How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  That is the big question, I think. And answering that question has been the struggle of Jewish and Christian theology since forever.

  When Major League Baseball uniforms went from their traditional wool/wool blends to double-knit polyester in the early 1970s, the Yankees followed the trend. No biggie. The Yankee tradition is still intact. But what if they moved to Wyoming and called themselves the Cowpokes? Or changed their uniforms from home pinstripes and away gray to green, gold, and red? Then all hell—every square inch of it—would break loose.

  Sometimes reading the New Testament feels like moving to Wyoming rather than switching to polyester uniforms.

  I’m probably stretching the baseball analogy (and I don’t care), but I’m doing my best to get across something about the New Testament that is so very crucial but also often misunderstood, if not ignored and resisted.

  The Jesus movement owes its existence to a thousand and more years of Israelite and Jewish tradition. There is no wavering from that point among the New Testament writers, and any attempt to build a thick wall between the gospel and the Old Testament would be like saying the study of the space–time continuum owes nothing to Einstein.

  But as great as Einstein was, his theories didn’t anticipate quantum physics, the study of the weird world of very, very small atomic and subatomic particles. In fact, Einstein didn’t know what to do with all of that (which is probably the only thing I have in common with Einstein).

  The New Testament writers were quite often on a very different page from those in the long tradition that birthed the Jesus movement—not always, but often, and at crucial moments. Even if we take into account the diversity of that Jewish tradition, which we’ve seen within the Old Testament and in the Judaism that followed, still, the New Testament writers talk about Jesus in ways that the tradition didn’t anticipate and that stretches the tradition to the breaking point.

  The New Testament writers clearly respected and revered their deep Jewish tradition. But they were also clearly not bound to the script of that tradition, even on some points that had been nonnegotiable. Explaining Jesus required new directions and new ways of thinking.

  New wine can’t be contained in old wineskins, and all that.

  Paul Reimagines the God of Moses

  It’s no secret that the Law of Moses is a big deal in the Old Testament. It makes up most of the first five books, the Pentateuch (or Torah)—half of Exodus, all of Leviticus, and most of Numbers and Deuteronomy. These commands were given to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai, and they weren’t presented to Israel as thoughts or suggestions to mull over, but laws, a contract, so to speak, the breaking of which would result in anything from a time-out or a cleansing ceremony to excommunication or even execution.

  We’ve already seen that the Old Testament Law is surprisingly ambiguous and diverse—it’s begging to be debated and deliberated over, which is exactly what we see happening in the Old Testament and also in some of Jesus’s teachings. But once we get to the other parts of the New Testament, we sense a mood shift, with Paul especially. He keeps bringing the Law up—like he’s trying to wrap his head around what place the Law has in light of this surprising story of Jesus, a crucified and risen Messiah.

  Paul is notoriously hard to pin down, but let me try to sum up the gist of his thinking.

  At times Paul argues that the Law is God’s gift to Israel and even cites Torah as something to be obeyed. Other times—and more often—Paul affirms the Law as fine and good, though only as far as it goes. It really can’t keep anyone on the straight and narrow. The Israelites had centuries to make it so, but their story is shot through with disobedience and ended in exile. The Law was “powerless” because humanity (including Israel) was under the thumb of Sin and Death,* a story that has its roots back in the Garden of Eden with the disobedience of Adam and the punishment of death.

  But what the Law couldn’t do, Paul says, Jesus did. By his death and resurrection, Sin and Death are defeated, thus freeing us to be obedient to the Law of God, which Paul sums up as loving others in a spirit of humility in imitation of Jesus.

  But, judging from Paul’s words, some Jewish believers didn’t see it that way. They were arguing that Gentile followers of Jesus weren’t really full-fledged members until they demonstrated their obedience to Mosaic Law (especially that Gentile males had to be circumcised just as Jews were). Paul responded that the Torah, which held such a central place in Judaism, has now moved to the side. Now Jesus occupied that central place. Otherwise, Jesus’s self-sacrifice on our behalf—the act of God’s pure grace—means nothing.

