Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution Thursday, November 8, 2018 St. Francis of Assisi in Bolingbrook

Transcription

1 Rev. Paul A. Hottinger Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution Thursday, November 8, 2018 St. Francis of Assisi in Bolingbrook We have to understand the Bible is not revelation. Whether there is revelation is a matter of faith. If you believe that this whole process began with God disclosing himself, that is faith. It can t be proven. That very idea rests on faith, and the Bible is the response that people have given to that revelation. So we don t see the revelation; we see the response to it in the way people behave. And sometimes the behavior is deplorable and sometimes it s pious, but it isn t really itself revealing whatever God did. We have to have a little timeline so we can keep things more or less in order. Any questions on that point, the last point in particular? What the Bible is not. It is not a modern history book, you understand that. And it s not revelation; it s a record of peoples responding to revelation. Keep that in mind. If we go back to the events and the people of which the Bible is really talking about, we can start more or less around 1750, anywhere from 1750 to 1500 before the time of Christ. This is the prehistory. This is Abraham. This is the time of Jacob more or less, Moses. And whatever Moses experienced, we call it the Exodus, the exit from Egypt, the whole formation of the covenant of Sinai that all takes place around Then 1000, the great King David who became the anointed of the Lord and the basic figure and character behind the kingdom of Israel, and the subject of his own covenant. God made a covenant with David in addition to the covenant he made with Moses, which was an addition to the covenant he made with Abraham. So this idea of covenant, it s flexible, it moves, it changes, it develops. Abraham is a development of a covenant God made with the whole of humanity at the time of Noah. Now, again, I am not saying we know what happened historically, but I m saying that the people understood Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

2 this. This is basically the religious understanding, faith understanding, of an historical people, the Israelites. Probably the time of David is the distant beginnings of the Bible as we know it, the first writings, probably Exodus, parts of Genesis probably started to be written at this time. 950 is Solomon and the building of the Temple and the founding of the Wisdom school, so very significant date. Now these are approximate. Solomon was very important because it is under Solomon that a temple was actually built. It s under Solomon the schools of Wisdom were formed in Jerusalem. 900 is the split in which the northern and the southern kingdoms separated, never to be rejoined. 721 the end of the northern kingdom, it was destroyed by Assyria, people were deported. 587 the Babylonian Exile. These are very important dates to keep in mind, as we see that the people who called themselves Israel were going through many, sometimes convulsive, changes over a long period of time, and it s a downhill history. It s a history that ends in exile, and in a way that ended something, but then it was a new beginning. So during the Babylonian Exile something new happened among the people and they reformed and what we call today modern Judaism, in a sense, started then with a new dedication to the Torah, to the Law, and a new sense of God and a new sense of their own vocation in the world. During this time probably most of the Pentateuch, that s the first five books of the Old Testament, were more or less formed, not completely but more or less. Then at 530 is the return from exile through the intercession of the Persian King Cyrus, a miracle if there ever was one. All of a sudden a completely pagan gentile king decides to reestablish Israel, and of course the Israelites see that as, again, the inscrutable wisdom and power of God doing what God wants to do and using whatever means you chooses to use. 2 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

