The Ark

Frank Peters, from New York University, explains the Christian understanding of Revelation, and how they came to possess a different Old Testament to the Jews.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: The Word of God was first heard, then written down to become Scripture.

Hello, on The Ark this week, Part 2 of how Jews, Christians and Muslims came to see their holy texts as the Word of God.

Last week, Frank Peters, who's recently published a book on this subject, told us how the Jews transmitted the Word of God through an anthology of books called the Tanakh, popularly known as The Bible. Today, we move on to the New Testament, which is written very soon after Jesus' death but not in his own language. Frank Peters, who's speaking to me from Manhattan, begins with what the New Testament writers thought they were doing when they wrote the Gospels.

Frank Peters: They were spreading the good news as they called it. That's their own name for what they were writing. It took maybe a century, a century-and-a-half for Christians to begin to think about their writings as Scripture, as being on a level with those Jewish texts, that Jewish background from which they all came. No, no, they didn't think they were writing Scripture at all, that would have been, we talked about chutzpah last time, that would have been I think excessive chutzpah.

Rachael Kohn: What did they think they were doing then when they were writing about Jesus' life and incorporating narratives and prophecies that they drew from the Hebrew Bible?

Frank Peters: First of all they were all Jews, and Jesus is a Jew, and that all Jesus claimed, the original claims are Jewish claims and his basic claim was that he was the Messiah, he was the expected annointed one who would bring a kind of spiritual redemption to Israel. Whatever the parameters of that were understood to be, he fitted into that category, he was a Messianic figure, and the proof of his messianism is that he fulfilled what many Jews regarded as the prophecies concerning the Messiah. So that the New Testament in a way is a kind of brief for Jesus. It's making the Jesus case and the case is that he's the Messiah and the evidence for the case is that he has fulfilled all the prophecies, all the Jewish prophecies, this argument only makes sense to a Jew, it doesn't make sense to a gentile, but he fulfilled these Jewish prophecies concerning the Messiah. And therefore, he was the Messiah.

I look upon them as a kind of almost a lawyer's brief. The New Testament is an argument, and it's making its own argument, it's trying to prove something, and it has to prove it in the face of other people's scepticism or lack of, saying 'That's interesting, but so what?' or 'I don't think so'. Any number of reactions to this on the part of that Jewish audience to whom it was first directed.

Rachael Kohn: Well gosh, if it was an argument then the Gospel writers were certainly needing to put down the evidence of their argument. How do they compare to the authors of the Hebrew Bible?

Frank Peters: Well the Hebrew Bible is a kind of historical record of the covenant and its playing out among the Jews. Here's the covenant that's made in the very beginning, with Abraham and then as I say the fine print given to Moses. And then the rest of the Bible is whatever happened to the covenant. Here are the chosen people, this is what happened to the chosen people. Some unpleasant things, some pleasant things, they were bad, they were good, but this is the historical record of God's providential dealings with his chosen people.

What the New Testament is doing is sort of tacking it on. Here is the next chapter in this things. That's why it's called the New Covenant; New Testament means New Covenant. This is Act 3, this is the final act of this, the closure, and the proof of it is, as I say, the fulfilment of these prophecies. They regarded Jesus as the Messiah. What is interesting about it is the transition or the dawning realisation as they thought, they were dealing with the Son of God. The Messiah is not necessarily the Son of God, but a Messiah is, I'm sure is different in the mind of every Jew at the time of Jesus. It's not just one sort of keyhole into which you fit the Jesus key and it turns. That keyhole is a very large affair.

There are all sorts of expectations about the Messiah, and so the whole case for Jesus is kind of arguable, and that even if you do believe he was the Messiah, a contemporary believed that he was the Messiah, what they expected of him, or expected conclusion from that is really quite different, depending on who is doing the thinking. But what as I say is extraordinary, out of this, it's not so much the messianic claim, and most Jews believe there would be a Messiah, as most Jews today also believe there will be a Messiah, somebody is going to be the Messiah. But what is remarkable in a Jewish context, particularly is the rather rapid realisation that Jesus was the Son of God, which is a very strange Jewish notion. As Jews and Muslims have noticed ever since, that this is rather peculiar in a monotheistic society, how God can have a son and have Jesus, this human figure, was the Son of God and therefore God. The beginnings of worship of Jesus as God are quite early.

