Fig Tree Institute

Fig Tree Institute is pleased to announce the availability of 'Messianic Prophecies in Historical Succession' by Franz Delitzsch for free download via the institute's website resources page -http://figtreeinstitute.org/Download/Messianic%20Prophecies%20in%20Historical%20Succession.pdf

It is undeniable, and is universally recognized, that in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, One divinely anointed, a Messiah, who is to go forth from Israel, is promised and hoped for, who makes His people victorious and powerful, and who from them extends His dominion to a world dominion. The Jews still look for this Messiah; Christianity sees the promise fulfilled in Jesus. This Jesus is regarded by Christians as the promised Messiah. Christianity is the same as the religion of the Messiah, the religion which has the Christ, who appeared in Jesus, as its principle and center.

Christianity claims to be the religion which is being prepared in the history and word and writing of the Old Testament. Even when we call it the New Testament religion, we thus recognize that it is the religion of a covenant which has taken the place of the old, but not without having the old as a first step, and not without standing in connection with it as the fruit with the tree, the child with the mother.

This is a delightful theme, a joyful work, in which the author proposed to be absorbed. The Messiah is in the process of coming in the Old Testament, in drawing near, in proclaiming His appearance, and we design to transport ourselves into this Old Testament period, and follow the steps of the One who is coming, pursue the traces of the One who is drawing near, seek out the shadows which He casts upon the way of His Old Testament history, and especially seek to understand the intimations of prophecy respecting Him.

figtreeinstitute.org

Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (Western) Thought -
http://www.hoshanarabbah.org/pdfs/heb_grk.pdf

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LOGOS, A JEWISH WORD
-- JOHN’S PROLOGUE AS MIDRASH (Part 2 of 2)

In the Targumic tradition, the translation of Exodus 3.12–14, the theophany of the burning bush, offers an instructive illustration of the essence of the Memra. The Hebrew text reads, “God said to Moses: ‘I am that I am,’ and he said: ‘Thus shall you say unto them, I am has sent me to you.’” “I am” is here a name of God. The Palestinian Targum translates: “And the Memra of H’ said to Moses: He who said to the world from the beginning, Be there, and it was there, and who is to say [to it Be there, and it will be there]; and he said, Thus shall you say to the Israelites, He has sent me to you.” In other words, the name “I am” is glossed in the Targumim by a reference to Genesis 1.3, “And God said: Let there be”: the Word by which God brought the universe into being is the Memra.

In the next verse in the Palestinian Targum, this name for God, “He who said to the world ‘Be there,’” becomes transformed into a divine being in its own right: “I, My Memra, will be with you: I, My Memra, will be a support for you.”

Targum Neofiti (Ms. 1) confirms this connection between the divine being and the word. In Exodus 3.13, in answer to Moses’ apprehension that he will not be up to the task of going to Pharaoh and persuading or forcing him to allow Moses to bring out the Israelites, God answers: “I will be with you.” Neofiti reads: “I, My Memra, will be with you.” The other Targumim maintain this interpretation but add the element of the Memra as supporter, thus: “And he said: Because my Memra will be for your support.” From here we see how this Memra, revealed to Moses in the declaration “I am,” supports him, redeems the Israelites, and all the rest of the saving activities. In the Targum, as in the Logos theology, this Word has been hypostasized, turned into an actual divine being.

The conclusive evidence for the connection of the Targumic Memra and the Logos of John appears in the Palestinian Targumic poetic homily on the “Four Nights,” probably a liturgical text in which four special nights in sacred history are delineated:

Four nights are written in the Book of Memories: The first night: when the Lord was revealed above the world to create it. The world was unformed and void and darkness was spread over the surface of the deep; and through his Memra there was light and illumination [italics added], and he called it the first night.

