Transcript

Alright, so welcome back to History of Christian Thought and Practice UNO. And tonight's topic for our first hour is the New Testament and what we call patristic exegesis, or how the early Christians interpreted Scripture.

And so we're going to talk about those things for a while.

If you think about it, you might be aware already Jesus did not, in fact, hand the New Testament in a leather cover with his words in red to the apostles right before the ascension.

But, in fact, the documents that make up our New Testament had to be put together by the Church.

So, interesting fact, the New Testament is a product of the Church.

And in fact, the New Testament itself and those documents that are collected as our New Testament are in fact part of the tradition of the Church.

So we start with the assumption here that the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles was what we call the Old Testament in Greek, or the Septuagint.

And if you're keeping score here, help me out.

Septuagint, often abbreviated with the Roman numeral 70, which you can see is actually part of the name already anyway, because of the tradition that it was translated from Hebrew into Greek by 70 Jewish scholars.

But the point is that this was the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles.

The Old Testament in Greek with, of course, those Old Testament books that are considered apocryphal, books like Sirach, Wisdom, Tobit, all of those.

So the church starts with the Old Testament, as we call it, already in place.

But then how did the church get New Testament?

How do we have our specifically Christian portion of our scriptures?

And basically this happens in four stages.

And the four stages are kind of overlapping.

But I'm going to give them to you and just know up front that the The boundaries between the stages are a bit fuzzy, so I'm not implying that these are necessarily distinguishable by a date or anything.

In a certain year, we move from stage one to stage two.

It doesn't quite work that way.

But basically, it goes like this.

Stage one is pretty obvious.

It's the writing of the apostolic documents.

Someone wrote these documents.

We call them the books of the Bible or the books of the New Testament.

But, you know, the word book really doesn't mean a whole lot because in this case the books of the Bible are documents, not as long as we would normally think of as a book.

Some of them are letters, etc. And, in fact, the word Bible itself, our word for the whole business, just means book anyway.

So the word book isn't really helpful at this point, but the documents that we begin with are the documents that are written in the Apostolic Age.

We started with the Apostolic Age in this class, and when I talk about the Apostolic Age, I'm speaking roughly about the first century, or the first century after the time of Jesus.

And the interesting thing about this is that already by the time the letter we know as 2 Peter was written, there is a sense that the apostolic documents are coming to be understood as inspired scripture.

Now, of course, you already know there's debate over the authorship of 2 Peter.

We don't need to get into that.

But if you were to read 2 Peter 3, 14-16, it goes like this.

Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by him in peace.

And regard the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters.

Speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.

So here is the author of 2 Peter referring to Paul's letters as Scripture along with the rest of the Scriptures.

This debate over the authorship of 2 Peter is also closely tied to the debate over the date in which it might be written, so the very fact that here we have the letters of Paul referred to as Scripture could be an argument for a later date, but nevertheless, We're still talking within this apostolic age and we see already these documents are coming to have a sense that they are inspired by God and authoritative.

So stage one was the actual production or the writing of these apostolic documents.

Stage two then, again overlapping with stage one, would be the use of the documents and the distribution of the documents.

Now you already know this probably, especially if you've studied Paul's letters at all, but these documents were meant to be read out loud.

Not everybody could read, although, you know, again, don't get the sense that illiteracy was quite as bad as you may be thinking of from the Middle Ages or whatever, but not everybody could read, and in many cases, an education was the luxury of the more wealthy, and so people expected to hear this stuff read out loud, and so that's what they did.

These documents were read in their worship assemblies.

The case of things like the letters of Paul, these were copied and passed around immediately.

So that if you were a Christian in a small town, maybe, you know, a small town some distance from Corinth, let's say, and you heard that your brothers and sisters in Corinth had received a letter from Paul, what are you going to do?

Well, you're going to send a scribe over there, copy that letter, bring copy back.

Even though it's not directly for you, it's from Paul.

So, that letter would be copied and would be passed around immediately when it was received.

And in fact, collections of Paul's letters started to circulate, some of them including the letter to the Hebrews, which most scholars today believe Paul did not write the letter to the Hebrews.

And I may have mentioned this to you already, but there's already a debate in the early church over the authorship of Hebrews.

different theories floating around.

One of the theories is that Eusebius, for example, says, well, most people think Paul didn't write it, but some people think that he did write the original in Hebrew or in Aramaic, something in a language for the Jewish believers, and then it was translated into Greek, perhaps by Luke or someone else.

So, multiple theories floating around as to who did or didn't write it, or maybe how it was written by Paul, but still doesn't quite sound like Paul.

At any rate, some of the collections of Paul's letters did include the letter to the Hebrews under his name.

You also had collections of the four Gospels, and sometimes including the book of Acts floating around.

Now, believe it or not, there was a publishing industry In this time, obviously they didn't have any sort of mechanical printing, so everything is copied by hand, which means it's expensive, but you could buy a collection of Paul's letters, or you could buy a collection of the Gospels and you could own these.

And in fact, it is right around this time that a new invention appeared.

In fact, some scholars believe that perhaps this new invention appeared precisely because of the demand for these apostolic documents.

Now, this new invention is very complicated to try to understand.