Already in Paul, and Paul is only 20 years or so after the death of Jesus, already Paul regards Jesus from the evidence of his letters as God. The Gospel has been preached to all of these people, and what Paul is doing is delivering a kind of interpretation of this orally delivered good news. The biographers of Jesus, the preserved biographers, the Gospels, as we have them, are later than Paul but they reflect a tradition which is probably earlier than Paul. So Paul is not interested in the nitty gritty of the life of Jesus, he assumes that the people know this, the people he's dealing with, they're all converts, these people are already followers of Jesus. He's trying to explain to them what the consequences of all of this. He's giving a kind of midrash on the life of Jesus for the benefit of these bewildered followers of Jesus, many of them Jews, or asking, Now what? I mean whatever happened to the Torah in this whole shuffle, in this new world that we live in. And Paul is trying to answer these questions, but what is remarkable about that, is that the early Christian community who put together the New Testament gave Paul such a prominent position right next to the Gospels, so it's not just the four Gospels describing the life of Jesus, it's also one man's interpretation of those Gospels which has become the dominant one because of its position in the New Testament, its inclusion in the New Testament.

Rachael Kohn: So we have the Gospels and we have Paul's letters and we have some other letters and even perhaps letters by Paul that were written by somebody else. I think many Christians accept that some of those letters with Paul's name on them actually were not written by him. But then there's the Book of Revelation, a most curious, apocalyptic text which is unlike the previous ones because well, it's a revelation, isn't it?

Frank Peters: But not unlike previous Jewish writing. There are lots of Jewish books of Revelation, apocalypses. Apocalypse means literally unveiling, that's the name of it in Greek, the Book of the Apocalypse. It's an unveiling of what's going to happen at the last day and that was a relatively familiar form of literature to the Jews. They were writing apocalypses for one or two centuries before John wrote his Apocalypse. So what's interesting about is that it's a Christian adaptation of a Jewish literary form, a new Christian view of what the end of the world would be like.

Rachael Kohn: I found one of the most interesting parts of your book The Voice, the Word, the Books to be how you reveal the extent to which early Christians were looking at all of these different parts of their tradition and comparing them and analysing them, particularly the Gospels, because there you have narrative accounts with variations and discrepancies. You talk about Eusebius and also someone before him who arranged the Gospels in a kind of comparative way and look at them and number them. Now that's a very analytical approach to these texts.

Frank Peters: But it also reflects a very important development in Christianity, namely its movement out into the pagan intellectual tradition, which some Jews embrace but the Jewish mainstream, what turned out to be the Jewish mainstream, was very suspicious of that. But as Christianity developed and very quickly they began to make converts of Gentiles, non-Jews. That's one of the surprising developments in Christianity, its appeal to non-Jews, which took everybody by surprise I think, including the Jews who were watching this phenomenon.

But what happened was as more and more Gentiles were converted to this movement, they were trained in the techniques of textual analysis and textual criticism that they had learned at the University of Alexandria and other places, and now they were Christians and they brought that skill to the study of Christianity. So it's a different intellectual tradition that Christianity dipped into and over the centuries got more and more profoundly involved in. I mean Christianity in effect the Gentilisation of Christianity changed the intellectual cast of Christianity, changed it from that Jewish prototype, the rabbi as prototype, to the university professor as prototype.

Rachael Kohn: And did translations of the Bible and of the New Testament also affect those ideas?

