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Use of the Old Testament in the New (part 2)

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.


I began by saying that there were certain broad areas that are touched by this broad topic of the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament. We’ve gone over text-critical issues and the larger issue of the nature of law and patterns of continuity and discontinuity in this regard. Next I’d like to talk about …

1. The rubric of how the New Testament is actually interpreting the Old Testament.

There is quite clearly a whole array of issues that fall under this in explicit contexts. Now there are many questions under that rubric. When the New Testament comes along and says, “Out of Egypt have I called my Son,” this is, in fact, fulfilled in Jesus coming out of Egypt, when on the face of it, Hosea doesn’t seem to be going down that line. What on earth is going on?

In the New Testament, the two books that are most difficult in this regard are, in my judgment, Matthew and Hebrews. They are full of quotations, and they seem on many occasions to be using the Old Testament texts in a way where, if you used a text that way in an exegesis paper, you would fail. So the question is.… What is going on? What is the warrant for this sort of thing?

When I was writing my Matthew commentary 20 years or so ago, I read, of course, many other commentaries first. One of the most interesting in this regard was one by John Broadus. It was published in 1886. John Broadus was a Southern Baptist, and he was a very, very good scholar. Very well trained, theologically alert, and read very widely. He wrote this long commentary on Matthew.

Although much of it was brilliant … much of it was very competent and deep … what was so interesting in it was that every time he got to one of these difficult passages in Matthew where Matthew quotes the Old Testament, John Broadus would end up saying something like this (not in exactly these words but with this intent): “I don’t have a clue what Matthew’s doing here. I’m sure God understands it, but I don’t.” And he keeps right on going. He doesn’t put it quite that bluntly, but that’s basically what he’s saying. “I don’t have a clue what Matthew is doing.”

In one sense, that’s not an entirely bad approach; it’s acknowledging your ignorance. It’s rather different from the approach of my own Doktorvater. My Doktorvater was Barnabas Lindars, and his first significant book was called New Testament Apologetic. In that book his thesis was that the New Testament writers basically quote the Old by ripping texts out of their context, abusing them gloriously, repeatedly, and perversely in order to justify their Christian presuppositions. That’s what he said, in a nutshell.… New Testament Apologetic.

In that sense Barnabas Lindars thinks that he does understand what’s going on. He thinks that, in fact, the New Testament writers are really quite perverse. Or as John Broadus looks at what’s going on, he doesn’t understand what’s going on, and he admits it. If I have to choose between the two approaches, on the whole, I prefer John Broadus’.

On the other hand, is there something a little more that we can say? That is to say, can we begin to try to understand what these New Testament writers are actually doing? What is going through their heads? What do they think they are doing? How are they reading the text to say the sorts of things they do? Not, of course, just when they quote a text and may simply be making verbal allusions, but especially when they deploy introductory formulae. They’re the ones that are most interesting.

“This happened in order that it might be fulfilled what was said by the Spirit of God according to the prophet Isaiah, saying …” That doesn’t give you a lot of wriggle room. If you simply have an allusion of some sort, of even if you have a quotation, you have to be very careful what’s being affirmed.

I was brought up in a Christian home. My father had studied Greek and Hebrew and kept them up, his Greek better than his Hebrew, all his life. He didn’t begin to learn French until he was 26, but eventually he became a part-time translator for the federal government of Canada. Then he became a church planter and was in pastoral ministry. His French was superb. He would read his Bible in French, read his Bible in English, and memorize vast tracts. He was somewhat taciturn.

He was not extremely verbal, but when he wanted to talk to us, his children, very frequently he talked in Bible quotations. So we would start complaining, whining about something. He would turn to us, and he would say, “This is the day which the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” Not for a moment was he saying that this was an exhaustive explanation of what that text meant in its context. On the other hand, his mind was so steeped in Scripture that he thought in those categories.

If one of us started rabbiting on, talking about things we don’t know.… You know when you’re 14 or 15, you are prepared to pontificate on absolutely everything? So some matter would come up, and one of us would vent an opinion with great dogmatism and certainty. My father would turn, and he would say (this is King James English; you might not understand it), “He wist not what to say, so he said …”

Let me explain that one, in case you didn’t get that. It’s from the transfiguration narrative, of course. Wist is Old English. It’s from the Greek eidō. Wist. “He did not know what to say, so he said …” It pictures Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration when the three figures appear. “He did not know what to say, so he said …” My father would simply stand there and say, “He wist not what to say, so he said …” which sort of put us all in our place.

He was not saying that this was sort of a fulfillment of the transfiguration narrative either, was he? There are some times when the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, and they’re using Old Testament language without trying to say anything much more clever than that too. So it’s very important not to make over-claims, but where you have fulfillment formulae, you don’t have any wriggle room at all.

Then you have to start figuring out exactly what is being claimed, how it works, and so on. In this respect, there are several approaches that people commonly make. Let me offer some of them. These are not mutually exclusive; they overlap. They all have some strengths and some weaknesses. They work in some times; they don’t work in other times. There are problems with them, but let me just mention some of these categories. Some of you, of course, will already be thoroughly familiar with these, but they might be new to some, so I’ll mention them.

A) There is the approach of what is called, historically, sensus plenior, which was often the category deployed by Catholics. (The fuller sense.)

In the case of at least some Catholic theologians, the sensus plenior was in some ways within the magisterial jurisdiction of the church, so there is a kind of deposit of faith given to the church.

The magisterium has the right, indeed the responsibility, of unpacking what texts say. So, yes, it’s true that in the New Testament Peter is not called the Pope; nevertheless, out of Matthew 16 and other texts, then there is this sensus plenior that eventually is unpacked by the church which authorizes, ultimately in 1870, even the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope.

