Author: Christopher R Smith

The Rev. Dr. Christopher R. Smith is an an ordained minister, a writer, and a biblical scholar. He was active in parish and student ministry for twenty-five years. He was a consulting editor to the International Bible Society (now Biblica) for The Books of the Bible, an edition of the New International Version (NIV) that presents the biblical books according to their natural literary outlines, without chapters and verses. His Understanding the Books of the Bible study guide series is keyed to this format. He was also a consultant to Tyndale House for the Immerse Bible, an edition of the New Living Translation (NLT) that similarly presents the Scriptures in their natural literary forms, without chapters and verses or section headings. He has a B.A. from Harvard in English and American Literature and Language, a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Gordon-Conwell, and a Ph.D. in the History of Christian Life and Thought, with a minor concentration in Bible, from Boston College, in the joint program with Andover Newton Theological School.

Why are the details of some episodes in different gospels irreconcilable?

Q. Why do several of the stories told by multiple Gospels have details that seem to be contradictory? I would expect that different authors would bring out different (non-contradictory) details when telling the same story, but there seem to be details that just flat-out can’t be reconciled in some cases. Stories I’m thinking of include the woman who poured perfume on Jesus (did that happen on two occasions?), the time Jesus walked on water, and the time when Judas betrays Jesus in the garden.

You’re right that when the same story is told in more than one gospel, sometimes there are not just differences in which details are included, there are also differences in the specific facts of the story.

For example, when Jesus walks on the water, Matthew includes the detail that Peter wanted to walk on the water, too; Mark and John don’t mention this. Matthew and Mark simply say that the wind died down when Jesus got into the boat; John says that “immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading.” These could be cases of one gospel writer knowing about something the others didn’t, or at least of one writer choosing to include something the others left out.

But there is another difference in detail between the versions of this story that can’t be reconciled this way. Both Matthew and Mark have the disciples starting across the lake at the end of the day or in the evening, and Jesus walking out to them “shortly before dawn.” In other words, the disciples were on the lake all night. But John says that they saw Jesus approaching the boat “after they had rowed about three or four miles.” We would have to make a deliberate effort to harmonize the stories by insisting, “Ah, the winds must have been so strong and the waters so rough that they were only able to row 3-4 miles all night.” But that’s not what John says, and it doesn’t seem to be his meaning; instead, he depicts the episode as taking place once evening has given way to “dark,” not with dawn approaching. So there is a time difference.

Similar points could be made about the other episodes you mentioned. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Judas identifies Jesus in the Garden of Gesthemane by kissing him on the cheek, the customary respectful greeting of the time. But in John, Jesus identifies himself after asking the soldiers, “Who is it you want?” And while all four gospel writers agree that a woman anointed Jesus with perfume in the city of Bethany, and it’s not impossible to reconcile all the accounts to conclude that this took place in the home of a man named Simon, Luke sets the episode early in Jesus’ ministry, while the other gospel writers place it near the end of his life.

But I don’t personally see irreconcilable details such as these as diminishing the truth or authority of the Bible in any way. Rather, as many have observed, these differences actually show that the gospel writers weren’t all trying deliberately to tell the same story as the others. This should give us even greater confidence in the independence and authenticity of their reports. If some minor details differ, the main points are always confirmed. And so we can be confident, based on multiple independent reports, that Jesus did walk on the water–the gospel writers agree about this miracle that testified to who he was. Judas did betray Jesus by bringing the soldiers to the garden. And a woman did anoint Jesus with perfume, and he acknowledged this as an appropriate, if extravagant, act of worship.

We only have problems with the differences in minor details if we embrace the idea that if the Bible is to be the word of God, it has to present only exactly what happened, without dispute or variation, down to the last detail every time. That’s simply not the kind of Bible God has given us. We should recognize that we have instead a Bible whose human character, including such variation in minor details, only helps it to be an even better authoritative witness to divine truth.

Why does a serpent represent what Jesus did on the cross?

Q. In the gospel of John, when Jesus is speaking with Nicodemus, why does he liken Himself to the serpent that was lifted up in the desert in the Old Testament, considering that serpents are usually associated with Satan? Why was a serpent chosen as a type/foreshadowing of what Jesus would do on the cross, especially in light of the Bible always emphasizing the “lamb” that was slain? I’ve thought that perhaps in a sense sin/evil was on the cross since Jesus “became sin” to put an end to it, but other than that it just seems weird to me.

