Romans 6:15-23 -- "Free - and a Slave"

[The index for the series is here.]

I am using the Pastor's titles for these posts. The appropriate links are:

• Audio file
• Note sheet

The text:

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A Comment I Made Elsewhere

This was a post-size comment I made over at Street Prophets in a diary called "End Times: A set of prophecies or a set of hallucinations?". The real answer to that question in my mind is: "who knows?". Typically, it appears to me that prophecy isn't:

1. proved until it comes to pass
2. clear until it comes to pass

So, read the diary - and then this comment (go to the link if you want to see the responses):

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There are so many things here that are just wrong. Then, there are the things here that are certainly not agreed to by all New Testament scholars. I find it hard to take your source as an expert.

Let's start with just plain wrong:

Eventually, the city fell, and the people were slaughtered. Those remaining were expelled from the land. This is the time of the Diaspora--the scattering of the Jews, who were dispersed around the Mediterranean--Asia Minor, Greece, Northern Africa and Europe.

Actually,

Modern historians have come to view the Bar-Kokhba Revolt as being of decisive historic importance. The massive destruction and loss of life occasioned by the revolt has led some scholars to date the beginning of the Jewish diaspora from this date. They note that, unlike the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War chronicled by Josephus, the majority of the Jewish population of Judea was either killed, exiled, or sold into slavery after the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, and Jewish religious and political authority was suppressed far more brutally. After the revolt the Jewish religious center shifted to the Babylonian Jewish community and its scholars.

The next

The author, who we know only as John, had lived through the horrors that accompanied fall of the city.

is only really, really wrong if it means the author was actually in the city during the siege. John was actually in Ephesis in Asia Minor, where he had gone after the deaths of Peter and Paul in Rome in the early 60's. He took over Paul's duties with the church there. Christians, in general, had been forced out of Jerusalem and Judea prior to the Great Jewish War.

[The Christians still in Judea, etc. sat out the war in Pella. Indeed, their unwillingness to involve themselves in this war cemented the final split of the Christians and the Jews.]

Then,

When you are dealing with an end times fundamentalist Christian, you are dealing with a person who believes that the Bible was written by God- God writes it and there is a secret code and if you are in the know you will know the code and the elect will know the code. The Bible itself becomes a magical book, a secret script.

Huh? Who believes this? What folks believe is that prophecy in scripture is never exact, is almost always drapped in allegory and symbolic language, and therefore the events (such as Christ's life) that are prophesied usually help clarify the prophesy when they occur. However, there is no "secret code" or "secret knowledge" - it is all written for all to see. Then, on to opinions not shared by all:

The people who actually knew Jesus, the twelve, none of them left writings for us. All of these writings are written well after the death of Jesus.

What is "well after"? What counts as "actually knowing Jesus"? Only three of the 12 are credited even by conservative scholars with New Testament works - John, Matthew, and Peter. However, James, probably Jesus' brother, probably knew him ;-) but wasn't one of the twelve. The Apostles accepted that Paul "knew" Jesus, at least after His resurrection - there is no other reason they would have accepted Paul into the church after his history. Luke and Mark have never been thought of as companions of Jesus - just companions of companions: Paul and Peter respectively. I think it is pretty clear that all of the New Testament works (except Revelations) were completed by 64AD (see Redating the New Testament or these Introductions for the arguments) - or within 30ish years of Jesus' death - and all within the possible lifetimes of the folks who knew him. They were almost all written to pass on knowledge to the church after it became clear that Jesus was not coming back immediately. I believe the earliest of the New Testament works was James (see article linked above) within 15 years of the death of Christ.

Narrowing to Revelations, there are two general views (with a bunch of other minor ones) - preterist (with postmillienialism and amillienialism) and premillienial - related to whether Revelations is looking at events already occurred (as the person interviewed believes); or is a prophetic work. It is interesting that the preterist view is key to replacement theology - that the Christian church has replaced the Jewish people in the promises of God. A small sliver of that group are the Reconstructionists - those real Dominionists - who believe that Revelations shows that only through destruction of what exists and replacement by the Church will God's Kingdom be advanced. These are the folks (along with the preterists in general) that believe God's Kingdom on earth is possible through the actions of Christians (or is spiritually here now).

