The Power of the Book

• Take up and read

On the West Coast in the late 1950s, when she was just 8 years old, a girl named Storm began picking fruit as a full-time farm laborer for less than $1 per hour. Storm and her family moved often, living in Native American migrant worker camps without electricity or running water. She wasn’t allowed to have books because they are too heavy to carry around when you keep moving from place to place. She recalled:

The conditions were pretty terrible. I once told someone that I learned to fight with a knife long before I learned how to ride a bicycle. And when you were grinding day after day after day, there’s no room in you for hope. There just isn’t. You don’t even know it exists. There’s nothing to aspire to, except filling your hungry belly.

When she was 12, something arrived in camp that changed her life: a bookmobile came to the fields. She approached it but hesitated. A staff member waved her in and explained it was completely free to check out books for two weeks – no strings attached. She tells about the books:

And I took them home and I devoured them. I didn’t just read them, I devoured them. And I came back in two weeks and had more questions. And he [the staff member] gave me more books and that started it. That taught me that hope was not just a word, and it gave me the courage to leave the camps. That’s where the books made the difference. By the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps. I believed I could find a place in it and I did.

She eventually went to night school and worked in a library for 30 years. [1]

There is a much more powerful book: the Scriptures. And it tells not just of a wider reality beyond the place where we live, but of unseen Reality. And it leads us to a hope not just of improved living conditions but of eternal life. The Gospel explains it in John chapter 5.

• What are the Scriptures?

In John 5, the Lord was in a lengthy discourse with the religious leaders in Jerusalem. During the talk he said he was the Son of God (equal with God, 5:19) and the Son of Man. And he gave three witnesses to the fact of his divine nature (having the same being and powers as God does) and divine authority (his role of judge in the Day of Judgment when he calls the dead out of the graves and some of the dead experience the resurrection for life and the others experience the resurrection for judgment), 5:19-29. These are the three witnesses. Witness one was John the Baptist (5:32-25). Witness two was the miracles Jesus was performing (5:36). And witness three was the Scriptures (5:37-47), the voice of God. Let’s look at number three in depth.

³⁷And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, ³⁸and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. ³⁹You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, ⁴⁰yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. ⁴¹I do not receive glory from people. ⁴²But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. ⁴³I have come in my Father's name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. ⁴⁴How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? ⁴⁵Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. ⁴⁶For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. ⁴⁷But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

Behind everything we can see, feel, and touch, there is a personal, absolute, invisible Reality – present with us and yet utterly transcendent from us: God. He can be overlooked, he can be denied, but he cannot be willed away. He is there. In the fullness of God, there is the invisible Father. The invisible Father sent the second Person of the Deity, the Word into the world to be seen, heard, and touched. The Word – the Son of God – became a human being, the Son of Man.

However, the personal, absolute, invisible Reality has always had a voice. He is there and he is not silent. That voice has taken three notable forms. First, there is the creation itself:

The heavens declare the glory of God,

and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours out speech,

and night to night reveals knowledge….

Their voice goes out through all the earth,

and their words to the end of the world. (Psalm 19:1-2,4)

Historically, the third major voice has been the Word who became flesh, known to us as Jesus Christ:

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. (John 1:17-18)

There has been a critical second way: the Scriptures. Notice the words of the Lord from John 5. God the invisible Father does not have a form that you can see with your eyes, nor does he have a voice that you can hear with your ears (v 37). Nevertheless, he has a word (v 38) and that word is the Scriptures (v 38). You can hear him by reading and listening to this written word.

The Scriptures are the voice of God. Are we listening?

• Which are the Scriptures?

And how can I identify that written word, the Scriptures? In this section of our exploration, the reader becomes a gatherer of evidence. This requires the patience of a scientist in a laboratory.

