Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

I want to talk about one of the most powerful lines in the whole Bible, and how it's connected to what I think might be the most incredible, prophetic, and detailed Old Testament account of the crucifixion.

It's the line where Jesus cries out from the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Now, those words by themselves are terrifying in their implications.

If Jesus is the man he says he is, if he is truly the God man, how can he speak of God having abandoned him?

And I've seen Christians stumble over this verse, thinking that it means that God the Father has somehow turned his back on his beloved Son in whom he is well-pleased.

I'm going to address some of those confusions and misinterpretations in another video.

But today, I want to talk about why, despite the perhaps chilling nature of these words, they're actually incredibly important in proving Jesus to truly be the promised Messiah.

And in fact, I think they're excellent evidence that Christianity is true.

Before we begin, I want to give a shout-out to the beautiful people supporting us over on shamelessjoe.com, because it is through your direct support that we've been able to continue this ministry.

We are seriously passionate about bringing the good news to people, and we are so incredibly honored that you think it's valuable enough to support us monthly.

So, if you haven't already, I'd ask you to please go over to shamelessjoe.com, the link's in the description, and prayerfully consider becoming a member.

All right, let's get into it.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Jesus isn't actually the first person to say these words.

They're at the beginning of Psalm 22, which is a plea for deliverance from suffering and hostility.

When you read that psalm with an eye to the cross, the connection between Psalm 22 and the crucifixion, they're astonishing.

In fact, the historical details fit in so well, so perfectly, that even today, you will find non-Christians claiming that these details must be Christian additions.

Now, I'm going to address those claims in a moment, but what are the parallels between Psalm 22 and the passion of Christ?

I'm gonna look at the Psalm and compare it to Matthew 27.

Well, the first connection is obvious.

Jesus cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

And that is the opening line from the Psalm.

But then, look at the details.

In verses 7 to 8, the psalmist cries out, All who see me mock at me.

They make mouths at me.

They wag their heads.

'He committed his cause to the Lord.

Let him deliver him.

Let him rescue him, for he delights in him.' Meanwhile, in Matthew, we find this exact same language when he talks about how those passing by the cross of Christ derided him, wagging their heads, while the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him by saying, He trusts in God.

Let God deliver him now if he desires him.

Then we get into what's perhaps the most obvious detail.

It's right there in verse 16, in which the psalmist says, They have pierced my hands and feet.

Matthew doesn't spend much time on this detail, but this is quite literally the crux of the matter.

Matthew just says, When they had crucified him, in verse 35, because crucifixion was considered by ancient authors to be almost unspeakably shameful.

In the words of the Roman orator, Cicero, The very word 'cross' should be far removed not only from the bodies of Roman citizens, but even from their thoughts, their eyes, and their ears, since the mere mention of them are unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man.

So the gospels are actually less explicit about the gory details than you might imagine, but it's still clear how the crucifixion brutally fulfills the piercing of Jesus' hands and feet.

In Psalm 22:18, the psalmist says, They divide my garments among them and for my raiment, that is, garment, they cast lots.

And that is precisely what we find in Matthew's Gospel, verse 35.

It goes on to say, When they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots.

Taken together, I think it's fair to say Psalm 22 seems like a pretty obvious prophecy of Christ.

In fact, the early Christians pointed to this psalm for just this reason.

So, how do skeptics respond to these connections?

Well, largely one of two ways.

One way is to claim that the gospel writers are making up the details of the crucifixion to match Psalm 22.

The other way is to say that Christians actually added details to Psalm 22 to make it match the gospels.

Now, Dan McClellan is a good example of someone making that first claim.

In response to Christians who point out that the psalm describes Jesus on the cross perfectly, he says

Or maybe the authors of Mark and Matthew describe Jesus' death on the cross perfectly so as to resonate with this psalm.

Okay, so here's the deal.

It is absolutely true that Matthew and Mark want you to see the connection between Jesus' death and Psalm 22.

Nobody's denying that.

Nobody's claiming it's just a coincidence that they wrote in those exact words and those phrases.

But the point that we're making is, many of the details that they're pointing to are things that they couldn't just be making up.

We don't need to get into all of the details of the scholarly disputes about the order of the books of the New Testament in terms of when they were written, but it's enough to say this.

Most scholars today are going to say the writings of Saint Paul are older than the gospels, including Matthew and Mark.

And either way, however you resolve that, we know that Christians were orally proclaiming the story of Christ's death and resurrection long before any of the New Testament was written down.

So Matthew and Mark couldn't just be inventing this out of whole cloth.

So let's just start with the basic fact of crucifixion.

I want you to think about the details of Psalm 22, particularly the detail about the piercing of the hands and feet.

It's not just that the psalm sounds like crucifixion, it's that it really doesn't sound like anything but crucifixion.

What I mean is, try to think of a widespread method of execution in antiquity in which the hands and feet of a victim were systematically pierced.

You can't do it.

I mean, I'd love to hear your attempts in the comments below, but there isn't one.

