In the mid 1970s some theatrical entrepreneurs started thinking about a movie theater statistic: Attendance was lowest onTuesday and Wednesday. Could they fill more seats by offering a subscription film series on those nights, presenting great plays to a nationwide audience? I got season tickets (or saw a lot of the films, anyway), as did some of my high school friends, my father, and some of his faculty friends. I was excited to see Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and enjoyed Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel as the leads. Lost in the Stars was haunting, and I loved Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which included Brel singing one song–“Ne Me Quitte Pas”–after the intermission. I recognized it as the original of Terry Jacks’ hit “If You Go Away,” but better. (I found out Jacks’ other hit, “Seasons in the Sun” was also drawn from Brel.)
I saw a lot of other films and enjoyed them, including Robert Shaw’s take-off on the Eichmann trial, The Man in the Glass Booth. Israeli agents kidnap Arthur Goldman and take him to Jerusalem to stand trial as a Nazi war criminal. At one point in the trial his assistant, Charlie, says something like, “Of course he’s a Jew. Who else could possibly be so anti-Semitic?” (I think it was at the end of Act I, but when I perused a copy of the play on a recent visit to BYU’s library I couldn’t find it.) A nice bit of comic relief in a fairly dark play, and poignantly prophetic.
I think about that line often when thinking about Jesus’s conversations with the Pharisees. Nothing Jesus says to them is harsher than the opening chapter of Isaiah.
13 Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.
14 Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.
15 And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.
Even the harsh rhetoric of Matthew 23 is not harsher than Isaiah, indeed echoes Isaiah. Consider verse 15
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
alongside Isaiah 1:4
Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.
The obvious rejoinder is that Jesus was not Isaiah, and Isaiah’s followers didn’t break with Judaism and start a religious movement which used his harsh words to justify persecuting and murdering Jews. Fair enough, but I’m not trying to justify anti-Jewish sentiment in the New Testament, I’m trying to understand the original context Matthew and Mark were trying to create for Jesus’s words. Both take pains to place Jesus in the context of the great prophets of the Tanakh. Eventually, maybe quickly, the context changed into prooftext and pretext. Passages that showed Jesus as the new Moses coming out of Egypt, out of the wilderness, with God’s word, became prooftexts that Jesus had supplanted Moses, along with his law.
The difference between prooftexting and contexting may be subtle, but consider as example a passage from Matthew 2 we looked at recently in the Gospel Doctrine lesson.
16 Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.
17 Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,
18 In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.
As Jim Faulconer pointed out in class one day many years ago, Jeremiah’s words are not a prophecy of children being slaughtered, they’re an allusion to Rachel weeping for Joseph and Benjamin–or rather to Jacob weeping for his dead wife, his reportedly dead son, and his lastborn just summoned to join his older brother (See Genesis 42;36).
Now, I’m sure I’m not the only believer who has read both Jeremiah and Matthew, and listened to both many times, but never bothered to look at Jeremiah 31:15 and ask why was Rachel weeping?
Thus saith the Lord; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.
She’s weeping because her children are being “carried away captive unto Babylon” (Jeremiah 40:1). But it wasn’t until I was looking at the footnotes on LDS.org today that it occurred to me Jeremiah is doing the same thing Matthew was. Matthew is looking for a way to tie the grief of Bethlehem’s parents to a greater tradition of their people. Jeremiah is looking for a larger context for the grief of deportation, a context that includes mourning from the beloved wife of the founder.
But Matthew’s putting Jesus into the context Jeremiah created for his captives, became a prooftext for Jesus as Messiah, which got translated to the term Christ–a further loss of context. As the church grew from a group of messianic Jews to Greek Christians it lost an understanding of how the Jewish prophets worked. Consider this passage, which could have come from Isaiah or Jeremiah.
I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.
The writer here is using the same rhetorical technique Isaiah used when he called his people “a people laden with iniquity,” the same technique of choosing a striking image to emphasize the point:
The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.
(Isaiah 1:5-6)
The passage is clearly about hypocrisy, about people “which say they are Jews” but don’t live the covenants and teachings taught in the synagogue. The passage is directed toward Jews, meant to resonate with Jews as a call to repentance, but the phrase “synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9, 3:9) took on its own life, as if a senior apostle was to give a talk in General Conference exhorting musicians in the Church to build the kingdom, to make sure they are not singing in Satan’s Tabernacle Choir, and then at the next Conference the picketers carried signs reading “Satan’s Tabernacle Choir.” (There, I’ve finally come up with a simile to match those Rebecca West sprinkles throughout Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.)