The premillienialist on the other hand do not think that the events in 70AD resulted in the "end of the Age"; and that therefore the destruction of Jerusalem was not the event looked at in scripture. They believe that human Christians are not capable of creating a Kingdom of God on earth prior to the actual return of Christ to lead that Kingdom - and do not support the Dominionist idea that the governments on Earth must become Christian before Christ can return.

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I am thinking that last section on "end times" theological differences is pretty weak - it just isn't an area I concentrate on. Y'all can help me straighten out/deepen my understanding.

It isn't an area of interest because I am pretty sure it shouldn't be for a follower of Christ. He said to be ready, but He also made it pretty clear we would not see the scenario coming when it came. So, I think folks who are focused on when the end times are going to get here would be better off focusing on now. Tell me if you think I am wrong about that.

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John or The Fourth Evangelist: Part II

[The point of this post is to draw in both Critical and Conservative Bible scholars for, particularly, a discussion of The Gospel of John. I am not such a scholar, and I am posting my view on this - based on the work of others- to kick off that discussion. Certainly, it would be nice to have a good discussion of this here - or an "elsewhere" I am looking to create]

As the Catholic Encyclopedia points out:

The authenticity and authority of St. John's Gospel form the great battlefield of present N. T. criticism. They had been attacked as early as 1792 by a certain Evanson. The majority of contemporary critics incline to Harnack's view, which is that the Fourth Gospel was composed by John the Presbyter or the "elder" referred to in a fragment by Papias, and asserted by the Harnackians to be distinct from the Apostle and a disciple of the latter.

I think there are theological reasons for this assault on the authorship of John: as pointed out by the Catholic Encyclopedia article, John is mainly a theological work - not primarily an historical one - and it destroys the modern view that the divinity, and therefore the divine authority, of Jesus is a creation of the post-Apostolic church.

This part of the post will not be comprehensive - I would hope the reader will follow the links to the many much longer articles on the topic. However, I will try to at least deal with Ben's statement quoted in Part I:

I'm willing to concede more room than many of my colleagues for 'apostolic' authorship of many contested NT texts, but it is almost inconceivable (based on internal evidence alone) that, for instance, the Fourth Gospel was written by the Beloved Disciple who was John son of Zebedee.

To draw the distinction very sharply, I think it is almost inconceivable that scholars would discount the universal early church testimony to the authorship of the fourth Gospel by just that son of Zebedee based on the arguments I have seen presented. I offer the following resources for those wishing to investigate the Conservative arguments against the Critical view of John :

• The Introduction to the section on John in B.W. Johnson's New Testament Commentary Vol. III (1886):

  If, then, John did not write the Fourth Gospel, it must have been written about the time he died by a great Unknown, the mightiest mind of the Gospel historians and palmed off on the men who knew John personally and had been educated at his feet as the genuine composition of the last of the apostles. This must have been done so skillfully that no dissenting voice in the Church protested against the fraud!

  This expresses exactly why I hold Critical scholars to a high level of proof if they are going to say the Apostle John's authorship of John is "inconceivable".



• For a discussion of the difference between an anonymous work and a pseudoepigraphic one go here:

  "Until recently, most scholars tacitly assumed that the four gospels first circulated anonymously and that the present titles were first attached to them about A.D. 125 . . . Now, however, this consensus has been vigorously challenged by Martin Hengel. Hengel examines the practice of book distribution in the ancient world, where titles were necessary to identify a work to which any reference was made . . . Tertullian contends that "a work ought not to be recognized, which holds not its head erect ... which gives no promise of credibility from the fullness of its title and the just profession of its author." Hengel argues that as soon as two or more gospels were publicly read in any one church--a phenomenon that certainly occurred, he thinks, not later than A.D. 100--it would have been necessary to distinguish between them by some such device as a title. The unanimity of the attributions in the second century cannot be explained by anything other than the assumption that the titles were part of the works from the beginning. It is inconceivable, he argues, that the Gospels could circulate anonymously for up to sixty years, and then in the second century suddenly display unanimous attribution to certain authors . . . Hengel concludes that the four canonical gospels were never even formally anonymous.