This text matches the first verses of John’s Prologue, with its association of Logos, the Word, and light. The midrash of the “four nights” culminates in the coming of the Messiah, drawing even closer the connections between the Targum heard in the synagogue and John’s Gospel. Moreover, the midrash of the “four nights” is most likely a fragment of Paschal liturgy, suggesting even more palpably its appropriateness as a text for comparison with John’s Gospel, where Jesus is compared to the Paschal offering. In order to see this, however, we must pay attention to the formal characteristics of Midrash as a mode of reading Scripture. One of the most characteristic forms of Midrash is a homily on a scriptural passage or extract from the Pentateuch that invokes, explicitly or implicitly, texts from either the Prophets or the Hagiographa (Gk “holy writings”: specifically, very frequently Psalms, Song of Songs, or Wisdom literature) as the framework of ideas and language that is used to interpret and expand the Pentateuchal text being preached. This interpretive practice is founded on a theological notion of the oneness of Scripture as a self-interpreting text, especially on the notion that the latter books are a form of interpretation of the Five Books of Moses. Gaps are not filled with philosophical ideas but with allusions to or citations of other texts.

The first five verses of the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel fit this form nearly perfectly. The verses being preached are the opening verses of Genesis, and the text that lies in the background as interpretive framework is Proverbs 8.22–31. The primacy of Genesis as text being interpreted explains why we have here Logos and not “Wisdom.” In an intertextual interpretive practice such as a midrash, imagery and language may be drawn from a text other than the one under interpretation, but the controlling language of the discourse is naturally the text that is being interpreted and preached. The preacher of the Prologue to John had to speak of Logos here, because his homiletical effort is directed at the opening verses of Genesis, with their majestic: “And God said: Let there be light, and there was light.” It is the “saying” of God that produces the light, and indeed through this saying, everything was made that was made.

Philo, like others, identifies Sophia and the Logos as a single entity. Consequently, nothing could be more natural than for a preacher, such as the composer of John 1, to draw from the book of Proverbs the figure, epithets, and qualities of the second God (second person), the companion of God and agent of God in creation; for the purposes of interpreting Genesis, however, the preacher would need to focus on the linguistic side of the coin, the Logos, which is alone mentioned explicitly in that text. In other words, the text being interpreted is Genesis, therefore the Word; the text from which the interpretive material is drawn is Proverbs, hence the characteristics of Wisdom:

1. In the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God,
2. And the Word was God.He was in the beginning with God.
3. All things were made through him,and without him was not anything made that was made.
4. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
5. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not receive it.

The assertion that the Word was with God is easily related to Proverbs 8.30, “Then I [wisdom] was beside him,” and even to Wisdom of Solomon 9.9, “With thee is wisdom.” As is frequently the case in rabbinic midrash, the gloss on the verse being interpreted is dependent on a later biblical text that is alluded to but not explicitly cited. The Wisdom texts, especially Proverbs 8, had become commonplaces in the Jewish interpretive tradition of Genesis 1. Although, paradoxically, John 1.1–5 is our earliest example of this, the form is so abundant in late antique Jewish writing that it can best be read as the product of a common tradition shared by (some) messianic Jews and (some) non-messianic Jews. Thus the operation of John 1.1 can be compared with the Palestinian Targum to this very verse, which translates “In the beginning” by “With Wisdom God created,” clearly also alluding to the Proverbs passage. “Beginning” is read in the Targumim sometimes as Wisdom, and sometimes as the Logos, Memra: By a Beginning—Wisdom—God created.

In light of this evidence, the Fourth Gospel is not a new departure in the history of Judaism in its use of Logos theology, but only, if even this, in its incarnational Christology. John 1.1–5 is not a hymn, but a midrash, that is, it is not a poem but a homily on Genesis 1.1–5. The very phrase that opens the Gospel, “In the beginning,” shows that creation is the focus of the text. The rest of the Prologue shows that the midrash of the Logos is applied to the appearance of Jesus. Only from John 1.14, which announces that the “Word became flesh,” does the Christian narrative begins to diverge from synagogue teaching. Until v. 14, the Johannine prologue is a piece of perfectly unexceptional non-Christian Jewish thought that has been seamlessly woven into the Christological narrative of the Johannine community.

