What Could the Torah Not Justify You From?

In Pisidian Antioch, Paul preached a sermon on the Sabbath in the synagogue (Acts 13). The sermon quickly reviews Israel history, leading up to Jesus (13:16-25), and then he talks about how Jesus was killed and raised from the dead (13:26-37). The very end of his sermon offers a warning that the audience, relying on a quotation from Habakkuk 1:5 (13:40-41). But it is the part between the focus on the resurrection and the concluding warning that interests me now.

γνωστὸν οὖν ἔστω ὑμῖν, ἄνδρες ἀδελφοί, ὅτι διὰ τούτου ὑμῖν ἄφεσις ἁμαρτιῶν καταγγέλλεται [καὶ] ἀπὸ πάντων ὧν οὐκ ἠδυνήθητε ἐν νόμῳ Μωϋσέως δικαιωθῆναι, ἐν τούτῳ πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων δικαιοῦται.

I have neither the time nor the expertise (in NT studies or the debates about justification) to enter into a full treatment of this passage, but I did want to offer a thought. I have looked at a few commentaries (Fitzmyer, L.T. Johnson, Bock), none of which related this statement at all to the preceding emphasis on the resurrection.

But it seems to me that the context of the sermon, the context of Acts as a whole (which emphasizes the resurrection quite a lot--see 2:24-35; 4:2; 17:32; 23:6; 25:23, just to name some references off the top of my head), and the situation in which the sermon was delivered, in a synagogue among Jews who knew that Leviticus promised forgiveness of sins through sacrifices--all of this indicates that while Paul here certainly related this 'justification' to forgiveness of sins, perhaps more specifically he relates it to forgiveness of sins that liberates from the curse of sin = death.

To be brief and simplistic, in his letters Paul speaks of Adam's sin as ushering in death (Rom. 5:12-14; 1Cor. 15:21-22), so that death is the consequence of sin. Now, Paul in Acts could be saying to the Jews in Antioch: "The Torah promised forgiveness of sins through slaughtering a goat, but it never promised justification that you would not suffer the effects of sin, that is, death. No matter how many goats you slaughter, you will die. The Torah cannot set you free from death. But Jesus can. What the Torah could not justify you from (= the effects of sin = death), Jesus does justify you from. He has inaugurated the resurrection, he did not see corruption, and everyone who believes can join him in that."

NAPS 2012 Program

It seems that the program for the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society is already available. On the homepage of the society, it says that the program will not be available until April, but if you click on the annual meeting call for papers, you will find at the top that it says: "The 2012 program may be opened by clicking here." So, click on it and voila, the program. Also, on the 'call for papers' page, it says the program was released on Feb. 13.

It's nice to see the program released a bit early--it helps with planning the trip to Chicago. The opposite happened in the case of the SECSOR program, which was just released a week or so ago even though the conference itself is the first weekend of March. Mostly I don't stay for entire conferences, so I like to know when I'm presenting a paper so I can book the hotel for that night.

I still don't see any information on the NAPS website about registration or housing--they say that information will be available in March. I remember last time (in 2010) the hotel rooms were $142/night, which I thought pretty good for late May in Chicago, but I have no recollection about how much the conference itself ran.

Anyway, back to the program, I'm sure you'll want to examine the whole thing yourself, so I'll just point out the two places where my name appears. On Friday morning at 9:00, I chair a session on Jerome (session 30). That's pretty cool--I'm quite pleased not only to chair a session but that they assigned me that particular session. The first paper in that session is by Thomas Hunt at Cardiff, whom I met this past August in Oxford at the International Patristics Conference, and with whom I shared a brief email exchange about Jerome. I look forward to seeing him again. The other papers--by Stuart Squires (DePaul), Christine McCann (Norwich), and Peter Anthony Mena (Drew)--also look very interesting.

Later that same day, at 4:20pm, I'll present my own paper in Session 47. The session itself is called "Scripture: Commentary and Translation," and it is chaired by Mischa Hooker, whose website I use constantly. Other than me, the session features some big names: D.H. Williams (Baylor) on "The First Gospel in Service of the Early Fathers," Thomas Scheck (Ave Maria University) on "A Brief Introduction to Jerome's Commentary on Isaiah" (I'm very interested!), and Paul Blowers (Emanuel Christian Seminary) on "Anastasius of Sinai's Hexaemeron: Negotiating an Exegetical Via Media."

My own paper is called "Why Did Jerome Translate Tobit and Judith?" This is a topic I've been thinking about for some time, though I still have yet to put everything together into a coherent paper. That's why I like presenting at conferences--they give you a deadline to write the paper! I'll have to have it done by May 25.

I'll have more to say about my paper as the conference draws closer--you know, after I've actually written it.

UPDATE: Just a couple hours after I posted this, the NAPS website issued an announcement about the meeting, pointing to the conference program available on the site. But the homepage still says the program will be available in April.