Imagine a scroll, which is a bunch of sheets of papyrus glued together on the edges, made real long and rolled up.

Now, if you have a document that's in a scroll form and it's all rolled up, and you need to find a particular verse, where was it that Jesus said, cleanliness is next to godliness?

Anybody know?

Yeah, that's not in the Bible.

Okay.

Trick question.

But, imagine if you had to find a particular passage.

It's difficult when you have to roll and unroll a scroll.

So somebody had this brilliant idea that instead of gluing the sheets together and, you know, side to side and making a long scroll, let's just stack the sheets on top of each other, bind them on one side, and then when you want to find something all you have to do is turn the sheets.

It's a little thing we like to call the book.

Actually, it's called the codex.

But again, this is about the time when the codex or book appears.

So we have these collections floating around and we have this This feeling that the Apostles were inspired by God to write these things and so they're copied very carefully and they're handled with great reverence.

By the time of Justin Martyr, you read Justin Martyr, did you notice in the first Apology where he refers to on one hand the archives and on the other hand the memoirs of the Apostles?

Did you catch that?

Well, that's what we call the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Old Testament, he calls the archives.

The New Testament, he calls the memoirs of the apostles.

Now, he might be just speaking specifically about the Gospels there.

He might be speaking of it more broadly.

Hard to tell.

The point is, we are starting to get the sense that Christian scriptures have two parts.

The part that was there before the church, and the part that is a product of the church.

In the early second century, One of our old friends, one of our old heretical friends, Marcion, remember him, Docetic?

He came up with a list of what books or what documents he thought ought to be in the inspired scriptures.

But because he was a Docetic, his list doesn't look Music will be omitted.

Music will be omitted.

scriptures to the Gospel of Luke and the letter to Paul, but highly edited, cutting out anything that made Jesus sound too human, and certainly cutting out the birth narrative.

So, because Jesus was born, that's a pretty human thing to go through.

So, Martian creates a list, or what we might call a canon, canonical list, of what documents he thinks ought to be authoritative.

And of course, Marcion was excommunicated by the Roman Church in 144, and so his list of authoritative documents is not going to be acceptable to the Church, right?

I mean, not only can you not throw out half of our New Testament documents, but you also can't cut them up, you know, the ones that you're keeping.

So, Marcion's canon, not acceptable.

But as a response to that, of course, the Church has to create a canon of its own.

And we really don't know for sure if Marcians was the first attempt or if there were other attempts at creating a canonical list.

The earliest one we have, that comes from the mainstream Church, is called the Muratorian Canon.

Named after the person who discovered it, not the person who wrote it.

Now, this is probably late second century, probably from Rome, and probably written in response to Marcion's canon.

In other words, if this is wrong, then that begs the question, well, what's right?

What are the authoritative books?

And so we have this early canonical list.

And actually, believe it or not, it isn't exactly like our New Testament.

The Meritorious Tantum does not include the letter to the Hebrews.

It does not include 2 Peter or 3 John or James.

James is always a problem, you know, because there's 27 Jameses, right?

So what we have here is, by the end of the second century, we have a group of documents with a growing consensus that are more or less like our New Testament, but not necessarily exactly, depending who you ask.

But this list of documents is considered the Scripture of the Church, along with the Old Testament.

And by the time we get to Irenaeus, we are going to hear the terms Old Testament and New Testament.

So I believe Clement of Alexandria also, and then Irenaeus, used the terms Old Testament and New Testament.

Sam, do you have a question?

All of this should be in your head, making you ask the question, what are the criteria for inclusion in the canon?

In other words, what kind of things get a document included or excluded?

I'm going to give you the three main criteria.

For inclusion in the New Testament can.

The first one, and most important one, is authorship.

If a document is understood to be written by an apostle, or a close associate of an apostle, it's going to be in.

And you get one degree of separation.

So in other words, Luke is in, but, you know, Plymouth, not so much, right?

And I, you know, as I always say, if somebody found the Apostle Paul's grocery list, it would be in the Bible.

Because it's just, you know, that authorship is that important to anything by an Apostle.

I mean, look at the letters of Philemon.

Not the kind of thing that you'd expect in the New Testament.

In fact, it's a little embarrassing because, you know, we kind of wish Paul would condemn slavery, and then he doesn't, actually.

And so, it sort of seems out of place, you know.

But it's there.

Why?

Because Paul wrote it.

So, anything written by an apostle or a close associate of an apostle is going to be included.

And the fact that something gets included in the end is evidence that the early church leaders thought or believed it was written by the apostle or the close associate of an apostle.

I know you hear a lot that people wrote pseudonymous literature a lot back in the day, and that they would often write documents and attribute them to someone else.

And that is true.

What is not true is that everybody thought that was okay.

So in other words, if the The theologians of the early church had a document that said it was by someone, and if they believed it was not in fact by that someone, they would not consider it authoritative.

They would consider that a cheat.

That was somebody trying to pass their own work off as someone else's. Someone trying to use another person's authority.

It's kind of a form of plagiarism actually.

That in itself would be not respectable.

If something is included in the New Testament, it's there because ultimately the authorship was accepted.

So that's the most important criteria.

The second one is that it has to stand the test of time and use in worship in liturgy.