• "Background to the Study of John":

  Views on the authorship, origin, and historicity of the Fourth Gospel have changed drastically over the last century and a half. One hundred fifty years ago, if one had asked a New Testament scholar which of the four gospels gave us the most information about the life and ministry of Jesus, the answer would almost invariably have been, “The Gospel of John.” Today if one asks a typical New Testament scholar the same question, the Gospel of John would be the last choice as a source of information about Jesus (if it was viewed as having anything to say about this topic at all) . . . This state of affairs held sway until only about two decades ago. Things have now begun to change again with regard to views on the Fourth Gospel as a legitimate source for information about Jesus’ life and ministry.

• "Major Differences Between John and the Synoptic Gospels"
• Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel of John
• "The Gospel of John: Introduction, Argument, Outline"

I will follow this last by Daniel Wallace, primarily, for sake of unity throughout the series: unless otherwise stated it is almost all a direct quote, paraphrase, and/or re-arrangement of Wallace's argument. Since Ben mentioned the internal evidence as adequate (and seemingly overwhelming) to prove the Apostle John was not the book's author, I will focus there (and leave the reader to look at the external evidence in the links on their own).

Internal Evidence of Authorship

Against John's authorship: Wallace traces three areas:

1. the identification of the “beloved disciple,”: Although the identification of the beloved disciple with the apostle John has been alleged as a proof of Johannine authorship, one problem plagues this certitude: would any writer be so arrogant as to identify himself in such a manner?
   • However, not only is ἀγαπάω rather than φιλέω used in this designation (suggesting more of a commendation of the subject than the object), but
   • John, in his old age, might well have adopted an affectionate term given to him by others in this self-description. “Far from it being an evidence of arrogance, as is so often suggested, it may perhaps be regarded as a sign of modesty" -- Guthrie


2. apparent contradictions with the synoptic material: Where John and the synoptics do overlap (only 8-10% of the time), there seem to be inherent contradictions, especially in three areas: the cleansing of the temple, the presentation of dominical sayings, and the chronology of the Lord’s supper.
   • Although John places the temple cleansing early in Jesus’ ministry, there is no necessary chronological indicator in John 2. Thus, John may have moved it forward for theological/motif reasons. Further, there is a good possibility that Jesus cleansed the temple twice
   • Although the Johannine Jesus speaks with a different voice than the synoptic Jesus, only if we assume both that (a) only ipsissima verba constitute authentic dominical sayings and (b) Jesus must speak the same way, regardless of his audience or locale (Galilee in the synoptics, Judea in John especially), does this criticism hold water. In our view, John has indeed hellenized the voice of Jesus for the sake of his largely Gentile audience. But this is not to deny his accuracy, for he basically gives us the ipsissima vox, not the ipsissima verba of Jesus.
   • The Lord’s Supper in John does pose major historical difficulties with the presentation in the first three gospels.
     • Wallace leaves it at saying that there are solutions available which, in the final analysis, may indeed show independence, but not contradiction; and suggests particularly reading H. W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ, 76-90; and I. H. Marshall, Last Supper and Lord’s Supper, 30-56.
     • Deffinbaugh also dismisses this while giving resourses:

       There are many technical questions involved in the timing of this meal, which are of much interest to scholars, but not of much profit to our exposition. Suffice it to say that John is not really interested in such matters, either. He must have read the Synoptic Gospels before he wrote this Gospel, and yet he did not see it profitable to clarify every apparent discrepancy. For a more careful look into these issues and possible solutions, see D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, pp. 455-458.