First, the Scriptures had a contemporary portion, as Jesus was speaking. It consisted of the writings of the Hebrew law-giver, Moses (v 45-47). As passages in the Gospel show, it also consisted of the Hebrew prophets (both history and prophecy) and the Hebrew poetical writings (chiefly the Psalms). To marshal the data from the four-fold Gospel and from contemporary sources would require an article of significant length. We will need to be content with sampling. Here are three examples each from prophets and poets:

At that hour Jesus said to the crowds, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But all this has taken place that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.” (Matt 26:55-56)

And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21 citing the prophet Isaiah 61:1-2)

He [Jesus] said to them [the disciples], “. . . . For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment.” (Luke 22:36-37 citing the prophet Isaiah 53:12)

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” (Matt 21:42 citing Psalm 118:22, 23)

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— . . .” (John 10:34-25 citing Psalm 82:6)

When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “. . . . I have guarded them [the disciples], and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” (John 17:1,12 citing Psalm 109:8)

In Alexandria, Egypt, the Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament) were translated into Greek (3^rd to 1^st centuries BC) called the Septuagint. In Alexandria the codex (pages sewn together into a book) became popular. In the Septuagint the Old Testament ran from Genesis to Malachi. However, in Jerusalem, where scrolls continued to be used, the scrolls of the Hebrew Scriptures were typically stored in three bins and regarded as three categories: (1) the law, (2) the prophets and (3) “the rest of the books” (Prologue to Sirach 1:1). Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) dates to about 180 BC with the prologue by his grandson dating to about 132 BC). The broken fragments of 4QMMT (2^nd century BC) from the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to imply an arrangement similar to the threefold arrangement of Sirach (Moses, prophets, David & events):

      [And] we have [also written] to you so that you may have understanding in the book of Moses [and] in the book[s of the Pr]ophets and in Davi[id and in the events] of ages past . . . [2]

Regardless of the precise arrangement of the books among Jewry in the ancient world, the words of Jesus signify the contents of the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament. First:

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” (Luke 24:44)

In the standard “scrolls” arrangement for the third division of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Book of Psalms was placed at the beginning and could therefore serve of the name of the whole division.

[Jesus said,] “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! . . . . Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. (Matt 23:29,24-25)

Zachariah was not the last martyr. But in the standard “scrolls” arrangement of the Hebrew Scriptures, Abel (the first martyr) was slain in the first book, Genesis (Gen 4:8), and Zacharias (the last martyr) was slain in the last book, Chronicles (2 Chronicles 24:20 -23).

Our brief survey shows that the Scriptures had an existing portion during the ministry of Jesus and that it comprised what Christians call the books of the Old Testament. Questions about precise composition cannot be answered here. (Examples: Were Esther and Ezekiel regarded as canonical by rabbis during the ministry of Jesus? What books did the Dead Sea Scrolls community regard as Scripture? What about the deutero-canonicals recognized at two church councils in North Africa?)

The Scriptures also have a future portion beyond when Jesus was speaking in Jerusalem. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). But he himself did not write any letters or books. Instead “he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach . . .” (Mark 3:14). “Apostle” was a personal envoy, a special and exclusive representative. [3] Jesus told this group, “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me” (Matt 10:40; cf. John 13:20).

For this purpose Jesus endowed the apostles with the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of truth—who will

teach them all things and recall to mind what Jesus had said, will guide them into fullness

of truth and will also explain the future (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:13-15). In Hebrews 2:1-4 the apostles are compared to the angels of the Old Testament as transmitters of God's revelation. Heb 2:3 asks us, “How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard,” the apostles.

“Last of all, as to one untimely born, he [Christ] appeared also to me [Paul]” (1 Cor 15:8). This apostolic office gave Paul a peculiar authority shared by all the apostles: “So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thess 2:15). The apostles handed down sacred traditions from Jesus Christ explained and enlarged upon by the Holy Spirit. Their authoritative writings are also Scripture. As Peter says of Paul,

And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. (2 Peter 3:15-16)

At the time of the Lord’s earthly ministry, the Scriptures had a contemporary portion – the Old Testament – and they had a future portion – the New Testament, the writings directly sponsored by the apostles. But . . .

• So what?

Unfortunately, Jesus had to tell his listeners, as recorded in John chapter 5, “³⁹You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, ⁴⁰yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” It is possible to never hear or read the Scriptures. It is possible to read and re-read the Scriptures but allow personal prejudice to miss the point. It is possible to give diligent attention to the Scriptures but miss the message by getting bogged down in the minutiae of detail. Where do you stand?

Journalist Marvin Olasky's grandfather was born in the Ukrainian town of Olyevsk, the Anglicization of which became their American surname. The grandfather, Louis Olasky, originally Lepke ben Yehoshua, escaped the Czarist army in 1912 and ended up in Malden, Massachusetts.

Raised Jewish, as a teenager, grandson Marvin Olasky read H.G. Wells’ History of the World and Sigmund Freud’s Future of an Illusion.” By age 14, he said, “I thought all this belief in God was just childish stuff.” While in college during the Vietnam War, his non-belief in God led to embracing communism.