3 By 300 now the history of Israel, its laws, its prophets, and its writings start to be put together, mostly by a school of scribes who were all part of the tradition begun in the time Solomon in the Wisdom schools of Jerusalem. But it is not only the Bible we have now that was written at this time, but also there are many other books called, for example, deuterocanonical, meaning secondary canon, apocryphal, or pseudepigraphal. Those are long words. Here s a book called the Lost Bible. The Lost Bible is not all the books, but it is a list of a huge number of them that did not become part of the Bible. And yet they are very interesting. They are informative. They help us understand what people were thinking, what people were expecting, how they looked to God, and so on. So they are very helpful even though no one considers them actually inspired works of God. In the Ethiopian canon there s two books not in ours, One Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. But the Book of Jubilees and One Enoch is not found in the Jewish Canon or in the Catholic canon or in the Protestant canon, which is the same as the Jewish canon, basically. In 6 BC the birth of Jesus. Now people say isn t that 0? No 6 BC for some reason, I don t know why, and therefore the death of Jesus about 24 and the launching of the apostolic mission. Now in the second century A.D., and this is important, the Jewish rabbis rejected the Septuagint, the Greek translation. So already by the second century they were saying we don t accept this as official, and their Hebrew version started to diverge from it. See, for a long time, well it s about 500 years, it was perfectly okay to use the Septuagint among Jews and Jewish scholars and rabbis and so on. But now it was not accepted, and the reason was that they objected to Christian interpretations of the Old Testament, of the Septuagint, in which they said that Jesus fulfilled these prophecies. And they said, well, you don t understand the prophecies because they are not written properly. So there was a certain amount of pushback and a certain amount of rejection of the Christian proclamation that Jesus was the anointed of God, Jesus was the 3 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

4 fulfillment of God s promises, Jesus fulfilled the prophecies. And the leaders of the Jewish religion, who didn t believe in Jesus, decided that they had to reformulate the Hebrew Scriptures to make things clearer from their point of view. When we talk about Scripture, I m repeating myself here, but we are talking about the expression of beliefs written with intention, but we must not assume that the intentionality of ancient peoples was the same as ours, that they intended to do what we would intend to receive. Not necessarily. We have to be very cautious in reading Scripture not to impose our ideas on them or our expectations, especially what we would call historical accuracy or critical accuracy. That was not an interest for them. But it was really more about the meaning of life and how God s will was unfolding. So it s not history in the way we mean, but what all these writers, Christian and Jews, were trying to do was to explain to their people how to serve God. That was their goal, not to tell people what happened, although they assumed that something had happened, but that was not their point. They assumed that the stories in the Bible really took place, all the people named were real people, but that wasn t what they were trying to say. They weren t trying to tell them about those people. They were trying to tell them how to serve God. So they took the stories as lessons. And they had four basic assumptions. The first assumption is that there is a message in Scripture, a message. So it s not the words themselves, but the message in the words. Number two, the message is cryptic, that means it s hidden, it needs to be translated, it needs to be interpreted. That s why you need rabbis. That s why you need a magisterium. So the idea that anyone could simply read the Bible and just because he knew how to read and get out what was in there would never have been accepted by either Christians or Jews for the first 1500 years of the life of the Church. That idea came later on with Martin Luther, who thought that anyone could 4 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

5 simply open the Bible and read it and understand exactly what God wanted to say because more or less God had chosen the words. That was not the belief, not of Jews and not of Christians. Now we are getting to something more important here, and that is the models that people used to understand God. We have our ideas of God and we might believe that these same ideas of God have always been around. But if you read the Hebrew Scriptures carefully, you see that there were not one but two different ways of looking at God. There are human looking images of God, models of God, in the Bible. Right? You have read those. You have seen them right? Okay, now many people think they are simply intended as poetry, but they really weren t intended as poetry. The man-looking images of God were what people really thought Yahweh was. They believed Yahweh was a being something like a man that could appear and disappear, as if walking through a curtain and then out again. This Yahweh, that s the name they gave to this image of God, was not omniscient was not omniscient. In the story of the garden of Eden he calls out to Adam, Where are you? He didn t know. When the cry arose about the depravity of Sodom and Gomorrah, Yahweh says, I m going to go and see what s going on there. That is the way that the early Hebrew mind thought about God, not omniscient and not omnipresent, but usually out of town, arriving only once in a while. First of all, the word Yahweh, what does it really mean? The one who makes to be, so Creator. Yahweh looks like a man. He comes and goes; he is here not there. He doesn t understand or know everything, and yet he is the Creator. And one of his titles is Yahweh-sabaoth, meaning the one who causes the heavenly hosts, the sabaoth, the heavenly hosts to be. So their understanding of divinity was very different. They believed that there were many different gods. They were not monotheists. You may have heard that Judaism is monotheistic. 5 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

