New Testament Interpretation in Light of Second Temple Traditions
Below is my digest of an excellent article (”Biblical Interpretation, Jewish”) in the Dictionary of New Testament Background by Karyn’s and my Old Testament Introduction professor, Dr. Peter Enns. I’ve found myself fascinated by our discussions in class about the use of the Old Testament by the New Testament writers. In the past, I had been taught that we somehow had to believe that the Old Testament writers really meant what the New Testament writers say they meant, because Scripture can be of only one interpretation. But what I’m learning in class is opening up as whole new way of reading the Bible. In some sense, I think I’m learning to read it like Peter and Paul did, in the light of the startling historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here’s my digest…
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New Testament (NT) authors make frequent use of the Old Testament (OT), often in ways that seem strange to us. What lies behind the way they interpret those passages? At least one major step toward answering that can be found in studying Jewish biblical interpretation during the Second Temple period.
1. Diverse Data: The Variety of Second Temple Literature
A. Some of the OT was written during this period. Biblical authors of this period were already interpreting earlier biblical material.
B. Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha. Centuries after the return from exile produced a great deal of literature. Pseudepigrapha refers to Second Temple texts that claim some degree of inspiration but remain outside any canon. Apocrypha are Second Temple works that have been received in some canons, but not the Jewish or Protestant canons. Great variety of genres in each. Both interact extensively with OT canonical books, sometimes offering entire interpretive schemes.
C. The Dead Sea Scrolls include many OT commentaries, most notably those on Habakkuk.
D. Philo (1st century AD) allegorized many OT books, sometimes using methods that appeared in earlier 2nd Temple works.
E. Josephus wrote a history of the Jews in which he records incidents only found in 2nd Temple texts.
F. Targums and the Septuagint (LXX) are translations that incorporate 2nd Temple interpretations of the OT. Most notable Targum is Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.
G. Rabbinic literature (post NT) displays interpretive thinking previously seen both in 2nd Temple literature and in the writings of Paul in the NT.
2. Broad Contours of Second Temple Biblical Interpretation. Second Temple writers generally displayed a high respect for the OT Scriptures.
A. Deliberate Exegesis of OT Passages
i. Diverse motives. 2nd Temple writers used OT Scripture for apologetic defense, both of sectarian concerns and in attempt to demonstrate the relevance of Judaism to the surrounding cultures.
ii. Diverse methods. Some merely alluded to a Bible story or theme, while others did thought-by-though exegesis of passages or entire books, methods seen in the NT as well.
iii. Emphasis on present application. All of the 2nd Temple writers shared a common concern for how the OT spoke to their own situations. They were motivated to interpret by the real concerns of persecution and Hellenistic synchrotism in which they lived. This can be contrasted sharply with the concerns of much of modern hermeneutics, which tend to be merely academic or concerned with the ancient meaning of the text at the expense of its relevance to our day. Of course, the apologetic and present-day concerns of the 2nd Temple interpreters often caused them to do their work at the expense of the contextual original meaning of the text.
B. Incorporation of Previously Existing Interpretations. It is impossible to find the origins of the peculiar interpretive methods used by 2nd Temple writers, but their pervasiveness across many types of literature and a wide span of time and geography demonstrates some kind of common tradition. For example, the interpretation that the Israelites were paid wages by their Egyptian slave masters, rather than having “plundered†them, shows up in a great many 2nd Temple writings. This seems to point to a commonly accepted interpretation, rather than just direct borrowing.
3. The Nature of the New Testament’s Use of the Old Testament in It’s Second Temple Context
A. NT Writers used many of the same interpretive methods as Second Temple writers, including line-by-line pesher-style exposition, use of words as other than their obvious original meaning, and outright changing or augmenting of a passage to suit a new purpose. For example, when Matthew applied Hosea 11:1 to Christ, he was not arguing that this is what Hosea originally meant, but rather was following in the Second Temple tradition of assuming that the passage had to do with his present situation (the resurrected Christ). This extends to all the NT writers; they interpreted the OT in light of the coming of Christ. “The methods of interpretation are subservient to the goal. The NT writers’ experience of the risen Christ drove them back to the pages of the OT and caused them to understand its message afresh: the OT speaks of Christ, and proper responsible, biblical interpretation will draw this out.â€
B. NT Writers used not only their own insights, but those of others who preceded them. NT writers seemed to be steeped in and make use of many of the interpretive traditions prevalent in 2nd Temple writings. In addition, they refer to a number of incidents and people who are never mentioned in the OT, only in extra-biblical literature. All of this reveals that it is wrong to examine NT interpretation of the OT in isolation from the 2nd Temple hermeneutical traditions. Once again, NT exegetical methods were not so much concerned with objective meaning, as many modern methods are, as they were with fulfilling an overarching purpose defined and motivated by their own overwhelming experience of the risen Christ.
