Let’s
Hang the Bible
October
22, 2020
We Christians all
know Jesus’ Great Commandment. It appears in each of the first three Gospels of
the New Testament. Our oldest version of it is in Mark. There Jesus answers a
question from a scribe, that is, a teacher of the law, about which commandment
is first of all by saying,
The first is ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The
second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no
commandment greater than these. Mark 12:29-31.
This oldest version of the Great
Commandment explicitly ties it to the Shema, the creedal statement of Judaism.
At Deuteronomy 6:4-5 we read, “Hear [Shema in Hebrew] O Israel, the Lord [Yahweh in Hebrew] is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus’ Jewish audience would
immediately have recognized the first part of the Great Commandment as the
basic statement of their faith.
Luke handles the
Great Commandment a little differently. There we read that a lawyer, that is,
an expert on Torah law, asked Jesus “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Luke 10:25. Jesus responds to this question with a question, something he did
often that must have driven people nuts: “What is written in the Law? What do
you read there?” The lawyer answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor
as yourself.” Luke 10:27. Jesus responds by saying, “You have given the right
answer; do this, and you will live.” Luke 10:28. Luke’s version of the Great
Commandment differs from Mark’s in that a lawyer speaks it rather than Jesus. Luke
also leaves out “Hear, O Israel….” Otherwise the Great Commandment is the same
in both Gospels.
I want here to
focus on Matthew’s version of the Great Commandment because it includes an
important line that the other two versions of it don’t have. At Matthew
22:34-40 we read:
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced
the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a
question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’
He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first
commandment. And a second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’[1]
It’s the last line of this passage
that I find so important: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets.”
To get at the
significance of that line we need to start by understanding something that most
Jews know but most Christians don’t. If you do please bear with me while I
explain it for those who don’t. In the Jewish tradition the Hebrew Bible, which
is also the Protestant Old Testament,[2]
is said to consist of three distinct parts or types of writings. They are the
Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Law is the Torah law and consists of
the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy. The Prophets are the books with prophets names on them plus what
scholars call the Deuteronomic history—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1
and 2 Kings. All the other books of the Hebrew Bible constitute the Bible’s
third section, the Writings. Though the books of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah
have personal names Judaism does not consider them to be part of the Prophets
and includes them in the Writings.
The first thing
to notice about the line “On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets” is that it mentions two of the three major divisions of the Hebrew
Bible, that is, the Law and the Prophets. The line clearly refers to some but
not all of the books that are now part of the Hebrew Bible. The question arises
of why the line does not mention the Writings. The answer is almost certainly that
in the first century CE, that is, in the time of Jesus and the somewhat later
writing of the four canonical Gospels, the Law and the Prophets had attained
the status of holy scripture in Judaism, but the Writings had not. There is
some disagreement among authorities on the question of when the Writings became
canonical. At least one authority I saw put the date back as far as the fifth
century BCE, a dating that is impossible because not all of the Writings had
yet been written by that date. The Writings not having been canonical in the
first century CE is a good explanation of Matthew’s mentioning the Law and
Prophets but not the Writings. I accept that the Writings became canonical only
later, probably in the third century CE.
We understand then
that when Matthew’s Jesus says that the Law and the Prophets “hang” on the two
parts of the Great Commandment he is saying that all of scripture hangs on
them. For us, and in a partially different way for Jews today, scripture is
more than the Law and the Prophets parts of the Hebrew Bible. Jews add the
Writings to the Law and the Prophets. We Christians add the Writings too but
also add the books of the New Testament to our Bibles. Yet there seems to be no
reason why what Jesus says in Matthew about the Law and Prophets wouldn’t apply
to those other documents as well. Jesus’ statement that the Law and the
Prophets hang on the Great Commandment just becomes more meaningful for us when
we understand that all scripture hangs on that Commandment as much as the parts
of it that were canonical in the times of Jesus and Matthew.