Jesus refers to the way Moses made a bronze serpent and put it up on a pole in order to make one specific point to Nicodemus. Jesus has just told him that he needs to be “born again” in order to enter the kingdom of God. Nicodemus has misunderstood this and thinks that Jesus is describing something physical rather than something spiritual. (This happens often in Jesus’ conversations with people in this gospel, as I explain in my study guide to John.) “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asks.

Jesus tries to explain that he’s talking about being “born of the Spirit,” but Nicodemus still asks, “How can this be?” So Jesus uses the episode of the bronze serpent to explain more precisely what he means by being “born again.”

This episode is related in the book of Numbers. The Israelites are traveling through the wilderness and they start complaining about the very manna that God has been providing miraculously to feed them in the desert. (They say, “We detest this miserable food!”) As a punishment for their ingratitude, God sends poisonous snakes among them and many of the Israelites start dying from snake bites. So they come to Moses and admit, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you.” They ask him to “pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” God forgives the people and tells Moses to make a bronze snake and put it up on a pole.” God promises, “Anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.”

In other words, an admission of sin and a response of hopeful faith, looking to the means God provided for deliverance, was how the Israelites could be rescued from physical death in this instance. Jesus is telling Nicodemus that the same thing will be true, on a much grander scale in the spiritual realm, when he is “lifted up” onto the cross. Anyone who is sincerely sorry for the way they’ve disobeyed and offended God, and who looks in hopeful faith to Jesus’ death on the cross for their sake, will be rescued spiritually and given the chance to live anew. This is what it means to be “born again.”

So that is the single point of comparison: just as the Israelites needed to look in hopeful faith to God’s provision for their physical deliverance in the wilderness, so Nicodemus (and anyone else, ever since, who hears about Jesus’ conversation with him) needs to look in hopeful faith to God’s provision for their spiritual deliverance in the form of Jesus’ death on the cross.

We should not make any further points of comparison, such as “Jesus must be like a serpent in some way, rather than a lamb, because he said he had to be lifted up just as the serpent was lifted up.”

However, we should keep in mind that in the gospel of John, there are always multiple levels of meaning at work. Behind physical references there is often spiritual significance. We’ve already seen that this is true when Jesus speaks about being “born,” and it’s also true when he speaks of himself being “lifted up.” This can mean simply being raised onto the cross, but as a footnote in the NIV explains each time this phrase occurs in John, “The Greek for lifted up also means exalted.” We need to recognize that this spiritual meaning is also in view when Jesus says things like, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

Why does the Bible say that the moon could hurt us?

Q. I’m reading Psalm 121 and I’m puzzled that it says, “The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.” I can see the dangers of things like sunstroke and heat exhaustion, but how can the moon hurt us?

As I explain in my study guide to the Psalms, Psalm 121 is one of the “songs of ascents” that were composed to reassure the Israelites of God’s protection as they went up to Jerusalem for the annual pilgrimage festivals.

One approach to answering your question is to try to argue that the moon actually can hurt us (for example, by observing that there are more car accidents when the moon is full, etc.), on the premise that the Bible’s authority is somehow at risk if it suggests the moon could hurt us when it really can’t.

Another approach is to say that in statements like this, the Bible is preserving a popular belief that has since proved unscientific, but this doesn’t put the Bible’s authority at risk; rather, the preservation of such ancient beliefs is part of the Bible’s human witness to God’s deeds and character.

I personally wouldn’t have a problem with that second approach, but in this case I don’t think it’s necessary, because there’s a third approach that’s actually more in keeping with Hebrew thought and language.

We need to hear the statement that “the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night” in light of the understanding, articulated in the Genesis creation account, that God established the “sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night.” Psalm 121 is saying, “Not even the ruler of the day will hurt you; how much less any of the servants of the ruler of the day (that is, anything else during the day). Not even the ruler of the night will hurt you; how much less anything else during the night.”

In other words, this is one of those marvelous Hebrew expressions for totality that we find so often in the Scriptures (which include others such as “from the least to the greatest,” “from the heaven above to the earth beneath,” etc.). In fact, in Moses’ blessing on the tribe of Joseph at the end of Deuteronomy, there’s a very similar statement to the one in Psalm 121, which illustrates this point: “May the Lord bless his land with . . . the best the sun brings forth and the finest the moon can yield.”