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For more on this topic, please see Rabbi Saul’s (Tim Gallant) excellent notes on a pair of lectures by Richard Hays on reading each Testament in light of the other.
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February 26th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
It’s nice to see that you’ve integrated your blog with actually doing a reading assignment!
February 26th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
Always a good thing when you can combine your hobby and your vocation, Jason!
February 26th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
In a book I’m trying to read, Contours of Pauline Theology by Tom Holland, (keyword = trying) the author discusses using the pseudepigrapha in New Testament research and begs people to be cautious. His main premise is (I think) that we do not have the orginals (of most) and we don’t know who really wrote the pseudepigrapha and from what (of the many) backgrounds they were coming from so how can we really interpret their theology without a far amount of guessing and possibly faulty presuppositions. He uses this illustration:
” A visitor to the UK seeks to gain some understanding for the Scottish Presbyterian doctrine of the Spirit. The research begins with a survey of what the population thinks about the subject. Searches of past editions of newspapers give a variety of references to the Spirit. Then the search of the literature of other religious groupings within Scotland is made of their understanding of the Spirit. Spiritualists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Uniterians, Baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics, etc are consulted. Within this contextual study, the writings of the Presbyterian divines are then considered.
Now if this method were followed, and the fruit of the wider study were the basis of understanding the priamry texts, there would be virtually no possible chance of understanding the distinctive doctines of Presbyterianism. It is the theological differences that are important points of study, not the similarity of the vocabulary. Much contemporary New Testament study is conducting its reasearch in a similar way. The fact that terminology is similar or even identical is no guarantee that the meaning is the same. Faiure to appreciate this results in eisegesis not exegesis.
It might be thought that the above illustration makes the point, but it does not. The reason for saying this is that it does not actually match the situation in New Testament studies. To have a direct equivalence you would have to imagine that the researcher who has gathered all of this material on the Spirit from so many sources has a disastrous day. All of the search facilites he has employed fail. They are never available for anyone ever to use again. Better still for the illustration, his collection of material is the only collection in the world. And then, to add to this technological disaster, he is working in his study with the window open and a gale blows through the study window. Every top sheet of paper, with the details fo the origin and theological background, is blown out of the window and lost forever. Added to this the pages are scattered all over the room and the collections are completely mixed together so that it is impossible to know what page belonged to what group and therefore what the terminology on the individual sheets of paper conveyed to the original writer. THe ablility to locate sources that they came from and therefore the views that they represent has also totally gone. There are now only piles of text, which cannot be labelled for their origin and whose original meaning can only be guessed at. And now the researcher begins his study of the Presbyterian doctrine of the Holy Spirit!”
February 26th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
It seems as if second temple Judaism was expecting something big to happen and that gave them the reason for applying Scripture to their own time without any consideration for the grammatical-historical origins of the text.
It gives new meaning to the idea that Jesus Christ arrive “in the fullness of time”.
February 26th, 2005 at 11:57 pm
Phil,
I’m not exactly sure what the point of your example is. It is not the theology of the Second Temple interpreters that we are interested in, but rather their method of interpretation.
One of the most puzzling aspects of the New Testament for readers who believe it to be the inspired Word of God is how the NT writers use the OT text. They consistently do things that I learn in my seminary classes we should never do in biblical interpretation. For one, they take passages from the OT and assign meanings to them that have nothing to do with their original context. Look at the example I mentioned in my outline above. Matthew wrote in 2:5 of his gospel concerning the return of Jesus’ family from exile in Eqypt: “This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.†This is a direct quotation from Hosea 11:1. But look at the context of Hosea 11:1…
Clearly the “son” is Israel, and a very disobedient Israel at that. Matthew seems to be completely misusing this passage. And this is only one of literally hundreds such “misapplications” or “misinterpretations” of OT texts in the NT. In the past, conservative scholars have tended to either try to ignore these discrepancies or to give highly forced explanations that the OT writers really did mean what the NT writers said they meant. These explanations did not really satisfy anyone. To be sure, they were given by people who had a high view of Scripture, but unfortunately what I think was a false hermeneutic. They believed that the unity of God’s Word meant that any given passage could have only one meaning ever. The redemptive-historical approach, however, teaches that God unveiled his purposes slowly over time, with the climax and full revelation coming with his Son.
Now, why the interest in the Second Temple writings? Just this…the interpretive methods used by the NT writers are remarkably similar to those used by the writers of the non-canonical books written between the return from Babylonian exile and the destruction of the second Temple in AD 70. Those writers routinely retold biblical stories (or wrote commentaires on them) in ways that clearly had nothing to do with the original meaning of those passages.