Which brings us
to the really crucial question here. What does it mean to say that all of scripture
hangs on the Great Commandment of love? Some English translations of Matthew
try to avoid that question by translating the Greek word used in the original
of Matthew as “depend” rather than “hang,” although my Interlineal Translation
of the Greek Scriptures which gives the Greek original along with a perfectly
literal translation of it translates the Greek word here as “hangs” not “depends.”
Yet perhaps the translation of the Greek as “depends” gives us a clue as to
what hang means here. Just what could the word “hang” mean in this context? We
are of course dealing with metaphor. Jesus wasn’t telling us to hang our Bibles
up somewhere for storage when we put them down. So what does the image of one
thing hanging on another thing convey about the relationship between the two
things? The thing on which the other hangs is holding the other one up. When I
hang a picture on the wall the hardware on which I hang the picture holds the
picture up on the wall. If the hanger isn’t strong enough to hold up the weight
of the picture the picture will come crashing down to the floor. A sufficient
hanger permits the picture to function as a picture, that is, to stay up on the
wall for people to look at. The hanger enables the picture to be what it really
is and to fulfill its proper function as a picture.
Surely Jesus had
that sort of relationship between two things in mind when he said that
scripture hangs on the Great Commandment. The Great Commandment of love enables
scripture to be what it really is and to function as it should function. Without
hanging on the love of God, neighbor, and self all of scripture comes crashing
down. It can’t be what it is supposed to be. It can’t function as it is
supposed to function.
A couple of
things I’ve learned from the Jewish faith help make the point clear. The great
ancient Rabbi Hillel is said to have answered the question of the greatest
commandment by saying “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that
is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” I have also heard
that the ancient rabbis said that everything in the Bible is about love. If you
read something there and cannot make it be about love you still have to work to
do. I readily admit that I still have work to do, but I guess that’s beside the
point. That scripture hangs on the Great Commandment of love of God, neighbor,
and self means that the message of love of God, neighbor, and self is what
scripture is all about. Detach scripture from love and it all collapses. Detach
scripture form love and it becomes useless at best and destructive at worst
when it breaks into sharp, shattered pieces.
So let’s be done
with any reading of anything in the Bible as being about something other than
love. Let’s be done with thinking that the Bible tells us to reject, condemn,
or hate anyone. Let’s be done with reading the Bible as ever saying that some
people are better than other people or that violence against any people is ever
morally justified. All of those things violate the Great Commandment of love.
Whenever we read anything in the Bible let’s view it through a lens of love.
Not love as a feeling or a sentimental emotion but as the selfless, giving,
even sacrificial love that we see in and learn from Jesus. That is what Jesus
is telling us to do when he says that all of scripture hangs on love. Let’s
make what Jesus says true for us and for our world. Let’s hang the Bible. Let’s
hang it on love.
[1]
This may be the place to explain something that’s going on here with the word
rendered in the Great Commandment as Lord. In the Deuteronomy text I quoted the
word is spelled in what are called small capital letters. It’s Lord not Lord. In many English
translations including the NRSV I use here the word Lord, typed that way in small caps, is a rendering of the
sacred Hebrew name of God usually rendered in English as Yahweh. The Shema
could appropriately be translated “Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh
alone. You shall love Yahweh your God….” The Christian Gospels mean something
different in their use of the word Lord, typed that way and not as Lord. They mean that God is our Lord in
the sense of our ruler and guide. They don’t mean Yahweh. That doesn’t mean the
Shema is wrong. Not at all. In the ancient Hebrew tradition Yahweh became synonymous
with the one true God of all creation and was often called the people’s Lord.
[2] I
say Protestant Old Testament rather than Christian Old Testament because while
the Roman Catholic and other Christian versions of the Old Testament contain
everything in the Protestant Old Testament they also contain books that are in
neither the Hebrew Bible nor the Protestant Old Testament.
No comments:
Post a Comment