So we talk about stage two as the use of the documents.

These documents are used in liturgy.

Not only are they read out in the worship assembly, but they become part of the liturgy itself.

What pops into my head is how much of the book of Revelation finds its way into the Eucharistic prayers and stuff like that.

So it becomes part of the liturgy.

The third criterion is that the documents come to be cited, quoted by respected theologians.

Now this is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, right?

A theologian who is writing and who is trying to argue a point and convince the audience of that point is only going to quote an authority if everybody sort of agrees that that is an authority.

And so if a theologian, like Irenaeus or Tertullian, we're going to talk about them later, if they quote a document And if there's any chance that their audience doesn't accept that document as authoritative, then it's going to hurt their argument.

So the very fact that they quote a document means that it already has a certain level of authority.

But then, by the very fact that they quote it, they increase the authority of that document, because as respected theologians themselves, they come to be seen as authoritative, and so they are an authority quoting another authority, so that adds to the authority of the document in question.

So those are the criteria.

And that brings us to stage three.

Stage three is the authority of the apostolic document.

The growing and increasing authority within the church.

I was just mentioning the citation by respected theologians.

When we talk about our first and foremost theologians, Irenaeus and Tertullian, they quote almost every book of our New Testament.

They don't quote very many other documents.

Obviously they quote the Old Testament too, but I mean, when they're quoting the authorities, when they're using what they believe to be authoritative scripture to support their arguments, You can see how the theologians in their own writings enhancing the authority of the apostolic documents and also sort of whittling away the authority of other things and narrowing it down to this collection of documents.

It's worth mentioning that they all quote the pastoral epistles, And no one in the early church ever questioned the Pauline authorship of the pastoral epistles.

And I know if you take a New Testament course, you take a course on Paul.

The first thing they tell you is, well of course we know that Paul didn't write the pastoral epistles, the Timothy and Titus letters.

And that is the consensus of scholarship today.

However, I just want to point out that in the early church, no one ever questioned the Pauline authorship of the pastoral.

It was a given.

And so that's their assumption.

Even though they understood the issues surrounding authorship and they had these debates, Some books that we have in our New Testament almost didn't make it in.

You can already guess what some of them are.

Hebrews, top of the list, almost didn't make it in.

Why?

Authorship.

That's the first criteria.

So if the authorship is in question, then One would question whether it should be included.

So the letter to the Hebrews almost didn't make it in.

2 Peter almost didn't make it in, again for reasons of authorship.

Most people today would probably say that 2 Peter was not written by the Apostle Peter, and that it was probably written later.

Not all scholars will agree with that.

Some are more traditional, but that might be the majority.

Second and Third John.

Now, Second and Third John are interesting, because if you look closely, they are written by someone who calls himself the Elder.

And the term Elder in the early church seems to be used by some people as a kind of a technical term to refer to that second generation of church leaders who are not apostles, But who are the ones who were disciples of the Apostles, or appointed by the Apostles.

So in that sense, like Timothy would be an elder, Titus would be an elder, Luke, Mark.

And so if 2 and 3 John are written by someone who calls himself the elder, it sounds like he's admitting he's not John the Apostle.

Second and third John, kind of questionable because, again, there are multiple Johns.

And James, of course, as I said, you know, you see the name James, the first thing you have to ask is, which James are we talking about?

So those books almost didn't make it in for authorship reasons.

Revelation almost didn't make it in, though not for reasons of authorship.

Almost all of the early church leaders believed it was written by John the Apostle, but It almost didn't make it into the canon because of the way that some people were interpreting it.

And so we already have, even by some of our most important theologians, we already have a very dispensationalist If you know of interpretations of the book of Revelation that you think are problematic today, they're not new.

They were there in the early church, and those kinds of interpretations almost got the document excluded from our canon.

Now, on the other hand, some books almost made it in that didn't in the end.

And you've read some of these already, or you will.

Well, 1 Clement, the Didache, and the Shepherd.

And Irenaeus, I believe, refers to the Shepherd as Scripture.

So here's one of those cases where an early theologian is quoting a document as authoritative, and that particular document didn't make it in.

And also, just as an aside, I think I said this already, but to point out again that the Gnostic writings were never considered for inclusion in the canon because they were written later and everyone knew that they were not written.

You've got your Gnostic Gospels like the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Peter, and everyone knew they were certainly not written by those people.

So those writings are not the so-called lost books of the Bible.

They were never considered for inclusion.

So that's stage three, the authority of the apostolic documents.

Finally, stage four then is coming to some consensus on the standardization.

So stage four is the standardization of the canon.

Now the word canon, by the way, if I didn't say it, it just means like It's kind of like the way we might use the word yardstick, something we measure other things by.

It's a rule, it's a measure, it's a standard by which other things are measured.

So that word canon simply comes to refer to the collection of documents that we refer to as authoritative for the church.

So the canon then becomes the group of documents or the list of documents.

And I wish I could tell you that on this date, the Church unanimously confirmed this list of documents as its New Testament.

Even if I had to go to the 8th century to do it or something, I can't give you a date, I can't give you a council.

It is not true.

That the Council of Nicaea decided what books would be in the New Testament, and it's certainly not true that the Emperor Constantine decided what books would be in the New Testament.