     • Johnson, however, says:

       To the same conclusions the Hebraic style of the book bears testimony. Dr. Ewald, the greatest Hebrew scholar of the nineteenth century, declares “The Greek language of our author bears the strongest marks of a genuine Hebrew who, born among the Jews of the Holy Land, and having grown up among them, had learned the Greek language in later life, but still exhibits in the midst of the whole the spirit and air of his native tongue.”

For John's authorship: Ben implied that the internal evidence runs against the Apostle John writing John; but there is positive internal evidence for his authorship to go with the rebuttals of the evidence against above.

1. Westcott's Concentric Proofs which according to Harris have never been refuted - only ignored.



2. Incidental Evidence:
   • The author uses the historical present more than any other gospel writer (161 times) and in such a way as to indicate vividness of portrayal. One should note the especially heavy use in chapter 4 and the passion narrative. This suggests the vivid recollections of an eyewitness.
   • In 19:35 and 21:24-25 the most natural reading of the text suggests that an eyewitness wrote the gospel. But this has been debated: “advocates of theories of authorship which deny an eyewitness author treat the clear testimony of this verse [21:24] as a redactional device.… By such a method any embarrassing evidence can be disposed of."
   • The beloved disciple shows up with Peter on several occasions; belongs to a group of seven in 21:2 (Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee, and two others) — and here, he must be one of the last four unnamed disciples; and nowhere in this gospel does John the disciple appear by name (even though he is named twenty times in the synoptics). This strongly infers either that the author of this work was absolutely unaware of John the disciple—a possibility which seems quite remote—or he was John the disciple.
   • Independence from the synoptic tradition coupled with early and widespread acceptance by the church. The fact that over 90% of the material in this gospel is unique to itself, coupled with its early acceptance by the church, argues very strongly that it was authored by some authority. This, coupled with the further fact that John was widely employed in early gnostic circles yet was not thereby abandoned by the orthodox, argues quite compellingly that all quarters recognized its authority. A work not done by an apostle would hardly have met such a reception.

Going back to Johnson's statement quoted above: it will take far more proof than Critical scholars have presented up to now to overwhelm the external proof in the testimony of the early church; and the internal evidence which I think favors John as the author of John. Certainly, his authorship isn't "inconceivable".

Dating the Gospel of John

I am not going to go into this here. I will only state that I agree with John A.T. Robinson that John pre-dates the destruction of Jerusalem - I think it was written before 64 AD; and that John did not have access to the synoptics when he wrote it. There are many arguments on this in most of the quoted pieces and the reader can draw their own conclusion. The one conclusion, however, that I believe is impossible, based on manuscript evidence from 20th century archeology, is that John was written anywhere after the 90's.

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John or The Fourth Evangelist: Part I

[The point of this post is to draw in both Critical and Conservative Bible scholars for, particularly, a discussion of The Gospel of John. I am not such a scholar, and I am posting my view on this - based on the work of others- to kick off that discussion. Certainly, it would be nice to have a good discussion of this here - or an "elsewhere" I am looking to create]

I have a pet peeve towards folks who ascribe in some degree to Higher Critical views of the Bible. Let me define that as well as I can: I am not talking about textual, or lower, criticism, which is working hard at reconstructing, as much as possible, the original text of the Bible - very necessary and very good. I am talking about the "Higher" Criticism of the last two centuries:

Higher criticism, in particular, focuses on the sources of a document and tries to determine the authorship, date and place of composition of the text.

In particular:

Higher criticism originally referred to the work of German Biblical scholars. After the path-breaking work on the New Testament by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834), the next generation which included scholars such as David Friedrich Strauss (1808 – 1874) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) in the mid-nineteenth century analyzed the historical records of the Middle East from Christian and Old Testament times in search of independent confirmation of events related in the Bible. These latter scholars built on the tradition of Enlightenment and Rationalist thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Hegel and the French rationalists.