Let me provide one of many examples I could share. The Wisdom of Solomon chapter 10 retells the story of the Exodus. It states that the Israelites received the “reward of their labors” from their Eqyptian masters before leaving Egypt, while the original text makes it clear that they “plundered” the Egyptians, who gave them their gold and jewelry out of fear of their God and to entice them to leave as soon as possible before any more judgments could come upon them. Now why did the writer of W of S feel a need to change the original meaning of the incident? We know from history that one of the accusations frequently leveled at the Jews by their Gentile oppressors at the time of its writing was that they were nothing but a rag tag band of thieves, with the plundering of the Egyptians cited as evidence. The writer of Wisdom of Solomon was clearly putting a different slant on it–the Israelites were just collecting their just wages for services performed. Thus, they weren’t crooks.
Hundreds of hundreds of examples could be given of such use of the OT by the post-exilic writers. There is never any indication that anyone thought they were misusing the scriptures, however. It simply had become the common interpretive practice to view the Scriptures in the light of one’s present day situation. In the Pseudopigrapha, Apocrypha, and other 2nd Temple books, this situation was usually one of persecution by the Gentiles. The writers were writing not as detached scholars musing over what the OT books might mean, but as men desperately trying to give encouragement and hope to oppressed Jews who no longer had a king or a land of their own to look to as signs that God was with them. All they had was a Book, and their contemporary interpreters were sending a message that the Book, if “properly understood,” indeed told them that they had not been forgotten by God.
Now, indeed, many of these interpretations come off as quite ridiculous, even laughable. For example, one writer took Moses quite literally when he commanded the frightened Israelites trapped before the Sea to “be silent!” He implies that he believed they actually became mute at that point, because he tells of a miracle of their mouths being unstopped after the destruction of the Egyptians so that they could sing the song of victory recorded in Exodus.
Nevertheless, what is of interest to scholars is the fact that these kinds of interpretation show up throughout the writings of that period. Moreover, the same interpretations show up again and again in writings produced in very different times and geographical locations. This indicates that there was a whole body of accepted interpretations that had become so much a part of the Jewish culture that, in many cases, writers could merely allude to them with little explanation.
Now what bearing does this have on the NT “problem” we began with? It becomes clear that the NT writers, being Jews who grew up in the 2nd Temple culture, were doing OT hermeneutics in a way that was quite acceptable in their day. Knowing the 2nd Temple literature helps us to be less surprised and shocked when we see Matthew turning the son in Hosea 11 from a rebellious Israel to the obedient Son of God. Why did Matthew feel he could do this? His culture had taught him to interpret the OT as applying to his own situation…and his situation was that he had witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He and the other inspired NT writers realized that the death and resurrection of Christ were the central events of redemptive history. It made perfect sense for them to go back through the OT and apply what Jesus for the men on the road to Emmaus when he “interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” In the case of the Hosea interpretation, Matthew was saying, “the risen Christ is the New Israel, the fulfillment of all that Old Israel was supposed to be but failed at.”
There is another important consideration in all this: the Scriptures are neither a divine work alone (with the human writers only acting as robots) nor is it a completely human work (men writing their own imaginative thoughts about who God might be). Rather, inspired Scripture is a perfect harmonization between God and the human authors. God insures that everything they wrote is the truth he wanted to convey to men, but he did so in a way that fully involved the humanity of each author, including that author’s individual writing style, life experiences, and cultural mileu. So saying that the NT writers did their OT interpretive work in the framework of Second Temple hermeneutics in no way threatens our view that what they wrote is the inspired Word of God. Instead, I view it as Pete did in his comment above, that this was another example of Christ coming in the “fulness of time.” He came at a time when there were human authors to whom reinterpreting the whole OT christotelically (with Christ as its end and purpose) would be a completely natural and accepted practice.
February 27th, 2005 at 1:28 am
My post was very much in the spirit the of second temple interpeter’s. I saw your post and wondered how it applied to my situation. I thought it interesting that I was reading a book dealing with some of the same literature. Then I post an illustration that had some words in common with your post but probably had nothing to do with what your talking about.
I’ll have to go back and reread the chapter but somewhere in there he made the leap between cautioning the use of the intertestimental period literature to unlock the N.T. and comparing their theologies.
His main point is that we need to use caution because we don’t know where in Judaism, or Judaisms as he notes N.T. Wright saying, the writers are coming from. I guess to tie it all together and to try to make my post a little less random I could ask the question, “Did their backgrounds or theologies affect the way they treated scripture or did the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Essenes, and any other group of this time period all use a similar set of hermeneutics?
I have noticed the writer’s of the N.T. use of O.T. scriptures and have always wondered.