  Paul even goes so far as to say that the main purpose of the Law was to show just how bad we are at keeping it (the Law multiplied the trespass, as he puts it in Rom. 5:20) and to show, therefore, how great God’s grace is by comparison. And in Galatians, where Paul is particularly irked, he makes the rather surprising argument that the Law given on Mt. Sinai is symbolically represented—and let this sink in—by the Egyptian slave woman Hagar. Freedom from the Law is represented by Hagar’s mistress, Abraham’s wife, Sarah (4:21–26).

  So Sarah—mind you, the wife of Abraham, the father of Israel—represents freedom from the Law. We can see why Paul had a lot of opposition from Jewish believers.

  Paul’s thinking is complicated, and what he says about the Law predictably fills floors of libraries, keeps young doctoral students busy and paranoid, and can get you pummeled in the dark back allies of academia. But still, you can’t help but read Paul and walk away with the sense that he’s not fully with the ancient program where Torah is central to knowing God’s purposes.

  You don’t find Paul’s line of thinking reflected in the Old Testament or in the various paths of Judaism after the exile. Just look at all 176 verses of Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Old Testament. God is praised over and over again for this wonderful gift of Torah:

  Do not take the word of truth [the Law] utterly out of my mouth,

  for my hope is in your ordinances. (verse 43)

  My soul languishes for your salvation;

  I hope in your word [Law]. (verse 81)

  Oh, how I love your law!

  It is my meditation all day long. (verse 97)

  Your word [Law] is a lamp to my feet

  and a light to my path. (verse 105)

  I just can’t see Paul saying any of those things, and he doesn’t. Or better, all the praise Jewish tradition gives to the Law Paul gives to Christ, who is the end of the law (Rom. 10:4)—meaning not the rejection of Law as such, but the end goal that the Law was driving toward all along.

  Paul doesn’t reject the Law of Moses, as some in Christian history have thought, but he does marginalize it, decenter it, by placing at the center of God’s plan for the world not our obedience to Torah, but Christ’s obedience to go through with the crucifixion to defeat Sin and God’s raising of Jesus from the dead to defeat Death.

  Am I missing something, or is this a major shift, folks?* You don’t get to Paul’s gospel simply from reading the Old Testament. You need to be convinced, first, that Jesus is the way, and then reimagine God and the faith of old to account for it, which is to say, to read the moment—the Jesus moment—and adjust the tradition in light of it.

  That’s the message Paul delivered, and judging from his letters he got a lot of resistance.

  Again, let’s not be surprised about that. In a way, it’s easy for Christians today to say that the poor blokes just didn’t get it. But in another way, we need to understand why. Paul was expecting a lot—a rethinking of the heart of the tradition, the role of Torah.

  Going Off Script

  The whole matter comes to a head with two specific laws that keep coming up in Paul’s letters: circumcision and not eating unclean food.

  God commanded that Abraham circumcise himself, his son Isaac, and any other males of his household and that circumcising males on the eighth day from then on would be an everlasting covenant, which sounds serious, because it is (see Gen. 17).
Failure to keep the command would mean being cut off from the people, which probably means something like excommunication, but in any case is one of the more delightful puns you will read anywhere. The laws about clean and unclean animals are given in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, commands from God to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and are no more negotiable than any other commands.

  These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul’s day. They had become social badges of honor to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, something concrete to hang on to amid the persistent religious chaos introduced by centuries of Greek and Roman ways. That’s why I wear my Yankees jersey in Phillies country. I do it, at great risk to myself, to let the world—the world, mind you—know that I am different. I belong to another tribe. I am special.

  Paul argued tirelessly that these badges of honor, which he often refers to as works of the law (for example, Gal. 2:16), are not what identify people as children of God. They may have at one time, and they served their purpose. But now faith in Jesus and love of others are the badges of honor.