6 Well, yes, it is now, but it wasn t in its origin. There was belief there were many different gods; Yahweh was the one that caused them all to be, therefore the chief, you could say. But these various gods actually did have existence and at first they had a purpose, but God eventually fired them for doing a bad job. And this is where the rebellion came, so these spirits became rebellious and started to rival God, and that is really the beginning of sin. Later when God creates Adam and Eve, who are of course images of humanity as a whole, they take on the same rivalry and thus sin enters into human history. Now it s very interesting St. Augustine says that time began when Eve and Adam were expelled from the garden of Eden, meaning that in St. Augustine s understanding the garden of Eden didn t take place in real time. It took place in something before time, what could be called dreamtime. So time begins with the expulsion from the garden, according to Augustine. Now that wouldn t exactly agree with modern accountings of evolution, and it doesn t agree with most people s picture of what Scripture says either. It s something worth thinking about. The story in the garden of Eden is about God s purpose in creating everything good even though as we watch, everything starts falling apart. Now the nations, so to speak, the goyim, the gentiles, all had their own gods, and, in a sense, they were welcome to them, at least at first. As I said, later on God fired them, but at first they were actually supposed to take care of these various nations. The Most High God apportioned to different deities, different spirits, powers, principalities, whatever you want to call them, the care of different nations. And they believed that the carved images, idols, they believed that the spirit actually dwelt in the idol. I just used the term Most High God, so that s the second idea of God that is found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Most High God, the Most High God is not Yahweh but Yahweh s Father. 6 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

7 And the Most High God gave Yahweh for some unexplained reason the people of Israel and the land of Canaan; that became his land. There is no explanation why this took place; it just did. And they considered themselves very fortunate that in fact Yahweh is their God because Yahweh is the Creator of everyone else and therefore superior to everyone else. So all these various gods, although they are not actually divine in our sense of the term, they are not infinite, they are limited, but they are superior to us. These various gods were all thought to be, again, physically present in certain places. When you hear the first commandment: You shall have no gods before me, what that s referring to is the fact that ancient temples had a multiplicity of these images. And God said, that is Yahweh said, number one, no images; number two, nobody else around me. In other words Yahweh was requiring a certain sort of wholehearted devotion that did not exist anywhere else in the ancient world that we know of. When Yahweh then creates Adam, meaning man, creates Adam from the clay, adama is clay, Adam: man, so man comes from the clay, and Yahweh creates Adam in his own image and likeness. Now this does not only mean that he can think and know and will and love, but also means that in a certain way a man looks like Yahweh. And someone once pointed out if you spell Yahweh vertically, some people think that looks like a man. I don t know if you think that looks like a man, but it does have a kind of stickman look to it. So, again, this is just another way in which the Hebrew mind worked with images and letters and so on to see things. Now, although Yahweh was physical when he appeared, to see him was very dangerous. People feared the sight of God. They thought if they saw God, they would die. Very often when people did see God, they didn t realize it at first. So these appearances of Yahweh were recognized later. When Abraham saw three men in the afternoon and he extended hospitality to them, at first he didn t know what they were. Later on he realized it was a visit from Yahweh. 7 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

8 Jacob fought with an angel all night long, but in the morning he realized it was God; it was Yahweh that he was contending with. And so it is that people did not originally recognize what they were actually seeing. In the appearance to Gideon for example, Gideon saw some being, which he called an angel, meaning a messenger, could be anything, but he heard the voice of Yahweh, and he heard the voice of Yahweh in his heart. The same with Hannah. The image of God, as I mentioned, is not omniscient. Not realizing this, Augustine had trouble with the story of Abraham and Isaac. He said well why would God ask Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac if he really didn t want him to sacrifice him, and he knew anyway that he would do it? But the fact is, in the mind of the people who told that story, God didn t know what Abraham would do until he actually did it. Now there s another word in Hebrew for God, Elohim, which is actually a plural. So, again, I said there are many gods, and many of the gods participated in the creation, but then later on when it became obvious that God is one, they simply changed the verb from a plural to a singular. So Elohim is actually a little bit ambiguous. Sometimes it means the gods; sometimes it means God. There are other words for God. As I said the Most High God is Elohim and El Shaddai. These models are getting into the more common understanding of a totally transcendent God, not a God that shows up, not a God who appears, not a God who speaks, but a distant transcendent God, who is embracing all of time and space, but beyond time and space. It is Justin Martyr, one of the early theologians of the Church, who first acknowledged, or saw, had the insight, that Yahweh actually is the pre-incarnate Christ, and therefore the Most High God is the Father, so that in a way the Christian Trinity is already anticipated to some degree in the Old Testament stories. If you look in the Book of Wisdom, which you can find in 8 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

