I Just Don't Believe It, Part One

 

I Just Don’t Believe It, Part One

October 18, 2022

© Thomas C. Sorenson 2022

The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

St. Paul says, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:3 NRSV. I suspect that when most Christians read the word “Christ died for our sins” they fully agree with Paul that that confession is “of first importance.” It is, after all, a traditional belief that for Christianity dying for our sins is precisely what Jesus Christ did. Paul’s statement that he did it “in accordance with the scriptures” probably means less to most Christians that the idea that Christ died for our sins, but it is a major contention of many of the New Testament writings. “The scriptures” means of course the Hebrew scriptures, for there were no specifically Christian scriptures when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. Many of those writings believe that predicting Jesus was precisely those scriptures’ major purpose. The Gospel of Matthew in particular insists that much of what Jesus did he did to fulfill something in the Hebrew scriptures.

Here's the thing though. I’m a Christian. I’m even an ordained Christian minister, and I don’t believe either of those things. I am convinced that Hebrew scripture does not and was never intended to predict Jesus either by those scriptures’ authors or by God. Neither do I believe that Jesus died for our sins. At least, I don’t believe that assertion in the way most Christians today understand it. I want here to explain, if only briefly, why I don’t believe either of Paul’s assertions here and to state in briefly what I replace them with. In this Part One I will deal with the issue of the Hebrew scriptures predicting Jesus. I’ll deal with the issue of Jesus dying for our sins in a later Part Two.

 

Part One: Not in Accordance with the Scriptures

 

Despite all the New Testament assertions that they do, the Hebrew scriptures simply do not predict or foretell Jesus. I will explain how we know they do not and why we must stop saying that they do in this essay. It is true, however, that as soon as I utter contention that texts do not do something I run into a problem. It is always difficult, and indeed, usually impossible, to prove a negative. I can say that nothing in the Old Testament predicts Jesus and that Jesus doesn’t fulfill anything in the Old Testament; but unless I go through every verse in the Old Testament to show that none of them has anything to do with Jesus, my contention remains just that, a mere contention. I’m not going to go through every verse in the Old Testament here. According to one source at least that’s 23,145 verses, which of course is far too many to consider individually even in a work much longer than this one.[1] Instead of doing that I’m going to look at what the Hebrew scriptures actually are and why it is wildly inappropriate for Christians to try to force them into a Christian mold.

What we Christians call the Old Testament is in fact the Jewish Bible.[2] It consists of numerous writings originally written in Hebrew that span close to a millennium in time. Some of the material in them comes from as far back as the late second millennium BCE. Some of the Old Testament books have a complex editorial history which makes it impossible to date the material in them as a whole. Judaism arranges the books under three headings, the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. For Jews, the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, is particularly sacred, but all of the Old Testament writings are sacred scripture for the Jews. The Torah and the Prophets were already considered sacred scripture in Jesus’ time. The Writings became part of the Hebrew Bible later, but they too are sacred to the great Jewish faith with which our faith shares so much.

All of the Old Testament writings are ancient. They were all written at least a couple of centuries before Jesus. Daniel is the most recent of them, and it dates from the second century BCE. Most of the Old Testament writings are substantially older than that. Deuteronomy, or at least the core of it, for example, dates from the late seventh century BCE. The book of the prophet Isaiah, the Old Testament book to which Christians most often point as predicting Jesus, consists of three parts written at different times. The writings legitimately attributed to the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, which scholars call First Isaiah, roughly chapters 1 to 39 of the book, date from the eighth century BCE. The part scholars call Second Isaiah, roughly chapters 40 to 55, date from the mid-sixth century BCE. The writings scholars call Third Isaiah, roughly chapters 56-66, date from the late sixth or early fifth century BCE. Clearly, all of the book of Isaiah is really, really old. Most importantly for my purposes here, all of the Old Testament writings were written a long time before Jesus.

All of the writings of the Old Testament were written in the language of the Hebrew people in fully Hebrew contexts for wholly Hebrew purposes. The writings called Second Isaiah are the writings people most often say predict Jesus, but they were not written for Christian purposes. They were written to proclaim Yahweh, the traditional tribal god of the Hebrews, as the one and only true, universal God and to promise the Hebrew exiles in Babylon that restoration to Judah was coming. None of that has anything to do with predicting Jesus. Other Old Testament authors wrote at different ancient times, but they all wrote for a Jewish audience not a Christian one. They wrote in a Jewish context, not a Christian one. They wrote for a Jewish purpose not a Christian one.

Whenever I read or hear someone say that the Old Testament predicts Jesus I want to say, “Really? People back then knew what would happen centuries after their deaths? I don’t think so.” At which point my Christian interlocutor is likely to respond that, while most people can’t do that, at least some of the Old Testament authors could because they were inspired by the Holy Spirit. I suppose you can believe that if you want, but I am convinced that it isn’t true.[3] Both testaments of the Christian Bible are so full of factual errors, contradictions (Matthew: Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Luke: Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth and traveled to Bethlehem when Jesus was born), and theologically untenable assertions (God told King Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites) that on their face they contradict the contention that they were divinely inspired. But if some of the Old Testament authors were divinely inspired, why would God inspire them to predict Jesus, then wait hundreds of years before making the prediction come true? Surely, if God were going to inspire Hebrew men (sadly, all of the biblical authors were men) writing for a Hebrew audience in a Hebrew context, God would inspire them with truths that their audience needed to hear not with something that wouldn’t happen for centuries after those authors’ deaths.

