The problem with biblical prophecy about Jesus

The preacher at church issued Sunday what he called The Bible Challenge. It's where you read a passage of Scripture from one religious tradition, and then read a passage of Scripture from another religious tradition, and see if you can tell from the flavor of the Scripture which is actually from your religion.

Well no, not really, but that would be fun. He did do something similar, where he had 10 quotes projected onto the screen and we had to figure out which ones actually were from Scripture and which ones weren't. Among the most popular goofs were the Karl Marx quote "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" and two proverbs: one that says a righteous man cares for his animals but the wicked abuses them; and a second that urges giving strong drink to those who are in mortal pain. Some others I think were thrown off by a quote from a pastoral letter, where Paul lays out the requirements for a "bishop."

The longer-term idea is to combat biblical illiteracy by challenging us to read five chapters of Scripture a day, and then to journal about them, as though journal were a verb and not a noun. If anyone gerunds it into journaling -- i.e., "Did you do your journaling today?" -- I may have to resort to lethal force, at which point I promptly will withhold strong drink from those who are perishing.

Monday's passages are Matthew 1-2 and Acts 1-3.

First, the genealogy. Everyone knows that this genealogy flatly contradicts the genealogy given in Luke's gospel, so I won't even pretend I'm saying anything new here. I've heard some people say that Luke's gospel is the genealogy of Mary, but it certainly doesn't say that in Luke's genealogy. They're both patrilineal.

Matthew builds his genealogy around two key figures from Israelite history. The first is Abraham, from whom the Jewish people claim descent; and the second is David, whom the Tanakh treats as the gold standard for kings. Thus Matthew is linking Jesus to the Abraham, the man whom God made his covenant with; and with David, whom God make a second covenant with.

Astute readers are sure to make the connection and see how Matthew is casting Jesus as a new Abraham, representative of a new covenant; and also to see the claim that Jesus, as a direct descendant of David, is heir to the promise that God would make David's throne an everlasting one.

The third leg of Matthew's genealogy is the time after the Babylonian exile. I'm not sure what he's attempting here, unless it's tying Jesus back into the joy of returning from captivity -- something I'm sure Matthew's contemporaries probably felt they could understand, as the Jewish people were scattered all across the Roman world at this point, and even in Judea, they were under the rule of a foreign power, with a king who was not even one of them. (Herod was a half-Edomite.)

So that's the genealogy. Jesus as the author of a new covenant between God and man, Jesus as heir of the promise to David, and Jesus as the promised homecoming. All that makes sense, since Matthew's gospel was written for the Jewish reader.

Moving along, we come to what for me has long been one of the iffy parts of Matthew. It really seems like he's cherrypicking the verses he wants to cite as prophecies about Jesus, doesn't it? He quotes Isaiah 7:4, the virgin will be with child; Micah 5:2, out of Bethlehem will come a ruler; Hosea 11:1, "out of Egypt I called my son"; and Jeremiah 31:15, a voice heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her childern.

And then he has one about "He shall be called a Nazarene," but no one really knows where he got that one. I've heard it linked to a few, including one about a branching bush in Isaiah, but each one's a stretch.

Which, of course, some of the others are as well.

"Out of Egypt I called my son," is a pretty good example, when you recall that passage continues "and the more I called him, the more he turned away." Hosea of course was describing the relationship between God and Israel in the Tanakh, where God literally called Israel out of slavery in Egypt and then, as the Scriptures recount, watched as the people engaged in one form of idolatry after another. The next verse says "They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images."

And this is supposed to be a prophecy about Jesus? Yikes!

I really don't know what Matthew was thinking with this one. Hosea tells a beautiful story through the tragedy of his own life, of marrying a prostitute and watching as she had children with men other than him -- and then, rather than divorcing her, redeeming her and restoring her to his side.

It's a parable about what God was saying he would do with Israel, and through a christocentric lens, it's easy to see Hosea's behavior as a foreshadowing of Christ's behavior. But Matthew for some reason links Jesus not to Hosea, the hero of the story, but to Gomer.

A little earlier in the passage, Matthew cites the prophecy about "the virgin will be with child, and you shall call his name Immanuel." That's a great Christmastime verse, but there's two problems with it. One is that Isaiah actually said the almah will be with child, almah being the Hebrew word for "young woman," and "virgin" being only a tertiary meaning, according to the scholars I've read.

We can cut Matthew some slack on this one, since he's quoting the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Scriptures made sometime in the previous few centuries, and the rabbis who translated it from Hebrew and Aramaic presumably had no pro-Christian bias at work in the translation process. Evidently they felt that parthenos, the Greek word for "virgin" was close enough to the sense of almah that they would use it, instead of the Greek word for "young woman," and so they went with it, however much contemporary Hebrew scholars disagree.