However, as a doctoral candidate in American Culture at the University of Michigan, he needed to demonstrate foreign language mastery. So he chose Russian "in order to speak to my Soviet big brothers," he recalled. Along the way he picked up a New Testament in Russian and started reading — very slowly “puzzling out the words.”

“I started believing there was really something here. This is not just a book written by man, there’s something inspired by God in this,” he recalled. This is the power of the Book, the Scriptures. The Scriptures have self-authenticating power and life-changing power. But it is not enough to have a vague belief, “Hey, there’s really something here." You must find out what the Scriptures are all about and embrace that.

Then Marvin Olasky got an assignment to teach a course in early American literature — which largely consisted of the sermons of leading Puritan preachers Jonathan Edwards and Increase Mather, as well as authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (dead men from 300 years ago). Wholesome books have uplifting power — and these books led the young Olasky to come to personal, repentant faith in Jesus Christ. Marvin’s worldview and life were transformed. He received the sure hope of eternal life in the age to come, and he received transforming, spiritual life now. [4]

Are you willing to search the Scriptures and come to Christ that you may have life?

[1] “Once Forbidden, Books Become A Lifeline For A Young Migrant Worker,” StoryCorps, NPR Morning Edition, May 30, 2014. A conversation of Storm Reyes with his son, Jeremy Hagquist. http://www.npr.org/2014/05/30/317035044/once-forbidden-books-become-a-lifeline-for-a-young-migrant-worker

[2] James VanderKam & Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: T&T Clark, 2002), pp 169-172.

[3] R. David Rightmire, “Apostle,” Baker’s Dictionary of Biblical Theology, (ed) Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996). http://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionaries/bakers-evangelical-dictionary/apostle.html

[4] Mark A. Kellner, “Marvin Olasky preaches journalism through the lens of scripture, faith,” Desert News, September 18, 2014. http://national.deseretnews.com/article/2371/marvin-olasky-preaches-journalism-through-the-lens-of-scripture-faith.html

Memory and history, and the first step of the Gospel

•Memory and History.

One nephew of mine asked about the relationship of memory and history. Because this has been an important topic in biblical studies since the turn of the century, I’d like to do a post on the subject.

1. Memory is recalling experiences from the past. These may be either your personal experiences or else the experiences you’ve heard or read from other people, including formal education. The recalling may be random or organized and may involve merely recalling or both recalling and retelling.

2. History is a subset of memory. History is the selective retelling and/or recording of memories (recalling of experiences from the past) that have significance. These are told by a speaker or writer who has a particular point of view which will somehow shape and color the retelling. The experiences may or may not have happened as the history teller says. The retelling involves oral history in pre-literate societies and includes documents in literate societies. When history tellers believe that there is such a thing as truth, they typically strive to be “objective” and evidence-based. However, point of view and selection of which evidence to tell remain.

3. Historians of all stripes now accept this as a truism: “All history – meaning all the historians write, all historiography – is an inextricable combination of fact and interpretation, the empirically observable and the intuited or constructed meaning.” — Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans, 2006) PDF version p 12.

4. History can be told through various forms, including poetry. For instance, as a child in Midwestern United States, I learned this school age rhyme:

In fourteen hundred ninety-two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

He had three ships and left from Spain;

He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.

He sailed by night; he sailed by day;

He used the stars to find his way.

5. Families, ethnic groups, societies, and nations typically have histories that serve as a self-identity for the group. In the U.S. we have “the American story.” Religions and cultures provide an overarching framework by which individuals may view reality. In postmodern theory this framework is called a metanarrative (a grand history or grand story). Postmodernism proposes a grand narrative of the end of all grand narratives in favor of small, local narratives. It thereby has its own metanarrative and, as a philosophy, is self-refuting.

•History and the Gospel.

Because of my interest in biblical studies, I would to add several particulars.

6. In an address to the International Congress of Old Testament Studies meeting in Edinburgh in 1974, M. H. Goshen-Gottstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem did a survey of academic Bible study from 1500 to 1974 [1]. This is one of his conclusions (and I paraphrase): Since World War II, in order for Jews (liberal and conservative), Christians (liberal and conservative), unbelievers and atheists to have harmony in the academic study of the Bible and in their scholarly meetings, the various disciplines related to Bible study deal only with secondary issues rather than the main issue, which is: what is the message of the Bible?

