Is the NT Jewish?

[colinlindsay]

Is the NT Jewish?

I don't mean which writers were Jewish, but where did the ideas, ways of thinking, polemic or pedagogy and theology come from?
Arnold Fruchtenbaum says that protestants have traditionally misunderstood the NT because they don't give full weight to the Jewish cultural and theological milieu of NT times. You also have David Pawson saying we need to de-grecify the NT. Well, DO we?
The gory descriptions of hell and afterlife, for example, used by Jesus came into the pharisaical discourse and theology because of the Greek persecution and cultural invasion during the silent 400 years between the testaments and was very useful to them in intimidating the population into accepting blame for the national disaster and holding onto their positions of respect and privilege.

If then NT is Jewish it affects how we look at certain passages.
For example Matthew 24 - the sheep and the goats and the terms under which Jesus seems to accept or reject the people at judgement day.
Are the goats those that did not feed the poor or those that did not nurture the Church or those that did not support the ethnic people of Israel?
So… Who are "my brothers"?

Also Matthew 13 - the parables.
If you believe the NT is a Jewish document then the mustard seed and the birds are BAD things, corrupting the church, not positive wholesome things. This is in line with regarding the Church lightly, weak, compromised and apostate from the beginning.
The pearl of great price is Israel, sought for longingly by the Merchant Jesus and the treasure in the field is the kingdom of God.
So what is it? Church, Torah, Salvation by grace, Ethnic Israel, Spiritual Israel, the Kingdom?

Can we truly have double or multiple interpretations? What does that say about the mind and purposes of God or the perspicacity of the bible?

 

[heymikey80]

Is the NT Jewish?

I don't mean which writers were Jewish, but where did the ideas, ways of thinking, polemic or pedagogy and theology come from?

Of course they came through the contact of Jewish thought with that of Greco-Roman thought. Paul wrote to predominantly Gentile churches. Jesus preached to predominantly Jewish people.

Arnold Fruchtenbaum says that protestants have traditionally misunderstood the NT because they don't give full weight to the Jewish cultural and theological milieu of NT times. You also have David Pawson saying we need to de-grecify the NT. Well, DO we?

I think that's a mistake. Paul puts the announcement of the Gospel in terms of the Caesars' announcements of victory.

It's clear there are both Jewish and Greco-Roman allusions in the New Testament.

In addition, I don't think the Protestants made this mistake. History has a telling point to make with regard to who is misunderstanding what, and I quickly tire of all scholars -- radical, new-perspectivist, and conservative scholars -- saying "they got it wrong".

Finally, the first point of the 5 Points of Calvinism is very telling here. "Total Inability" points fingers everywhere. We've all got it wrong in one sense or another. So making such allegations simply doesn't impress me.

The gory descriptions of hell and afterlife, for example, used by Jesus came into the pharisaical discourse and theology because of the Greek persecution and cultural invasion during the silent 400 years between the testaments and was very useful to them in intimidating the population into accepting blame for the national disaster and holding onto their positions of respect and privilege.

For the church to be "intimidating the population" up to about 316 AD is utterly implausible. The church was a persecuted religion at that time. There's no evidence these descriptions were used to intimidate the general population for the first 300 years of Christianity. It's a fabrication of gnostic radical scholars.

On the flipside, the Essenes apparently used the final destination of the apostate to justify their seclusion from the general population and their asceticism. And they're Jewish.

If then NT is Jewish it affects how we look at certain passages.
For example Matthew 24 - the sheep and the goats and the terms under which Jesus seems to accept or reject the people at judgement day.
Are the goats those that did not feed the poor or those that did not nurture the Church or those that did not support the ethnic people of Israel?

The goats are those condemned for not feeding the poor, visiting the sick and imprisoned, etc.

So… Who are "my brothers"?

Those who are relying on Jesus.

Also Matthew 13 - the parables.
If you believe the NT is a Jewish document then the mustard seed and the birds are BAD things, corrupting the church, not positive wholesome things. This is in line with regarding the Church lightly, weak, compromised and apostate from the beginning.

The parables shouldn't be treated as allegories. They're not. The mustard seed is used in illustration because its seed is so tiny. Jesus says so. The idea that the church accretes things that are not in line with its main purpose, that seems to be the point of the birds. Not good or bad. Just irrelevant, or even to the point of supporting things that are irrelevant.

The pearl of great price is Israel, sought for longingly by the Merchant Jesus and the treasure in the field is the kingdom of God.
So what is it? Church, Torah, Salvation by grace, Ethnic Israel, Spiritual Israel, the Kingdom?

It's rethought Kingdom, Israel, salvation, Torah, and people of God.

Can we truly have double or multiple interpretations? What does that say about the mind and purposes of God or the perspicacity of the bible?

That not all things have the same clarity in Scripture.