Now, it is true that some passages in the Old Testament describe people who sound an awful lot like Jesus. This is particularly true of the passages in Second Isaiah called the Suffering Servant songs. You’ll find them at Isaiah 42:1-4, Isaiah 49:1-6, Isaiah 50:4-8, and Isaiah 52:13-53:12. These passages speak of a mysterious character they refer to as “my servant.” The verses about him say that he does things like suffer abuse in silence and that his physical appearance was not attractive. Most significantly they say:

 

He was despised and rejected by

               others

     a man of suffering and acquainted

               with infirmity…;

     he was despised, and we held him of no account.

 

Surely he has borne our infirmities

     and carried our diseases;

yet we accounted him stricken,

     struck down by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our

               transgressions,

     crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that

               made us whole;

     and by his bruises we are healed….

[T]he Lord has laid on him

     the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:3-6.

 

Sure sounds a lot like how most Christians think of Jesus, doesn’t it? It sure sounds like a prediction of Jesus, doesn’t it? Well, the scholars say no one knows who Second Isaiah’s Suffering Servant was supposed to be. Some think it is an image of Israel itself, which makes a certain amount of sense. In any event, however much these verses may sound like Jesus to us, they are not about Jesus. They do not predict Jesus. They were written in the mid-sixth century BCE by a Jew for Jews not by a Jew for Christians. There would, after all, be no Christians for nearly six hundred years after these verses were written. Something else is going on here that explains why these verses sound like Jesus but aren’t about Jesus.

When Jesus was crucified by the Romans (not the Jews), and when his followers experienced him as risen from the grave, they had a big problem. They thought he was the Messiah, but the Messiah wasn’t supposed to get executed by the secular authorities. He was supposed to conquer those authorities. Yet the disciples’ experience of Jesus was so powerful that they could not let it go. So they searched their scriptures, that is, the Hebrew scriptures, for language to explain how they had experienced Jesus and what he had meant to them. Among the things they found were the Suffering Servant songs of Isaiah. Those verses were sacred scripture to them, and they gave them images they could apply to Jesus in a way that made sense to them. They used those images to speak of Jesus. Those images were familiar to the Jews of their time. They resonated with the people to whom the disciples spoke and for whom the evangelists wrote, but that doesn’t make them ancient predictions of Jesus. What’s going on here isn’t prediction forward from the sixth century BCE, it is discovery and application backward from the first century CE. That’s why some passages in the Old Testament sound like Jesus when they really aren’t about Jesus at all.

There is one more vital consideration I must raise as part of my argument that we must stop trying to make the Hebrew scriptures predict Jesus. That reason is the horrendous, sinful, violent, hate-filled history of how Christians have spoken about and treated Jews for as long as there have been Christians. Far too many contemporary Christians don’t know that history. They’ve probably heard of the Holocaust, the systematic slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis, though some of them inexplicably deny that that even happened. They have read or heard the attacks on Jews in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels of Matthew and John, though they’ve probably never heard a scholarly explanation of those passages and why they’re there. They probably don’t know that Christian armies going on crusades to the Holy Land stopped on their way at Jewish communities in Europe to massacre Jews, but they did. They surely know that “in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” They surely do not know that in that same year Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs who sent Columbus on his fateful voyages, expelled from Spain all Jews who would not convert to Christianity. They have probably heard of the Spanish Inquisition, but they surely do not know that the main targets of the Inquisition were Jews who had converted to Christianity but whom the authorities suspected of continuing to practice Jewish religious rituals.

They certainly have heard of Martin Luther. They almost certainly do not know that he hated the Jews vehemently, as did many other leading Christian theologians of times past. They most probably do not know that in 1791 Empress Catherine the Great of Russia created something called the Pale of Settlement. The Pale was a region of the western and southwestern parts of the Russian Empire, including much of what today is Ukraine. Eventually all the Jews of the empire were forced to live there, and they lived almost exclusively in abject poverty because the Russians would not permit them to do anything at which they could make any significant amount of money. Our Christians may have seen Fiddler on the Roof, a Broadway musical and a film set in the Pale, but they probably don’t know how horrific the pogroms there by Christians against Jews really were. Unless they’ve seen Ken Burns’ recent documentary series about the US and the Holocaust they certainly do not know that in the 1930s this country refused to accept Jews fleeing the Nazis simply because they were Jews. Our great Christian faith has an enormous amount of sin in the way we have treated God’s people the Jews for which we must atone.

One easy if small thing we can do as part of that atonement is at long last to let Jewish scripture be Jewish. Yes, Hebrew scripture is our scripture too; but it is our scripture only because it is first of all Jewish scripture. We really do need to stop trying to force it into a Christian mold that it does not and never was intended to fit. So no, brother Paul, for whatever reason Jesus died, he did not do it in accordance with the scriptures. We simply must stop insisting that he did.

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[1] I found this number by googling “number of Old Testament verses.” It was the first response to that inquiry that came up.

[2] At least the Protestant Old Testament is. The Roman Catholic Church considers all of the books of the Protestant Bible to be canonical, that is, to be part of the Bible; and it also considers several writings that are in neither the Protestant Old Testament nor the Jewish Bible to be canonical. When I say Old Testament here I mean the Protestant Old Testament.

[3] For a discussion of the human nature of the Bible see Stop 11, “Inspired?” of Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating the Bible: A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Volume One, “Approaching the Bible,” pp. 247 ff.