Frank Peters: Well yes, because first of all the New Testament itself is a translation. Jesus didn't speak Greek, Jesus preached in Aramaic, which was the local language, and that yet these Gospels are in Greek. So they are already translations of Jesus' words. So therefore translation was never a problem for Christians, it started out that way, I mean it started out as a kind of polyglot religious movement as it passed out among the Gentiles, it just spread all over the Mediterranean and used the languages of the Mediterranean, mostly Greek, and that the early Christians, like the Jews around the Mediterranean, read the Bible, the Jewish Bible, in that Greek translation, that Septuagint that had been made in Alexandria a couple of centuries earlier.

They all read the same Jewish Bible and it was always in Greek that text. And so Greek was a natural language for them, but when in the Western Mediterranean people spoke Latin, and so very quickly the New Testament began to be translated into Latin and further east it began to be translated into Syriac and Coptic and eventually every language under the sun, without the slightest qualm. Jews and Muslims are somewhat hesitant about the notion of translation, because they're dealing directly with God's word, and particularly in the Qur'an. But in Christianity, they're not dealing with Jesus' direct words, they're dealing with a Greek version already of Jesus' words.

Rachael Kohn: But didn't the Jews in the early periods already produce translations? I mean they did do the Septuagint.

Frank Peters: On sure, sure. I mean yes, because the reality is that Jews could no longer speak Hebrew or understand Hebrew. Like when Ezra brought the Jews back from exile and began to reinstitute the cult in Jerusalem, he had the Book of the Law read out publicly to the Jews to which they then at the end said Amen, or assented to it, they renewed the covenant, but the book of Ezra tells us as these things were being read out, presumably in the Hebrew, they were followed by a translation, so already in the 500s BC the knowledge of Hebrew was such that this thing had to be translated for them. What a translation is called by the way is a Targum, and there are lots of them in Judaism, sure. But I mean the rabbis never lost their knowledge of Hebrew. The study of the Bible, the legal approach to the Bible, the extraction of law from the Bible is always from the Hebrew text. But Christians don't operate that way, there is no sacredness to the 'original'.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, especially as the Greek was not even a language of Jesus. Well Frank Peters, today the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament are very similar but they do differ. How did that come about?

Frank Peters: It came about in two ways. First as Christianity began to spread, the Jews began to disavow that Septuagint translation that they made in Egypt. The translation was too loose, and the Christians were making hay out of the looseness of the translation. So they wanted something more literal to sort of cut off the Christians at the pass, so that they moved in the direction of a more literal kind of translation. That's one thing that occurred. And also the Septuagint used a different order of books in the Bible, which eventually turned out not to be the arrangement that the rabbis favoured. But Christians since they were raised on the Septuagint, stuck with that order of the books and so the order of the books the early Christians read in their Greek Septuagint version of the Jewish Bible and what Jews were reading in their Hebrew version, the order of the books was different.

And then in the course of time, the Christians were aware of this, they were aware of the difference of the books, and that the Septuagint had more books than the Hebrew Bible, they were aware of the discrepancies, Christians were. But they accepted the Septuagint as the word of God, the authentic word of God and they stuck with it. Comes the Reformation, and Luther in his attempt to get back to a more authentic scripture, because that really was the motto of the Reformation, to rely on scripture alone, preferred to go back to the order and the arrangement of the books in the Jewish Hebrew Bible, that was his sort of assertion of authenticity, 'Let's go back to the Hebrew version'.

So now you have differences between not only the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible, but among Christians there's a difference between the Protestant Bible and the Catholic Bible.

Rachael Kohn: Frank Peters there explaining the theological reason behind the different Protestant and Catholic Bibles. Peters' book is The Voice, The Word, The Books, and he's Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, in Manhattan.

Next week, the Qur'an on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Frank Peters
is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His books include The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam: A New Edition and the forthcoming The Creation of the Qur'an.

Publications

Title: The Voice, The Word, The Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians and Muslims
Author: F.E.Peters
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2007

Presenter

Rachael Kohn

Producer

Geoff Wood and Rachael Kohn