  That’s a pretty radical move for a Jew to make. And yet Paul’s creative take on the Law isn’t all that different from the kind of Jewish reflection on Torah we’ve been looking at. Though going off in a very unexpected direction, Paul’s creative handling of the Law is a classic Jewish interpretive move. He is exercising wisdom.

  Paul is reinterpreting the purpose of Torah, because times have changed—Jesus has come. Now Paul has to account for something not accounted for by Israel’s tradition: a crucified and risen Messiah. Even though his fellow Jews probably wouldn’t have found any fault in principle with rethinking Torah, for many Paul’s reimagining of God went too far.

  They weren’t willing to move to Wyoming.*

  Paul didn’t wake up one morning with radical thoughts about the Law out of nowhere. He was awakened to the Spirit of Christ and the conviction that Jesus, because he defeated death, had something for both Gentiles and Jews, with neither being superior to the other. This has proved to be nothing short of an evolutionary innovation in the Jewish tradition, and without it Christianity, which began its life as a Jewish sect, would not have become an essentially Gentile phenomenon already by the second century CE.

  But—if I may editorialize—where Paul might have pushed too far is how he argued his point from scripture. Paul made the case that Jesus’s replacing Torah as the center of the tradition and the full and equal inclusion of the Gentiles were part of God’s plan all along—going back to the days of Abraham himself.

  Consider Abraham, Paul tells us. He was a friend of God, was he not, long before Moses and the Law? Hence, the Law was never really necessary to God’s plan, only faith was—the faith that Abraham had when he believed (better, trusted) in God (Gen. 15:6). The Law came much later and its role, rather, was (as I mentioned above) to expose the depth of sin, or, as he puts it in Galatians 4:1–7, to act as temporary trustee for God’s people until Jesus came. Then the Law could step aside and we could be released from the Law’s Hagarlike bondage.

  Paul’s take that the Abraham story marginalizes the Law feels forced, especially since very soon after Genesis 15 Abraham is required to obey God, so that the promises can be fulfilled. For example: I have chosen him [Abraham], that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him (Gen. 18:19). I would love to have been a fly on the wall for how Jewish believers might have responded to Paul’s take on the Abraham story.

  Or look at Romans 9:22–29, where Paul engages in a bit of biblical interpretation that is, frankly, tortured. He strings together several passages from the prophets Hosea and Isaiah that speak of God mercifully calling those who are not my people and not beloved back to the fold. Who are these “not” people? In Hosea and Isaiah they are rebellious Israelites who are restored as God’s people. Paul, however, reads not my people and not beloved as referring to Gentiles, which is a conclusion one can only arrive at either by simply not paying attention—or by reimagining Israel’s story creatively because the circumstances demand it.

  I don’t read these Old Testament passages the way Paul does, but then again my context is different. I don’t feel the need to tie the Jesus story to Israel’s tradition like this. Maybe I should, I don’t know. But I don’t. This does show, however, how determined Paul was to somehow tie his experience—the unexpected influx of Gentiles who were following Jesus as savior—to Israel’s tradition. The question it raises, though, is whether in doing so Paul is actually pouring new wine into old wineskins—trying too hard to make Jesus fit the old ways.

  But that’s an in-house debate. And I could be wrong, and I’m sure God is willing to let it slide if I am. I’m just trying to follow the twists and turns of the Bible. Either way the point stands: the gospel forced Paul to go back and reconsider Israel’s story from a point of view that the story itself wasn’t set up to handle. And not just any old part of the story, but the heart of it, the Law of Moses.

  Other New Testament writers also make Jesus-centered radical moves that touch at the core of Jewish tradition.

  1 Temple Avenue, Back Room, Jerusalem

  We might say today that God is everywhere at once, but that is not how the ancient Israelites (or any other ancient people) thought. True, on the one hand, God’s throne is in heaven, the earth is his footstool, and no structure can contain him (Isa. 66:1). On the other hand, God does most certainly have a residence, and the Old Testament makes quite a big deal of it.

