If this sermon was to be written down and handed in as an exegetical paper at most Universities Mark would very likely get a big red F:

I find this entire homily painful at best. First, elohim is simply the common Hebrew word for God, plural in construct but singular in meaning, and as Mark fails to point out takes a singular verb בָּרָ֣א. There is universal agreement that a trinitarian understanding of this noun could not have been the understanding of the priestly author of Gen 1.

Second, targum Neofiti is commonly dated in the second century CE! That’s significantly later than Driscoll argues. In fact, undercuts most of his argument.

Third, “firstborn” is an odd rendering of ברא in Neofiti, and its Greek equivalent is not πρωτότοκος (Col 1:15 is what Driscoll is referencing).

Fourth, I understand that grammatically there is a case to be made for ברא as son (not firstborn) in the Neofiti text; however, seeing as the Targums are translations, interpretations, and clarifications of Hebrew texts I’m not sure how you get by associating it with בָּרָ֣א in the Hebrew text and parsing it as a 3ms verb.

Fifth, the special pleading in Driscoll’s argument is actually quite shocking. Driscoll has stated elsewhere that there is nothing he can learn about the OT from someone who is not a Christian. Oh but wait, I have a tendentious translation of a targum, whose function I don’t understand, that if I twist the right way with an incorrect analogy from the NT “proves” there were Jews who believed in the trinity before Jesus. Egad.

His opening salvo that there was some Jews who believed in the trinity because “they read the Bible and took it at face value” is so wrong, on so many levels, before he goes into his mistake laden sermon, that is surprising that this has not been taken off of the internet.

I understand that operating within a church setting means that as interpretive communities we adopt certain assumptions and presuppositions about the text. But special pleading that is little more than outright misrepresentation (i.e., lying) seems to me to be contra the pastoral charge.

HT: Targuman

“A person is obligated to become inebriated on Purim until he doesn’t know the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai.” (Talmud Megillah 7b)

We all wonder: Why does God permit, nay encourage, us to get drunk on Purim?…The key of this rabbinic injunction is that we should reach a point of “lo yada” — we do not know, only God does.

Read all:  Becoming a holy drunk.

If you need me I’ll be down at the local…

A strange story I came across:

The rabbis taught: The year when Simeon the Upright had to die, he told the sages: “Children, know ye that this year I am going to die.” They asked him: “How dost thou know?” He said: “Every year when I entered and left the Holy of Holies, I was accompanied by one old man, dressed in white and enveloped in white; but this year it was an old man attired in black and in a black turban, and he entered with me but did not go out with me.” And after the festivals, he got sick, and died.

Here’s a short video introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) by the Israel Antiquities Authority that may be useful for some preachers, professors, or teachers that frequent Scotteriology:

Found via Zwingli Was a Heretic from IAA

I took a class on Genesis. One of our assignments for this class was to write “Chapter summaries of the book of Genesis consisting of one or two brief yet descriptive sentences based on a thorough reading of Genesis in Robert Alter’s translation.” The goal for this exercise is, of course, to actually have the biblical studies student read the text. How novel.

Fortunately, for me I get very high grades and this was worth a very small amount of our overall grade, so I thought to myself, “Self, have some fun with this one. If it goes over like a fart in church then at least it won’t ruin your academic career.” Equally as fortunate, the professor for this class has a great sense of humor, and enjoyed my take after 50 or so similarly dry reports.

Today I give you all of history from Creation to the Flood in under one minute. Enjoy:

Chapter 1

God creates the world Part I: From a Distance.

Chapter 2

God rests and blesses the seventh day. God creates the world Part II: This Time it’s Personal.

Chapter 3

Temptation of Eve; her succumbing to temptation; Adam and Eve hide from God; Adam blames Eve for current predicament (and demands his rib back); God makes coverings for Adam and Eve (first time in history a man is asked, “Does this outfit makes me look fat?”); God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden.

Chapter 4

Adam knows Eve Part I: Gone in Sixty Seconds; Cain kills Abel; Lamech kills a younger man; Adam knows Eve Part II: Revenge of the Seth.

Chapter 5

List of the descendants of Adam; Enoch does not die; Methuselah lives 960 years.

Chapter 6

God limits the number of years of men to one-hundred and twenty; Sons of God explain ‘tongues’ and the ‘laying on of hands’ to the daughters of men creating the Nephilim; God decides to rain on evil humans parade: literally; God instructs Noah concerning the Ark.

