Obstacle 5 continued: God making Jesus both KYRION and CHRISTON in Acts 2:36 is cosmic

IF YOU THINK, like I do, that "Lord" belongs to a previous generation of Christianity, what are the appropriate titles for our "Lord" Jesus? Is there a one-size-fits-all? In my post on Kyrios in Mark, we made the astonishing discovery that Mark did not make a strong connection between Kyrios and Jesus, just a small handful of passing references. Now, that was a surprise! As a result, a non-systematised methodology for translating this title in Mark was proposed.

Today, I want to move on from the gospels for a moment to examine a rather important passage reported by Luke in Acts.

So let's read Acts 2:34-36 in my adapted ESV translation, leaving KYRION untranslated for now:

For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, "'GOD said to Your Highness, "Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool."' Let all the house of Israel, therefore, know for certain that God has made him both KYRION and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified."

Acts 2:34‭-‬36 ESV

I gave some solid reasons in my post on Mark for adopting more royal and exalted terminology here when Mark used the Psalm quote in his colt-borrowing scene. I continue to find these reasons compelling, although they aren't without difficulty here if we still have lingering ideas that systematised translation for KYRIOS might still really be the best way to go. If that were the case, it really would be difficult to have God "making Jesus His Highness". Since our job is to unpack multiple layerings and expand the contextual nuances with Kyrios, it might be more helpful to move away from static titles. Here, the ESV like other translations sees "Kyrion" and "Christon" and probably doesn't think too much of it. These are simply translated "Lord" and "Christ". Bingo! 

But there is another way to go about this that can help modern readers not lose sight of the context of this passage, with Peter addressing these Greek-speaking Jews.

In this all-important context, Luke has Peter citing King David, in which Jesus is shown to be connected to David but also superior over him - ironically via a misunderstanding introduced by Mark, whom Luke had read. As in Mark, David is said to be addressing another King as "my Kyrios". Luke makes a similar point then to Mark in this new context. But what of that next bit, that Luke has Peter adding, that God has made Jesus both KYRION and CHRISTON? 

Let's look at Christ first - as we will see they are deeply connected. In the Septuagint, the term "Christos" is already firmly established. Saul is even described that way, and David wouldn't harm him because Saul was Yahweh's anointed king, his Christos (1 Sam 26:9 LXX, χριστὸν κυρίου). This anointing then passed, of course, to David, the new Christos (although with overlap, see 1 Sam 16:6,13). Thus the reign and the divine anointing are already naturally part and parcel in Jewish thinking.

Modern readers then should not be put off nor distracted by having their attention focussed on the action of God in exalting Christ more than the more static titles through which these actions may at one time have been communicated. Thus for Acts 2:36, we should be open to the possibility of:

Let all the house of Israel, therefore, know for certain that this Jesus [our Master] whom you crucified is the one God anointed and crowned to rule as KING.

Readers of this context might be surprised to see the early extent of this rule. Unlike David, Jesus flew through the sky to be sat at God's right hand, reigning in a divine capacity, which for a Jew is utterly unprecedented. Hence "KING" = Cosmic King. His Royal Highness has indeed ascended to as *High* a function as imaginable. Greeks already had a word for this in their naturally blended worldview between the divine and mortal realms: apotheosis. I think this Hellenised view is accepted into Christianity by some of its most influential interpreters, like Irenaeus Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas, but is even evidenced as an acceptable idea in the New Testament (see 2 Peter 1:4 and John 10:34-36). This, however, paradoxically superseded apotheosis. That's the impossible logic you get when you place Judaism and Hellenism in the same ring and think they are actually still boxing each other.

Careful, however, for although this supreme usage here in early Acts has now been provided, that does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that Kyrios now functions in any systematised way, ditching, so to speak, the previous layers and nuances or conveniently forgetting that the narratives in the gospel & Acts accounts are not influenced by events and correspondence preceding their penning, like visions of the resurrected Jesus and Paul's letters. Slaves continue to call their home-owners Kyrios, even Jewish ones. Even Jewish-Christian ones, probably. Context must and will continue to be the golden rule for understanding and translating the Kyrios-ship in question.