M. Patrick Graham: Charles Coil Lectures 2012

I'm very excited that Heritage Christian University will be welcoming Dr. M. Patrick Graham of Emory for the 2012 Charles Coil Lectures (Friday, 24 Feb. 2012). In previous years we've hosted the recently-deceased Frederick W. Danker (2010) and Richard Bauckham (2011), and the audio from their talks are available here.

Dr. Graham (PhD, Emory, 1983; MLIS, UT Austin, 1990) is a specialist on Chronicles, on which he has written and edited several volumes. His lectures are entitled "Reading Chronicles for All Its Worth." They should prove to be informative and interesting to non-experts. The two lectures begin at 8:30am and 1:00pm, and each is allotted two hours.

The break between the lectures should also be a lot of fun. Dr. Graham has agreed to have a little informal Q&A during lunch about his academic history, how he ended up doing a PhD at Emory and then an MLIS, how he splits his day now between library work and biblical research, etc. All are invited to this. This session will be especially helpful to students, but I am also looking forward to it.

The audio (and maybe video) of Dr. Graham's lectures will probably be made available online, as in previous years. If so, I'll note it here.

SECSOR 2012

A draft program for the SECSOR 2012 meeting in Atlanta next month is now available. I see that my paper is scheduled for the very first session, Friday, March 2, 6-8pm.

I'm presenting the paper in the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament section of the SBL part of SECSOR, and the paper's title is: "The End of the Bible? The Position of Chronicles in the Canon." It's related to my on-going research on the saying of Jesus in Matt. 23:35 (// Luke 11:51) regarding the blood of Zechariah and its relation to the canonical shape of the Tanakh in the first century. Last year at SECSOR (in Louisville) I read a paper to the NT section on that topic.

(Once upon a time, I started a series on this topic, but, of course, I never finished it, or even continued it. The series consists of one post.)

Here's the abstract for my paper this year.

"The End of the Bible? The Position of Chronicles in the Canon"

Scholars have argued for the ‘originality’ of the position of Chronicles at the end of the canon based on both external and internal considerations. The internal considerations entail identification of various ‘closure phenomena’ that allegedly indicate that Chronicles either was written for the purpose of concluding the scriptural canon or was redacted for that purpose (cf. Georg Steins, Stephen Dempster, etc.). The external evidence (most comprehensively presented by Roger Beckwith) includes the Talmudic order of books (b. B. Bathra 14b), various Masoretic manuscripts, and a particular dominical statement preserved in the double tradition of the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 23:35 // Lk. 11:51). This paper argues that none of this evidence can be considered compelling. The external evidence—especially Patristic lists of Old Testament books, including many that have an explicit concern for the Jewish number and order; and the best Masoretic manuscripts, including the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex—weighs decidedly against an ‘original’ location of Chronicles at the end. The internal indications for the concluding position of Chronicles too closely resemble many other types of biblical intertextuality perceptible in other books to warrant the conclusion that for Chronicles they require a place at the end of the Bible. The paper also explores the meaning of canonical ‘order’ in a pre-codex society, as well as the origins and reception of various canonical arrangements.

Indexing a Book

Well, I've finished (more-or-less) compiling an index for a book. This is my first book and my first index. I've learned a few things, mostly that it's a long, tedious process. But there are some other things that I'd like to remember for next time.

First, I should say that my book is the published form of my dissertation completed at Hebrew Union College under Adam Kamesar and Richard S. Sarason. If everything goes as planned, it will appear in May within the series Vigiliae Christianae Supplements (Brill). See here for a preview.

I compiled two indices--an index of ancient sources and a general index (subjects and modern authors). I did these in reverse order.

For the general index, I used the instructions provided by David Instone-Brewer at Tyndale House. It was supposed to be an easier way to index (I suppose it was), as the computer did some of the work for you, but it was still a bit more complicated and time-consuming than I anticipated. I'm sure this is partly because I was inexperienced, and partly because I am far from being a computer whiz.

You first have to make a Word document of the PDF that the publisher sends you (the proofs), and then get all the page numbers in the Word doc to be right, and then use a program to make a concordance of the Word doc, and then delete all the irrelevant words (words you don't want indexed--this took a long time), and then clean up the resulting word list, and then have Word provide the page numbers.

But, after all that, I still had to go through the index and eliminate the page numbers that weren't right. This is because sometimes people have the same last night, and Word provides the page numbers for both guys, so you have to eliminate the page numbers that don't apply. Or, when I look up Scholar X in the index, and I don't want to find references to articles written by someone else that happen to appear in books edited by Scholar X, so I eliminated those page numbers, too. And then also, for the subjects, I didn't want to include references for pages that included the term but were irrelevant. For example, I mention Homer a few times in my book, and those pages are referenced under the key word 'Homer'. But I also cite a book or two with Homer in the title, and I cite that book in contexts having nothing to do with Homer (like citing Honigman's Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship while talking about the Letter of Aristeas). I didn't want to include those references under the key word 'Homer'. So I found that I still had to go through the index and check every single reference to make sure it was one I wanted to leave in there.

