Peter’s
Just Flat Wrong
April
8, 2023
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.
The Revised Common Lectionary readings for Sunday, April 16,
2023, the Sunday when Doubting Thomas is always the gospel reading, include
Acts 2:14a-32. Those verses read:
But Peter, standing
with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, ‘You that are Israelites,
listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God
with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as
you yourselves know—this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan
and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those
outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it
was impossible for him to be held in its power. For David said concerning him ‘I
saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand so that I will not be
shaken; therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; moreover my flesh
will live in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy
One experience corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life; you will
make me full of gladness with your presence.’ Fellow Israelites, I may say to
you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his
tomb is with us to this day. Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn
an oath to him that he would put one of his descendants on his throne.
Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying, ‘He
was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption.’ This
Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.
First a quick word about what this
text really is. It is not an historically accurate account of anything Peter
ever said. It was written decades after Peter by the evangelist who wrote the
Gospel of Luke, of which Acts is the second volume. When I say here “Peter
said,” I mean that this text’s author has him say it here, not that he actually
said it as a matter of historical truth.
In these verses Peter is addressing the crowd that gathered
before the Disciples on Pentecost. Many, maybe most, people (or Christians at
least) will find what I’m about to say blasphemous. So be it. The truth is what
it is. In these verses, Peter is nothing but a flat out liar. Nearly nothing
that he says here is true, and Peter either knew or should have known that nearly
nothing he said here was true. There are so many false statements in what Peter
said that I hardly know where to start to lay them all out. I’ll work through
them in the order in which they appear in the words Acts attributes to Peter in
this passage.
Let me get one minor thing out of the way first. In verse
2:30 Peter says that David was a prophet. He’s just wrong about that. David was
a king not a prophet. There were prophets like Nathan who spoke to him, but
David was not a prophet. Judaism puts the stories about him in the part of
their scripture called The Prophets, but that doesn’t make David a prophet. Those
stories include prophets. David isn’t one of them, and Peter surely knew that.
Moving on. Peter’s speech starts out all right. He says that
Jesus was a man “attested to” the Israelites, that is, the Jews, by God with
deeds of power, wonders, and signs. True enough. But then Peter goes off the
rails. He makes his first profound mistake when he says in verse 2:23 that
Jesus was “handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge
of God…,” “you” being of course the Jews. Peter is saying that Jesus’ crucifixion
was God’s doing. It wasn’t. It couldn’t have been. If God caused Jesus
crucifixion, God is a cosmic child abuser. While God did not specifically send
Jesus to die, neither of course did God send Jesus not to die. Jesus
was, after all, a human being, mortal like the rest of us. That does not mean,
however, that Jesus’ brutal execution on a cross had been God’s plan all along.
God is not a cosmic child abuser. God has never required the brutal, unjust
suffering of an innocent man as a condition for God forgiving human sin.
Peter doesn’t specifically say here, but may imply, that
Jesus was some kind of sacrifice. Jesus was no kind of sacrifice. Calling Jesus
a sacrifice is a betrayal of Jesus. Jesus rejected sacrifice as what God wants
from us. The temple in Jerusalem in Jesus’ time was essentially a
slaughterhouse. Jewish law required various animal sacrifices for various
purposes. Forgiveness of sin was one of those purposes but not the only one. The
temple’s priests were essentially butchers. Jesus rejected the temple with its
practice of animal sacrifice. When he cleared the temple of the animals people
were selling in the temple’s courtyard he wasn’t “cleansing” the temple. He was
symbolically overthrowing it. He predicted the destruction of the temple at
least in part because he thought the people needed to be rid of it so they could
better understand and respond to God’s actual will. God did not foreordain
Jesus’ brutal execution. I could never worship a God who would do such a thing
to anyone let alone to God’s own Son. Peter is just wrong in any suggestion he
makes that Jesus died as a sacrifice to God.[1]
Then Peter makes an even more significant false statement
that he must have known was false. He says to the Israelites whom he addressing
that “you crucified” Jesus. He adds that they did it “by the hands of those
outside the law,” namely the Romans. That additional phrase, however, does not
obviate Peter’s claim that it was the Jews not the Romans who are responsible
for Jesus’ crucifixion. In that contention he is just flat wrong. No Jews of
the time had any authority to execute anyone. The Romans were under no obligation
to comply with any request that may have come from the Jewish leaders that they
execute someone. The Romans had plenty of their own reasons to crucify Jesus as
a threat to public order. They crucified him, and they didn’t need any
encouragement from the Jews to do it.