Let me make this clear: my pet peeve isn't that folks question the authorship and authority of the Bible: I expect that from materialists and rationalists. It isn't even that folks who consider themselves followers of Christ take up some of the materialist and rationalist pre-suppositions and arguments of Higher Criticism. My pet peeve (its name is Pooky) is about the arrogance/ assumptions of some of those Christian adherents (the non-Christian ones are not the issue here) who seem to believe true scholarship rests in the Critical camp; and that Conservative scholars aren't. Examine these recent comments in threads I have been involved in: First this

Given the currently presumed dates of composition of the canonical gospels, with Mark thought to have been written some 50 years after Jesus's death, and the others somewhat after that, there are many (including me) who feel that in the interest of verisimilitude, it might be more appropriate to refer to the gospels as written by the "Markan" community, the "Matthean" community, the "Lukan" community and (especially) the "Johannine" community, each of whom wrote - rhetorically, as was all current testamentary material of the time - to express their particular understanding of the events the gospels describe, as well as the doctrinal position taken by each of these communities toward those events.

and then this

I'm willing to concede more room than many of my colleagues for 'apostolic' authorship of many contested NT texts, but it is almost inconceivable (based on internal evidence alone) that, for instance, the Fourth Gospel was written by the Beloved Disciple who was John son of Zebedee.

These are only a taste. I have bumped into this same argument, and its variations, many times with assumptions by the makers that this is "just a known fact". The first quote presents these books being written by "communities of believers", or disciples, of these authors long after the event, and the fall of Jerusalem (a very critical event in this discussion). The second quote presents it as being "almost inconceivable based on internal evidence alone" that John was written by the Apostle John. Ben, in an unquoted part of this comment, also implies that all "scholarship" supports this conclusion. However, Conservative scholars find this Critical conception inadequate to overcome the universal, and early, belief in the Apostle John as the author of John. So, are the Critical scholars true scholars and the Conservative scholars some group of anti-intellectual apologists living on beachfront property on DeNile? That is the discussion I want to start.

Dating outside The Gospel of John

First, about that "Mark thought to have been written some 50 years after Jesus's death" comment above: this is important because Mark is generally thought, by both Critical and Conservative scholars, to have been a source available used in writing Matthew and Luke; and perhaps John. So, if Mark wasn't written until the 80's - that pushes everyone else farther back. However, certainly Conservative scholars do not push Mark back that far - the conclusion of this very good review, written by Daniel Wallace of the dating issue (as well as the internal and external evidences of authorship):

In sum, Mark should be dated before the production of Luke’s gospel which we date no later than 62 CE. Sometime in the mid-50s is most probable

So, first we have Mark in the 50's (25ish years after Jesus' death), while Peter (who Mark recorded) was still alive. In scientific support, a piece of Mark was found in Qumran cave #7 - 7q5 - and is dated as pre-70 AD.

Now, Luke is dated by Conservative scholars no later than 62 AD (29 years after Jesus' death); because otherwise its companion work (which it must have proceeded), Acts, would not have mentioned Paul's final imprisonment, but not his death that came as a result. Wallace (from the Acts link below) does not find the two Critical explanations of this satisfactory:

1. He did not want to mention the trial’s outcome. The opinions put forth for this refraine are very numerous—a telling argument against them. Some argue that it would put too much emphasis on the man rather than on his mission; that it would hint at a parallel with the death of Christ, which would be inappropriate; that the readers knew the rest of the story and hence Luke did not need to go on; etc. As Guthrie remarks, “It is not sufficient, on the other hand, to propose a theory of the author’s intention without supplying an adequate motive for the intention, and it may be questioned whether this condition has been fulfilled



2. Luke intended to write a third volume. This was the view of Spitta, Zahn, Ramsey, and W. L. Knox. It is based on the use of πρῶτος in Acts 1:1—a word which, in classical Greek, indicated “first of at least three.” That it does not do so in hellenistic Greek is quite evident from the data supplied in BAGD; further that Luke does not use the superlative as a true superlative is evident from his discussion of the first census of Quirinius in Luke 2:2: scholars have had enough trouble trying to locate two censuses of Quirinius, let alone three! Further, even if Luke did use πρῶτος as a true superlative on occasion, why would he break his three-volume work here? This explanation seems a quite desperate expedient.