But if you read the prophecy in the original context, it's pretty clear that Isaiah was talking about the more immediate situation facing King Hezekiah, namely the army that was laying siege to Jerusalem. Isaiah spells it out in 7:16, when he says that the land of the two kings besetting Judah will be laid waste. As the chapter goes on, Isaiah gets specific about Egypt and Assyria attacking the two kings. So it's hard to see this as a particularly messianic passage either.

I don't subscribe to an American view of prophecy, where the prophecy must refer specifically to one and only one event; I realize that these things often have layers of meaning and relevance, like an onion. David's psalm about being betrayed by a friend finds its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus' betrayal by Jesus, and yet it had meaning to David's life as well, and undoubtedly to the rest of us as well.

But come on. I'm not even touching the passages in Micah or Jeremiah, but I think there still are some interesting questions that I've never heard addressed satisfactorily from a pulpit about Matthew's approach to prophecy. Ernie Trask, formerly the pastor at St. Andrew's on the Roundabout in Rotorua, New Zealand, did mention the Hosea 11:1 prophecy in this vein once, but his commentary on it essentially boiled down to "What are you going to do?"

So what gives?

Luke chooses his Scriptures a little more judiciously when he puts them into Peter's mouth. They're not cited as prophecies, but merely as Scriptural guides for the sort of situation they're in, because of the whole Ish-Kerioth affair.

Anyway, it's late, and I haven't much else to say about Acts. Matthew 1-2 showed the lead-up to Jesus' big debut, and the first three chapters of Acts show the lead-in and debut of the church. Luke reinforces the parallels to David by connecting Judas' betrayal of Jesus to a psalm David wrote about being betrayed; and he connects Pentecost to the promises given in the book of Joel.

One other tidbit I've thought of lately is that Pentecost shows God's continued commitment to undoing all that is wrong with the world. Christ's resurrection shows that even death is being undone; Pentecost reflects a lifting or unraveling of the Babel curse.

At Babel, languages were confused and the people were broken up into 70 different nations. On the Day of Pentecost, there surely were many nations unrepresented, but the people who were there miraculously heard the early church worshiping in languages that the speakers couldn't know but the listeners understood completely. It's a reversal of Babel, and a sign that God wants to put the human race back together again, through Jesus.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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open theism and prophecy

1) Certain things inescapably are brought about by the will of God; i.e., they are predestined. The Incarnation was one of those, since I believe God always intended that he would walk among us and share our lives; the Crucifixion was a response to sin, so that Christ would identify with us in our deaths so that we could identify with him in his Resurrection. This is Christus Victor theology, and is nothing new. If God predestines it, then he knows it will happen, even if it takes some unexpected shapes.

2) Even if God does not know exactly what shape the future will take, he knows how to read the signs. I felt the air getting cold today, and saw clouds gathering and said, "It's going to rain." If I had told Rachel about it, she doubtless could have impressed her friends with her prognosticatory abilities.

Thus God can see trouble brewing in the empires, hatred stewing for Paul, and know with certainty "Thus-and-such will happen." If God knows all that can be known, he can still hazard a pretty good guess about things are going to work out in the forseeable future, right? Many of them would fall under "absolute certainty."

3) I'm not describing the Almighty as a clockmaker who created the world and is letting it run down on its own. He is an Author who remains inextricably involved with his story, and who is capable of nudging things in whatever direction he chooses to send them.

He is a Musician leading a free-form jam session, guided by the rules and structure that separate music from mere noise, yet still capable of guiding the band through crescendos and decrescendos, across movements and toward a final fermata where he wants it.

He is a Choreographer, set upon the stage with his troupe in an improvisational dance; yet though he dances among them, they follow his lead through moves we have no name for. History remains his to guide and direct, and he can do that through a miracle that sounds as a trumpet blast that tears the caps off mountains, or through the quiet voice that whispers in our hearts.

If he wants something to happen, he can make it do so.

4) Many prophecies concerning Christ were not solely concerned with him. The prophecy "The almah [maiden, virgin] shall be with child," for instance, referred to the events in the reign of Ahaz; later, the gospels writers saw something in that that spoke to them of Christ, and they included it. That we associate it primarily with the birth of Jesus and not with the promise of deliverance from the Assyrians that Isaiah made, is due to the emphasis our liturgical calendar places on that verse in light of its citation as a messianic prophecy.

Psalm 22 unquestionably resonates with the experience of Christ on the Cross, but so do virtually all the psalms about how the psalmist feels abandoned by God.

I don't know what David was thinking when he wrote that psalm -- it could easily have been written about his experience fleeing from Absalom after the prince had wrested the kingdom from him -- but my point remains the same: David's suffering and anguish over being defenseless before his enemies resonates with Christ's suffering and anguish on the Cross, much in the same way that we can identify with his suffering when the chips are rock-bottom down for us.

mildew prognostications

Some people, when they want to know the future, consult the stars. Others shuffle a deck of Tarot cards, and still others have their palms read.

