But
It Doesn’t Say That!
August
29, 2021
Reading the Bible
is tricky business. Many people say they want an easy translation and that they
just want the Bible straight, without interpretation, without commentary. The
problem is that that just isn’t possible. The Bible is an immensely complicated
book. Indeed it is hardly a book at all. It is a collection of sixty-six
different writings written by different people at different times in different
political and cultural contexts. There are a few exceptions, but for the most
part the texts were never written to be combined into a book with other texts.[1]
The Bible’s range of theological views and perspectives is broader than anyone
can easily keep track of. The Bible is full of contradictions, and it says that
thing happened that can’t possibly have happened. There simply is no way around
those realities. There simply is no legitimate way to make the Bible simple.
Because the Bible
is so complex and difficult to understand there are certain traps that people
fall into when they read it without proper guidance—and much of the guidance
out there is anything but proper.[2]
Most people who read the Bible do not come to it with fully open minds. Most
people who read the Bible are church people. They have been told, perhaps for
their whole lives, what the Bible says and what it means. Sadly, what many
pastors tell their people the Bible says and means is just wrong. Yet their
people bring what they have been told the bible says to their reading of it.
They read it to say what they’ve been told it says even if what they’ve been
told just isn’t right. That’s one trap people fall into.
Another is
reading the Bible to say only what you want it to say or wish it said. A great
many Christians want the Bible to be a how to manual for getting their souls to
heaven when they die when in fact the Bible is hardly about getting souls to
heaven at all. Others want the Bible to be about nothing but social justice, so
they read, or try to read, social justice into everything in the Bible. The Bible
says a lot of very good and important things about social justice, but it says
a lot about other things too. You can’t legitimately read social justice into everything
in it. I have a professional colleague who wants to read the Bible for the fun
parts, of which frankly there aren’t very many.[3]
We can make big mistakes when we read the Bible only for what we want it to say
rather than what it actually says.
There is a
significant example of people reading the Bible for what they want it to say rather
than to discern what it actually says in the Bible itself. It appears several
times in the New Testament. Here’s a prime example of that error from Acts
10:43. In that passage Peter says, “All the prophets testify about [Jesus] that
everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Several
New Testament authors insist that the ancient Hebrew prophets predicted Jesus. Here’s
another example, this one from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ conception and
birth:
All this took
place to fulfill what had spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
‘Look, the virgin shall conceive
and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’
which means ‘God
is with us.’
The Gospel of Matthew says several
more times that something has taken place to fulfill some ancient Hebrew
prophecy. About that it is simply wrong.
In chapter 8 of
Acts Philip talks to an Ethiopian eunuch who is reading the prophet Isaiah. He
was reading a passage from Isaiah that says “Like a sheep he was led to slaughter.”
The Ethiopian invites Philip to help him understand that text. He asks Philip “about
whom…does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Acts
8:34. Acts then says that Philip “began to speak, and starting with this
scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.” Acts 8:35. The
clear implication of this pericope is that the Suffering Servant Songs of
Isaiah, about one verse of which the Ethiopian asked Philip are predictions of
Jesus.
Here's the thing
though. Neither Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Songs nor anything else in Hebrew
scripture is about Jesus. Yes, the Suffering Servant Songs are the easiest
parts of the Old Testament to read as being a prediction of Jesus.[4]
The truth is, however, that those passages simply do not predict Jesus, and it
is illegitimate for us to read them as doing so. I say that it doesn’t predict
Jesus first of all because the best biblical scholars say it just isn’t clear
about whom the Suffering Servant Songs speak. I have two more reasons for saying
that those passages don’t predict Jesus and that it is illegitimate for us to
read them as doing so as well.[5]
The first is that the texts of the Hebrew Bible are ancient writings which many
Christians have taken to be talking about things that happened many centuries
after those texts were written. The second has more to do with the history of
Christian-Jewish relations. Let me explain.
When we have an
ancient text that appears to be talking about events that happened much later
than the time of the text one of two things is happening. One possibility is
that the ancient text really does foretell later events. That is how much of
the Christian tradition has understood Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Songs. The
other possibility, however (and I think a much better one) is this. At least
some of the people who had known Jesus during his lifetime, who had traveled
with him, learned from him, and spread his message to others experienced the
powerful presence of God in him in a unique way. He had revealed God to them in
a new way both in his teachings and in his death. Some of them believed him to
be the long-expected Messiah. Yet the Romans had falsely accused, arrested,
tortured and crucified him as a political criminal. That simply is not how it
was supposed to be with the Messiah. He was supposed to a very earthly king who
would restore the kingdom of David, and Jesus didn’t even try to do any such
thing. Doing any such thing would have contradicted everything Jesus taught and
stood for. Yet his followers could not deny their experience of God in Jesus.