Obviously crops grow from the light and warmth of the sun, not from anything that comes from the moon. But this is simply another expression for totality: May God bless you with everything that day and night can yield, that is, everything, all the time.

I hope this perspective helps explain the statement in Psalm 121.

For a discussion of another expression for totality, see this post.

What does the Bible tell us about the “third heaven”?

Q. Paul mentions that he knew of a man caught up to the third heaven (which he proceeds to call a paradise). Is there more information about each of the seven heavens in the canonical books of the Bible? There is some information in books not included in the canon (the book of Enoch, for example). How trustworthy is this information?

Nicolas Poussin, “The Ecstasy of St. Paul”

When he speaks of the “third heaven” in 2 Corinthians, Paul most likely means the place of God’s abode. His language echoes the cosmology found throughout the Bible in which the “first heaven” is the firmament or sky, in which the sun shines and birds fly; the “second heaven” is the “waters above the firmament”; and the “third heaven” is the place of God’s throne: according to Psalm 104, God “lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters” (i.e. the waters of the second heaven). And so when Psalm 148 says “Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies,” it’s saying, in a poetic parallel, “Praise him, you third heaven, and you second heaven.”

But Paul doesn’t do much more than allude to this cosmology. He does refer to the “third heaven” also as “paradise,” which could mean the blessed abode of departed souls. But we can’t say for sure, because Paul quickly shuts down his story by saying that “no one is permitted to tell” about the things seen and heard there.

This single and simple New Testament account of a journey into heaven contrasts strikingly with other more highly elaborated accounts from this period. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament notes, “The reserve which leads [Paul] to make only a brief reference distinguishes his account from the fantastic descriptions of heavenly journeys by contemporary Hellenistic mystics and Jewish apocalyptists.” One of these is found in the book of Enoch, which describes seven heavens, and there are similar descriptions in other apocalyptic works.

But I think we do well to take our cue from Paul’s reticence and not speculate about various “heavens” and what they might contain. His real point in telling this story was that he had all the credentials of an apostle, including visions and revelations, but that even so he should be recognized as genuine by the way God’s power shone through his weakness.

That being the case, even someone today who was entrusted with a vision of heaven should probably be very reserved about how much of it they shared. And we should probably be wary of the “fantastic descriptions of heavenly journeys” in books like Enoch. If the Bible doesn’t want to tell us much about such things, then there are much better areas of inquiry that we can more profitably devote ourselves to.

Are we really supposed to give thanks for everything?

Q. I wonder if you’ve encountered the idea that we’re supposed to thank God for everything, even for the bad things that happen to us. I’ve heard Paul’s statement in Ephesians referenced to support this notion: “always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This concerns me mainly because I can’t recall examples in Scripture where people thanked God for bad things that happened to them. Did Jesus thank God for sending him to the cross? Did Job thank God for taking everything from him? And so forth. Am I missing something?

Bible translations are generally agreed that when Paul says there in Ephesians that we should give thanks hyper pantōn, he does mean “for” everything (as opposed to “in” everything” or “in all circumstances,” as he says in 1 Thessalonians). Hyper followed by a noun in the genitive (in this case an adjective used as a substantive), when paired with verbs of thanksgiving or praise, clearly means “because of” or “on account of,” as these other examples from Paul’s writings show:

“that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy”
“many will give thanks on our behalf”
“something I thank God for”

But regarding that substantive pantōn, the NET Bible makes the interesting suggestion that Paul is actually saying we should give thanks “for one another.” The term pantōn can be either neuter (“everything”) or masculine (“everyone”), and the context in Ephesians does have to do with relationships in the community of Christ’s followers. But practically all other translations take it to be neuter, meaning “everything” or “all things.” So the broad consensus understanding is that Paul is saying we should give thanks “for everything.”

What does he mean by that?

I understand him to mean that we can always be thankful for what God is doing in a given situation or circumstance. God is always active to make all things work together for our good. But I agree with you that we’re not called to be thankful or grateful directly for things that are destructive and evil. I don’t see Scriptural examples of this, either.

