[quote]JayPierce wrote:
It really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who wrote what or when. The Father Himself wrote the entire Bible through the hands of men. It is one big riddle. Not to trivialize it, mind you. This is the most extensive and most important riddle ever in the history of man.
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Here is (I think) the central assumption on which all the other’s hang…
“These books function together to form a massive riddle that can only be deciphered through cross-textual reading (i.e., jumping from book to book).”
You argue, JayPierce, that the Bible is “one big riddle.” There are two major problems with that statement.
- The “Bible” is an invention of the 4th century church, the church that, by this time, was entirely “Paulinized.” The Jews of Jesus’ day did not have a “bible;” they had two major corpuses of authoritative literature (the Law and the Prophets), and a third relatively undefined group (which included Esther and the rest of the texts). While the Jews individual scrolls containing the various books, it was not until the rise of the church that anyone thought to combine authoritative texts in single volumes (the codex). The Christians did it first with the Pauline letters in one codex and the gospels in another codex; eventually, the Hebrew Scriptures were also copied and organized into codices. But this was a Christian in the 2nd-4th centuries A.D., and the church that did this had been thoroughly Paulinized.
Why does any of this matter? Because to say that the Bible is a big puzzle IS to implicitly affirm (1) the unity and legitimacy of the canon (2) which the Paulinized (i.e., deceived) church gave you.
This is the historical argument that you have been ignoring. IT DOES MATTER when the books were written AND by whom - if the gospels post-date Paul, and Paul’s authority was already widely recognized in the first century, then that means that the gospels even were written by those who had been Paulinized. In that case, the very people who supposedly give YOU the words of Jesus ARE THE DECEIVED. So on what grounds do you trust them? The doctrine of inspiration? The deceived (i.e., the late first-early second century church) came up with that one too! You have nothing to go on in that case except your OWN supposed authority. In other words, your claims are completely arbitrary.
- Of what does this “Bible” consist? 66 books, NOT 66 chapters. These books were written over a span of CENTURIES by individuals in completely different situations. These texts run the gamut of genres - historiography, prophecy-poetry, sapiential literature, romance, satire, etc.
Now, when it comes to written discourse, what is the basic unit of meaning? The word? Nope. How about the sentence? Nope. It is the paragraph . THAT is the basic unit of meaning. Individual words have a range of possible meanings that vary from context to context; the same is true of sentences. It is the paragraph that provides the most basic contextual frame in which individual sentences and words can be understood. Yet even there, the meaning of a paragraph is ultimately bound up with the WORK in which the paragraph is found. An author doesn’t simply write a bunch of stuff down at a whim; sentences, topics, etc. are all organized around coherent goals. Why does Genesis begin with the beginning of the world and end with the Israelites in Egypt? Because it is an account of the covenant’s pre-history; the account of the covenant’s formation is found in Exodus.
The purpose of a text - its subject matter and aim - is the foundation of an author’s rhetorical strategy. He will select and organize his material in ways that further that purpose. This is what you didn’t get about the gospels when you asked why they left out some of Jesus’ sayings and deeds. What you SHOULD have been asking was WHY, if the goal was SIMPLY (as you seem to think) to provide a record of Jesus’ words and acts, the gospel authors OVERLAP SO MUCH IN THEIR TALES. Why do Matthew, Mark, and Luke not simply add new material to the existing framework provided by the text they are using (Luke came last and used Matthew and Mark, Matthew came second and used Mark)? WHY DO THEY CHANGE WHAT ONE GOSPEL WRITER SAYS JESUS SAID (as in the previous mentioned case of Matthew 21:18-22 and Mark 11)?
The answer lies in their different rhetorical strategies. Mark wants to emphasize Jesus’ condemnation and replacement of the Jewish temple; Matthew wants to emphasize Jesus’ power, and Mark’s portrayal makes Jesus seem weaker, so Matthew changes it. JAYPIERCE - the purpose of each text dictates how the individual elements are portrayed .
Now this isn’t only a phenomenon in the gospels - this is a fundamental truth about ALL the biblical texts (even all works in general). THAT INCLUDES THE OLD TESTAMENT. So when you read books like Habakkuk or Zechariah, you have NO legitimate basis for treating them like a random assemblage of discrete sayings. THEY MAKE LOOK LIKE THAT TO YOU, but that’s because you aren’t a competent reader of ancient texts. You cannot simply pull prophecies out of context, especially if you are going to give them a meaning that (1) only one or two people have argued for in all of church history, and (2) that Jesus himself did not give them.
Moreover, I’ve spoken before about genres - the genre of a work is part of the context that helps determine its meaning. Genres are marked by specific techniques, motifs, etc. Whether “the Father” wrote the “Bible” or not, the individual books fall into well-established generic categories common in the ancient world and employ the techniques common to those genres.
Case in point - Habakkuk 2. THe book of Habakkuk records Habakkuk’s discussion with God over Israel’s suffering at the hands of other nations. Habakkuk laments the fate that has befallen Israel and calls God to account (1:1-4). What is his biggest complaint? “The evil one hedges in the righteous one” (Hab. 1:5). That’s a direct translation from the Hebrew; if you want to see something comparable, look at the JPS version. This evil one is contrasted with the righteous one again in 1:13, and the evil one is the subject of 1:15-17. This is the one Habakkuk, contextually speaking, is crying out against. Consequently, based on the context, this is obviously the same evil one contrasted with the righteous one in 2:4. Who is the evil one? He is a cipher for “the Chaldeans” (1:6), a people group oppressing Israel at the time. It is NOT a veiled reference to Paul, nor is the statement “the righteous one will live by his faith” an allusion to what Paul says. Rather, 2:4 is contrasting the righteous with the wicked, the Chaldeans, here described in generic terms. Contextually, this isn’t a reference to Paul at all!
As if that wasn’t enough, your lack of knowledge about Hebrew poetry results in your fundamental mistranslation of Sheol in 2:5 (though I know the exact person you stole that information from, and in the future, you need to realize that, traditionally, Lawyers make TERRIBLE exegetes). Hebrew poetry functions on the basis of parallelism - one line says something, and the line after it continues or expands slightly on the same thought. Habakkuk is prophecy in the form of Hebrew poetry. Now look at the lines of 2:5
“(the proud one) opens his maw as wide as SHL
Who is as insatiable as death
Who has harvested all the nations
And collected all the peoples!”
Now, based on the requirements of Hebrew parallelism, since the last two lines are in parallel, we need something in the first line to be in parallel with death. What is that? Sheol, NOT Saul. Sheol and death were synonymous for the Hebrews; the poetic form requires that the word be Sheol here, NOT Saul, because only Sheol is synonymous with death in Hebrew.
More to come.