So they did the
one thing they could do to make sense out of what had happened to him. They
turned to their Bible, the scripture we Christians call the Old Testament. They
mined their Bible for passages that might explain who Jesus was and what had
happened to him. They found at least some such passages in the prophetic books
of Hebrew scripture. Among those passages are Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Songs.
There these early Christians found a servant of God whom the world had rejected
and who bore the iniquities, the sins, of the world. That’s who Jesus was to
them, so they said that those ancient texts predicted Jesus.
I do not believe
that anything in Hebrew scripture predicts Jesus because I don’t believe that a
writer writing hundreds of years before Jesus could have had any knowledge of a
man who wouldn’t come along until many centuries later, not even of Jesus.
Perhaps I don’t believe that because I am, among other things, a professionally
trained historian. Historically speaking people just don’t accurately predict
things that won’t happen until centuries later. Yes, I know. Many people like
to say that the New Testament book of Revelation predicts the end times. It doesn’t.
People think somebody named Nostradamus from the sixteenth century CE predicted
all sorts of things that are happening in our time. He didn’t. It’s easy enough
to read an old text as predicting the future. The truth is those texts don’t do
that or at least don’t do it accurately. As Kris Kristofferson wrote, “Yesterday
is dead and gone, and tomorrow’s out of sight.” It’s out of sight for everyone.
It just makes a whole lot more sense to say that the earliest Christians read
Jesus back into the Hebrew Bible than to say that those texts actually predict
Jesus.
My second reason
for rejecting the notion that Hebrew scripture predicts Jesus arises from the
horrific, murderous, sinful history of Christian anti-Judaism. What we
Christians call the Old Testament is the sacred scripture of Judaism, the great
faith from which our great faith arose. The Old Testament is our scripture too,
but it is that only because it is first of all Jewish scripture. When we say
that it predicts Jesus was are attempting to force Jewish scripture to speak
with a Christian voice that it just doesn’t have. That it speaks with a Jewish
voice rather than a Christian one doesn’t make it wrong. It just makes it not
Christian. In light of the Holocaust and the centuries of Christian violence
inflicted on the Jews that led up to it, it is simply inappropriate and impermissible
for us to force Jewish scripture into a Christian mold that it just doesn’t
fit. So let’s let go of our attempts to make Jewish scripture say something
specifically Christian, that is, to say things it just can’t and doesn’t say.
And let’s let go
of reading any of the Bible to say what we want it to say rather than what it
says. That’s what those earliest Christians were doing when they said Hebrew
scripture predicts Jesus. They wanted it to predict him, but it just doesn’t.
It is true, as I explain in Volume One of Liberating the Bible, that the
meaning of a text is not necessarily limited to the author’s intended meaning. Yet
every legitimate interpretation of any text must begin with the text itself, not
with what the interpreter wants the text to say. It is inappropriate for any
interpreter to stray so far from the text itself as to say that it says
something that it just doesn’t say. It is even more inappropriate for any
interpreter to make any text say anything that is simply inappropriate for the
context of the text or the context of the interpreter.
So as you
interpret biblical texts, check yourself. Are you reading a text to say
something it just doesn’t say? If so, bring your interpretation back to the
text itself. Are you making the text say something that it is inappropriate for
you to make it say because of historical events in your own context? If so,
please discard that interpretation. Come back to the text. Let it speak in its own
voice. Let it mean what it meant when the author wrote it and whatever else the
text may legitimately be expanded to mean. It’s the only way to produce an
acceptable interpretation of any text. It is the only way to draw legitimate
meanings from Bible.
[1]
The exceptions include the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, Acts
being essentially the second volume of Luke. The books of the Deuteronomic
history—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings were written as a
piece and meant to be read together. The Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy—contain material from several earlier sources, but
they were compiled and edited to be read together, or at least all of them
except Deuteronomy were.
[2]
For proper guidance see my three volume work Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s
Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, soon to be available at amazon.com.
[3] I
find the book of Jonah to be biblical comic relief. The stories of Ruth and Esther
are fun in their way. There’s Balaam’s talking donkey (traditionally Balaam’s
ass) in Numbers. That’s about it for the fun parts of the Bible.
[4]
You’ll find them at Isaiah 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-8, and 52:13-53:12.
[5]
You’ll find this analysis also in Volume Two, The Old Testament, of Liberating
the Bible, my books that I mentioned above, in the Stop at Isaiah.
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