All of that is bogus.

But, it is true that it was not until the fourth century that we have a list that we know of that matches our New Testament exactly.

Now again, remember, there's a lot of documents that don't exist anymore.

So there might have been lists before this time that match our New Testament, but if there were, we don't have them, we don't know about them.

The first one that we know about that matches our New Testament exactly comes from the year 367. Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, we're going to meet him later, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his Easter Letter of 367, listed the books that the people under his authority, that he thought they should consider authoritative.

Scripture.

And when he gets to the New Testament books, his list looks exactly like ours.

Now, that does not mean that just because he wrote it in 367, everyone says, well, thankfully, now we have consent.

It doesn't mean that everyone automatically agrees, because when a bishop says something, normally a bishop's authority extends to his see, or his area, his sphere of influence.

Alexandria, being a metropolitan city, his authority would extend beyond just the city of Alexandria to the cities in the surrounding area, but it is by no means a worldwide authority.

So just because Athanasius says so in 367 does not mean the whole world is on board.

On the other hand, It's equally not true that the Church didn't have a Bible until the 4th century, which is sometimes what you hear.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

This idea of the New Testament as we know it is not new in the 4th century, and there was some consensus to a point already in the 2nd century with some disagreement over a few of the documents.

But in 367, we have one canonical list that matches our New Testament exactly, though I imagine that that doesn't mean that everyone agreed with that list immediately, and that consensus took some time after that as well.

So again, would love to give you a date, but that's the best I can tell you.

Now, if I haven't said this clearly enough, I'll say it again.

Because the documents that we know of as the New Testament were considered divinely inspired, and because they were treated with reverence and copied immediately, and multiple copies were made during the lifetime of the original documents, it turns out that the New Testament documents are, in terms of the manuscripts, the most reliable of all ancient literature.

Now, unfortunately we don't have the originals, what we call the autographs.

We don't have Paul's actual first copy of a letter, whether it was in his own handwriting or ascribed to whom he was dictating.

We don't have that stuff.

What we have are copies, and copies of copies.

But, because of the early demand and the reverence with which these were copied, Well, for example, put it this way.

With most ancient literature, there's a gap between the writing of the original and the earliest copies that we have.

So let me give you an example like Homer.

Something Homer would have written, the gap between the time of Homer himself and the earliest manuscripts we possess, that gap is like a thousand years.

With the New Testament, that gap shrinks to under a hundred years.

So you see how that makes the documents reliable.

Now, going back to what I said about just because we know what the Bible says, doesn't mean we will agree on what it means.

We still have the task of interpretation, but at least we have a very reliable text in front of us.

So, we got that going for us.

So that is the story of the New Testament canon.

Now, what I want to do now is talk about, okay, let's assume the early church has these scriptures.

How would they interpret that?

Before I do that, let's see if there are any questions at this point.

Any questions?

Yes?

I'm so confused how the early command and the reverence would preserve the document.

Like, the last part you were just saying about how going from 100 years, like, Why did the gap shrink?

Because more copies were made early on, right away, and they were treated with greater care.

So there are more of them still around from the early period.

It's not as though they're all exactly the same.

I mean, there are what we call text variants.

There are things that are, you know, little mistakes, pretty things here and there.

But the fact that there are so many of them, the scholars who make it their full-time job to deal with these manuscripts can boil it down to a primary text that is reliable.

So, you know, if we want to look at one of Paul's letters again, for example, We can look, and of course we're reading it in English translation, which creates issues, but at least in the Greek we're looking at...

Right, exactly.

And so we can be confident that what we're looking at is what Paul wrote.

Now we still have to interpret it.

And before we can do that, somebody else still has to translate it in English, which is why you have different versions of the Bible, because there are different English translations.

So that's my point.

Yes, question over here.

Now, the documents that were found in the Dead Sea, how close to the originals were those things?

You're talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Yeah.

There are no New Testament documents among those.

No, but you're talking about early documents, so I was wondering how close to the originals were...

Well, I mean, yeah, I would have to know more about the, like, yeah, there's some Isaiah stuff in there, and so we'd have to get Dr. Lester in here to talk about Isaiah and see what kind of gap we're talking about there.

But the Dead Sea Scrolls are a product of the time of about the first century, maybe first century BCE, but about the time of Jesus.

Let's go on and talk about how the early Christians interpreted Scripture.

Okay, so this word patristic, or patristics, refers to the early church, and you can see the Latin for father in there, patristic refers to the church fathers.

And then exegesis, of course, is a word that means to draw out, draw meaning out.

And so how did the early church interpreters find meaning in Scripture?

And I'm going to go over the assumptions that they brought to the task of interpretation.

And this is in the book, there's a chart in the back of the book with this on there too.

Basically, there are nine assumptions of patristic exegesis.

In other words, nine assumptions that the early interpreters brought to the text.

And this will help you understand their mindset.

Some of these things will be things that you think, oh yeah, I believe that too.

Others of these will be things where you think, I don't believe it.

But here's kind of how, in general, how they approach the text.

Assumption number one is that the sacred texts are death and death, sacred, because they are divinely inspired.

And that includes the New Testament.

You may remember the 2 Timothy passage that all Scripture is God-breathed, or inspired.