To use one of your illustrations, Jesus didn’t thank God for sending him to the cross. In fact, he prayed that he’d be spared the cross if at all possible. But I think he was aware of what God wanted to accomplish through the cross (which he calls his “hour of glory” in the gospel of John), and he celebrated that even in advance.

To use a contemporary situation as another illustration, I don’t think a follower of Jesus would be called to thank God directly for a loved one’s serious disease. But they could still be very grateful for what they were learning through it about God’s grace and sustaining power, and for the way they were discovering that they were surrounded by a community of caring, loving people.

I hope this is a helpful distinction. We don’t give thanks directly for evil or destructive things. But we do give thanks for the way God is at work in every situation.

Insider and outsider language

My recent post about the altar inscription Paul saw in Athens–did it say “To an unknown god” or “To the unknown God”?–was prompted, as I noted there, by a conversation I had with a friend who does sociolinguistic analysis of the New Testament and early Christian literature. One thing she has helped me see much more clearly is the way biblical characters employ either “insider” or “outsider” language depending on the audience. (To give a contemporary example, a follower of Jesus today might speak of “the Lord” to a known fellow believer, but of “God” instead to someone whose faith they aren’t sure of.)

Since this conversation I’ve been seeing more ways in which recognizing “insider” and “outsider” language can help us appreciate the possible dynamics of biblical episodes. Consider, for example, the episode in Acts in which a believer named Ananias is asked to visit Saul of Tarsus (later known as Paul) right after Jesus has appeared to Saul on the Damascus Road.

Ananias first greets him as “Brother Saul” (Saoul adelphe). This is how followers of Jesus addressed one another. Does this mean that Ananias is immediately acknowledging Saul as a fellow believer? Not necessarily. This is also the way one Jew would typically greet another in the Roman Empire. My friend thinks, and I agree, that the original audience of Acts would have sensed the ambiguity here, and many of them may have thought, “Okay, he’s playing it safe, appealing to their shared Jewish identity to create some common ground with this man who, for all he knows, might still be an enemy.”

However, Ananias says next, “The Lord has sent me” (ho kurios apestalken me), using insider language for Jesus (“the Lord”), as if he were sure that Saul really was a follower of Jesus now. This suggests that “brother Saul” maybe was intended as the greeting of a fellow believer.

But then it appears that Ananias worries he may have gone too far out on a limb too early, because he immediately qualifies who “the Lord” is: “Jesus who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here.” This is outsider language: the proper name Jesus with a descriptor, like “Jesus of Nazareth . . . a man accredited by God” in Peter’s Pentecost sermon.

We don’t get much more of the dialogue, but I’m sure that when Ananias saw the scales fall from Saul’s eyes, he was probably comfortable going back to “the Lord” as a name for Jesus! But the movement from language that could be taken “safely,” to insider language, to outsider language shows that Ananias was obediently going into a dangerous situation courageously but carefully. (As we all should do when God–you know, the Lord–sends us into one.)

What “insider” and “outsider” language are you seeing as you read the Word–you know, the Bible?

Who were the Nephilim?

Q. Who were the Nephilim? Offspring of angels? Or is that theory completely wrong?

The Nephilim appear in the Bible early in Genesis, and they seem in some way to have helped bring about the flood. Their story is told this way:

“When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.’

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created . . .’”

I believe that here the biblical author is intending to describe marriages that are best understood as unions of human women and some sort of male supernatural beings. These marriages produced offspring who were “the heroes of old, men of renown.” That is, the offspring were capable of prodigious deeds. But as a result they also threw off restraint and led the entire world into “great wickedness.” God became so “deeply troubled” by this wickedness that he “regretted that he had made human beings” and decided to destroy them in the flood.

This passage naturally poses many problems for interpretation. If it really is describing marriages between humans and supernatural beings, how are we to account for its claim that such marriages not only took place, but actually produced offspring?

In light of this difficulty, many interpreters posit that the “sons of God” in view here are not actually supernatural beings, but rather the descendants of Seth, the son born to Adam and Eve after Cain killed Abel. He founded a line that “called upon the name of the Lord.” These godly Sethites, in the understanding of these interpreters, were corrupted by intermarriage into the culturally accomplished but godless line of Cain, which would be called here the “daughters of men.” Such dilution and compromise of the godly line led to unrestrained wickedness throughout the human population, these interpreters suggest.