Do we have liberty to do this as well? Our old pastor tried to make the story of Hezekiah relevant to the situation that we were going through. He had come and restored true worhship. He was calling on us people to find it in our hearts to make a covenant with God to turn away His wrath. Revival had hit the land with Hezekiah’s reforms and that is what our church had been praying for. It was accompanied by string instruments so that gives biblical baking to his push to become more contemporary and go from hymns to worhips songs accompanied by the guitar. Just after revival hit the wicked Assyrian king, a type of Satan came in an surrounded Hezekiah. The people who were upset at the pastor for handling certain situations in an unbiblical manner and disagreed with him were obviously being used by satan to break up the church because of the true worship that had started happening. And because these people were being used by satan it justified all sorts of things like going to the police and getting a restraining order and sending out private trespass notices and telling people of they showed up at church the police would come and escort them out. I’m not really trying to make any big point here. I’m just sharing a story of someone who obviously took it to an unbiblical extreme.
February 27th, 2005 at 1:57 am
Phil, you wrote…
I’m not certain who the “their: is in your question, but I’ll assume you mean the NT writers. You seem to have to questions. As to whether their backgrounds affected their writing, I would say yes indeed; this is part of how God used their humanity in the process of inscripturation. Rather than seeing their inculturation into the Second Temple tradition of interpretation as a threat to inspiration, I see it as marvelous evidence that God was using even misguided Jewish traditions to prepare men who would be able to make the leap to a christotelic interpretation of Scripture without batting an eyelash.
You then ask if there was a common hermeneutic among the various religious factions of NT times. We have no way of knowing that. Some of the groups you named may not have even been involved in any hermeneutical projects. But we can see that there was a pervasive, almost monolithic, methodology of scriptural interpretation in the writings we do have from the exile through the NT period. We know a whole lot more about this due to archaeological discoveries in the last half of the twentieth century, the Dead Sea Scrolls in particular. Many Christians think that the Dead Sea Scrolls were just copies of the Bible, but in reality the vast majority of the scrolls were other writings, including the kinds of commentaries and targums (Bible translations with commentary interpolated in the text) that we have been discussing.
You went on to ask, “Do we have the liberty to do this [reinterpret Bible passages to fit our present circumstances] ourselves?” I would highly commend to you the article by Pete Enns I linked to in my latest post (”Enns on Freeing Evangelical Hermeneutics from Its Modernist Captivity”). He answers that question as follows:
So I would say that your former pastor was very wrong in the way he was using Scripture. He does not have the apostolic authority to change the context of a passage to fit his own situation. This is not to say that the Spirit doesn’t apply Scripture to our own lives and give us wisdom through it for our daily decisions; I believe He does. But your pastor went far beyond that work of the Spirit. He reminds me of a pastor I was once under who applied the Scriptures about the reign of King David to his own ministry. Sheer disaster for the sheep under him.
I agree with Dr. Enns in what we can apply of the apostolic hermeneutic: its christotelic aspect. Like the apostles, we should look expectantly for Christ on every page of the Scriptures. Of course, your own New Tribes training has already taught you that very well.
February 27th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
The “their” referred to the authors of the pseudepigrapha, sorry about the confusion.I personally do not see their inculturation into the Second Temple tradition of interpretation as a threat to inspiration. Nor do I cringe at their leap to a christotelic interpretation of Scripture because of it.
Again it gets back to the point that I think the author of the book is making (and I could be wrong). We have no way of knowing for certain where the the writers of the pseudepigrapha were coming from. As you admitted, we have no way of knowing if there was a common hermeneutic among the various religious factions of NT times. We have no way of knowing if they all used certain words the same way. All of these factors would play into figuring out how they thought, interpeted, and wrote about scripture. Tom Holland’s point is use caution when relying on these texts because of the unkowns. At the same time it is interesting that there seems to be, as you said,”a pervasive, almost monolithic, methodology of scriptural interpretation in the writings we do have from the exile through the NT period.”
As far as New Tribes’ curriculim that they use to evnagelize, I am always amazed at how extensive it is and they do take some flak for it. They start in Genesis and teach through the O.T. in such a way that anticipates Christ. They will take a month or two to do it. And then, after a presentation of the good news of Jesus Christ, they will go back and walk the new belivers through it all over again. I wonder some times if these new believers in their primitive, animistic cultures have a better and more realistic grasp of the scritpures then their western counterparts.
February 27th, 2005 at 3:13 pm
Thanks for clarifying, Phil. Just one clarification of your clarification
…look at the end of your second paragraph above. That’s the point I was making; we do have a great deal of knowledge about the Second Temple interpretive methods. My response that you refer to in the first part of that paragraph was limited to saying we don’t know this about specific groups of Jews, such as the Pharisees. But the conclusions about how most, indeed virtually all known ST commentary was done are pretty much beyond doubt.
And I totally agree that those natives under New Tribes missionaries are getting a better gospel presentation than probably a large percentage of our evangelical bretheren who attend a “Bible believing” church every Sunday.