This is really based on a notion of a deposit of faith, a deposit of truth, that has been given to the church. This allows the church then not to (in the church’s view) add to or contradict Scripture. That’s not what the church thinks it’s doing. Protestants think that’s what it’s doing, but that’s not what the church thinks it’s doing. It allows the church rather to unpack in a fuller sense what is already there.

That same sort of approach, then, is used by some Catholic scholars when they read the Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament as well. They say that’s what’s going on. There’s a fuller sense from the Old Testament that’s being unpacked in the New. Some Protestants use the same sort of category. Vern Poythress uses that on some occasions. I have some problems with that that are both historical and definitional.

There’s a sense of sensus plenior that I don’t object to provided it can be warranted textually, but if it becomes an abstract category that justifies almost anything, then it’s almost impossible to falsify. Despite the protestations that this is unpacking a greater sense, at the end of the day, it strikes the outsider as merely arbitrary. At the end of the day, it becomes less and less credible the harder and harder you push it, which is part of the criticism of the Reformation as well.

B) There is an approach that is taken by Gottlob Frege and picked up by John Feinberg and others that makes a distinction between sense and referent.

This is not the distinction of Hirsch, who makes the distinction between sense and significance. That’s another one. This is the distinction between sense and referent. Begin with a category like president of France. Anybody who’s literate in Europe knows what that expression means. It’s an abstract category.

In addition to the sense, the meaning of the expression, one may ask what the referent is. That is, which president of France? Are you talking about Jacques Chirac? Are you talking about some previous president of France? Maybe a president of France under the Third Republic rather than the Fifth? You see, there is a distinction to be made between the sense of the expression and the particular referent.

The mayor of Chicago is a sense category, but Richard M. Daley is the referent, at least at the moment, and we can multiply examples. A category like antichrist may, in fact, be a sense category. Then you may ask, “Yeah, well since 1 John speaks of many antichrists, then there might be referent categories that you have to unpack as well.”

In this respect, then, people have argued that many, many Old Testament texts speak at the level of sense, but the unpacking of the referent comes later. In fact, some would argue that some of these sense passages have many referents, so that in some ways you see there is an “entering into rest” when the people go into the Promised Land. There is an “entering into rest” when people return from the exile.

Psalm 95 speaks to the people who are in the Land of an “entering into rest,” even though they’re already in the Land. So the Land can’t be all of it. “Entering into rest” is the general sense category, but where the particular referent is, what particular “entering into rest,” well that’s a bit different. Finally, in the Apocalypse there’s an entering into rest that has to do with the dawning of the new heaven and the new earth. Jesus for his part says, “Come unto me all you who labor, and I will give you rest.”

So there may be multiple “entering into rests” that are part of a streamlined package that unpack the sense in terms of the referent. Obviously, that’s useful, but it certainly does not explain many things. After all, in some instances, Old Testament texts (and other texts) give us not only the sense but the referent. Yet when you come to the New Testament, there is a different referent. The question becomes.… What’s the warrant for the shift?

C) Another approach that is increasingly common is what’s often called canon criticism or canonical theology.

In fact, there are different forms of canon criticism, two dominant ones. There’s the kind worked out by John Sanders, and then there’s the kind that’s worked out by Brevard Childs. The Sanders one I won’t go into here. It’s too far removed from our concerns at the moment. It’s interesting, but I don’t have time to unpack it.

Brevard Childs is another kettle of fish. He does not actually use the expression canon criticism. That’s an expression that everybody uses of him, and everyone sees him as the father of canon criticism, but he does not actually use the term. Nevertheless, it’s a useful summary of what he does. There are a lot of people who are related to Childs, have been influenced by him, have studied under him, and so forth.

I need to relate Childs, I think, to the larger Yale school. Childs does a great deal of work with the text that is profoundly admirable. Very interesting, very challenging, very useful. On the other hand, in my view, there is a problem at the heart of it that is tied to the whole Yale school that we need to think about. Let me say something about the Yale school.

By the Yale school, I don’t mean absolutely everybody who teaches at Yale at the moment. Nevertheless, there’s a certain kind of stream of tradition that’s bound up with Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; George Lindbeck and many of his writings; and, less so, Brevard Childs, although he’s been influenced by his colleagues at Yale as well. So let me try to unpack that trace of scholarship.

Hans Frei’s book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, wielded an enormous amount of interest. Frei himself is dead now. His argument, in brief, is that until the rise of the Enlightenment, people read the stories in the Bible just as they were. They knew how to read the accounts as stories. They knew how to read them as narratives. They read them realistically, and it shaped their living, their thinking, and so forth.

With the rise of historical criticism people started trying to find out what was behind the text. Those in the more liberal tradition didn’t believe quite what the narrative said, so they tried to explain what really was behind it. What produced a narrative like this? What kind of community produced this? What kind of source criticism produced this? What kind of … whatever. It’s always trying to find something behind the text, and people are no longer intelligently reading the text.

Then he says the conservatives come along, and in order to reply to the liberals, they do the same thing. They’re no longer just reading the text as text either. They’re saying, “Well, you say that what really happened was this, but we say that what really happened was this.” That might be a sort of more conservative line, but at the end of the day, they stopped reading the text as text. They’re reading behind the text all the time. So people are playing games behind the text, and what they’re losing is the text itself.

What he speaks of, therefore, is the eclipse of biblical narrative. The biblical narrative somehow is lost in all of this as you start playing a whole lot of historical critical games behind the text. In some ways, that’s quite insightful. It’s also, in my judgment, profoundly misleading, because in this pre-Enlightenment period when the people were reading the narrative, they were not only reading the narrative as narrative, but they believed it to be true narrative.

They weren’t reading it as if it were nineteenth-century fiction. They were reading it as narrative, that’s true, but they believed it to be true narrative. So when the liberals were reading behind the text, they weren’t saying, “Well, this is the narrative, and now we’re interested in something further back.” They were reading it and discounting the narrative as true and saying what really happened took place behind the text in various sources, various naturalistic phenomena, or whatever.