All in all, that Acts ends where it does is a great embarrassment to those who do not maintain a pre-64 date. Robinson, who bases much of his Redating the New Testament

[Bishop Robinson, a theological modernist whose "Honest to God" made him controversial within the Anglican communion, began this book as what he labels "a theological joke": "I thought I would see how far one could get with the hypothesis that the whole of the New Testament was written before 70", the year in which the Roman army sacked and burned the Temple of Jerusalem. As it turned out, he got much further than he had ever expected, a journey made more impressive by his lack of any predisposition toward a "conservative" point of view. - commenter at Amazon

he wrote in his work . . . that past scholarship was based on a "tyranny of unexamined assumptions" and an "almost willful blindness".]

on an early (62) date of Acts, argues ably for this view. In particular, he points out that Adolph von Harnack, “whose massive scholarship and objectivity of judgment contrast with so many who have come after him,” is still worth quoting precisely because “on this subject he was forced slowly and painfully to change his mind.” Two snippets from Harnack’s The Date of Acts will have to suffice: “Throughout eight whole chapters St. Luke keeps his readers intensely interested in the progress of the trial of St. Paul, simply that he may in the end completely disappoint them—they learn nothing of the final result of the trial!” “The more clearly we see that the trial of St. Paul, and above all his appeal to Caesar, is the chief subject of the last quarter of Acts, the more hopeless does it appear that we can explain why the narrative breaks off as it does, otherwise than by assuming that the trial had actually not yet reached its close. It is no use to struggle against this conclusion.”

However, this flies, as does Matthew, in the face of the great underlying pre-supposition of German Higher Criticism: that miracles and prophecies are impossible and therefore Jesus could not have prophesied the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD in the Olivet Discourse. In fact, it is this rationalist anti-supernaturalist presupposition that marks Higher Criticism in general; and can be seen in the theology of many scholars of the school generally. Read both "Luke: Introduction, Outline, and Argument" and its Acts counterpart for a continued discussion of the authorship and dating of Luke and Acts

Of course, if Luke can get away with the Olivet Discourse as prediction, so can Matthew. If you are a Critical scholar who operates under the presupposition that prophecy is impossible, then Matthew cannot. Again, there is scientific support for a pre-temple destruction Matthew: The Magdalen Papyrus (P64) with a piece of Matthew 26 which has been re-dated by new scientific technologies and handwriting analysis to 30-70 AD. Also, the solution to the "Synoptic problem" favored by Wallace in his pieces quoted here is that, while both Matthew and Luke had access to Mark, Matthew and Luke wrote without seeing each other's work - and therefore they believe they were written in the same period of time.

The conclusion is that Mark, Matthew, Luke and Acts were written between 55 ish AD and 62 AD; or the authors intentionally wrote them that way in order to pass them off as pre-destruction texts. This dishonesty would really make them unworthy of authority or reading; but there is no real reason to believe this about them - and no indication that any 1st or 2nd century church father viewed any of them as written by anyone but the Apostle Matthew, the doctor Luke as a companion to Paul, and John Mark as a companion to Peter.

I have looked at the three synoptic Gospels to lay the groundwork for the real point of this post: John - I think the assumptions and mistakes of Critical scholarship are highlighted better in these works because John creates more difficult problems for Conservative scholars.

And, of course, to pet my peeve Pooky. At the end of Part II we will discuss that peeve a bit more.

[Comments, BTW, will be open at the end of Part II only]

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