9 a Catholic Bible, chapter 7:15-30, I will read something that to me is very indicative of what we call the Holy Spirit. May God grant me to speak as he would wish and conceive thoughts worthy of the gifts I have received, since he is both guide to wisdom and director of sages. This is a new concept of God. This isn t like Yahweh. This isn t the Most High God utterly transcendent, but an imminent, indwelling kind of God: since he is both guide to wisdom and director of sages, for we are in his hand. Yes, ourselves and our sayings and all intellectual and all practical knowledge. He it was who gave me sure knowledge of what exists to understand the structure of the world and the action of the elements, the beginning, end, and middle of the times, the alternation of the solstices and the succession of the seasons, the cycles of the year, and the position of the stars, the nature of animals and the instincts of wild beasts, the power of spirits and human mental processes, the varieties of plants, and the medical properties of roots. And now I understand everything hidden or visible, for wisdom, the designer of all things, has instructed me. This is already the idea of the Holy Spirit, who is the teacher and guide of the Church, the soul of the Church. So we see now in even the Old Testament already three different models that form the basis for our understanding of God as one, but subsisting in three different persons: Father, the transcendent El Elyon, the Most High God; Son, Yahweh; Holy Spirit, wisdom. If you have any questions on this; is this very dry for you? Do you have any questions about the images of God and how they grew and developed? Two and then toward the end the third. Three images and yet more than that there are many names for God. El Shaddai. Shaddai actually means breasts. So is this a female image? Perhaps. Any other questions? Well the decision about what books are in a canon are decisions made by people, by the authorities in each individual church. The Ethiopian church was separated from the other 9 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

10 churches for a long time and these books were used. In fact before the canon was made official, they were used among Christians as well and Jews as well. It s just at a certain point what happens is a certain sort of narrowness sets in and people don t want to be too flexible because they are afraid of error. So they start eliminating, and there were a whole group of books that were written by different sects. A sect in Greek is heresy, so you heard about heresies. People think heresies are false teachings, well that s how it is used now, but originally there were sects. Now a sect is a small group of people, and a sect could have its own books. Well at first that was fine; everyone used whatever they wanted to, but eventually Church authorities decided that was too dangerous, and so they banned them, and so many of them were lost, although some have been found in various places. So that s how certain books got put out of use. Why is this important? Because I think we get the idea that Christianity just came on the scene and created this whole new idea of theology, but actually that s not true. Christianity borrowed a theology that had already been established, although a theology that for the most part the Hebrew teachers, Jewish authorities, moved away from. See they moved away from these ideas of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; they ended up with God Father, period. They moved away from Yahweh altogether. That even happened earlier at the time of Second Isaiah. Second Isaiah takes the idea of the Most High God and he calls him Yahweh. Well that isn t what Yahweh meant up until then. So there is a tendency to move away from the familiar, move away from the intimate, and Yahweh is a very intimate God. He walks with Adam in the cool of the evening. He goes to eat with Abraham; he even wrestles with Jacob. I mean he is an intimate sort of being. In time they felt that was embarrassing; they didn t want such an intimate God, and so they more or less pushed those ideas away, although you can t get rid of them because they are in the stories. 10 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