When the conservatives replied, they were trying to say, “Yes, but what really happened behind the text was such and such” in order to say that what the text was saying was true. In other words, the conservatives and the liberals in this Enlightenment period were not playing quite the same game.

It is a bit deceptive on Frei’s part to pretend that they were, because if you keep saying that they were playing the same game behind the text, then what you invite is what actually does happen in the Yale school. Namely, that people start reading the text but are not interested in the text’s extratextual referentiality. Let me explain that. It is extraordinarily important.

There is a sense in which George Lindbeck is the best exemplar of what I’m talking about. You read large swaths of Lindbeck, and he’s getting people to read their Bible, to think imaginatively in terms of what the Bible says. “We’ve got to go back to preaching the Bible. We’ve got to go back to talking about the Bible. The Bible must fire our imaginations. We ought to be memorizing the Bible and having devotions from the Bible.” You read all this stuff in Lindbeck, and you think, “Boy, oh, boy! The guy is not only conservative, he almost sounds like a fundamentalist.”

Except if you read him closely, he is either disavowing or refusing to affirm the possibility of affirming the connection between what the text says and that to which the text refers. That is, the extratextual referentiality. I have in mind someday, if I am perverse enough (and probably I am), to write an essay with a rather cheeky title, “The Bibliolatry of George Lindbeck.”

If you take the most conservative right-wing fundamentalist, the most conservative right-wing fundamentalist still is not a bibliolater. The most conservative right-wing fundamentalist thinks that the Bible is talking about something outside the Bible, namely God. The fundamentalist is not inviting you to worship the Bible. It’s still talking about something outside the Bible, namely God and what takes place in history, all being true.

George Lindbeck takes us back to the Bible and then refuses to say that the Bible goes beyond the Bible in extratextual referentiality. It’s not that he’s overtly denying that there’s a God out there, don’t misunderstand me. George is not stupid. He’s saying, however, that the only way we can think about this God is precisely by the categories that come to us in texts that fire our imaginations.

He refuses to say that what this text is saying, whether the language be analogical or anything else, is true about the extratextual referentiality. There’s a hiatus there that comes from the postmodern presuppositions of the man. It is desperately important to see that it is not the Bible that saves us. It’s what the Bible is talking about that saves us, namely God and what he’s done in redemptive history.

If you only go back as far as the Bible, then there is a sense in which your terminus, your end, is in fact the Bible. The Bible itself, however truly it speaks (and I do believe it does speak truly), is pointing outside the Bible. It’s bearing witness to who God is and what he has done in redemptive history.

What saves us is the God who has entered space-time history to do certain things in redemptive history to bring about our salvation. By the calling of Abraham, by the raising of Moses, by the giving of the Law, and ultimately by the sending of his Son, the incarnation, and the death on the cross. It’s very important to see that it’s that which saves us, to which the Bible speaks, to which the Bible bears witness.

Within this framework then, it seems to me that the Yale school, precisely influenced by Hans Frei … who wants to speak of the narrative but refuses to say that the narrative speaks truly, and who casts both confessional Christians and flat-out liberals in the same camp as dealing behind the text … is not facing the issue of whether or not the text is telling the truth about things.

When you come to Lindbeck then, you have this move toward the text that fires the imagination, but I can’t find in him extratextual referentiality. In fact, this year I put one of my graduate assistants.… Trinity, bless its heart, pays for doctoral assistants. So I put this student on going through the entire corpus of George Lindbeck from the very beginning … first all of his books, then all of his articles, then all of his reviews … scanning them for any discussion whatsoever of these matters, taking notes on them, and photocopying the relevant materials.

I got a thick stack that I’ve now gone through. I know what George Lindbeck says on these matters. The fact of the matter is, you simply cannot find a place where he will affirm (and many places where, in fact, he denies) any possibility of talking intelligently about extratextual referentiality. In other words, the god becomes the text. That’s bibliolatry.

Someone like Brevard Childs does something a bit different, but it’s part of this larger Yale school. There’s a sense in which Childs disagrees profoundly with Lindbeck, partly because he is himself, first and foremost, an exegete, and an exegete in a fairly conservative tradition that wants to deal with real space-time events, real history, and so on.

He has another interesting hiatus. There is a sense in which he wants to establish the links within the Canon at the theological level, and along those lines he has some enormously useful and helpful analyses, very important things to say. I think that his commentary on Exodus, for example, is a classic. There’s a great deal to be learned from his commentary on Isaiah, although there are parts where I don’t think he’s right. His Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments.… Just countless insights all the time. I read them. I profit from them.

Yet at the same time he wants to affirm, in the same breath, classic analyses of historical-critical categories that cannot, on the face of things, be easily integrated at the level of extratextual truth to the way he sees the storyline developing within the text itself. There’s a hiatus there. I will come to that tomorrow when I deal a little bit more with the question of the New Testament’s appeal to Old Testament sequence in its use of the Old Testament. We’ll come to that one again. It’s a very interesting set of arguments.

Within that framework, in my view, Childs is imminently useful, but canon criticism as a whole raises some issues that we have to address. The useful part of it is, in a sense, at least a little bit like what I was trying to do with John 1:4–5 yesterday. Do you recall when I came to John 1:4–5, I said that if you read verses 4 and 5 in the light of verses 1 to 3, first of all … you don’t know the rest of the book … then you will be inclined to read those verses, it seems to me, a certain kind of way?

Once you have read the rest of the book several times, you are inclined to read verses 4 and 5 the other way. The question is.… Which way is right? I would insist both, and that John layers things that way. He wants us to read it that way. It’s one of the marks of John’s depth as a writer. I think that he’s doing this sort of thing again and again in his book.

There is a sense in which canon criticism, rightly done, is doing a similar sort of thing. Not in the context of one book, but in the context of the entire Canon. You read certain events, certain texts, and certain arguments one way, and then as more text is given, you go back and reread, and you start seeing things through different eyes again. I don’t have any problem with that.