But if this is the case, it is difficult to understand, for one thing, why intermarriage should only have been between Sethite men and Cainite women, rather than also between Sethite women and Cainite men.

Moreover, this interpretation requires that the term ‘adam, which to this point in the book has always had a generic meaning (“humanity”), suddenly and without indication be used to signify only a certain line of human descent (not “the daughters of humans” but “the female descendants of Cain”). But the generic meaning is clearly required again where God says “my Spirit will not contend with humans forever,” while the specialized meaning would be needed once more in the second reference to the “daughters of humans [Cainites?],” and the generic meaning would be needed again where God observes the wickedness of the “human race” and regrets making “human beings.” And yet there is nothing in the text to guide the reader in making these shifts of meaning.

Finally, the contexts of the other biblical occurrences of the phrase “sons of God” all call for a supernatural meaning. The term occurs near the beginning and ending of Job, for example, where the NIV translates it as “angels.” While it is true that the chosen people, to whom the Sethites would correspond at this point, are referred to metaphorically as God’s “sons” from time to time, the precise phrase “sons of God” is never used to describe them.

There is an alternative non-supernatural interpretation, first offered by Meredith G. Kline, in which the “sons of God” are kings. Kline argued that this passage actually describes human corruption in the form of institutionalized polygamy: “The sinfulness of the marriages described in [this passage] was not that they were . . . a mixture of two worlds . . . . The sin was that of . . . polygamy, particularly as it came to expression in the harem, characteristic institution of the ancient oriental despot’s court.”

But while this explanation accounts for why no marriages between the “daughters of God” and “sons of men” are described, it is still vulnerable to the same objections based on the shifts required in readers’ understanding of the term ‘adam (here it would have to mean “commoners” sometimes and “humans” the rest of the time) and the meaning of the phrase “sons of God,” which does not signify kings anywhere else in biblical Hebrew.

For all of these reasons, we should accept that the author’s intention is to refer to marriages between humans and supernatural beings, as difficult as this might be to square with our conceptions of those beings. As Derek Kidner notes at this point in his commentary on Genesis, “If the [supernatural] view defies the normalities of experience, the [non-supernatural] defies those of language (and our task is to find the author’s meaning).”

If this passage does describe marriages between humans and supernatural beings, however difficult it may be to understand how those could have taken place, this would actually fit well into the developing argument of the early narratives of Genesis, which explain the trouble-fraught human condition as a departure from an original paradisal state in consequence of measures God took to prevent human grasping after divinity.

The first pair are expelled from the Garden of Eden, for example, so that, having already become “like God” in “knowing good and evil,” they will not also “take from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” At the end of these early narratives, God divides the human community into contending factions through the confusion of languages, in order to frustrate its project of building a tower with its “top in the heavens.” In the same way, as Kidner observes, this passage “could well belong to the series [of human overreachings] as an attempt, this time on angelic initiative, to bring supernatural power, or even immortality, illicitly to earth.”

Even if the initiative was angelic, however, it appears that human consent was required, since the formal phrase for contracting a marriage is used in the passage: “to take a wife.” But we can imagine that this consent was granted only too willingly, since the prospect of semi-supernatural grandchildren would have suited perfectly the aspirations to “supernatural power” of the “men” who arranged these marriages for their daughters.

(The term Nephilim appears once more in the Bible, in the book of Numbers, at the place where the spies report back about the land of Canaan. But there the term probably just means “giants,” not semi-supernatural beings: “We saw the Nephilim there . . . We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”)

Where do the various topics in 1 Corinthians come from?

Q. My Sunday school class has just started studying 1 Corinthians. I have your study guide and I agree that the questions Paul addresses are of two sorts, some that were asked in person and some that were asked in a letter (that we do not have today).

My question is, what are the clues to do the sorting? Before your book I just thought that the division came about halfway through 1 Corinthians where Paul says, “Now for the matters you wrote about.” I thought that everything after that was addressing the questions from the Corinthians’ letter, and everything before that was addressing the questions delivered in person. But your book does not sort them that way, so I was wondering what clues I might be missing.

Here is how my study guide to Paul’s Journey Letters divides up the material in 1 Corinthians:

1 Corinthians Outline — (click to enlarge)

You’ll see that I distinguish between “things Paul heard about” and “things the Corinthians wrote about,” rather than between “things the Corinthians asked about in person” and “things the Corinthians asked about by letter.” This helps account for the way I sort out the material a little bit differently from the way you are used to.