We usually think of the Apostasy as “transgressing the laws, changing the ordinances, and breaking the everlasting covenant” (Isaiah 24:5), but I want to explore the possibility this year that the Apostasy was also tied to the split, that when the believers followed the example of those at Antioch and called themselves Christians instead of Jews they lost the Jewish way of reading and understanding scripture, lost a way of thinking about and understanding how texts behave.
I’ll start the exploration by looking at a particularly troubling text that has inspired a lot of misbehavior among Christians and suggest what I think it meant in its original context. In Acts 2 Peter makes a long speech to a group of Jews. The last verse is the most troublesome, but in the interest of context rather than fragmenttext I’ll quote the whole thing.
14 But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words:
15 For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.
16 But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel;
17 And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:
18 And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy:
19 And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke:
20 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come:
21 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
22 Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know:
23 Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain:
24 Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.
25 For David speaketh concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved:
26 Therefore did my heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad; moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope:
27 Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.
28 Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance.
29 Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.
30 Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne;
31 He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.
32 This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.
33 Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear.
34 For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand,
35 Until I make thy foes thy footstool.
36 Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.
The ideas of collective Jewish responsibility for Jesus’s death that grew out of verses 23 and 36 and other such references have been so destructive that even The Jewish Annotated New Testament, careful to point out how the Gospels portray Jesus as a Jew observing halakhik law, doesn’t try to recover the Jewish context. Gary Gilbert’s comment on v. 36 paraphrases it this way, “Luke again (v. 24) distinguishes between God’s act in making Jesus Messiah and Jews who crucify him.”
Gilbert begins a sidebar, “Jews and the Death of Jesus” (204), “Luke-Acts presents Jews as those primarily responsible for the death of Jesus.” Luke-Acts acknowledges both God’s plan for Jesus’s death “and that the Jews acted in ignorance,” but sees that ignorance as “inexcusable because they should have been able to discern God’s plan as set forth in the words of the prophets.”
The sidebar is a pretty good summary of how Christians have seen (and many still do) the Jews’ responsibility for Jesus’ death, but there’s more happening in Chapter 2, and since I haven’t heard anyone else comment on it I’ll close with a brief comment.
First, a question. Why is there a large audience of Jews for Peter’s speech? Another question, Why does Peter begin the speech by denying that he and his friends are drunk?
Christians generally understand that Acts 2 takes place on the day of Pentecost, but forget that Pentecost is a Jewish festival, or rather the Greek name for Shavuot. Peter and the others are there because they’re celebrating a harvest festival that became linked to “the time when Moses received the Torah” (201, Acts 2:1 note), an appropriate time for believers to receive the Holy Spirit.
Glossing the phrase in v. 4 “began to speak in other languages,” Gilbert says, “here, as opposed to the discussion of tongues in 1 Cor 14.6-19, the speaking is in languages that are understood by native speakers in attendance.” But they might as well have been unknown tongues for some observers, who hear the babel of people speaking from new wine, which “has not yet had time to begin turning to vinegar, so its alcoholic content is at its height” (2:13 note).
Peter begins his speech by affirming the Jewish identity and beliefs of the Messianic Jews who have just heard the Gospel preached in their own languages, then moves on to talk about the Gospel they’ve been hearing, and ends with a rhetorical flourish about “Jesus whom ye slew.” If it seems cavalier to dismiss as a rhetorical flourish a phrase that has wrought so much damage over millennia, consider what Peter doesn’t say, “Do not repent. It is too late.” (The last line of X. J. Kennedy’s delightful “Faces in a Bestiary” (p. 21)).
At the end of Peter’s speech his audience is “pricked in their heart,” and asks, “What shall we do?” Rather than saying “Do not repent. It is too late,” rather that saying anything further about slaying Jesus he says,
38 Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.
39 For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.
There’s not a word here about continuing guilt, or guilt being passed down to the thirtieth or fortieth generation. If we see Peter’s reply as a statement of intent, a statement of what he meant his speech to accomplish, we can see his words as intended to bring his hearers to repentance and belief. The end of Peter’s speech
40 And with many other words did he testify and exhort, saying, Save yourselves from this untoward generation.
echoes John the Baptist in Luke 3:7. But there’s a difference. John’s reply to the multitude is a question designed to convict them of their guilt.
Then said he to the multitude that came forth to be baptized of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
(See also Jesus’s question about John “What went ye out for to see” in Luke 7:24-26)
Peter doesn’t need to convict his audience of guilt. They may have thought they were seeing “a reed shaken with the wind,” or babbling people in soft raiment, but they’ve changed their mind. Luke emphasizes their conversion in the next verse:
41 Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls.
Unfortunately, Acts 2 is not the end of the rhetoric about the Jews killing Jesus, and the stakes rise as Peter and others repeat the rhetoric.
We’ll look at this more later. For now it’s your turn.