11 But then of course they quit using the name Yahweh, and they said we are never going to use that name anymore; we are going to say the Lord, Adonai. So then whenever the name would come up, they would say Adonai, the Lord. That s in prayer. Then when talking, if we just want to talk about the Lord, they don t even say Adonai. They say, Hashem, the Name. So it s a way of, you might say, isolating or insulating. It was done out of a sense of devotion and a sense of the sacred, but in a way I think it lost a little bit about the closeness, which then Jesus resurrected. Jesus came and he really represented himself as the voice of God, reinterpreting Scripture, reinterpreting everything, and they said, well, what gives you the right to do this? And he says, Well, tell me, what gives you the right to do this? And they wouldn t answer him. He says, then I m not going to tell you either. The dialogue, to me, helps us to understand where this all came from and makes the New Testament really alive. And this is the first part. The second part is about the Temple and the importance of the Temple. Again, the Temple is not that significant in many people s minds. And as you might say Judaism developed, there was a school of thought, a very powerful school of thought, that didn t think the Temple was very important. That was called the Deuteronomistic school. They are the authors of the Book of Deuteronomy. The Book of Deuteronomy is the fifth book in the Pentateuch. It s in a certain way a repetition; it s a repetition of what had already gone before, but with a certain slant. The feasts in Deuteronomy contain no Yom Kippur; there is no Day of Atonement. God tells Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy, no, Moses, no one can atone for the sins of anyone else. But the whole idea of the Day of Atonement, the whole idea of the high priesthood, was that indeed we could, that that was what God wanted. The human temple on earth is simply a physical model of a heavenly reality that had been opened up to many people in visions. We start with Abraham and who? Abraham and 11 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

12 Melchizedek. That is really a theophany. Melchizedek, it says in Scripture, I don t know if you ever thought this funny, it says he had no mother and no father. Doesn t it say that? He has no ancestry. He is not human. Melchizedek is another image of God, actually of Yahweh, of Christ. And he is the high priest, and Abraham brings him the tithes. Well the tithe belongs to God. But he goes to Melchizedek. Why? Because Melchizedek is an image of God; that s a theophany. That s a coming into the presence of God. You look in Isaiah and he has visions of the heavenly temple, Ezekiel too. This is a living reality within the ancient people. And Moses saw a heavenly temple, and then described how the earthly one was supposed to be built based on what he saw. And the temple was actually a representation of the week of creation. The holy of holies represents the time before creation began, so the presence of God, period. And the holy of holies was a place where the high priest went, once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and received visions. Now this I didn t know for a long, long time. I ve only recently discovered this, but actually the high priest was to receive visions when he went into the holy of holies. Now the holy of holies was covered with a curtain. The curtain represented matter. Matter to the Jewish mind or to the Hebrew mind was what blocked us from seeing God. And then the various parts of the temple were all representing a different day of creation. For example the altar of sacrifice represented the creation of animals. The table of bread represented the creation of vegetation. What represented the creation of Adam? The high priest himself, so the term Adam is man; man is Adam, Son of Man, son of Adam or second Adam. Jesus referred to himself as the Son of Man. He is referring to himself as the second Adam. And the high priest represented humanity as a whole, and was actually sanctified, they believed he was sanctified precisely in the eating of the sacrifice. You may know that in Judaism vinegar is not kosher and raw meat is not 12 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