I agree that it’s a perfectly straightforward reading of the epistle to understand that starting at the point where Paul says, “Now for the matters you wrote about,” he is answering questions that the Corinthians have asked him by letter. That’s really the only explicit indication he gives of the distinction between where the questions have come from. So why do I feel that two of the topics he addresses after this point (head coverings and the Lord’s Supper) actually aren’t things the Corinthians have asked about?

It’s because of the way Paul characteristically introduces topics as he takes them up in the letter. Paul explains when he begins to address his first topic, divisions in the church, that “some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you.” Paul is in Ephesus, across the Aegean Sea from Corinth, and apparently some servants of a woman named Chloe (presumably a member of the community of Jesus’ followers in Ephesus) have just returned from Corinth with disturbing news of problems in the community there that weren’t mentioned in the recent letter to Paul. So these aren’t so much matters that the Corinthians have asked about verbally via these servants; rather, they are matters that the servants have reported back to Paul.

And so Paul also says, as he takes up his next topic, “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you.” And since he does not refer to “the matters you wrote about” until after he has addressed his next two topics, lawsuits within the community and believers going to prostitutes, it appears that these are matters he has heard about from Chloe’s servants as well.

As Paul does take up the topics from the Corinthians’ letter, he characteristically introduces each one with a standard formula, peri de, translated “now for” or “now about” in the NIV. This is how he introduces his discussions of abstinence within marriage, whether to get married, food offered to idols, spiritual gifts, and the collection for the poor. Paul does not begin his discussion of the resurrection with this formula, but he nevertheless appears to be responding directly to their questions in what he writes on this topic.

By contrast, when Paul talks about the observance of the Lord’s Supper, he begins not with the formula peri de but once again by saying, “I hear that . . .” He doesn’t say this specifically when introducing the topic of head coverings, but he does use language of “praise” that is reminiscent of his adjacent discussion of the Lord’s Supper. Regarding head coverings he says, “I praise you for . . . holding to the traditions . . . but I want you to realize . . . ,” and about the Lord’s Supper he says, “I have no praise for you.”

These are admittedly subtle indications that are open to different interpretations. Nothing in them absolute rules out the division of material that you’re used to. But if we do take them as cues to where the topics in 1 Corinthians may have come from, they suggest that Paul is actually grouping his material somewhat thematically in places. He ends his opening discussion of things he has “heard about” with a teaching against going to prostitutes, and begins his discussion of the matters the Corinthians “wrote about” with thematically related teachings on sexual relations within marriage. And since the teaching about spiritual gifts has largely to do with their use in worship, he addresses two other topics related to worship, head coverings and the Lord’s Supper, just beforehand, even though they are matters he has presumably “heard about” rather than matters the Corinthians have “written about.” So in my understanding at least, Paul is not strictly dividing the two types of topics into separate sections of his letter.

I hope this explanation is helpful. And I wish you all the best as you teach this fascinating letter in your Sunday School class!

Was Jesus the “angel of the Lord” who warned Joseph?

Q. We were looking at the Christmas story in Matthew and noticed that Joseph was warned to go to Egypt by the “angel of the Lord.” Now I know many contend that the “angel of the Lord” in the OT refers to a pre-incarnation Jesus. And, Matthew is very tuned in to the OT. So…..does this mean that Jesus warned Joseph? I am guessing there is a Greek/Hebrew explanation for this.

I think there are a few reasons why it’s probably not actually Jesus, in the person of the “angel of the Lord,” warning Joseph in the Christmas story:

(1) First, the text should probably be translated “an angel of the Lord” rather than “the angel of the Lord.” Most contemporary English translations read this way, “an angel,” although some translations say “the angel.” (For the Greek/Hebrew specifics, see the bottom of this post.)

(2) Also, in Matthew this angel always appears in a dream. In the First Testament the angel of the Lord tends to appear in person. (Notice how, when an angel appears to Jacob in a dream, the phrase is “the angel of God” rather than “the angel of the Lord.”)

(3) While some interpreters do believe that the “angel of the Lord” in the First Testament is a manifestation of the pre-incarnate Jesus, I think it’s better to consider it more generally a “theophany,” that is, an appearance of God in human form, without being any more specific than this.