If that’s what you mean, too, by sensus plenior, I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t have any problem with canon criticism that runs along those lines. But (and it is a very big but) in the case of John’s gospel where that’s been done, both ways are text warranted. In other words, you can see what John is doing. You can justify the double layer. You can understand what is going on.

You must not let this appeal to canon criticism, this appeal to canonical rereading, become so broad and so controlling that at the end of the day you fail to see how anything is text warranted. It becomes a step of raw fideism. The question again, as always, is warrant. Warrant. Warrant. What is the warrant for reading it this way? You do not want your warrant to become so abstract and airy-fairy that it’s merely an appeal to the broader canon.

If it ever becomes that, then sooner or later, you’re likely to take the next step, which is found not so much in Brevard Childs (although it’s found a bit there), but it’s certainly found in Brevard Childs’ students quite commonly. Namely, that the appeal to canon as your base for rereading is itself grounded in the church deciding what the Canon is so that the authority for it becomes the community which has reread and reread.

So today we also reread and reread, and things become, in principle, open-ended. Now you really are into a very postmodern mode, and the Canon itself loses its function as the norming norm. You no longer see it as the revelatory Word. God has spoken. You no longer see Tanakh as Jesus saw Tanakh. It no longer functions that way.

The authority is finally in the community that rereads and rereads today, and it becomes as open-ended as postmodernism is. That is where a great deal of contemporary canon criticism finally ends up. There is another approach to these matters that’s worth thinking about.

D) A great many people who study the use of the Old Testament appeal to the Jewish middot.

This approach is very helpful, but it has some limitations. The middot are hermeneutical rules of appropriation. The rabbis developed these rules, and how many there are depends on the particular rabbinic period. Often, seven rules are cited. In other sources, 13 rules are appealed to. You’re probably familiar with some of these yourself.

Probably the best known is this one (at the risk of trying to transliterate the Hebrew): kal v’homer. Literally, of course, that means the light and the heavy. The light and the heavy is merely a rabbinic way of talking about what we mean in the Latin rhetoric tradition by an a fortiori argument. If this, how much more that. The light (if this), then how much more that (the heavy).

That’s one of the Jewish rules of appropriation of Scripture in later Scripture and, indeed, in theological discourse. You find it all over the place in the rabbinic.… Any decent treatment of the rabbis discusses these various things, the various middot, who is said to have formulated them, and so on. As a result, there are many textbooks today that go through, let’s say the Pauline corpus, and try to understand how Paul is reading the text in terms of the various middot.

You can actually go through text after text and say, “Yes, Paul’s argument here is appealing to this rule, or it’s appealing to that rule.” That’s all very helpful. Earle Ellis was doing this sort of thing all the time in his many books on this subject, and many others as well. It’s an analysis of the appropriation techniques. Are you with me? Although that’s useful, it has two problems with it that we need to understand.

First, just because some Jewish rabbis use a particular technique in some places does not by itself prove that this is a legitimate understanding of a text. In other words, if all you’re doing is engaging in discussion of method so that you can see that similar methods are being deployed, by itself that does not constitute genuine warrant. It constitutes a kind of explanation. It does not constitute warrant.

You still have to say, “Yeah, but is that right? Is this a genuine instance of the light and the heavy, or is it a misuse?” Just to appeal to the rule itself is merely descriptive stuff. By itself, it does not constitute warrant. As useful as it is, as interesting as it is, the more important problem with this approach is …

Second, it does not help you distinguish why Paul, the Christian with Jewish background, is reading the same texts as his unconverted Jewish friendly scholars and coming out with very different conclusions. It does not help you explain that difference. So they’re both using the same appropriation techniques. Oh, jolly good. Very nice. Then why are they reading the text so differently?

In other words, even if you prove that there’s a kind of kal v’homer argument here and not somewhere else, why in the net aggregate of the use of all of these rules does Paul come out seeing Christ in all kinds of Old Testament places where his fellow scholars, who are unconverted but equally informed as Jews, don’t find Christ? This may be interesting, but it explains very little because it does not deal with the distinguishing warrant of Christian exegesis.

At the end of the day, Paul is arguing, in books like Romans, Galatians, and elsewhere, but certainly in those two, that his reading of the Old Testament is not a reading … one useful reading amongst many. If you’re a conservative Orthodox Jew, you may have that reading. Personally I have this reading, and somebody else might have another reading. The Gnostics will come along and have another reading.

Paul, whatever he is, is not a postmodern. Paul is actually arguing that the positions that he himself once formerly held as to what the Old Testament text says are wrong, and he now thinks he’s got it right! At that level, the middot don’t help us that much. In fact, the more you point out that the middot are shared by Paul and his rabbinic colleagues, the more useless they are for explaining the distinguishing warrant. Although it’s all very helpful study, at the end of the day, it does not offer an explanation. Does that make sense?

Partly because of that, Douglas J. Moo, who wrote his dissertation on the use of the Old Testament in the passion narratives and was published eventually by Sheffield University Press, saw precisely the nature of this problem and developed a slightly different set of terminologies which have been picked up here and there. They haven’t been picked up as widely as they deserve. It’s better. It doesn’t answer everything, but it is making a contribution.

He distinguishes between what he calls appropriation techniques (roughly the middot) and hermeneutical axioms. He is saying, in effect, that although the synoptic writers (he does a bit on John, but he’s primarily the Synoptics) in their passion narrative use the Old Testament texts in ways that appropriate the Old Testament analogous to the way the rabbis do so, nevertheless, they come out with very distinctive conclusions because, in addition to the appropriation techniques which they share with the others, they deploy hermeneutical axioms which they do not share with the others.