Not me. When my curiosity about the new millennium got the better of me recently, I turned to the mildew that has started to grow on the walls of our shower at home, and studied it to divine the course the future will take.

Among my discoveries were the winning numbers to New Jersey's Powerball lottery, a remarkable likeness of Andy Kaufman, the results of the upcoming presidential election, and much more.

So, without further ado, here is what the next century holds for us all. Remember, you read it here first.

2000. Yosemite Sam wins the presidency on Nov. 7 as the result of a protest vote by Americans who want real candidates for a change. The U.S. Supreme Court orders all votes for "President Horny Toads" stricken, and gives the office to runner-up Tinky Winky.

2001. The Society for Anal Retentive Behavior celebrates the start of the new millennium, carefully explaining that 2000 wasn't really the start of the millennium because there was no Year 0. No one else cares.

2003. Religious activist-turned-politician Gary Bauer has a brain aneurysm when several gay- and women's-rights groups straightfacedly endorse his latest bid for presidency, calling him "a man of vision -- just what America needs for the 21st century."

2008. Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement to The NY Journal News, angrily declares, "I did not have an affair with that cleaning lady."

2012. The Titanic II, designed to replicate the original ocean liner in every aspect, disappoints everyone by not striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage. In order to keep his book deal, however, the captain of the boat arranges for a submarine from Finland to torpedo the liner just before it reaches New York.

2016. When some enterprising business owners begin shuttle runs to a new Hilton hotel on the moon for tourist vacations, national Republican and Democratic leaders alike rush to the nearest travel agency to buy each other one-way tickets. Voter turnout quadruples within three years.

2019. Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement delivered from his room at the Happy Acres Retirement Home, angrily declares, "I did not have an affair with the nurse who changes my bedpan."

2021. Somerset Valley Players, a theater based in Neshanic Station, N.J., becomes the third New Jersey theater to win the coveted Tony Award, for its innovative production of the little-known "Batman" musical.

2026. A group of animal-rights activists seize control of an entire barn for 53 tension-filled days. The confrontation finally resolves when government troops burst through one of the walls, knocking down a Coleman lantern and starting a fire that barbecues all the cows.

2032. Developers pave over the last available square inch in New Jersey and set their eyes on New England and rural Pennsylvania.

2037. The Packet Group of newspapers in Princeton, N.J., buys The New York Times, and makes the Hillsborough Beacon and The Manville News its new flagship papers.

2038. Disappointed survivalists abandon their bomb shelters and return to society after the Year 2038 arrives with only minor complications arising from the Y2038 computer bug. Ironically, the next day there is a nuclear attack and none of them reach their shelters in time.

2040. Developer U.S. Home scales back its controversial development The Greenbriar at Mill Lane to include only 2,000 living units. Elected officials promise a resolution to the 50-year-old controversy will be accomplished "soon."

2044. The smallest country in the world splits into two smaller countries when leaders in the reigning military junta disagree over whether the potatoes have enough salt.

2057. Hurricane Archibald hits the East Coast, and causes floods that decimate every municipality from Long Island, N.Y., down to Raleigh, N.C. Developers deny that flooding was exacerbated by excessive building, and instead blame the disaster on an unusually high tide.

2061. A particularly nasty flu virus wipes out all the chickens in the world. Yum Foods abandons its entire KFC chain, but not until after the chain jacks prices to $30 a piece because of the bird's new status as a delicacy.

2063. A cult forms in Hillsborough, N.J., worshipping the embalmed head of legendary freelance journalist Minx McCloud.

2065. Developer U.S. Home denies stonewalling the Hillsborough Planning Board as it submits a new application for 3,104 living units. Elected officials assure voters that a resolution is "in the works."

2070. An experiment with tachyons at Brookhaven National Laboratory accidentally causes time to run backward, with the unforeseen consequence that disco becomes popular again. An angry mob storms the lab and, unable to find the responsible scientists, eats all the yellow Zingers in the snack machines.

2075. Humanity's first colony on Mars comes to an unfortunate and untimely end when someone opens a window "to get a little fresh air."

2092. Experts in the computer industry, concerned about falling profits, start to make noise about the "Y2.1K bug."

2097. Hillsborough, N.J., planners finally approve the controversial Greenbriar development, allowing developer U.S. Home to build 2,876 units in ten 23-story buildings and calling it "a victory for open space in Hillsborough."

2098. James Cameron III wins 43 Academy Awards for his movie "Titanic II," which fortunately does not star either Kate Winslet or Leonardo DiCaprio, or anyone who looks remotely like them.

2099. A spry Dick Clark is one of dozens killed during a New Year's Eve party in Times Square when the dropping ball breaks off the pole and plows through the crowds.

2100. Every one of these predictions having come true, there is a renewed interest in the writings of David Learn and in the science of divination through reading mildew. The so-called Wall of Futures, however, is destroyed through an unfortunate accident involving a sponge and a bottle of bathroom cleaner.