That's 2 Timothy 3.16. And so, this idea that what is written is inspired by God.

Now, that doesn't discount the human author.

There is a human author, and then behind the human author, the ultimate author is the divine author.

But divine inspiration means that for the early Christians, the written Word is like another incarnation of the living Word.

In other words, Jesus Christ is considered the Logos, the Word of God incarnate.

The Word became flesh.

But he's not with us anymore in a tangible form, so what we have is another incarnation of the Word of God that is in written form.

So the written Word is kind of like a permanent incarnation of the living Word.

In other words, the text of Scripture enfleshes the Word of God.

And like the incarnation of Jesus Christ, it is both Human and divine.

Just like Jesus is both human and divine, Scripture is both human and divine, because it has two authors.

All Scripture has a human author and a divine author.

Now, because there is ultimately a divine author behind the human author, that leads most interpreters to assume that every word is there for a reason.

There's no extras in there.

Every word is there for a reason.

On occasion, we'll lead them to look for meaning even in the smallest details.

We'll get to that in a bit more, but I'm sure you can see where that goes.

So that's the first assumption, divine inspiration.

The second assumption is that patristic exegesis assumes progressive revelation.

Progressive revelation.

Now progressive revelation in the early church context does not mean that you can change something.

What it means is that things get clearer over time.

So as time passes, as the human race matures, and the needs of the human race change, the messages of God and Even God's own self-revelations get clearer over time.

So, for example, the Old Testament presented God the Father clearly, but God the Son, while He's there in the Old Testament, He didn't prevail.

The New Testament presents God the Son clearly, but the Holy Spirit is there, but veiled or hidden or not presented as clearly.

And then, in the experience of the life of the Church, the Holy Spirit is presented more clearly and we come to understand the Holy Spirit.

So, over time, you see, the Trinity is explained and things get clearer.

And as we go through time, then, new interpretations can build on older interpretations, but they cannot contradict them.

If a certain understanding or interpretation is established in one generation, you can't change it in future generations.

They even had a proof text for this.

There's a passage in Deuteronomy that you may not move the boundary markers set by your ancestors.

And that becomes sort of an allegory for the boundary markers are the boundaries around doctrine.

And as one generation establishes certain boundaries around doctrine, we've already seen that happen, right?

As one generation establishes boundaries, the next generation may not move those boundaries.

So in other words, if the Ebionites were wrong in the second century, you can't come along in the third century and say, well, maybe they were right after all.

What's done is done.

You can only further clarify What's been said in the past.

Because remember, in the ancient world, newer is not better, but older is better.

The tradition is more reliable and more trustworthy.

And so, patristic authors would never want you to think they were saying anything new.

They only want to be clarifying what's always been believed by the church.

And this is connected with the concept of apostolic succession, as you can see.

And connected to the idea that the farther back in time you go, the closer you get to the source of truth.

Truth with a capital T, meaning Jesus himself.

That make sense?

Alright, so progressive revelation.

Things get clearer over time, but you can't contradict the conclusions of previous generations.

The third assumption is that patristic exegesis allows for multiple meanings from any given text.

And this is sort of a given when you assume that there are two authors for any given text because those two authors may have a different agenda.

The human author's intended meaning might not be the only valid meaning because there is an ultimate author behind the human author, and that is God.

A classic example of this is certain Old Testament texts that in their original context may not have been considered Messianic predictions or prophecies, but then in light of the life and ministry of Jesus, They become messianic prophecies.

When you read, for example, in the Gospel of Matthew, this happened so that the prophecy would be fulfilled and then there's a quote of the Old Testament.

Now, if you were to read that quote from the Old Testament in its original context, you might not think that was a messianic prophecy, but it becomes one.

In light of the person of Jesus.

For unto us a child is born.

Originally, the human author intended that to be about a prince born in the dynasty.

But it becomes applied to Jesus.

Multiple meanings for any given text.

In fact, the idea that there can only be one meaning from any text doesn't come up until the Renaissance or the Reformation.

That's much, much later.

So during the whole early medieval church period, it's possible to get multiple meanings out of any text.

The fourth assumption, and this sort of follows on the third, is that patristic exegesis allows for paradox.

In other words, two texts that seem to be contradictory, or at least in tension with each other, may both be held as true.

Now, one example of this would be passages that show or hint at Christ's humanity on one hand and divinity on the other.

For example, you have Colossians 2.9 that says, all the fullness of deity dwells within him bodily, okay, divinity of Christ.

But then you've got stuff in the Gospels where Luke chapter 2, he grows up, he learns things, right?

He starts out as a baby.

And we know that some in this time period argued that, well, wait a minute, if he's divine, you cannot apply these concepts of growth and change to him.

How is that possible?

And that became part of the argument over the very person of Christ.

Within the Gospel of John, within the span of four chapters, you have Jesus says, the Father and I are one, and you have, you say, The Father is greater than I. Well, again, which one is Jesus?

Make up your mind.

But the early Christian interpreters would not have wanted to force Jesus to make up his mind.

The point is not which one is true, but how can they both be true?

How can they both be held together without picking and choosing between them?

Why?

Because if the text is divinely inspired, then they both have to be true.