The distinguishing feature in the use is not in the middot (in the appropriation techniques); the distinguishing feature is in the hermeneutical axioms. Then the hermeneutical axioms turn out to be things like, “Jesus really is the Messiah” and things of that order. There is no doubt that those do become hermeneutical axioms in New Testament exegesis, but (and again, it is a very big but) the question is.… What is the warrant for those hermeneutical axioms? You’re back to questions of warrant again.

If you simply say, “Well, the real difference is that dear old Matthew does believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and his Jewish friends don’t, so they read the testaments differently,” then how far away are you from Barnabas Lindars who is saying the New Testament writers are ripping Old Testament texts out of their context precisely because they are already convinced that Jesus is the Messiah. Barnabas Lindars is a bit more cynical in the way he puts it, but how far are you away at the level of warrant from thinking about these things?

I’m going to give you two more of these problem areas before we start putting something together again, which we’ll unpack later, and then I’ll stop for questions.

E) Many others refer to some form or other of typology.

Now there is typology and there is typology. There is not a universal definition of typology. In some ways, typology has received a lot of very bad press because of the extremes and the stupidities of some people in appealing to it. For example, if Rahab the harlot puts down a red string or a red piece of cord from her window well, clearly, the red refers to the blood of Christ.

There is kind of an old-fashioned, pietistic typology that is completely and utterly uncontrolled. It’s very reverent, but it’s uncontrolled. It can be applied to all kinds of things. It’s applied to numbers … to all kinds of things. For example (I keep files on this stuff. I have such a perverse mind), do you remember how many fish there are in John 21? There were 153. There are scores and scores of interpretations of that 153. I have files on them all.

Did you know that 153 is the triangular number of 17? For the non-mathematicians amongst us, a triangular number is called a triangular number because it works like this. You start building an equilateral triangle. When you finally have 153 dots, you will find 17 on each side, and 153 is the triangular number of 17. Isn’t that interesting? And 17 equals 10 plus 7.

Ten is the number of the Ten Commandments. Now 7 is not only the number of perfection; it is 3 plus 4, and 3 is the number of the Trinity and 4 is the number of the church built foursquare. Thus, you see, the 153 fish represent Christ’s mission to become fishers of men in which the disciples are sent out in the name of the Holy Trinity to build the church foursquare in all of its perfections according to the law of God.

I bet that if I did it with a straight face, I could preach this in most of our churches, and people would come out saying, “Deep. Deep.” That’s the problem with it. It’s so uncontrolled. Yet at the same time, sometimes numbers really are symbol-laden. That’s a genre-related matter as well, and apocalyptic numbers are regularly genre-related. Outside of apocalyptic, you have to be far, far more careful about such matters.

This question of typology has many, many different faces to it, and it is very easy to make typology look really silly. On the other hand, there is enough to typology that it shouldn’t be dismissed. There is one huge question connected with typology that I’ll mention in a moment, but transparently, for example, there are countless uses of texts in the New Testament that appeal to Jesus as the great David.

Not a few of the usages of the Psalms, for example, in the passion narratives (not least Psalm 69) are bound up with the assumption of a Davidic typology. That is, what happens to some person, institution, or structure in the past recurs in some sense. It recurs, and it may be augmented so that what is deeply significant in David’s life must … because there is a promise to David that there will be a Davidic line that continues … be in some sense repeated in great David’s greater son. That’s the assumption.

So if David thus faces the horrible experience of being betrayed by his friends, so also will great David’s son be experiencing these sorts of things. There is a typology that operates, and it is assumed again and again. How you define such typologies, how you warrant them, is a more interesting and difficult issue.

The most disputed area in this regard.… And it is not a conservative-liberal dispute, or anything like that. It is disputed by people with an equally high view of Scripture, for example. The most disputed area in the unpacking of what typology consists in is whether or not typology is warrantably future-looking. Warrantably anticipatory. Warrantably predictive.

Or is typology in the nature of the case seen only after the fact? That’s a huge question, and it is very difficult. I will come back to that toward the end of tomorrow if I have time. It’s a very interesting question and not at all easy. The last issue that must be faced is …

F) When we start thinking of the use of the Old Testament in the New, it is worth distinguishing quotation, allusion, echo, and even thematics.

I don’t have time to unpack all of those categories in detail. A very helpful work has been done in this area by Richard Hays in his book on the Old Testament in Paul where he tries to develop some criteria for distinguishing quotation (sometimes called citation), allusion, and echo.

Those three categories are not necessarily absolutely distinguishable. You can develop your criteria, and then you might quibble a bit whether you have this one or another one. You can understand why. You can have a quotation that is actually verbatim from the LXX, let us say, or you can see is a very literal translation of the MT over against the LXX … yes, that happens too sometimes … or is, occasionally, a very fine reflection of what one of the targumim say. That also happens every once in a while. You can see where from where it’s coming.

Sometimes you get a quotation that is really quite loose no matter what it’s dependent upon. Some authors do more of that than others. John’s gospel is notoriously loose. It is very, very loose in its handling of text. The looser you get, and the shorter the quotation, the more you start wondering if you’re better off thinking not so much of a quotation as an allusion. You can understand why the borders between these things become a bit porous with time. Still it’s worth thinking about these sorts of distinctions somewhere along the line.

On the other hand, you pick up an echo when, for example, a person’s name is dropped into the narrative. The question becomes whether you’re supposed to bring with that Old Testament name the whole pattern of something from that person’s life or not. There is an echo of something there, but how much of that do you presuppose as you start reading the New Testament text which actually drops in his name? There is an echo of the Old Testament; how much of it is brought through? That becomes a more difficult question to decide as well.

There are other important issues, but before we start trying to focus in on some of them, let me pause now for some questions before we proceed.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don Carson: I will answer that, but at this point instead of throwing this open to every hard case that you can think of, I want to deal with some of the principles that are at stake. Then I’ll try to open it up to questions about the hard cases. Otherwise, this will go on into focusing on each little text, and it won’t be dealing with any of the principles. Let me say something about that one.