13 kosher, but believe it or not, the high priest was instructed to eat raw goat with vinegar, and that was considered a sacred act of sanctification. Now goat, the goats used, the word goat, we separate goats from sheep, but actually the Lamb of God is probably a goat because if you read in the Passover the lamb can either be of the sheep or the goats. Well in the sacrifices they were the goats. But anyway Melchizedek is this person that really reflects Yahweh himself. And so the high priest had this mission to reflect God. Isaiah had a vision of the heavenly temple as well, as does Ezekiel. So earthly worship in the Tabernacle and later the Temple was a sacramental representation of the heavenly temple. The holy of holies represented the first day of creation when there was just God and nothing more. The curtain represented matter that cuts us off from the vision of God. I am repeating myself somewhat just to go over it again. But in the holy of holies the high priest did have visions, which they took to the people. So in the holy of holies the high priest wore the white, which represented purity and divinity. He took it off and put on a cloak just like the curtain on the temple and he would go out and share any visions he had, and that was part of what the role of the high priest was. If you remember that Zechariah was going to the temple and offering incense and he saw a vision. Well that was perhaps common. The priest on duty would receive visions. So the high priest on earth was a representative of the pre-incarnate Christ, and the king frequently exercised high priestly roles. In a sense, the high priest and king went together. So this is another thing that David took on the high priest role in his day, and he performed all the functions, which really belong to Christ, the pre-incarnate Christ. And so you can see why now Jesus takes on the role of the Son of David, the Messiah. The Letter to the Hebrews identifies him as the high priest entering into the holy of holies of heaven, so it s completing the whole circuit. 13 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

14 Now what happened is that the people, Judaism, the people in the Jewish world, you might say, were threatened by what they saw as corruption in the priesthood. Now to what degree this is true or not, we don t know, but we know that many groups at the time of Jesus believed the temple to be corrupt and the priesthood to be corrupt. And we believe Jesus agreed with this. Why? So he goes into the temple at the time of the Passover and he kicks out all the animals. Well kicking out all the animals is negating the power of sacrifice; you can t have sacrifice without animals. And when he is asked what he is doing, he says, Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up again. Again, he is becoming the Temple. So not only is he taking over the role of high priest, he is taking over the role of Temple, which he clarifies at the Last Supper when he says, Take and drink, this is the cup of my blood poured out for you. Well that s what happens on the Day of Atonement; blood is poured out. He says my blood. I am now the Lamb of God. I am the sacrifice, and my blood is poured out for you and for the many. Now the many are those awaiting the Messiah, in particular the group called the Essenes, who call themselves the Assembly of the Many. And Jesus may well have been part of that and probably John the Baptist as well. Malachi says that the Temple has been corrupted and that the Shekinah is moving out of the Temple onto the Mount of Olives. So then those who believed what Malachi said would go pray in the Mount of Olives, and we see that s exactly what Jesus did. After he gave his blood at the Last Supper he left the upper room and he went to the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, to pray. This is really a coming together of many historical factors: the corruption of the priesthood, the desire of many people for redemption; all of this comes together at the time of Jesus and he takes it upon himself to allow himself to be called Messiah, Son of David, on the day we call Palm 14 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

15 Sunday. But if we look at Palm Sunday from the standpoint of this background, we see how he really is choosing to deliver Israel within the context of the heavenly mystical Temple and become that himself. You have a question? We don t know what version. They are reading partly the Old Testament. They could be reading apocrypha. They could be reading pseudepigrapha. We don t know exactly what they are reading because it hadn t been defined yet. It s much later. It s in the second century and the third century that the Church and the Jews decided what was going to be Scripture. Until then it was very fluid. You see the problem is that it became more rigid. And partly that had to happen. Probably there was a lot of craziness. I mean, religion attracts crazy; it does. And so no doubt they had all kinds of problems that that was their answer. Is it the perfect answer? Not necessarily. There was a group in the early Church that were called the Prophets, and they were accepted as actually mediating words directly from God. And they would consult the prophets, what shall we do? But the prophets became opposed to the bishops when the bishops said that apostates could be forgiven. The prophets said no, there can be no forgiveness after Baptism. Well you don t see a class of prophets in the Church any more, do you? So every conflict led to something, and the decisions weren t always the most, perhaps, genteel. However the point is that Jesus himself was in the midst of the greatest of all conflicts. And he clearly saw the Temple as wrong, otherwise he wouldn t have kicked out the animals. He clearly saw the priesthood as corrupt. He went to pray not in the Temple but in the garden of Gethsemane. He superseded the rites of the Temple with his own blood and said so. The apostles remembered this. Now did Jesus intend to die for everyone? We cannot say, but the Church believes that God desires the salvation of everyone. But did Jesus actually say that the day he died? No, he said, 15 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