“JOHN’S PROLOGUE AS MIDRASH” by Daniel Boyarin, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” essay

GODFEAR (Part 2 of 2)

How did these Jews manage? Our inscriptional and papyrological evidence in particular should caution us against taking at face value the confluence of classical ethnographers’ complaints of Jewish ἀσέβεια and ἀμιξία, rabbinic prescriptions in Avodah Zara, and modern notions of “orthodoxy” or of “monotheism.” Different Jews negotiated their responsibilities differently. The ephebes Jesus son of Antiphilos and Eleazar son of Eleazar appear in a first-century inscription that was itself dedicated to Heracles and Hermes, the gods of the gymnasium. A papyrus fragment of roughly the same period alludes to an athlete whose “Jewish load” (circumcision) publicly emphasized his Jewish identity precisely when his prowess in foot racing publicly expressed his Greek identity. One inscription, a synagogue manumission, invokes the God of Israel at its beginning while closing with the witness of Zeus, Gaia, and Helios; another, marking a tomb, likewise commemorates funds to be distributed on Passover, Pentecost/Shavuot, and Kalends. Jews in the city of Miletus reserved seats in the theater; they turn up elsewhere in hippodromes and odeons; they both watched and acted in pantomime performances. These sites host divine–human interactions as well as intra-human ones.

If we find Jews in pagan places, we no less find pagans in Jewish places. Some traveled to the temple of the Jews’ God in Jerusalem, where they collected in the largest courtyard (i.e. the court of Gentiles at temple mount in Jerusalem). Others, closer to home, appear variously engaged in diaspora Jewish activities, most specifically in and around the Jews’ “ethnic reading houses,” their prayer-houses or synagogues. These pagans range across a broad spectrum of activity, from occasional contact, to the voluntary assumption of some Jewish ancestral practices, to major benefaction and patronage. The first point to note about these crossover activities is that they seem to have been ad hoc, voluntary, and not all that unusual: after all, the pagan–Jewish foot traffic went in both directions. The second point to note is that such mutual and fluid arrangements—pagans (and, eventually, gentile Christians) in Jewish places and Jews in pagan (and, eventually, in gentile Christian) places was on the evidence both extremely widespread and extremely socially stable: for centuries into the Common Era, well into the post-Constantinian period, ideologues of separation—Christian literati, bishops, emperors, and rabbis—all still complain about it. In the cities of Mediterranean antiquity, it seems, often if not always, no fences made good neighbors.

How do we identify all these ancient actors as they comfortably cross these ethnic/cultural/“religious” lines? And do the data themselves give us any assistance in this effort? Some ancient formulations emphasize the “ethnic” aspect, though what we think of as “religious” behaviors would also be entailed: Jews can act “gentilely” or “paganly” (ἐθνικῶς) and pagans can act “Jewishly” (Ἰουδαικῶς) (Gal 2:14); non-Jews can “Judaize” and Jews can “Hellenize.” Other formulations emphasize the “religious” aspect, but they thereby entail an ethnic aspect as well. In this second category, in first- and second-century Hellenistic Jewish literary sources, we find pagans who “fear god;” and in later inscriptions, third through fifth century (and most dramatically in Aphrodisias), we find non-Jews who are identified as “godfearers.”

As with the English, so with the Greek: sometimes “godfearing” simply means “pious,” indicating nothing particularly about ethnicity. But sometimes, and especially in Jewish contexts, “godfearing” indicates what we might elsewhere find designated as “Judaizing” (e.g., as in Josephus, J.W. 2.18.2). Its “religious” cast notwithstanding, “godfearing” also connotes “ethnic” behaviors. This is all to say that we are looking at, and endeavoring to speak about, ancient Mediterranean phenomena; and in that cultural context, gods and humans formed family groups, and cult is another expression of ethnicity.

When can we as historians know which kind of “godfearer”—a pious person full stop, or a voluntarily Judaizing pagan—our ancient evidence bespeaks? As usual, we have to consider critically each case, without expecting complete agreement among our different interpretive arguments. Sometimes the “ethnicity”—thus, also, the “religious” orientation—of an inscription or (especially) of an incantation will elude us, thus reinforcing the larger social-historical interpretive point: different peoples mixed with and borrowed from each other. But sometimes we will find in our evidence a Roman synagogue benefactor (such as Julia Severa) or a Septuagint-celebrating pagan (Philo, Life of Moses 2.41–42) or a non-Jew who rests on the Sabbath (as in Juvenal’s satire). Such pagans are “sympathizers” or (to use another contemporary term) “Judaizers.” The particular inscription or mosaic or literary reference itself might not designate these Judaizing non-Jews specifically as “godfearers.” But as historians, might we?