Many, many people have argued, in my judgment rightly, that Jesus is using what is often called an ad hominem argument there. In other words, his opponents are objecting to the use of theÛs as an appropriate title, and he’s saying, “Oh, give me a break. Back off a wee bit. I mean, the Old Testament text itself can use that term in this sort of usage. Cut me some slack.” It may not be much more than that, because there are certainly some places where Jesus is quite prepared to use ad hominem arguments.

Sometimes we come to usages of texts that give us difficulty because.… I will overstate this and then back off and qualify it immediately … we’re too serious. We’re trying to milk it for too much theology too fast, when in fact that’s not quite what’s going on. I think it is merely an ad hominem argument, and I’ve argued it that at some length in my John commentary. Many have argued that. C.K. Barrett argues that. Even Brown argues that, and his approach is much looser than mine. I don’t think that’s a really tough one, to be honest.

Male: What about the places where it seems that a New Testament writer like Paul takes one quote from one place, another from another, and puts them together. Another question that is quite at the other end, what about places where you don’t find the quote in Scripture or you are hard-pressed to find it?

Don: They are two quite different things. The first one where you put texts together, in terms of appropriation technique, is a pretty common rabbinic habit. That is you say.… With a hook word or something like that, you find another text that seems to be related because of the hook word, and so the two texts must be related in some sense. At the level of appropriation technique, there is nothing surprising.

Paul does this. Mark does this. Matthew does this. It’s a pretty common phenomenon in the New Testament when you start looking for it. The question becomes.… What is being done by this? How is this being handled? In the very famous text at Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son …” It’s pretty clear that there’s allusion both to a psalm and to Isaiah 42, one of the servant songs.

I think that there is, in fact, theological insistence in this bifurcation of texts, which means that Jesus is to be interpreted both ways. We do that sometimes too, do we not? We might, in full flow in a sermon, quote some biblical text and say, “Do you not recall that the apostle Paul says …” Then you give a quotation and then throw in something else from some other text because it’s associated with it.

We’re not actually saying that Paul says the other bit, but we’ve quoted a genuine bit from Paul and then pulled in some further biblical quotation. I don’t think that most of those are hard to understand what is going on. The challenge is trying to figure out exactly what theological capital to make of it.

There are just a few passages where you have an actual introductory formulae and you’re not sure what text is being quoted. They have to be handled case by case. Let me mention two to show how they might be handled differently because I have treated both of them at some length in some commentary or other. I’m not saying that you need to follow my particular approach either. I’m just saying that I’ve tried to wrestle with those things.

One is found in John 7:37–39. There the problem is not that there is no Old Testament possible source. There the problem is that because John is so often loose in his use of the Old Testament, there are connections between John’s quotation and several Old Testament passages, and there is a dispute about which one is meant. It’s slightly changes how you understand what John is doing in John 7:37–39 depending on which text you think he’s quoting.

When I was teaching one of my doctoral seminars a few years ago, I had an Old Testament scholar in there from the department who was also listening in. We started doing some work together. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that there was another Old Testament background that is not commonly cited in the literature. I think it’s Nehemiah 9.

In fact, I have a 10-page excursus on that in my John commentary because I think actually there are thematic structures that connect Holy Spirit, tabernacles, and a whole lot of other things to the Nehemiah 9 passage. The point is, in that case, the problem is not that there is no Old Testament connection; it’s trying to figure out which is the right one and try to be sober. You have to give reasons again. It’s warrant.

We might be less sure in some cases about what’s going on, but in principle that’s not more difficult than other cases where we’re not quite sure what’s going on as well. The more challenging one is like the Nazareth one in Matthew, chapter 2. The most common answer given to that is there is a pun going on with netser, Hebrew for branch. So it’s tied to the branch passage in the Old Testament. That’s the most common explanation. It’s possible. It’s not what I think is right. I think there’s something else going on.

There is plenty of first-century literature, Josephus and elsewhere, that shows how much Galilee was despised by first-century Palestinian Jews in the south. In Galilee, Nazareth is very regularly especially despised. That’s common in the literature; people know that. The text itself actually breaks the regular formulaic introduction that Matthew uses in the four other quotations in Matthew 2. There are four quotations that precede it.

For example, Matthew 2:17: “Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled.” Or a little further back, in verse 15: “And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet.” Then there is a specific quotation. Back in chapter 2, verse 5: “ ‘In Bethlehem, in Judea,’ they replied, ‘for this is what the prophet has written.’ ” But when you get to the last one, chapter 2, verse 23: “So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets.” Note the plural.

In every other case, there’s reference to a particular prophet and then a quotation that is pretty unambiguous. Here there is a general reference to the prophets. I’m only guessing. I won’t nail this down; nothing deep hangs on it. I think that this is part of Matthew’s understanding (and it’s a common New Testament understanding) that the Old Testament texts picture the coming Messiah as being despised.

He’s betrayed in the Psalms. He’s the despised servant in Isaiah 53. He’s rejected in Zechariah. All of these texts are picked up in the Old Testament and understood to be part of the Old Testament picture of a despised Messiah not a kingly Messiah. So what has been going on in this passage? Well, he’s been born in Bethlehem, in Judea. He’s the Davidic son, but he is going to be known not as Jesus the Bethlehemite; he’s going to be known as Jesus the Nazarene.

In which case, this may simply be saying, “Look. Already there was ample Old Testament warrant for saying that he would be the despised one.” This becomes a periphrastic way of saying no more than that. “So was fulfilled …” Because he went back up into Galilee. What was said in the Prophets? “He will be called a Nazarene.”

It’s a bit like.… Every country has places like that. In Australia, if you’re from Queensland, then you’re slow and thick. In America, if you’re born in the Ozarks, then you’re slow and thick. Do you see? I suspect in most of your countries.… In Poland, tell me, is there some place where if you come from a certain part of the country you really are a bit stupid? Yeah? It’s not fair, of course, but I mean, most countries have ways of talking about that.