16 For you, and that includes everyone who would ever hear those words, and for the many, probably he meant those awaiting a Messiah, and especially, as I said, the Essenes, who called themselves the Many. So he clearly was doing something, and he knew the end was near for himself, and he wanted to use his death as a point of deliverance and freedom for people. And the priests were the ones that arrested him and convicted him and handed him over to Pilate. Of course Pilate is the one that killed him, but they are the ones that did this. So why, what s the motivation? Of course we don t know. But we do know that many of the people of the time believed they were corrupt, and we see that they did play along with the Romans. They were more or less allies. There s another issue involved having to do with the Roman Empire and the Roman Emperor himself, and for long time people said, well how does Jesus get away with really criticizing the authories? And the theory is, whether it s true or not, I don t know, the theory is in Rome there was a man who was chosen to be the successor to the Emperor, and he was not favorable to the high priesthood, and so as long as he was in this position in Rome, the high priest wouldn t act; they wouldn t move against Jesus. But what did happen that guy got booted out and once he was booted out the high priesthood now didn t have an opponent in Rome in the successor to the Emperor, and then they were able to move. So that s the theory, and there is historical fact in regard to those individuals, but really what went on in their minds we don t know for sure. On the cross Jesus did pour out his blood in solidarity with all those who suffer. When he died and his body was pierced, blood and water flowed out, and the evangelists write that the veil in the temple was torn in two. Well the veil in the temple was matter itself, symbolic of matter, so his body is the veil. He is the Word of God. He is a holy of holies. He is the holy of holies, the high priest, who already represented Adam and Yahweh as well, and he s all those things, and his 16 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

17 body is the curtain of the Temple, so it s torn in two. And what does the soldier say there, but Truly this is the Son of God, meaning that the veil is torn in two, so that he can see into the holy of holies, who is Jesus himself and his real nature. When the tomb was entered, if you remember when the disciples came to look for Jesus after his death, and they entered the tomb, there were two angels on either side of the place where the body had lain, and the two angels represent the cherubim in the Temple because the Mercy Seat where the high priest poured out the blood was surrounded with two angels, two cherubim. So all this is meant to be connected in our minds and imaginations so that we see a single picture emerging. In the years following the Pentecost, the Church is able to fit Christ into Temple theology very easily because it was a foreshadowing of his redemptive mission. In other words, all along going back to Abraham and Melchizedek, God was foreshadowing the work of Christ. So it wasn t like the Christian theologians had to make it up; it was there already. Now as the Church grew, so did opposition, and there was a lot of very unfortunate nastiness between Christian versus Jew, persecutions, resentment, all kinds of things. What this led to was the altering of some of the Scriptures to avoid any connection between the Jewish tradition and Christ, even though actually there are lots of connections. But the Church continued to use the Septuagint and other versions with various results. In the foreshadowing of the incarnate Word, including the high priest, the suffering servant, these are all terms in the Old Testament; they all refer to Christ: high priest, suffering servant, Son of Man, man, Messiah, great angel, and many others. They all refer to Christ. So these ideas to me are important because it shows that in fact the Bible is one, and the Old and the New form one single story, and to me that is important. 17 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