So Psalm 22 is almost certainly referencing crucifixion, but that's really weird, because Psalm 22 is part of the Old Testament.

It's traditionally believed to have been composed by King David, and it was certainly composed before the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC. Why does that matter?

'Cause there's no way that the human author of Psalm 22 could possibly know about the crucifixion.

It hadn't been invented yet.The first documented case of crucifixion was in Persia in 522 BC, and even there, the victim in that case, the Greek tyrant Polycrates, was already dead before being hung up on a cross.

But what's more, we know as a matter of history that crucifixion becomes this common means by which the Romans make an example of non-citizens well after the time of David, well after Psalm 22.

There's a grim description of this, for instance, in the Jewish historian Josephus's description of what happened when Titus crushed the Jewish uprising in the first Jewish-Roman war in the year 70 AD. And we actually have plenty of similar accounts from Roman sources themselves, despite their reluctance to speak in any detail about the ghastly practice.

We even find the Roman historian Tacitus, who decried Christianity as a mischievous superstition, briefly mentioning that Christians are named after one Christus, who had suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.

And that's a clear reference to Christ dying by crucifixion even though, being a typical Roman, he doesn't want to speak of crucifixion explicitly.

So these are the basic facts.

Number one, at the time of Christ, crucifixion was a common means of execution.

Number two, Jesus himself was by all accounts crucified.

Number three, this matches Psalm 22's description of the piercing of hands and feet in a remarkable way.

And number four, Psalm 22 is written before the human author could possibly have known facts one, two, or three.

Now Matthew and Mark point these connections out to us, absolutely, but they don't invent them.

Even if you were to take Matthew and Mark out of the Bible, we'd still know the basic facts about Jesus' death, and we could see for ourselves how much it matches up to the details of Psalm 22.

Okay, but that still leaves us with another objection.

Maybe the reason Psalm 22 sounds so much like the New Testament isn't because the New Testament authors were making things up.

Maybe it's because later Christians made up the whole piercing of hands and feet part of Psalm 22.

That's the claim you'll find people like Rabbi Tovia Singer make.

What did the church do?

It's mind-blowing.

So imagine you've got these words, Like a lion they're at my hands and my feet, and you, you've got it on Microsoft Word.

You selected the words like a lion, so you have now white letters on a blue background, okay?

You tap your Delete key.

They disappear.

And then you type in, They pierced.

The text now is made to read, They pierced my hands and my feet.

And, and so the t- the Jewish scripture, the Hebrew Bible, listen very carefully this is going to be offensive, was raped.

I selected that word.

Was raped by the church.

He's right about one thing that is wildly offensive.

It also happens to be false, though.

So let's start with the truth.

If you open a Jewish Bible today, like the JPS translation, he's right that you're not gonna find anything in the psalm today about them piercing the Messiah's hands and feet.

Instead, it probably says something like this, For dogs have encompassed me.

A company of evildoers have enclosed me.

Like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet.

Okay, so what is going on?

Well, despite Singer's hyperbolic language, this doesn't appear to have been intentional malfeasance by either side.

Nobody was using Microsoft Word and going in and deleting things.

In fact, that's actually part of the problem.

Nobody was using Microsoft Word at all.

Both Christian and Jewish copyists are copying handwritten Hebrew texts, and this whole debate turns on whether a particular word in Psalm 22 ends in a vav or yod.

It's the equivalent in English basically of trying to make out if something in handwriting is an I or an L. So the standard Jewish argument is that the word in question ends in a yod.

If that's right, then the psalm reads, Like a lion my hands and my feet, and that is the way the 9th century Masoretic Text renders the passage and it is the way most Jewish sources today render it.

But that's not actually how earlier manuscripts, including earlier Jewish manuscripts like Aquilas rendered the verse.

And what's worse, Like a lion my hands and my feet, is incoherent.

It's meaningless.

Are you trying to say you have paws?

It's why the JPS translation has to add, Like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet, even though absolutely nothing in the Hebrew says They are at.

You can actually see Rabbi Singer sneak the words in when he's telling us what he claims the Hebrew actually says.

So chiuri, the prefect means like a lion, yodai, my hands, veraglay, my feet.

Like a lion, all my enemies are at my hands and my feet.

So he adds a whole my enemies are at that is just absolutely absent from the Hebrew in any version.

So if you take the yod interpretation, this is what you're facing.

You're left with a meaningless sentence fragment, and you have to add some words not found in scripture just to turn it into something coherent.

Specifically, you have to at least add a verb because Like a lion, my hands and my feet doesn't have a verb at all.

So while the 1917 JPS translation has, as I said, Like a lion, they're at my hands and my feet, the 1985 new JPS has, Like lions, they maul my hands and feet.

Abraham Cohen had, Like a lion, they have bitten my hands and feet, but in each case, the translators here aren't translating at all.

They're making things up.

They're adding verbs.

They're adding words.

They're plugging them in.

As Professor Michael V. Flowers put it, One could insert other verbs into the text with equal justification.

From a text critical standpoint, this kind of approach is useless.