  At first, it was the Tabernacle—a tent, a moveable house of worship—that Moses and the Israelites built in the wilderness after the exodus. This worship tent is such an important structure that Exodus 25–40, the last sixteen chapters of the book, is mostly taken up with describing how exactly it was built according to a heavenly blueprint. After the Israelites settled in the land of Canaan and the monarchy was established by David, the honor of building the permanent structure, the Temple, went to David’s son Solomon (1 Kings 6).

  The Temple was an elaborate structure—perhaps too elaborate—with all its gold, silver, bronze, and precious wood. But despite all of that, the Temple represented God’s presence with the Israelites. It was where sacrifices were made and where God appeared to the high priest once a year on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) in the inner space called the Holy of Holies, a fifteen-foot square back room that housed the holy ark of the covenant, which contained, among other things, a copy of the Ten Commandments, the symbol of Yahweh’s tie to his people. The failure to maintain the proper worship of God in the Temple led directly to the razing of the Temple and the deportation of the residents of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

  The Temple was, to say the least, a big deal for Israelite religion, so much so that the first order of business upon returning to the land in 538 BCE was to rebuild it. Completed around 516 BCE and though merely a shadow of its former glory, it was nevertheless proof that Yahweh had returned to be with his people. This Second Temple, as it is called, received a major face-lift around 19 BCE during the days of Roman rule under King Herod the Great and remained the central symbol of Judaism until the Romans razed it in 70 CE, a too familiar replay of the Babylonian invasion centuries before.

  The Temple was still standing during Jesus’s and Paul’s lifetimes. On the one hand, its presence was simply a given—the central symbol of Jewish identity and God’s presence. On the other, the Temple simply isn’t a focal point in the New Testament. It’s not a treasured part of the plan—which is truly strange if we remember that the Jesus movement was fundamentally Jewish.

  We’re coming to another major reimagining of God in the New Testament.

  We will recall that Jesus famously cleansed the Temple by overturning the tables of the money changers. Jesus was angry, and that’s fine. The Temple was sacred and not supposed to feel like you’re at a tailgating party. And yet, we might wonder what animals and mone
y changers were doing there in the first place. The animals were for sacrifice, and the money changers allowed Jewish pilgrims, who came from all over, to exchange their pagan money (with the image of Caesar on the coins) for shekels, so they could buy animals to sacrifice (rather than schlepping them from who knows where).

  Jesus isn’t just venting. The act is deeply symbolic, especially in John’s version of this episode (2:13–25): the Temple has outgrown its usefulness. With no money changers, there is no sacrifice; with no sacrifice, well, Judaism would need to figure something out. And as you read that, again, remember that Jesus and the early followers of Jesus were Jewish and not angling to start a new religion.

  We are at a pivotal moment in understanding the significance of Jesus: the ancient story of Israel and Israel’s God was hinting at an upheaval, a shift in direction.

  When asked by the Jewish authorities to give them some indication that he had the right to turn over tables, Jesus answered (and this is only in John, who you remember is very big on establishing Jesus’s authority), Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up (2:19). They all thought Jesus might be a bit bonkers in the brain, since Herod’s renovations were still going on forty-six years later. But John goes on to explain that Jesus was talking about his body—that he would be crucified and raised on the third day.

  Jesus is the Temple. Talk about an upheaval.

  Money changers and animals are no longer needed. Neither is the Temple. The Romans would destroy the Temple in 70 CE, never to be rebuilt. But Jesus will still be here.

  It might help to remember that John is writing all this about two decades after the Temple fell. John is taking the time to explain how the destruction of the Temple speaks to the significance of Jesus. The other three Gospels were written much closer to 70 CE (Mark perhaps a bit before). They don’t include this exchange that John has—perhaps because they hadn’t yet had time to process how the cataclysmic fall of the holy sanctuary fit with the gospel.