And it would be one thing to say, and some did, it would be one thing to say, well, you know, this document is acceptable, but this one's not going to make it into our Bible so we can ignore it, you know, if there's something that seems contradictory.

But you can't do that within one document.

You can't do that with two passages within John.

Now, that's what Marcy invented, you know, cut and paste, but the mainstream church says, no, we don't do that.

In fact, that's what the heretics do.

they pick and choose.

They pick one set of passages and throw out the others.

We don't do that.

We accept them all.

And so again, the question is not whether a biblical text is true or if there are two seeming paradoxical.

It's not which one is true, but how are they both true.

So, allows for paradox.

Assumption number five.

Patristic exegesis follows New Testament interpretations of the Old Testament.

In other words, the early church interpreters follow the lead of the apostles, folks like Matthew and Paul, or even Jesus himself, as we see in the Gospels.

to interpret the Old Testament in light of the life and ministry of Jesus.

So, in other words, the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament becomes a kind of a midrash or a commentary on the Old Testament meant to teach something about Christ.

So, what that means, one of the things it means is that Christianity is not new because it is the fulfillment of Judaism.

So, if anyone were to want to argue, hey, what about that rule where older is better, isn't Christianity something new?

Or isn't Christianity itself a Jewish heresy?

The answer to those kinds of arguments would be, no, Christianity is the most consistent version of Judaism going back and fulfilling what Judaism was always meant to be.

So there's that.

The other thing, of course, then, is that, you know, the Old Testament, much of the Old Testament, was seen by the early Christians as not really all that relevant for the church, unless you could find something about Jesus in there.

And so, the early Christian interpreters are all about finding Jesus under every Old Testament rock, right?

Because the best interpretation of the Old Testament Assumption No. 6 Scripture interprets Scripture.

In other words, if you have one passage that's difficult to understand, you can use another passage to help you understand it, even if that other passage is in a different document by a different author or even in a different testament.

And again, this goes back to the assumption of divine inspiration because if the whole business is inspired by God, Then that implies that there is an internal integrity across the whole set of biblical documents.

That there is a consistency even across the two Testaments.

Again, assuming you interpret everything Christocentrically.

So, you interpret one text by the application of other presumably clearer texts.

One possible example of this would be We have that passage in Deuteronomy where it says that whoever is hanged on a tree is cursed.

That presents a bit of a problem when you want to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah, since he was in fact executed by hanging on a tree.

So what do you do with that?

Well, what you do is you combine that text with Isaiah 53, the so-called suffering servant, where you get the stuff about, you know, by his wounds we are healed, and he dies for the sins of others, and all of that stuff, and you put that together, and now we have a suffering Messiah.

Originally a suffering Messiah would seem like an oxymoron, but now it makes sense when you put these things together.

Again, this is not something that the early Christian interpreters made up out of the blue.

They're simply following the lead of Matthew and Paul, and to a certain extent, Jesus himself.

Assumption number seven.

In general, interpretation of the Old Testament was non-literal.

Or at least the non-literal meaning was held up as the higher meaning, or the deeper meaning, or the more spiritual meaning, or the truer meaning, or something like that.

But you see what's happening here.

We're building on the assumption that there are multiple meanings in any given text.

And so when you approach the Old Testament now specifically, there are multiple meanings, One of which is a literal or a historical meaning, and that might be okay, but it might not be all that useful for the Church.

And so if the literal meaning was the only one you had, a lot of the Old Testament would be considered irrelevant.

How is it relevant then?

Because there's a deeper meaning, or a spiritual meaning.

Okay, it's the Christocentric meaning, right?

You get that.

And so that meaning, the non-literal meaning, was held up as the better one.

And so there's this idea that the true meaning of the Old Testament could never have been understood before the coming of Jesus.

Again.

You won't get away with this in your Old Testament class, but this is how they understood it for the most part.

For some of the same reasons that Marcion threw out the Old Testament, because Marcion read his Old Testament and he saw an anthropomorphized God who had to ask questions and has ears to hear and feet to walk through the garden.

He said, if this is God, this is no God at all, and he threw out the Old Testament.

Well, the mainstream church said, well, we're not going to throw out the Old Testament, but we can't really interpret this stuff literally, or it wouldn't make much sense, and so it has to be interpreted non-literally.

Especially when it comes to stuff about God.

Because God can't have feet, hands, ears, eyes, because God doesn't have parts.

God is simplex.

We talked about this, right?

God is simplex, so God does not have parts.

And God is immutable.

God doesn't change.

So you can't push this stuff about God getting angry and one minute he's not angry and then he is.

You can't push that stuff too far either.

Because God doesn't change.

So all of that stuff has to be interpreted non-literally.

So to interpret the Old Testament literally was sort of ridiculed or criticized as not doing it right.

Not seeing the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament, through the lens of the Gospels.

It was criticized as being sort of the Jewish way of doing it, although that doesn't really mean that all Jewish interpreters only interpreted the Old Testament literally.

That's not really how it happened.

But it presented in a lot of the early Christian literature as well, you know, that literal meaning of the Old Testament, that might be good enough for the Jews or for the average person, the pude of knowing better.

But that's not really good enough for the real student of Christianity.