 

[colinlindsay]

Good stuff.
Sorry I didn't make what I said about intimidation clear...
It was the pharisees, not the Church that sort to intimidated the people. They put yokes and burdens on people's backs, preventing them from finding forgiveness and peace but instead dumping guilt on them for the loss of the nation. "You were born in sin and you dare to lecture US"....
What do you mean by rethought Kingdom, Israel, salvation, Torah and people of God?
Is this obscurantism or conflation, or basically are you saying that the promises of God for the nation have been redirected/replaced?

 

[heymikey80]

Good stuff.
Sorry I didn't make what I said about intimidation clear...
It was the pharisees, not the Church that sort to intimidated the people. They put yokes and burdens on people's backs, preventing them from finding forgiveness and peace but instead dumping guilt on them for the loss of the nation. "You were born in sin and you dare to lecture US"....

That'd be ... interesting. But were that true, it would be a definite part of Jewish Christianity, wouldn't it?

On the other hand a number of positions of the Pharisees were overturned by Jesus and later at Jerusalem Council, so it'd be a question whether the church really inherited this tendency from Christian thought or not.

What do you mean by rethought Kingdom, Israel, salvation, Torah and people of God?
Is this obscurantism or conflation, or basically are you saying that the promises of God for the nation have been redirected/replaced?

The basic position of Reformed thought:

The Jewish people gradually shallowed-down and lost the original intent of the Law, Kingdom, Temple, Torah, and people of God. Jesus restored the original intent.
​

If this is true, the snapshot of what was happening in the First Century would appear to be a redirection of God's promises.

But it wouldn't be.

In Paul this misdirection is explained in even greater detail. Jewish thought is accused of essentially acquiring the basic tenets of the nationalistic gods of the Gentiles. Obedience to the Law is used to define the people of God; the nation is defined by ceremonialism; the Temple defines purity and religious reputation. These are all Gentile ideas of how religion and nation and the gods interrelate. Yet they crept into Jewish ideas of how to run the Judean state. They were detonated first by Jesus, and theologically explained and exploded by Paul.

 

[colinlindsay]

Some very interesting stuff here.

This is a quote from Fruchtenbaum :


A basic problem I see in your hermeneutical principle is you seem to use the New Testament to interpret what the Old Testament says, but I think that is the wrong way to go about it. Every Old Testament passage must be interpreted as to actually what it means contextually and exegetically in its own context. Once that is established then precede and interpret subsequent revelation about what God gave previously.

Whatever additional information subsequent revelation gives it cannot so totally change what the original revelation says.

Whatever additional information the New Testament gives, whatever it may promise for the church, et cetera, it cannot undo change, rectify the promises already made in the Old Testament specifically for Israel. If it does that then the New Testament becomes a fraudulent document.

But to interpret the Old Testament by the New means that the Old Testament documents cannot be understood, or the meaning cannot be determined until centuries later when the New Testament came into being and that is just a faulty way to treat the Holy Scripture.

The issue is not what constitutes salvation, salvation is by grace through faith and the content of our faith today is the death of the Messiah for our sins and His resurrection. Nor is there any question when Israel is saved it is saved only because they believed the content of the gospel. But to say what constitutes Israel, and trying to make the Church Israel just carries no biblical warrant and you will not find a single verse that clearly uses the term "Israel" in reference to the Church.
-----

He seems to be saying that you can't look for the church in the OT as if that was always God's intention right from fall.

Now what you can end up with here is a swapping of formuals about how to interpret scripture.
One person says you can do this another says you can't. A kind of ya-boo, yes it is , no it isn't thing.
I need someone just to PROVE that Fruchtenbaum's methodology or presuppositions of hermeneutical key is not valid. One way could be to show how Jesus and the NT writers used the Old, but even that wouldn't be determinative.

 

[heymikey80]

I worry that anyone who states "That's the wrong way to go about it" hasn't examined the view enough to get from that view to his. And thus hasn't examined it enough to pronounce that kind of judgment.

There's every reason to believe we'll get somewhere by understanding the initial redemptive intent of a passage of the Old Testament. However, is that all God wanted to accomplish? For instance, did God simply want to deliver the Law to Israel at first and create a nation, or was God fully aware at the time that the people couldn't fulfill the Law? Was God "winging it"?

The Law has multiple intents because the Law has multiple redemptive roles. So yes, we should see multiple intents appearing for many of God's actions. They're going to be consistent, though. They're going to have a common, redemptive thread running through each of them, pointing people to the God of the Universe, leading us to glorify Him.

So I would seriously doubt that we're actually talking on terms that are significant here. Who can reduce any single action to a single meaning? I'm unsure. I can say that the Spirit behind an action of God would find complete consistency. That's why Jesus could condemn certain purposes of the Law in His day -- e.g., vow-taking is condemned when its purpose is changed to make lying permissible.

I'd say original intent is very important, because we know the environment God is addressing and we know what God is saying to them. Then we can attempt application to our own perceived failings and discover its intent for us, today.