Well, in the first century, if you’re from Galilee.… You find that elsewhere, don’t you? “Galilee of the Gentiles?” Likewise, you find, “Judge for yourself! Does any prophet come out of Galilee?” That’s also John’s gospel. “Does any prophet come out of Galilee?” “Yes, yes. He shall be called a Nazarene. That’s what the prophets [plural] say.”

Don’t forget, too, that in the first century, there was not orthography to mark direct quotations. A ȍti could introduce them, but a ȍti could introduce a paraphrase or a theme too. There was no quotation mark orthography. So this may be saying, “Oh, look. His going back up to Galilee and living in Nazareth.… Despite the fact that we’ve just said that he came from the tribe of David. That’s what the genealogy says in chapter 1. He was born in Bethlehem according to the fulfillment of prophecy from Micah, chapter 5, verse 2. Nevertheless, the prophets also say that he would be despised, and so he was called a Nazarene.”

See, it could be saying no more than that. Now I’m not prepared to die for that interpretation, but it seems to me that it’s entirely within the range of coherence and so forth. I’m not going to take any more individual texts now just because I want to get into the larger theme. So if we’re dealing with the questions of the larger themes than what I’ve said so far, then I’ll take a couple of questions.

Male: I don’t know what you are speaking about tomorrow, but I would be interested if you would be more specific of your criticism about Brevard Childs’ canonical approach.

Don: I probably will end up saying a little bit more about it in connection with mystery and fulfillment. Give me a little room, and then you can ask at the end if we may.

Male: We talked about how there could be two meanings that the author means to say; both these meanings can be inspired. What if the author means one thing, and then later on it is said that it means something else? And if the author didn’t originally intend this meaning, can the other meaning be an inspired meaning?

Don: I skipped over this entirely. That is the sort of approach taken by those who follow the Hirsch camp on sense and significance, so there’s an unpacking of further significance. In fact, in some cases, the Frege camp where you have sense and referent is taken along those lines too. So that what is argued is there’s a fulfillment of something at the level of sense but not at the level of referent. People make all kinds of judgments along those lines.

In the Catholic tradition what you appeal to is sensus plenior. In typology you’re saying, “Well, it belongs to the same sort of typological structure.” In every case, the question that has to be raised to justify any of those is.… What is the textual warrant for this sort of reasoning? What we’ll have to look at are some hard cases in a few minutes.

Male: Like the Matthew-Hosea.

Don: Well, that one I spent about 10 pages on in the commentary. I’m not going to deal with that one now. It’s just too long and complicated. I think there are some things that can be said, but I will allude to that one briefly if we get to it when I start talking about typology and Sonship. It’s a complicated one, and I’m not sure I have it right, but I have published on that one, so you can do some more reading for yourself. There’s a vast literature on it.

Male: As evangelicals, do we still hold to the inspired meaning of the text is what the author meant to say?

Don: What you’re appealing to is what Walter Kaiser calls single intent theory. I think single intent theory works in a lot of places. I doubt that it works well in typology. There’s a reason for that. We’ll come to that tomorrow. Give me some space, and I’ll come back on that one.

If you’re following the outline, I’ve given you a survey of some of the fundamental issues. I want to come now to the first set of tough cases that I’ve called the fulfillment theme, the fulfillment of law. We’ll start with Matthew’s gospel. I introduced this theme briefly yesterday in the workshop. May I ask how many of you were at the workshop yesterday afternoon? Just three or four, so I have to back up a bit and fill in a bit of what I gave in the workshop, but I want to fill it in much more fully this time.

Matthew 5:17–20 is one of the most disputed paragraphs in Matthew’s gospel, but it’s also very interesting for this whole matter. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” The standard interpretation of this passage amongst those who believe most strongly in the Thomistic and Calvinistic tripartite division of law is that what Jesus had in mind is moral law.

There is some sense, surely, in which you would want to argue that Jesus does come to abolish various kinds of ceremonial law. Thus we read in Matthew, chapter 15, the same book, “This, Jesus said, making all foods clean.” Doesn’t that abolish the law? Do you see? So what he is really referring to here, it is argued, is moral law.

Then, if you ask, “What does Jesus mean by the two principle verbs here? ‘I have not come to abolish but to fulfill …’ ” You’ve got some sort of contrast going on. The opposite of abolish is surely something like maintain or even deepen. “I haven’t come to abolish them, I’ve come to deepen them or intensify them.”

“And further,” it is argued, “when you read the following verses, 21 to the end of the chapter, in the every cases of the 6 antitheses that follow, you’re dealing with matters in what would traditionally be called the moral realm. So,” it is argued, “what Jesus is saying here is ‘I have not come to abolish the moral law of God. I haven’t come to abolish it; I’ve come to deepen it, intensify it, and maintain it … fulfill it, in that sense.’ ”

You find that not only in learned, conservative commentaries, but also in popular expositions. Read, for example, John Stott’s Christian Counter-Culture, which is his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. In many ways it is a very good, useful, and interesting book, but that really is his argument in a nutshell here. At the end of the day, I’m not convinced, for two reasons.

First of all, that presupposes that Jesus and/or Matthew has already bought into the tripartite division of law, which you cannot find unambiguously until Thomas in the thirteenth century. Makes you a bit nervous. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, but it does make you nervous. Now it is true to say that Jesus can distinguish kinds of law or importance of law, but he uses categories that are Jewish.

For example, in Matthew 23:23 in connection with the matter of tithing, he says, “You tithe the garden herbs—mint, cumin, and anise.” Then he says, “You have ignored the weightier matters of the law—justice, mercy …” So he has a distinction between the light and the heavy. That’s a common rabbinic way. That is, which one is more important?