This translational care that I am advocating is why I place in the square brackets Peter's relationship with his Master. This inclusion would permit a fantastic semantic bridge between 2 of the key layers of Jesus' authority, being a personal Master to his disciples and God's cosmic KING SIMULTANEOUSLY. That was the power of Kyrios. We don't have a word that does that today.

ESV adaptations taken from ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Image taken from http://thejustmeasure.ca

John’s third impacting figure: Dr Dale Tuggy

Fatscript Episode 7 show notes, John’s third impacting figure: Dr Dale Tuggy

• ·        Onscript: http://onscript.study/

·        (Pennington interview http://onscript.study/podcast/jonathan-pennington-the-sermon-on-the-mount-and-human-flourishing/)

• ·        My book chapter is out! Check it out here: https://www.academia.edu/34726445/Trinitarian_Interpretation_Mutated_Faith_and_the_Triune_Hub_Re-examining_the_Foundations_Chapter_1_
• ·        Mark Gooadcre video on John’s relationship to the synoptics: http://www.christianorigins.div.ed.ac.uk/2017/10/23/johnandthesynoptics/
• ·        My first public interaction with Dr Dale Tuggy on his listeners’ questions show: http://trinities.org/blog/podcast-90-listener-questions-1/
• ·        My main interactions with Dale

1.      Dale’s post: http://trinities.org/blog/dialogue-with-john-on-thinking-about-the-trinity/

2.      John’s response: http://faithandscripture.blogspot.fr/2017/07/responding-to-dale-tuggy-on-trinitarian.html

• ·        Please give us a rating! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-fatscript-podcast/id1217930034?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Responsibility (2)

Hullo!

This is a small update on my first post about the wonderful discovery of responsibility. While on my retreat, I realised that issues in me that I didn't want to recognise (they really "suck" as Americans would say) held me back from deeper relationships. Fragmented identity is a killer in our modern societies, and more than once I have heard French philosophers wax lyrical about the fatigue and pain of simply being.

At least some of what Christianity understands as "sin" in our lives, makes existing really hard work, simply trying to "hold it all together". As a fragmented person, as soon as I meet someone, I am confronted with complex decisions like: what aspect of who I am should I reveal to that person? Shall I try and impress them falsely to feel better about myself? If there is no real sense of cohesion in my identity, then my relationships will instantly suffer and level out, for the simple reason that folk aren't dupe. We all sense when what you see is NOT what you get. That discrepancy has potential to ruin relationships. Because our potential friends do not seem knowable or trustworthy even to themselves. In the New Testament of the Bible, James says:

Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 

In fact the first chapter of James is really hot on deep sincerity, and not just with other people. With ourselves.

Taking responsibility is a wonderful spiritual process that has its place in what Christians call repentance. Taking responsibility is taking ownership of everything you are (the bits you love and the bits you'd hate anyone else to point to you) and all the negative consequences of your existence on others, intentional or otherwise. Most of the time it is otherwise.

Roadworks make you late for your husband, who regularly criticises you. This is a very tough one. But can you imagine a you who has the depths of grace to dig soooo deep down to find the genuine sorry, even though it is not your fault? One of my grievances about the 1st century Palestinian context in which Christ's life and record are indelibly marked, is that some of these "grace notes" of please, thank you, so sorry, and so on have yet to be developed.

This is a good point to address a mistake I made in my previous post, where I overly connected the idea of sin and responsibility. I appended a small comment about this to the post itself to state:
A couple of issues in the relationship between responsibility and sin here ... If God took his responsibility with respect to his oath, Responsibility is not a.k.a. "sin", as I casually asserted .... Responsibility is about truly being in the universe, without any discrepancy between word and deed, word and thought, thought and deed, repressed desire and thought, and so on. Since sinning is affecting me and others in the universe, and I often ignore it, then this is an example of failure to  *be* in the universe and take my responsibility. Taking responsibility creates re-alignment in the chaos, and is truly a most beautiful thing.