Chapter 7

The Flood.

Chapter 8

God remembers Noah; the Earth dries and Noah, his family, and the animals emerge from the Ark; Noah makes a sacrifice to God; God promises to Himself to never again wipe out the Earth on account of man.

Chapter 9

God blesses Noah and his sons; Noahidic covenant; God sets His bow in the sky as a reminder of the covenant; Noah plants a vineyard and parties like it’s 1999 BCE; Ham sees his father’s nakedness; Noah curses Ham and blesses Shem and Japeth. Noah lives to the ripe old age of one hundred and twenty… give or take eight hundred and thirty years.

Chapter 10

Lineage of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japeth: Table of Nations. Ancient cure for insomnia discovered by reciting this chapter.

———————————————

Gervais on Genesis

Yes, it is a re-post, and yes it is deserved.

Sometimes I think that perhaps we are just a little too familiar with some of the stories of the Bible, and they don’t really affect us the way that they should. We can make all sorts of propositional statements about a book like Genesis without ever stopping and actually really listening to the story we have discarded for its ‘timeless truths’.

This video is not for the faint of heart, but it seems that Gervais is more impressed with the fact that God created light than many pastors I have heard speak. I’m not endorsing or defending anything Gervais says or does in this video, but I think it would be wonderful if we could regain a legitimate sense of wonder that he shows (acts) in this stand-up.

I almost forgot… he’s funny. Really funny.

Well we are less then a month from Rosh HaShanah, and five weeks from Yom Kippur, and I have been reading some relevant material. There is a story I came across in the Talmud related to the Day of Atonement that some Christians like to use as a tool for converting Jewish persons. Just in case you don’t know (and I’m paraphrasing off of the top of my head, so if I get one small detail wrong keep it together) in ancient times the Jewish High Priest would take two goats, and throw lots to determine which one was the scapegoat. The sins of the entire community were put on this lucky creature and he was led out in the wilderness to die.

Also, the High Priest put a crimson thread on the scapegoat; he hung a similar thread on the gates of the Temple as well. Apparently, the thread that hung on the gates of the Temple would turn white signaling the forgiveness of the people’s sin. Yomah 39b relates this story:

“Forty years before the Temple was destroyed, the lot never came into the right hand, the red wool did not become white, the western light did not burn, and the gates of the Temple opened of themselves, till the time that R. Johanan b. Zakkai rebuked them, saying: “Temple, Temple, why alarmest thou us? We know that thou art destined to be destroyed. For of thee hath prophesied Zechariah ben Iddo [Zech. xi. 1]: ‘Open thy doors, O Lebanon, and the fire shall eat thy cedars.’”

The Christian apologist’s reasoning goes something like this: the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. and the Talmud says that 40 years before this destruction the crimson wool stopped turning white. Can anyone tell me what happened 40 years before the destruction of the Temple around 30 C.E.? That’s right Jesus died, and became the atonement for our sins and this proves that the old system is invalid.

That sort of reasoning is fine except for one thing. The number forty. If you are a fundamentalist of a certain worldview and reading persuasion you might want to stop reading right now because I’m going to use a word you don’t like very much: symbolic. There, I said it. As you may or may not know the number forty is highly symbolic in the ancient Hebrew writings. Primarily I can think of three ways. 1) it is the duration of a generation 2) it represents a period of testing 3) it represents a time of change brought around by God’s strength.

I declare myself a follower of Christ, but I’m going to have to go with meaning 2 or 3. I mean seriously think about it. When the Mishna was redacted/compiled by Judah HaNasi the whole Christian thing wasn’t exactly a secret. And to say that the rabbis were pedantic in their argumentation would be an understatement. If there was something in the text that pointed to Yeshua the Nazarene as the Son of God and as the Atonement for the world I’m pretty sure they would have noticed it. These guys knew their sacred texts in ways that would put most modern Christians to shame. It would not have “slipped their attention.” I think that the Rabbis were so involved in some sort of defense of God and the destruction of the Temple that they employed this highly symbolic language to show that not only did they know the Temple was to be destroyed but that God himself was responsible.

Perhaps, this is one of the differences between a high context and a low context society. Any of the original readers would have known instantly what was meant by the symbolic use of the number forty, and 2000 years later we see only a literal number of years that point us back to 30 C.E.

Just came across something interesting and thinking out loud. Anyone else have some thoughts on this?