Moreover, it is at least highly improbable that the Jewish
people as a whole wanted Jesus crucified, as Paul here says they did. Perhaps
the temple officials were happy to have the Romans rid them of someone they saw
as a blasphemer and a threat to their power and authority. It is far more
likely, however, that the Jewish people as a whole either knew nothing about
Jesus or considered him to a profound new prophet bringing truth not lies. Even
if there were any truth to the claim that the Jews crucified Jesus, which there
isn’t, we would have to stop saying that they were. There is a direct
historical link between statements like Peter’s that the Jews crucified Jesus
and the Holocaust. Christian anti-Judaism is one of faiths deepest sins. It is
something of which we must repent with all our hearts and minds, not something
to repeat when we read anti-Jewish texts in the New Testament.
Peter’s next statement is OK. He says God raised Jesus from
the dead. That, of course, is one of the central Christian confessions. We’ll
celebrate it tomorrow, Easter Sunday.[2]
But then Peter comes completely off the rails again. He says that David said
things about Jesus. Folks, David never said a single word about Jesus. No Old
Testament text says a single word about Jesus. The Old Testament texts are
Christian scripture, but they are Christian scripture because they are first
and foremost Jewish scripture. Even the most recent of them was written a
couple of centuries before Jesus, and most of them were written much longer
before Jesus than that. They were written by Jewish people to address the
concerns of the Jewish people of their time not those of Christian people
centuries later. Paul simply utters something he must have known to be false
when he says in verse 2:31 that “David spoke of the resurrection of the
Messiah.” Absolutely nothing in Hebrew scripture says anything about a
resurrection of the Messiah. Nothing. None of us has ever seen a citation to anything
in Hebrew scripture that speaks of the resurrection of the Messiah. We can’t
have, because there is nothing there that says it.
Moreover, we have the same problem with Christian
anti-Judaism here that we have with the claim that the Jews crucified Jesus. It
is simply anti-Jewish for Christians to take Hebrew scripture and try to force
it into a Christian mold. Doing so says that the Jews of Jesus time must have
known that Jesus was the Messiah because he fulfilled various things in their
sacred writings. They must have known it, and they crucified him anyway, which,
frankly, is pure BS. Christianity has arrogated to itself a position above
Judaism for nearly two millennia. One of the ways it has done that is by trying
to make Jewish scripture speak the language of Christianity, which it just
doesn’t do. Especially in light of the horrific history of Christian
anti-Judaism, it is way past time for us Christians to let the Hebrew Bible be
the Jewish text that it actually is. Judaism Is not inferior to Christianity.
It is far more ancient than Christianity, and it is one valid, sacred way for people
to be in relationship with the one true God. Christianity evolved out of
Judaism and is inconceivable without its Jewish parent. When, in God’s name,
are we Christians going to respect, even honor and revere, Judaism as a sacred
path to God? It’s not our path, but that doesn’t make it false. It just makes
it different. No, the Hebrew Bible does not predict Jesus. It says nothing at
all about Jesus.
Any similarities between anything in the Hebrew Bible and anything
in the Christian story of Jesus is there not because Hebrew scripture predicted
Jesus. It’s there because the first Christians, being Jews, looked to their
scripture for language they could us to speak of Jesus to their fellow Jews.
They read some of Hebrew scripture, especially the Suffering Servant songs of
Isaiah, into their telling of the story of Jesus. In no way does that mean that
the Hebrew Bible predicts Jesus. It doesn’t. Peter is flat wrong here when he
says that it does. We Christians absolutely must stop trying to make
Hebrew scripture speak the language of Christianity. It doesn’t, and it is a
grave sin against our Jewish sisters and brothers when we say it does.
Sure. Peter said Hebrew scripture speaks of Jesus as the
Messiah. Many passages in the New Testament say it. That doesn’t make it true.
It means only that early Jewish Christians looked to their scripture for images
they could use to speak their truth about Jesus to their fellow Jews. They read
some of their Christian story back into ancient Jewish scripture. That’s a far
different thing than Jewish scripture reading something about Jesus forward to
a future time centuries away. The great sin of this passage from Acts is that
it is so anti-Jewish. If we’re going to use it in worship or in teaching at
all, all we can do is preach and teach against it. Peter may be one of the
founding figures of the Christian faith. At least, the Roman Catholic Church
says that he is. So be it. He’s still so flat wrong in these lines from Acts
that he either knew or should have known that what he said wasn’t true.
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