18 Answers to questions: I don t think it s wrong to say you can read the Bible and get out of it what you need, but I don t think you can actually know what the original author necessarily intended just by reading it. Okay so what happened by the time we get to the Reformation, Martin Luther was a brilliant man. He learned Greek and Hebrew and he produced a brilliant translation in German of the New Testament. Well how he did it, he translated, had people read it back to him, and if it didn t sound right, he changed it, so it sounded like spoken German. So it was a brilliant work, but Martin Luther had already come to the conclusion that he didn t need someone to interpret for him what the Bible was about, and so he just said you didn t need tradition, so that brought in a new attitude really of the Bible, almost like the Bible s role is to tell you what happened. That s what came about more or less. Melchizedek really was Yahweh. Did he return? Not to my knowledge, except in Christ, who is high priest in the order of Melchizedek. So all the high priests were modeled on Melchizedek, and Christ is of course the high priest accordingly to the order of Melchizedek. In a way so was David though. David was also called in that order. Faith is faith; it s not fact. So I cannot prove to you that Christ is the Messiah, but I can show you how Christ fulfilled various functions from olden times. But when the Jewish people didn t believe that, well then they rejected the explanation too, naturally. The problem is when people want to put too much into the Last Supper and make it do what it doesn t do; I mean, he used certain words, at least the apostles remembered this, and that s that. You should just let it be, but that is not the whole story either. No, we do believe God intends the salvation of all people. Many of the saints, for example Gregory of Nyssa believed that eventually God will save everyone, that no one will ever be lost. That s Gregory of Nyssa and Origin also, and 18 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

19 I think in a way you can read John Paul II that way. I mean, he surely says we don t know if anyone has ever been lost and we don t know if anyone ever will be and we ought to pray for it, and Sister Faustina thought so as well. I think believing that somehow God will bring salvation to everyone is perfectly acceptable. But on the other hand, we also believe the people have free will. So on the one hand, we are set on this course to God and union with God; that s the goal of life; that s why God created us in the first place. But then we have free will to say no. Well how powerful is that free will? Will God in his way get around this? I don t know, but I do think it s important to point out that in the New Testament it always says that eternal life is given to those who believe. In the Book of Wisdom immortality is given to those who receive the gift of knowledge. So it s not, you might say, a property of humanity to be immortal; it s a gift given. So let s say someone really does refuse absolutely and never allows any change in his refusal to live in God and his refusal to be part of the Trinity, let s say. Well when the world ends, after all, the idea of hell in the Old Testament is sheol, it s a pit in the earth. Well the earth will not last forever; another four and a half billion years or so, no more earth, well then no more sheol either. So if people really can resist God, eventually they will simply not exist anymore, because if they are not in God, then where are they when the rest of creation dissipates? We do know the universe is headed for total entropy, the loss of all energy. Well when that happens and you are not in God, well then where are you? The answer is nowhere, it would seem to me. This is not dogma; I m just telling you what I think. I said that St. Augustine said the garden of Eden was not a physical time or place; that s Augustine. Now does the author of Genesis intend that? I doubt it. I think the author of Genesis thought of the garden as a physical place. But the point, again, wasn t that there was this physical place. What the point was that God created everything good, but people didn t cooperate. 19 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution

20 They fell into this rivalry with God and then everything bad started happening, but God kept working at making it good, and that s the whole history of salvation, that God keeps trying to get to the good, but people don t cooperate. That s what the author of Genesis, I think, intended. But Augustine s view to me is fascinating also. There is God, and God is infinite. But you see when God creates, God creates by giving a participation in himself. That s why St. Paul says, We live and move and have our being in God. We don t live beyond God; there is no way to exist apart from God. All things, including stones, exist in God. But God wanted more than that; he wanted someone to share his inner life, the life of the Trinity, the knowledge and love of God; he wanted to share that with his creation. That s what we are for. We are created so that we can share that. But if we refuse to share it, will we continue to exist? That s my question. I don t know, especially when the rest of the universe eventually we know that the universe will pass away. And the Bible does say that, that heaven and earth will pass away. So when it all passes away, those who resist God, how could they continue to exist? I m getting at the idea some people think hell goes on forever; that seems unlikely to me. God forgives everyone; God forgives everyone all the time, before you even want to be. Well, thank you very much. In name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your Word. We thank you for the gift of your Spirit our teacher, our Advocate whom Jesus promised would remain with us, as he will remain with us until the end of time. We ask that you help us to open our hearts, our eyes, and all our senses to your presence shining through your creation. And we ask this through Christ Our Lord. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 20 Hebrew Scriptures and Their Evolution