Because, again, what you want is to find Jesus in the Old Testament.

So the most important meaning is often the meaning that's hidden under the surface.

An example of this would be the promise made to David in 2 Samuel 7. There's a promise made to King David that a son or a descendant of his will Reign over an everlasting kingdom.

Well, in fact, the Davidic dynasty didn't last forever, although David's son Solomon did rule.

But the point would be, well, okay, so how can you interpret this passage so that it really comes true?

From the Christian perspective, Jesus is the son, or the descendant of David, who rules over an everlasting kingdom.

That's how the passage is interpreted so the prophecy came true.

Reading it in context would be more of the literal or historical meaning.

That is one valid meaning, it's just not the best meaning.

So, in other words, reading it in context would say, well, we know what they meant originally.

But, in other words, we know what the human author of the text meant.

And that's nice.

But the better meaning is what the divine author of the text meant, and that's about Jesus.

So that's how they would approach it.

Good question.

Alright, so what I want to do now for a few minutes is just talk about...

You may have noticed that when I'm talking about early Christian interpretation of the Old Testament, I keep using the phrase non-literal.

I've been avoiding...

Using words like allegorical or metaphorical because I want to talk a little bit more specifically for a minute about that.

About 15 minutes before break.

There are two primary types of non-literal interpretation.

And the first one is known as typology.

I guess I'm too strong for this child.

Typology.

Typology means that there is an Old Testament concept that we call the type that foreshadows or symbolizes something in the New Testament or in the life of Jesus or in the life of the Church.

Now this method is usually attributed to Irenaeus because he used it, but it really goes back to Paul.

Remember in Romans, Jesus is the new Adam.

So in that interpretation, Adam is the type, Jesus is the anti-type.

But the point is that there's an Old Testament symbol or foreshadowing of something that comes later.

So let's play this game.

Know your type.

If Adam is the type and Jesus is the anti-type, then if Eve is the type, give me the anti-type.

Mary, yes.

Why?

Because, think about it, when Paul talks about Adam and Christ, Adam is the one who did it wrong, Christ is the one who did it right.

Because if Adam's sin enters the world, So, the antitype fixes or reverses the type.

So, if Eve is the type, she gets it wrong because she ate the fruit, Mary is the antitype.

Why?

Because she got it right, because at the Annunciation she says yes to God.

Eve said no to God, Mary says yes to God.

If the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the type, give me the antitype.

The cross, yes.

And actually, the farther you get into this, Every time anything made of wood is mentioned in the Old Testament, it becomes, you know, a type of the cross.

You have another question?

Is it also linear?

Because, I mean, you're saying, you know, Adam is the first person in Genesis, Jesus, you know, the first, and then it's so linear.

Would it be linear by state, too?

Well, the point is that the antitype comes after the type.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Let's see.

Let's try a couple others here.

Crossing the Red Sea.

If crossing the Red Sea is the type, what's the end type?

Being baptized.

Yes, baptism, right.

Water, going through water, passing through water, crossing the Red Sea, getting baptized.

So you see how this works.

If the manna from heaven The Arch of the Covenant The Ark of the Covenant is the type...

What's the antitype?

The Ark of the Covenant is the type...

What's the antitype?

No, not the New Testament.

Good guess.

All good guesses.

Nobody has guessed right yet.

The Ark of the Covenant.

The vessel that held the Ten Commandments.

No. The Ark of the Covenant, remember that Moses breaks the tablets with the Ten Commandments, but those pieces go into the Ark.

So the Ark of the Covenant is the vessel that held the words of God.

The womb of Mary.

The vessel that held the word of God.

Again, the point of this is to find Jesus under every oldness and rock.

You have a question there?

Oh, the relation between manna and the Eucharist.

Good question.

The manna is the bread from heaven, so then the Eucharistic bread is the heavenly bread that nourishes your soul.

Well, actually, I don't understand that part.

I don't understand why manna is a type.

Like, what was the wrong thing about it?

Oh, what was wrong with it?

Oh, that's good, good.

Excellent question.

Nothing was wrong with it, per se.

It was just temporary, though.

It was sort of a temporary fix.

So it wasn't perfect.

It was imperfect in the sense that It is a gift from God, but it is temporary.

So you get the typology, you get what that is.

There's a connection made between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

And again, one of the reasons why Irenaeus uses this so much is because the Gnostics, remember Marcion and then the Gnostics, are trying to throw the Old Testament out.

And Irenaeus and guys like him are using this method to show why it's important to keep the Old Testament, because the two Testaments are connected.

Now you may not agree with all of the connections they're making, but they are making connections in order to keep the Old Testament from the Church.

There's all kinds of connections like that.

The binding of Isaac, of course, becomes a type of Jesus as well.

So yeah, there's tons of connections like that.

The other method of non-literal interpretation is allegory.

Allegory is usually credited to the theologian Origen, but it really goes back to Greek philosophy, because just like the Christian theologians needed non-literal interpretation to keep the Old Testament, or so they thought, the Greek philosophers needed non-literal interpretation to keep their mythologies.

In other words, If you read the Greco-Roman myths, literally, you've got multiple gods who were immoral, who were going around killing each other and sleeping around and stuff, and so the philosophers who not only wanted to promote some sort of civic morality, to a certain extent, but also were moving more towards Consolidating the gods under one high god.