I think so. “Godfearing” is one of those terms, like “Judaizing,” that is both emic and etic: that is, one of its ancient cultural definitions maps closely onto its modern, academic one. Historiographically, “godfearing” can serve us as an identifier for a long-lived and internally various sub-group that evinced a broad range of behaviors (pious, political, practical) across this specific ethnic divide: the one between Jewishness and everything else.

Of course, “to Persianize” (Μηδίζειν) or “to Egyptianize” would likewise indicate crossover behavior between “everything else” and a particular ethnic/religious group. “Godfearing” specifically—that is, pagan Judaizing—is significant to historians of ancient Mediterranean religions, however, because of the ways that it complicates our conceptualization both of Roman-period Judaism and of ancient Christianity. If so many and such different diaspora Jewish communities over so great a stretch of time so readily accommodated such a broad range of interests and involvements from pagan neighbors, a standing separateness cannot be presupposed, for example, to account for Paul’s remarks in Galatians 2, or for “Peter’s” in Acts 10. Pauline communities need not be imagined as having the sort of biblical literacy crash courses that would be the envy of modern Methodists. And the later gentile Christian pattern of keeping Saturdays as the Sabbath, or of fasting on Yom Kippur, or of taking oaths before Torah scrolls need not be explained by appeal to a sudden interest, via the “Old Testament,” in Jewish practices, but can be seen for what it is: a long-lived social pattern within the Greco-Roman city.

Diaspora Jewish involvement in pagan cult and culture also needs to be seen, and to complicate our conceptualization of Roman-period Judaism and of ancient Christianity. We do not have a contemporary term for this ancient (and entirely unremarkable) Jewish behavior in the way that we do, with “godfearing,” for the corresponding pagan behavior. Terms such as “assimilated” or “not orthodox” come from much later periods of European Jewish history, and inevitably embody anachronistic value judgments. (And “Hellenized” seems too non-specific: after Alexander, what eastern Mediterranean culture was not to some extent “Hellenized”?) Still, the nonexistence of an ancient term for “paganizing Jews” does not, it seems to me, require that we let go of an existing ancient term for “Judaizing pagans.”

These normal Jewish negotiations with the majority culture should also complicate our construction of what it meant for a pagan to “become” an “ex-pagan”—a “convert” in our modern terms, a προσήλυτος (and that only eventually) in Hellenistic Greek. If native Jews (such as, perhaps, Pothos [Ameling, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, 1:303–7]) summoned lower gods to witness synagogue manumissions, or if one (such as Moschos son of Moschion [Ameling, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, 1:177–80]) placed inscriptions honoring foreign gods in foreign temples while identifying himself as “Ἰουδαῖος,” how uninvolved with his former gods need a προσήλυτος actually have been? And what would it mean, via ritual actions, to change ancestors and ethnic groups? What, indeed, would it mean in antiquity “to convert”?

These are important and interesting questions, none of which I can address in the space remaining here. But, given the difficulties that we have when speaking of all these mixing and mingling gods and humans, it seems overfastidious to shelve our hybrid emic/etic term that can still work, should we choose to let it, to identify some of these ancient actors: a “godfearer” is a pagan who voluntarily assumes (like the sympathizing father in Juvenal’s Satire 14), or who supports (like the patron Julia Severa, who builds the οἶκος for Acmonia’s Jews [Ameling, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, 2:348–55]), or who utilizes (like the adept who invokes “the God who was a pillar of fire by night” in order to work his spell, PGM 11.3,007–85) some aspects of Jewishness, which eo ipso implies some degree of contact both with (local) Jews and (thus and also) with their god. As an identifying category, such a term may indeed be “sweeping,” but so is the phenomenon that it names.

For all the reasons reviewed above, then, but especially for this last one, I would not give up the “godfearers.”

“If It Looks like a Duck, and It Quacks like a Duck . . .”: On Not Giving Up the Godfearers - Paula Fredriksen, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem