This is the standard, conservative Protestant interpretation I think. I’d make a bolder statement though (as a Christian who’s fairly skeptical of much/most of the Old Testament). This interpretation requires you to believe that provisions of the Mosaic law- like stoning adulterers and homosexuals to death- were legitimate at one time, but no longer. I don’t think things like that were ever morally legitimate. I think Jesus was being deliberately ambiguous here, and meant something different by ‘the Law’: specifically, I think he meant the moral/natural law that we know through conscience, or perhaps the spirit of the law that underlay the explicit laws set down by Moses. The same as what Paul meant here:
“(For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)”
In practice, of course, Jesus overrode the explicit Mosaic law on numerous occasions (re: the death penalty for adultery, working on the Sabbath, kosher dietary laws, associating with lepers, etc.).
I think that some of it was, and that God’s message is discernible in it, especially to the extent that it prophecies Jesus. I would not go so far as the Marcionites who jettisoned it wholesale. I don’t think every individual part of it was or is, though. And I think it has value, essentially, only insofar as it prophecies Christ and leads us closer to Christ. I don’t think, for example, that stuff like slaughtering Amalekites, stoning homosexuals and adulterers, etc. expresses the will or nature of God.
The Old Testament is mythology, but it’s the one particular mythology that God made use of to prepare the people among whom His son would be born, for his arrival. Which is why we should read it and take what we can from it, but also not treat it (or not all of it, anyway) as unalterable and infallible Truth.
I’m ostensibly a Calvinist and also have a lot of difficulty with the OT.
I think that a lot of what Jesus was pointing out was that the Jews of the day had misunderstood the law and were too slavishly following the letter of the law without understanding the spirit of it.
But that interpretation would seem to nullify itself. People feel their consciences pricked by different thoughts and actions. There can be non-“doers of the law” who commit unlawful acts and aren’t hurt by their consciences; and by the same basis, there are people who can do right by them without it, too. Such doers of the law wouldn’t show to work of the law written in their hearts, to borrow the terminology.
Put another way - if someone treats another person well, not because of any moral compunction on their part but because of peer pressure or a desire to look good in front of others - he or she would be a “doer of the law” and justified before God by this interpretation. It’s purely about end result, the intent is assumed.
I think that some of it was, and that God’s message is discernible in it, especially to the extent that it prophecies Jesus. I would not go so far as the Marcionites who jettisoned it wholesale. I don’t think every individual part of it was or is, though. And I think it has value, essentially, only insofar as it prophecies Christ and leads us closer to Christ. I don’t think, for example, that stuff like slaughtering Amalekites, stoning homosexuals and adulterers, etc. expresses the will or nature of God.
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Wow, really? Everybody’s happy with this?
The Law explicitly dictated by God, and the orders explicitly dictated by God or his prophets, are not indicative of God’s will, but the alleged Messianic prophecies, many of which the greatest experts on the Hebrew Bible throughout history (namely Jewish scholars) say are not prophecies at all, let alone prophecies pointing to Jesus, THOSE are the most important part of the Hebrew Bible?
Because as we all know, Christianity spread like wildfire through Israel, especially among the upper class Jews who were intimately familiar with all those verses, and got no traction at all among the Gentiles, who were completely ignorant of the Torah.
:shrug: It’s certainly a valid Christian viewpoint on the Old Testament (though not one I share completely). There was a conscious reinterpretation of the Old Testament by early Christians to read it with prophesying Christ in mind.
I’m not Jewish, I disagree with the tenets of Judaism, so I don’t think it should come as a surprise that I think Jewish readings of the Old Testament, scholarly or otherwise, are less reliable than Christian ones.
Why is a Jewish scholar a better interpreter of Isaiah 53 than a Christian one? Because Isaiah was Jewish? OK, but that assumes that what really matters is the ‘original intent’ of Isaiah, and what he himself meant by writing the passage. If you take divine inspiration seriously, though, then maybe God was working through Isaiah and inducing him to write the passage. If that’s the case, then what matters is not what Isaiah meant, but what God meant. Those of us who believe some OT passages prophecy Jesus, generally don’t think that the original intent of the author is the most important thing here.
And this is exactly why it is so amusing when Christians tell atheists that they as outsiders are in no position to interpret the New Testament. :rolleyes:
Except that atheists do not claim the NT as their own holy book; Christians, OTOH, do claim the OT as one of theirs. Once they assume that the Jews are wrong about the Messiah, then the Jewish interpretation of the OT–even though it’s their own scripture–is flawed.
I could as easily claim that the Advanced Technology is the basis for my new religion, and that Hubbard simply did not interpret it correctly. Or that the Book of Mormon is god-breathed, but Smith and Young did not interpret it correctly. Or, for that matter, that this new Protestantism I came up with is a much more godly approach to the Bible than the Catholic.
Same books, different interpretations…and naturally when my interpretation is correct, theirs is not.