So for these reasons I wouldn’t say that Jesus is warning Joseph to protect Jesus!

I hope you and your family had a merry Christmas. And as the story of the flight into Egypt reminds us that Jesus became a refugee shortly after he was born, let us remember all those in our world today who are refugees with our help and prayers.

Specifics regarding translation: Each of the three times the phrase occurs in the Joseph narrative (when the angel tells Joseph to take Mary as his wife; when the angel warns him to flee from Bethlehem; and when the angel tells him to return to Israel), “angel” appears in the nominative case in Greek with no article, which generally means an indefinite noun rather than a definite one, thus “an angel of the Lord.” By contrast, the phrase in the First Testament for these theophanies is definite, “the angel of the Lord,” because “angel” is in the construct state and dependent on YHWH, which as a proper name is always definite and so makes “angel” definite as well. If a Greek writer wanted to express in Greek that the noun was definite, using an article would be the clearest way to do this, but no article is present.

Did the apostle John write the book of Revelation?

Q. Thank you very much for your recent post about whether the apostle John was the author of the gospel of John. This has been a question at the back of my mind for some time and it’s great to hear your reasons for believing John to be the author. I was also wondering about the authorship of the book of Revelation. In your study guide to Revelation you state that its author was unlikely to be the apostle John since in the Gospel of John and his letters he never refers to himself as John, but goes by “the elder” or “the one whom Jesus loved.” Along with that textual evidence, I was wondering what other evidence supports this view. Has the church traditionally seen the apostle John as the author, or is that a more recent phenomenon?

“St. John Receiving His Revelation” from the Apocalypse of St. Sever (11th century). Church art customarily follows the traditional view in ascribing the book to the apostle John.

We need to recognize that there was a tendency within the early church to accept that the books they read in worship and considered reliable had been written by the apostles or else by their close companions (such as Luke). This was in keeping with the growing belief within the community that these books were authoritative. And so we find early figures such as Ireneus, Tertullian, Origen, etc. ascribing the book of Revelation to the apostle John.

Even so—and by contrast with most other New Testament books—there were some who questioned Revelation’s apostolic authorship. In his late third-century Ecclesiastical History, for example, Eusebius quotes Dionysius of Alexandria (who lived a generation earlier) as saying the following about Revelation:

“That this book is the work of one John, I do not deny. And I agree also that it is the work of a holy and inspired man. But I cannot readily admit that he was the apostle, the son of Zebedee, the brother of James, by whom the Gospel of John and the Catholic Epistle were written. For I judge from the character of both, and the forms of expression, and the entire execution of the book, that it is not his . . . I do not deny that the other writer saw a revelation and received knowledge and prophecy. I perceive, however, that his dialect and language are not accurate Greek, but that he uses barbarous idioms, and, in some places, solecisms.” (VII.25)

So in the case of every New Testament book, when asking about authorship, we have to reckon with the tendency of the early church to ascribe accepted books to apostolic sources. And we need to be prepared to critique this tendency in light of evidence that is internal to the book (as Dionysius did in the case of the book of Revelation less than two hundred years after it was written).

When it comes to the authorship of Revelation, in addition to the evidence you cited (the author’s own self-description), we can note, as I also say in the study guide (you’ll hear echoes of Dionysius here), that “the language, themes, and perspectives of the apostle’s writings are very different from those in Revelation.”

This is not a simple matter of style or genre; great authors can write in a variety of styles. (If we didn’t know better, we’d never imagine that James Joyce wrote The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in a more conventional style, and then changed styles so drastically to write Ulysses, and then did so yet again for Finnegan’s Wake.)

Rather, the perspectives are different. The gospel of John is said to have a “vertical eschatology.” That is, eschatological realities are understood to be present now, breaking in from the heavenly realm. For example, when Jesus tells Martha, “Your brother will rise again,” and she replies, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day,” Jesus counters, “I am the resurrection and the life” (now).

Revelation, by contrast, has a “horizontal eschatology.” Eschatological realities are coming in the future and believers must await them faithfully and hopefully, enduring in order to “overcome.”

For reasons like these I consider someone other than the apostle John, but a person who was nevertheless named John, to have been the author of Revelation.