Moreover, lions do not attack the hands and feet of their prey as this is an ineffective way to kill.

They certainly do not crush, much less pin the hands and feet of their prey.

So the translation isn't really a translation at all.

It's people making up verbs and putting them into the Bible to try to make it work, and the resulting image isn't even coherent or accurate to how lions attack.

The obvious alternative is that the original word ended with a vav, not a yod .

and that it meant they have dug, meaning they have pierced, my hands and my feet.

Now, this then gets accurately translated into the Greek version of Psalm 22 as, They have dug.

And by the way, despite Rabbi Singer's claims, this isn't done by some later Christians like Origen in the third century.

No, the Greek versions of the Psalms are some of the earliest texts, right after the Pentateuch, to be translated into Greek, well before the time of Christ.

And this also matches the Syriac Peshitta, unless he's gonna claim that Origen or somebody tinkers with that as well.

Now, you'll notice the advantage of reading it as, They have dug, or, They have pierced my hands and my feet, are threefold.

First, it makes better grammatical and contextual sense than, Like a lion, my hands and my feet.

Second, it's true that lions are mentioned in Psalm 22, but that actually accounts for why an innocent copyist might have mistakenly put a yod where a vav belonged.

There's no need to posit a cabal of conspirators in either direction.

And third, reading Psalm 22 in this way matches other Old Testament messianic prophecies.

Most famously, Zechariah 12:10 says of the Messiah, When they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him as one weeps over a firstborn.

But fourth, and I've admittedly been sitting on this one, amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, we actually have a scrap of Psalm 22 taken from the Nahal Hever Cave.

And what do we find there?

Well, the word in question ends in a vav, matching the Christian rendering of the passage, but admittedly, a vav that is easily mistaken for a yod.

So again, seemingly an innocent mistake, but the Christians were certainly right on this one.

Okay, that leaves skeptics with only a few ways of trying to dismiss the Psalm 22 prophecy then.

One of those is to say, Okay, even if the original Psalm does say, 'They dug my hands and my feet,' that's not the same as saying pierced, right?

But to dig out, to excavate, is not to pierce, and that's absolutely not describing anything remotely associated with the description of Jesus' crucifixion in the New Testament.

Look, this just is frankly not true.

In the Hebrew of Psalm 40:6, the author expresses his fidelity to God by saying, Ears thou hast dug for me.

And the verb there is ʻqarā, to excavate, to make a pit.

So there's two ways of understanding what the psalmist is saying there.

One is that he literally just means God has given him ear holes to listen.

The other is that he's referring to the practice, mentioned in places like Exodus 21, of piercing the ear of a slave with an awl.

But either way you understand the passage, it's a clear instance in which making a hole in somebody's ear is described by using the Hebrew word for digging or excavating.

It is not at all farfetched to see it also being used to describe making a hole in somebody's hands or feet.

Now, sure, dig is not the word we would use for either of those things in English, but the Bible wasn't written in English.

So dig or dug is a literal translation, but pierced makes more sense to our English ears.

That then leaves one final argument, which I'm honestly surprised to see people like McClellan even attempting to make.

But, They pierced my hands and my feet, is a mistranslation, pure and simple.

It is definitely not that, and there are a number of reasons for that.

To begin, this verse isn't quoted anywhere in the New Testament, and no one understood this as a reference to the crucifixion until the year 1535.

It's wild to me how confidently wrong he is about stuff like this so regularly.

In fact, Christians immediately recognized the amazing connections between Psalm 22 and the crucifixion.

As we've seen, they're kinda too obvious to miss.

And so especially in the second century, which is really the first time we're gonna see direct Christian-Jewish apologetics, we find Christians pointing to this passage.

I'll give you just two examples.

First of all, St. Justin Martyr, in his dialogue with Trypho, who was Jewish, he points to this verse as referring to the suffering and to the cross in a parable of mystery.

Since, quote, When they crucified Him, driving in the nails, they pierced His hands and feet.

End quote.

He even points out that none of the other purported messiahs died by crucifixion like this.

Again, it seems so obvious it could only be talking about Christ on the cross.

Now strikingly, even though Justin points to other times when the Jewish and Christian versions of the Old Testament disagree, he doesn't say anything of the sort here.

Nobody seems to be aware that the verse is really saying something about a lion.

So, Justin is writing those words around the year 150.

That is well before Origen, the kinda bad guy in Rabbi Singer's version of events, and a really long time before 1535, as McClellan claims.

And we see similar arguments being made by Tertullian around the year 200, referring to the Psalm's description of the digging of the hands and feet as foretelling the peculiar atrocity of the cross.

All right, so where does that leave us?

Despite claims this must be a Christian interpolation, this is in fact what we find in the oldest witnesses, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, nearly a thousand years before the Masoretic Text that claims it's, Like a lion, my hands and my feet.

And so we can say on good authority that Psalm 22 graphically and accurately describes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in ways that the psalmist couldn't have guessed, and that the evangelists couldn't have invented, all of which I think shows us that Jesus truly is the Messiah.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmair.

God bless you.