Who’s telling you that? Interpret it to your heart’s content. I may not give much credence to your interpretation or think it’s well supported by the evidence (much as believing Jews don’t pay much attention to Christian interpretations of the Hebrew bible) but why should my opinion matter to you?
Well, with a look at posts #51 and #201 we get the definite feeling that “atheists” can jolly well keep off the one, true sacred book of choice.
But BTW I find your forthrightness about your intellectual inconsistency to be refreshing, and I think it will be more interesting to communicate with you than with the other Christians on this thread.
See, Hector, this is the kind of drivel I was referring to.
Flyer: First off all, you can leave off the quote marks around inconsistencies. There are many flat contradictions. The only way around this would be to make all the words of the Bible suspect anyway. Just as, logically, Billy-boy Clinton would have made it impossible to discern what he really meant to say when he was actually telling the truth and wanted to say something important.
I’m not sure which parallel universe you are living on. First, many hard-core atheists DO NOT CARE about contradictions, especially if they have been atheist all life long.
On the other hand, there is a whole cottage industry of the intellectually dishonest frantically trying to defend the Bible as the perfect Word Of God.
And it’s not only atheists and the similarly minded involved here. If you want to look you can see sites where Jewish folks find all sorts of galaxy-sized holes in the NT rhetoric to be the fulfillment of the so-called O.T.
There is quite a bit of irony here, but it isn’t a matter of “atheists” going to “great lengths” to find huge holes. (Such as the fact that no large numbers of Israelites were ever in Egypt as slaves. They emerged from the Canaanites.) The real irony is you using such words as small, ridiculous, and illogical. That describes the book you worship, not every criticism of it.
“Principles” of Bible study? This is the word you need to put in quotes.
Intellectual dishonesty is not a principle.
The cheap lawyer tricks that any really bright child could see through are not a matter of principle.
You don’t get to reverse burden of proof just because you want to.
Finally, I have never heard anyone say “Hur! Hur! Hur!” to anything they found laughable. A quiet rueful chuckle is all the nonsense of infallibility of wholly scribbles merits.
Flyer, believe me, no one who knows what they are talking about cares what you think. (The only halfway valid excuse for believing the Babble to be some great truth is never having read it.)
I’m not saying non-believers can’t have their own interpretations of the Bible, I’m saying Christians have little value for them. Why should we care about the interpretations of someone who doesn’t share our traditions or faith? We argue even with those share our traditions and faith!
Jews can tell us what the Old Testament means to them, but can’t really speak to what it means to Christians. Likewise, atheists can tell us what the OT means to them, but shouldn’t presume to say what it means to Christians.
+1. More to the point, if you interpret the new testament according to a set of premises that Christians don’t share, then don’t be surprised if your interpretations are unconvincing. For example, if you think “Book X must have been written before 70 AD, because it predicts the fall of Jerusalem and genuine prophecy is impossible”, then, well, Christians are not going to find that convincing because they don’t accept the premise.
No, because the scholar is Jewish, and therefore doesn’t begin with the assumption that Jesus is the Messiah. Also, he’s probably spent more time and gone into the original language text in more depth than a Christian scholar, who likely devotes part of his time to the NT and koine.
For my purposes (namely, an objective examination of the text), an atheist would be even better than a Jew, other things being equal, since he has no assumption that the text is divinely inspired. But other things aren’t equal — an atheist is unlikely to be as motivated to spend his life studying the Hebrew Bible as a Jewish scholar would be.
But for your purposes (which I assume is to find out God’s will as expressed in the text), a Jew should be just as good as a Christian, since Jews hope and believe that the Hebrew Bible does contain Messianic prophecies, and have just as strong a desire as you do to find and understand them. I therefore see no reason to believe that they are not just as capable of finding hidden (even from the authors themselves) meanings as Christian scholars are – unless you think God is punishing the Jews by clouding their minds, or something. But they are obviously less likely to go along with the likes of Matthew, as he attempts to pound round verses into square events in Jesus’ life – which IMO is done very clumsily, even when he’s making up those events, like the Flight to Egypt.
The relative merits of Jewish and Christian scholarship aside, it seems to be your position that the Hebrew Bible is so infused with divine inspiration that God is speaking through the authors to express hidden meanings even when the authors themselves don’t realize it, but at the same time, you say that the passages where God is quoted directly as giving orders or laws do not necessarily express God’s will.
Name any book with more than a couple hundred pages, and name any conclusion you want me to reach using that book, and I’ll bet I can do it using those exegetical principles.
But I agree with whoever said above that you are the most intellectually honest person in this thread. IMO, those who resolve their cognitive dissonance through more sophisticated (I would say tortured) reasoning are just better at kidding themselves.
Isaiah 40:22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
Granted, it says “circle”, not “sphere”, but it’s suggestive. Pre-Christian Jewish writing, in any case.
(apologies if somebody else already posted this verse)