 

[colinlindsay]

< < I worry that anyone who states "That's the wrong way to go about it" hasn't examined the view enough to get from that view to his. And thus hasn't examined it enough to pronounce that kind of judgment > >

I agree. And yet you must be worried all the time.
As soon as you get beyond the throwing of proof-texts at each other (reminds me of trench warfare - the internet is perfect for this, all those ministry and discernment sites), you have to start looking of motivation, presupposition, hermeneutic, priorities.

And you could never accuse Fruchtenbaum of shallow exegesis or lack of understanding of context. He prides himself on both. I need to know why he's wrong.
In fact, I've found some good things, which I'll post myself next.

 

[heymikey80]

< < I worry that anyone who states "That's the wrong way to go about it" hasn't examined the view enough to get from that view to his. And thus hasn't examined it enough to pronounce that kind of judgment > >

I agree. And yet you must be worried all the time.

I read critically all the time, because to be reforming I need to be aware what I think, distinguish what another thinks, and compare the differences plainly with Scripture. That's not easy if an advocate has already developed some reading of Scripture that he wishes to advance. It means I need to commit time to what he's saying, then commit time to Scripture to see what it's saying. And critics often just get in the way of that.

I don't know Fruchtenbaum, so I'm interested to know what you find from him. I do follow someone else on the First Century era, NT Wright. While I think about a half-dozen of his tenets are problematic, I think his thrust is dead-on. The Messianic movement was a call to reform pushed out of Judaism -- and it actually had specific ideas about reforming religion, Judean state, and personal piety in a redemptive way. If Christians examined our own religious structures, we would find they are reinvigorated by just such a redemptive approach.

So certainly there's no reason to avoid reading other people. I'd just have to see what views he takes up and compare them with what I've read about the historical context. Of course either can be wrong; and I find it interesting that Wright's criticized as "not going far enough" by certain scholars in comparison with Fruchtenbaum, yet with most conservative theologians he's accused of "going to far".

 

[colinlindsay]

Yes, I like N T Wright. He ws the one who said that at any time it was likely that up to 25% of what he was currently believing and preaching was probably wrong.

I've never heard anyone else confess this.

Anyway, back to Fruchtenbaum. (He of the "My Brothers = Jesus's Jewish compatriots")

You've got to avoid packing this debate with proof-texts. Volume does not in this case equal quality.

Nor is it any good producing a general principle, like the useful one about the character of God (never changing etc) to direct the marshalling of the verses.

This kind of rebuttal would be useful.

Regarding Fruchtenbaum’s basic premises, you could attack it as follows. I found this this illuminating and rather surprising. I’ve never come across this clarity before.

(i) 1) that God always wanted His intentions to be understood in the time at which He spoke, and in that context;
(ii) 2) that God does indeed want us to disregard all subsequent revelation for purposes of understanding what He meant by an earlier oracle; and 3)
(iii) that we can establish the original, contextual interpretation of every Old Testament passage with certainty. (If we cannot, we clearly cannot say whether subsequent information would “totally change what the original revelation says.”)

But did God always speak in such a way that His intention could be understood in the time and context of the oracle?

(a) Both the Old and New Testaments teach that, in certain matters, God purposefully prevented His intention from being understood at the time of a revelation.
(b) In certain cases, the original, contextual understanding was not what God really intended.
Intentional ambiguity - God often spoke allegorically and abstrusely.

Did God want us to disregard subsequent information for purposes of properly understanding an earlier revelation?
Can we establish with certainty the original, contextual interpretation of every Old Testament passage?
The idea that there is a fixed and definite meaning for every Old Testament scripture is Talmudic, not Biblical.

What do you think?

 

[Steve Petersen]

IMO, the best way to understand texts is in their historical/cultural setting.

Other methods are 'strictly FM' as we said in the Army.

 

[colinlindsay]

Understanding texts in their historical and cultural setting. Sure. The Bible isn't the Koran.
Agreed. But are we sure we really want to go there? It's the favoured ground of the liberal, especially when he wants to argue that a particular passage or verse or idea or turn of phrase is an importation from a non-Jewish culture. I posted something about hell elsewhere. Within that discussion there can be found foreign references to atonement.
Do we go there? In my opinion, not very often. We prefer rather as fundamentalists to let scripture interpret scripture.

 

[Steve Petersen]

Understanding texts in their historical and cultural setting. Sure. The Bible isn't the Koran.
Agreed. But are we sure we really want to go there? It's the favoured ground of the liberal, especially when he wants to argue that a particular passage or verse or idea or turn of phrase is an importation from a non-Jewish culture. I posted something about hell elsewhere. Within that discussion there can be found foreign references to atonement.
Do we go there? In my opinion, not very often. We prefer rather as fundamentalists to let scripture interpret scripture.

Go wherever the facts lead. No one should be afraid of the truth.