For Jews, Goshen-Gottstein cites an old midrash which said, “Since the Holy One, praised be He, foresaw that the nations are going to translate the Torah and read it in Greek, and they will say ‘We are Israel’ . . . He said unto them: ‘You maintain that you are my children? . . . Only those who guard my ‘mysteries’ are my children.’ What is that? The Mishnah.” [2]

In the New Testament Jesus Christ said, “The (Hebrew) Scriptures . . . testify about me” (John 5:39). Goshen-Gottstein wrote:

It should be borne in mind that no system of biblical theology can exist in vacuo. Exegesis cannot be divorced from theology—and vice versa. . . . Franz Delitzsch [spelled out the very truth, which] Luther had expressed centuries earlier: if the exegete ceases even for one moment to disregard the presence of Christ in the Old Testament as an exegete, he ceases being a Christian. [3]

Unbelieving humanists say with the pre-Socratic philosopher, Protagoras, “Humanity is the measure of all things.” That is, no truth exists except what individuals or groups deem to be the truth. Atheists adhere to materialism and deny any possibility of miracles or revelation from God. “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.” [4]

[1] M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “Christianity, Judaism, and Modern Bible Study,” Supplement to Vetus Testamentum 28 (1975), pp 69-88.

[2] Ibid., p 75.

[3] Ibid., p 81.

[4] Carl Sagan, “Cosmos: A Personal Journey” (TV series), 1980, Episode 1.

7. In “Story as History – History as Story; The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History” (2000) Samuel Byrskog shows that Greco-Roman historians – such as Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus, and Tacitus – believed that true history could be written only while events were still within living memory, and they valued as their sources the oral reports of direct experiences of the events by participants. And it was better yet that the historian was one of those participants. [Bauckham, PDP version p 15]

8. In the New Testament, the four gospels and Acts have the genre of ancient biography and history. In 2006 Richard Bauckham, New Testament professor at St. Andrews University in Scotland (now emeritus), came out with a book, “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony” (referenced above.) I now quote from an unpublished lecture of Bauckham’s available on his website as “Denver.pdf.” The lecture was given after the publication of the book. Bauckham says:

The first point I want to make is that the Gospels are not based on what detached observers of the events said, but on what participants in the events remembered and recounted. One modern response to that could be to say that it’s very subjective, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be much better to hear the evidence of uninvolved observers?

Well, ancient historians certainly did not think so. What they valued was the testimony of eyewitness participants in the events, people who could speak of the events, as it were, from the inside. Moreover, this is what oral historians today are after: they want to know what it was like for people involved in the events. The detached observer often doesn’t remember much anyways, while there’s a lot that we simply could not know about historical events except from insiders.

Such insiders are, of course, people who were affected by the events. In the case of the events narrated in the Gospels, for those who told the stories. In the book [Jesus and the Eyewitnesses] I use as a kind of parallel the modern example of testimony by survivors of the Holocaust. [Without the testimony of survivors, we wouldn’t know what it really was like.]

9. Skeptics use ridicule as the tool of choice to defeat people who dare to defend biblical history as true history. For example, Philip Davies, Emeritus Professor, University of Sheffield, England, denies the historicity of Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the Exodus, Israel’s wandering in the wilderness and conquest of Canaan. He is doubtful about the existence of David and Solomon. In the article, “Biblical History and Cultural Memory” (April 2009) http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/memory.shtml he writes:

For it is still the common popular view that the Bible relates real events, and this belief is the result of complacency, laziness, and poor education about the Bible among those for whom biblical scholarship is alien (this includes a few of my university colleagues). Nevertheless, among biblical scholars, we should recognize that the major differences in evaluation of biblical narratives between “conservatives” and “radical” (or whatever the terms) can nearly always be identified with the role and importance of the biblical story as part of contemporary Jewish or Christian cultural memory.

That is to say, only skeptics know what the real events of history are. All the rest of us are either complacent, lazy, and poorly educated or else we are scholars driven by religious ideology. In contrast, educated skeptics are, in the field of history, as pure as the driven snow and their thinking is free from ideology.

The first step of the Gospel is humility and that first step is one step that no skeptic will take. Jesus said (Luke 18:10-14):

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

The skeptic walks the earth and proclaims, “I am so very thankful that I’m engaged, diligent, and well educated, and that I’m not like those Christian scholars over there on and off campus: humble and praying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'"