That’s likewise seen in the discussion in Mark 12 and parallels. “Master, which is the most important commandment in the Law?” That is, which is the heaviest one? That’s what the rabbis would have said. “Which is the heaviest commandment?” It was a rabbinic discussion going on. So there are distinctions being made, all right, between what is more and less heavy.

Nevertheless, as a category, you cannot find the tripartite distinction … moral, civil, ceremonial … as a given, which is already a presupposed set of categories on the table which enables you then to make distinctions between continuity and discontinuity that this sort of approach demands.

If you try to use merely a light and heavy distinction here, you get into very big trouble with the next verse. “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of the pen, shall in any way disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” Well, that doesn’t sound like just the heavier bits. Or to use the Thomistic distinction, it doesn’t sound like just the moral bits. It’s pretty comprehensive, isn’t it, on the face of it?

“Not the jot or the tittle.” Almost certainly, the jot is probably merely a transliteration for the Hebrew yod, the smallest letter in the consonantal system. The tittle, so-called, “the least stroke of the pen …” There are three pairs of letters in Hebrew where there’s only one small distinction in the forming of it. For example, you have a resh, but then you also have dalet with only a small distinction. Likewise, you have bet and kaf with only a small distinction. “The least stroke of a pen” is almost certainly that sort of thing.

This is a very powerful, visual way of saying, “Nothing will be abolished from the law, not the least stroke of a pen, until all is accomplished.” So when you use language that is that strong, it’s not very likely that what Jesus is really referring to is only the heavier stuff or only the moral stuff. You can make that work only by prior adopting the tripartite distinction and assuming that it’s already in place. On the face of it, that strikes me as a terribly anachronistic reading.

I think it is much better to begin by looking at Matthew’s usages of the verbs themselves. PlērÛō, to fulfill, is a pretty complex verb. In the New Testament it can be used in a variety of ways. In James it is used in one context where it almost certainly means to perform something or the like. But most commonly in the New Testament, it is used in a kind of fulfillment pattern, a prophecy fulfillment one, a prediction fulfillment pattern. That’s the most common usage.

Matthew uses it (I forgot the exact number) 23 times,. or something like that. It’s in in the 20s in any case, pretty commonly. I would be prepared to argue at considerable length that every single instance of Matthew’s use of plērÛō has some kind of prophecy-fulfillment assumption. In other words, there’s some kind of prediction, and now the prediction is fulfilled. You’re not talking about merely intensifying, keeping, or maintaining. No, no, no. You’re talking about something else.

That means that the argument (the antithesis in verse 17) does not mean, “I have not come to abolish, but to keep.” Or, “I have not come to abolish, but to intensify.” That’s not what it’s saying. It’s saying instead, “Don’t think for a moment that I’ve come here to smash the law, to abolish it. Don’t think that I’ve come to abolish it. That’s not why I’ve come at all. I haven’t come to abolish. I’ve come to be that to which it points. I’ve come to fulfill it eschatologically. I’ve come to bring it to the accomplishment that it was aiming for.”

It is a salvation-historical category. It is a prophetic-fulfillment category. There is a sense in which you and I are already prepared to think of law that way. Are we not? We’re more used to thinking of verbal predictions that way, and there are some verbal predictions in the Old Testament that are specific and literal and then that are fulfilled in the New.

There is one already in Matthew 2. The magi come and say, “Where is the Redeemer to be born?” Micah 5:2 is quoted. “He must come from Bethlehem of Judea.” That is a specific, verbal prediction from an eighth-century prophet, and it’s picked up then by Matthew’s gospel reporting the words of the Jews who were trying to explain things to Herod. Then the fulfillment is an event. There is a prediction, and then there is a fulfillment. We’re very familiar with that.

There is a sense in which, if we’re Christians at all, precisely because we lean on some kind of typology … the warrant for it, I’ll come back to later … we are prepared to say that there are elements in the law which are predictive, not by verbal prediction but by institutional typology. We’re doing that all the time with respect to temple language, priest language, and so on.

We’ll come to Hebrews tomorrow, where we argue very strongly.… Hebrews gives its reasons for it, its warrant for it, for saying, “Look, the priesthood in the Old Testament was not only a structure within the Mosaic covenant, it was also, in some sense, a predictive thing that announced a greater Priest.”

We saw briefly in John’s gospel the temple, the tabernacle is not only something given in the Mosaic covenant, but on the other hand Jesus insists according to John 2 that he is himself the ultimate temple, the ultimate meeting place between God and human beings. Similar things are done for the Passover by Paul in 1 Corinthians 6, “Christ, our Passover, was slain for us …” We do this sort of thing with respect to the mercy seat, the hilastērion. The hilastērion shows up in Romans, chapter 3.

There are all kinds of institutional and structural things in the law (mostly bound up with cult, with worship, with the so-called ceremonial aspects of the law) where we are already, as Christians, as we read the New Testament, unconsciously saying that they have a prophetic function in the whole stream of redemptive history. They are not only institutional structures in the law covenant, they have a certain kind of prophetic function, a predictive function, within the whole stream of redemptive history.

The warrant for that we’ll come to tomorrow, but give me some slack again. The New Testament is full of those, isn’t it? They’re hard to avoid. We’ll come to what the warrant is. They’re all over the place. In that sense, we’re already comfortable with the notion of the law having a predictive element, but when it comes to what we nowadays call moral law, then we’re less comfortable with the law having a predictive element.

The moral law merely prescribes. The priestly law predicts, or it prescribes for that covenant but not today. We say that it predicts what’s going on today. But I think that Jesus’ point is: In certain profound ways, the entire law … however much it is legislative, however much it makes its demands, however it functions within the Mosaic covenant. The entire law has a predictive-prophetic function, including what we more traditionally call moral law.

I think that’s Jesus’ argument here. I want to tease that out tomorrow with respect to the antitheses here, what the argument is, and how that ties into Romans 3 that we’ve looked at and to other passages as well. So we’ll play with that one a bit more before we’re done and move on to other topics.

 

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
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