To take it literally would be an embarrassment to what they were trying to do.

So what do they do?

They interpret it non-literally.

What that means is that these myths then become allegories, stories, symbols, for human virtues and human behaviors and things like that.

So, when it comes to the early Christian interpretation of the Old Testament then, allegory is a method that's used to find things in the Old Testament that, you know, if they were to be interpreted literally would, you know, It seems impossible, or would maybe not be relevant for the Church, and to turn them into symbols for human vices and virtues and things like that.

A good example of this would be the food laws in the Old Testament, the dietary laws.

All the things you're not supposed to eat.

Now, we know that the Church did not follow these laws.

So, the question comes up, well, wait a minute, if we're not following these laws, then what are they there for?

Why are they in Scripture?

You know, isn't this inspired by God?

Oh, well, they're there for a reason, but the meaning isn't what you think.

For example, you know that rule where you can only eat something with a cloven hoof, you know, a hoof with two parts?

You can't eat a single, like, a single hoof animal would be like a horse or a camel, right?

You can't eat those.

But you can eat the cloven hoof like a cow or...

I don't know that much about animals, I'm sorry, but...

So this thing about the cloven hoof, the double hoof versus the single hoof becomes an allegory for the Bible itself.

And so the interpretation of it goes like this.

Well, the hoof is the testament.

The animals with the double hook are clean, because what you really need are two Testaments.

You need the Old Testament and the New Testament, double hook.

But a single hook is only one Testament.

That's no good.

The Jews only have one Testament, the Old.

The Gnostics and the Marcionites only have one Testament, the New.

Both of those are wrong.

You need both Testaments so you can only eat animals.

That's what that really means.

God doesn't care what animals you eat.

God cares how many Testaments you have.

Here's another one.

I love this one.

When it comes to, like, you're not supposed to eat weasels, right?

Again, God doesn't care if you eat weasels or not, but there's a rule not to eat weasels because weasels are thieves, and God doesn't want you to be a thief.

God doesn't want you to eat pigs because pigs are messy, and God does not want you to be messy.

Because cleanliness is next to godliness, right?

But anyway, you get the idea that these things become allegories for human behavior.

And so that's how the Old Testament would be interpreted.

When you read books about this, the definitions can be a little bit fuzzy, but the distinction between the two seems to have something to do with the fact that with allegory, something doesn't have to be historical.

But with typology, the early Christian interpreters would assume that the types, even though they are meant to foreshadow something else, The types are still historical.

The tree of the garden of good and evil is a type, but most of them would probably say there really was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden.

The manna is a type of the Eucharist, but there really was manna.

The types can be thought of as historical.

where the allegories tend not to be, they're really just there for some spiritual meaning.

So, you know, when it comes to the Old Testament then, you kind of had two choices.

You could either do what the Marcionites and the Gnostics did, and you could reject it as the product of an ignorant people or of an, you know, an inept or an evil demigod, or you can accept it as something that can only be interpreted through the lens of the Gospel and the New Testament, as almost like a riddle that can only be solved with the key of Christ.

So, that's why we say in general the Old Testament was interpreted non-literally.

Now, assumption number eight is that, in general, the New Testament was interpreted more literally.

The opposite.

So you can't make blanket statements like, you know, we interpret the Bible literally, we interpret the Bible non-literally, they interpret the Bible literally or non-literally.

It's really more about knowing which documents were meant to be interpreted, or which parts of documents.

Usually that's something that's a genre of the literature.

So even with the New Testament, Jesus' parables were understood as allegories, so they're interpreted non-literally.

Jesus says, you know, a man was coming down from Jerusalem and thugs beat him up and left him for dead.

The disciples don't say, you know, who was he?

What was his name?

When did this happen?

They know it's a story.

And so, the book of Revelation, again, is another example.

I mean, everyone pretty much would agree that you don't try to interpret the book of Revelation literally, right?

So certain genres, you knew you had to go to a non-literal approach.

But for the most part, most of the New Testament was considered pretty much recent history.

And the ironic thing here is that when the Gnostics, for example, they did the opposite of the mainstream church because they interpreted the Old Testament literally and then threw it out or rejected it.

When it came to the New Testament, they all put it the opposite and they intended to interpret the New Testament non-literally because they had to allegorize away the humanity of Jesus or various aspects of his life that they weren't comfortable with.

And so while the mainstream church interpreted the Old Testament non-literally and the New Testament mostly literally, the Gnostics did the opposite.

Finally, last assumption, number nine, Interpretation is not meant to be done in a vacuum or in isolation, but it's something that's meant to be done in community, within the context of worship and prayer, as a part of a devotional life, as a part of pastoral care.

It's not meant to be done in an ivory tower.

It's not an academic exercise, but it is an act of worship.

I'll end here with going back to 2 Peter, this time 2 Peter 1.20, where the author says, no interpretation of Scripture is a matter of one's own opinion.

And so again, it's meant to be done in community and not as an individual exercise.

So those are the assumptions that the early Christian exegetes brought to the text.

Any questions before we take a break?

Alright, well, I love when I end on time, so we're going to take a break, so come back in 15 minutes.