it was referred to as a dwelling for the Name (3 King 3:2; 5:5; 8:20; 29; 35; 2 Chr. 6:10; 26:1).

This meant that when the Holy Trinity was made manifest at the baptism of Christ it did not amount to a shocking revelation for strict monotheists but rather a gentle reminder of Yahweh’s hypostases: an implicit trinity drifted into an explicit one, allowing New Testament authors to speak of a Son raised from the dead by the Father, Christ rising Himself, and the Spirit raising Christ. Each hypostasis was capable of raising another.

The Lord of Hosts as a soteriological fact and not poetic imagery

Today, angels and demons amount to an embarrassing afterthought; powers brushed off as the attempts of more primitive minds to comprehend elements best measured by science. Yet these powers are better described by those most vulnerable to them like Gehazi the servant who saw the hosts protecting Dothan from a huge siege, or Elisha who saw them arrayed along the mountainside (2 Kings 6:17). Throughout the Bible are references to heavenly hosts––angels, archangels, powers, cherubim, virtues and seraphim––and they are all tied to one of the names of Yahweh: Yahweh Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts. Sabaoth comes from the verb tsavah, ‘to command.’ The phrase Lord of Hosts points not just to the large number of angelic powers but their regimentation and martial virtu. Another metaphor for the hosts is that of the divine council: God is depicted as being enthroned among a divine council.

Two key phrases are used to convey God’s divine council: the mountain of assembly (har moed) and the Most High God (el elyon). The first does not indicate a single mountain, Olympus-style, as Sinai was the mountain when God descended upon it, Zion later upheld the role when it became the site of divine worship, and Tabor assumed the role when it hosted the Transfiguration. The second term, ‘God Most High’ points to the reality that though other spiritual powers exist and are called gods in scripture, none of them are like Yahweh. The title ‘Most High’ is the one that spirits––both angelic and demonic––invariably use to refer to God (Mk 5:7; Lk. 1:32,35,76; Acts 16:17).

The rebellion and fall of the devil, described in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, portray the protagonist as scheming to usurp Yahweh’s leadership of the divine council. Instead he is thrown into Sheol and revealed as a god of nothing but dust and ashes. The connection between the angel thrown down to be king of dust, and the serpent who corrupted Eden and was cast to the ground––king of more dust––is the reason iconography often depicts Hades as an open-mouthed serpent.

The devil, however, was not the only power to fall. Another group sought to be worshipped as gods by the nations. Their story begins with the Babylonian effort to draw down divinity and control it via the Tower of Babel (the Akkadian babilim means ‘gateway of the gods’). God then scattered the nations, which numbered roughly 70, reserving Abraham for Himself. The Greek text of Deuteronomy translates a Hebrew that literally means the nations were divided ‘according to the number of His angels [κατὰ ἀριθμὸν ἀγγέλων θεοῦ] (Deut. 32:8).’

In other words, God assigned the nations to angels in the divine council, which is very much a deliberative body, not a passive one (cf. Book of Job, including the role of Satan, the ‘accuser’ or prosecution, as well as the intercession of angels in the case of Ahab in 3 Kingdoms). This set of angels, like the devil, however, became corrupt and encouraged self-worship instead of governing in Yahweh’s name, and the gods of nations became demons (Deut. 32:17; Ps.96/95:5; 1 Cor. 10:20; a situation perhaps repeated in episodes such as the world wars). And by the time of Cain’s descendant, Lamech, mankind's desires had become invariably evil (Gen. 6:5). Psalm 81/82 notes that these 'gods' failed to behave as sons of God, serving Yahweh, but instead brought about self-centred wickedness. Therefore God judged that they had to die like men so the world could be reconciled with Him.

Daniel 10 seems to indicate such a process began long ago as the prophet encountered an angel who had been delayed by a ‘prince of Persia’ i.e. Persia’s rebellious angel, against whom he was aided by St. Michael the Archangel (v.13). The passage also flags that the ‘prince of Greece’ will require battling down too (v.20). In short, God reigns but the angels are deeply implicated in the governance of creation, hence Gabriel’s repeated visits (Zachariah, Mary and Joseph), the angels at Bethlehem, the flight to Egypt, the temptation, Gethsemane and so on. And importantly, Christ says that in the resurrection people will be ‘like the angels’ (Mk. 12:25; Matt. 22:30).

Such a backstory explains St Paul’s words at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 18:22-) where the apostle presented the Most High God as the one who had originally divided the nations but been lost to their collective memory. He has never lived in the temples and did not scatter them out of hatred but hoped to make Israel an example for all the nations, and now looked to make Himself known to them, calling for their repentance.