If I had known at the beginning what I know now, I would have skipped some steps. I suppose I still would have the concordance program produce a concordance for me, and then I'd go through and delete all the many (thousands, it seemed) words that shouldn't be included. But, since I would go through and check all the page numbers, anyway, there's really no reason to have Word automatically provide the page references, and therefore there's no reason to make a Word doc based on the page proofs in PDF supplied by the publisher, and then ensure that all the page numbers are right in my newly-created Word doc. Next time I think I'll just make my concordance from the Word doc I sent to the publisher originally (from which the proofs were made), and then supply the page numbers myself by searching the PDF proof pages. This sounds incredibly tedious, but I think it will actually save me some time.

There was also an unforeseen problem with using a Word doc made from the PDF proofs supplied by the publisher. In the transfer between formats, for some reason, many (but not all) of the 'f's' did not come over. So, in the newly-created Word doc, the name 'Rufinus' appeared as 'Ru inus', and 'Niehoff' became 'Nieho '. This obviously created problems for the concordance program, which produced no occurrences of Rufinus but instead had 'Ru' and 'inus'. Making the concordance from my original Word doc would avoid this problem.

For the index of ancient sources, I knew of no better way than to simply go through the document and find who I cited, and then run a search in the PDF for all the places that I cited that author or work. Instone-Brewer does provide instructions for an 'automatic' way of doing this index, but the directions were too complicated for me.

The OT as Christian Scripture

Ernst Axel Knauf has issued a review of the commentary on Joshua written by J. Gordon McConville and Stephen Williams for the Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary Series published by Eerdmans.

The review is rather negative, and quite brief, and I will leave aside Knauf’s comments on the book itself. My interest was peaked, however, by a comment toward the close of the review. As Knauf explains how he would read Joshua as scripture, he writes the following.

If I want to read Joshua as part of a Bible that also contains a New Testament, I turn to the Vulgate as the first Bible that did that. If I read the Hebrew text, I read it as part of the Prophets that comment on Torah.

This comment interests me mainly because I don’t know what it means. Let’s take it one sentence at a time.

So, the Vulgate is the first Bible that put Joshua (and, no doubt, any other OT book) together with the NT. Um, how did it do that? Why wouldn’t you say the Greek Bible did this before the Vulgate? (And the Old Latin, for that matter.) I mean, after all, we have actual manuscripts of the Greek Bible, such as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, that have (or originally had) the entire Greek OT and entire (more-or-less) Greek NT, and that preceded chronologically the earliest parts of the Vulgate by several decades.

Perhaps Knauf would say that the Greek translations of the OT were translated by Jews, and piecemeal at that, so these translations were not created with a view to the NT, and they were only joined with the NT sometimes many centuries after the original translation. But, Jerome is the translator we typically associate with the Vulgate, and he failed to translate (probably) the majority of the NT, working only on the Gospels before turning to the OT. So, the Vulgate too was translated only piecemeal, and put together, OT with NT, only at a later time, much the like the Greek Bible.

Again, Knauf may respond that Jerome was the first one who translated the OT as a Christian, at least, whose translation is extant (since the Old Latin is not completely extant). This may be true, and it may not be (see Peshitta), but Jerome certainly used his Christianity as an argument to his contemporaries that his translation would be better than others. On the other hand, Jerome was convinced that he was revealing the Hebrew text in his translations, and that it was the Hebrew Bible, rather than the Greek LXX, that really testified to Christ, and that the apostles themselves attest this by quoting the Hebrew rather than the Greek (so Jerome argued). So, saying that his Vulgate is somehow more Christian than the Hebrew text is actually a repudiation of the principles behind the Vulgate. I don’t mean to say that it is wrong, but I don’t think that Jerome would have agreed with it.

Now for the second sentence:

If I read the Hebrew text, I read it as part of the Prophets that comment on Torah.

When Knauf speaks of Joshua as “part of the Prophets”, I assume he must be talking about the divisions of the Hebrew Bible into three parts: Law (Torah), Prophets, and Writings. Otherwise, I’m not sure how you could classify Joshua as a prophetic book. So, when reading Joshua in Hebrew, one should read it according to the divisions defined in a later age, perhaps as late as the third or fourth century CE. I guess this is what he means at the very end of his review when he urges us to read the Old Testament not only as Christian scripture but also as Jewish scripture. He seems to mean: “scripture in terms of how it was received in what became normative Judaism.”

But, then I’m back to asking, “Why do Christians have to read the Vulgate, and not the LXX?”

LXX Article in the Reif Festschrift

A festschrift for Stefan Reif is about to be published:

'From a Sacred Source': Genizah Studies in Honour of Professor Stefan C. Reif. Cambridge Genizah Studies Series, Volume 1. Edited by B.M. Outhwaite and S. Bhayro. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

I mention it here because one of the articles deals with a subject of continuing interest for this blog.

Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, "An Early Palimpsest Scroll of the Book of Kings from the Cairo Genizah."

For previous posts on the LXX materials from the Cairo Genizah, see here, and follow the links back. I assume the article by Olszowy-Schlanger deals with the Aquila fragments of Kings first published by F. C. Burkitt.