What could we say with respect to he who was without sin, Jesus Christ? Jesus' human path of self-realisation is nothing short of extraordinary. It is assumed by some that Jesus actually may have coined the term "hypocrite". For Jesus, this inner cohesion is  E S S E N T I A L  for the holy life of his followers. I think perhaps the best way to understand the spiritually mature Jesus (and apparently he was streets ahead even at age 12!), is to realise that he became totally incorruptible. You could tempt him all you liked, but sin had zero hold on him, because he truly loved his Father God and cultivated his relationship with God. And it was mutual. When you see in John's gospel especially all this Jesus-talk of I depend on the Father for this and I depend on the Father for that, Jesus (theologically and I am certain historically) must have been a grand master of humility (see John 5:19 and 12:49, for example). Amazing. Without the Father, Jesus would have had no source for his abilities, words, wisdom, than himself, and this perspective strapped to a human brain has a highly reliable pride-generating mechanism.

As a slight aside: I'd like to announce plans to launch a website at some point in the next few months dedicated to promoting the love shared between the father and the son in the Christian faith. There will be a subsection about Christian worship too. Regular readers of the blog might already be aware that I am quite concerned by the modalistic tendencies in some churches (the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are so "one" that they are basically the same person, he's called "God", and he loves me), fuelled by a plethora of confusing Christian worship songs. The goal here is not to smash the modalism (that won't change anything), but again to promote what is so precious and at stake by confusing the Father and Son. Love itself.

Drops of blood

[Translation from recent post in French]

Thanks to a conversation today with a French-speaking friend, who read the blog but gave up because of the language, I propose[d] to do an article in French! Truly I am sorry to have been such an English-lover up until now. One reason for that is that I write better in English - after all, it's my mother tongue. But a second reason is that the sources and references I am examining come for the mostpart from English persons and scholars. However, that is not an excuse, and I hope to do more articles in French, including one this week (on a worship song in the continuation of the series I started on theology in worship).

But my subject for today is the question of the Son of man according to Luke's gospel. This expression THE son of man is radical and innovative. Indeed, this expression (combined with its definite article) is present nowhere else in antiquity, including in the texts of the Old Testament, which contains a hundred or so references to "A son of man" or "sons of man".

Some readers will already have heard of the "historical Jesus". It is a movement that developed in the field of history that applies to Jesus the same criteria of historical research applied to any other historical event or figure. These historians do not apply faith-based or religious criteria, but historical criteria. Some of them are believers, although many are not, and many debates have been held over the issue of the "historical Jesus". One of the most distinguished scholars of our time, who is no longer a believer himself, is Bart Ehrman. No-one seriously undertaking critical Biblical study will be unaware of his contributions to the field. Ehrman is one of those who believes that by applying historical criteria to the data and research we currently hold (for example on the workings of oral transmissions of stories and human memory) that there is a wide variety of historical preciseness in Jesus' recorded words.

Indeed, even some of the more conservative scholars can concede that some stylistic wording can be considered as likely added by the gospel writer, i.e. not exactly word by word what Jesus really said, and this is what interests historians (see Just Bass in his debate with Bart Ehrman on 18 September 2015). Ehrman is in agreement that given the diversity of the multiple and independent sources quoting Jesus talking of "THE son of man" that he really did teach about this a lot, and that it was new. But, what is most surprising, is that if you accept that there can be a difference between the true unfolding of historical events and wording and what is reported by the four gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and you also accept that Jesus spoke a lot about the Son of man, you are not obligated to take the position of Jesus having historically appropriated the title himself. According to certain verses, it seems totally obvious that Jesus did appropriate this title. However, for some historians, it is just as possible or even probable that it is the gospel writers who at times make Jesus appropriate that title. Let us look at an example that does not at all require such appropriation:

Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. (Luke 9:26)
For historians, this saying might be closer to the actual statement Jesus made than certain other statements recorded by the gospel writers concerning the Son of man.

But why am I telling you all this?

On his blog via several posts, Ehrman has explained why two verses from Luke chapter 22, verses 43-44, we can observe a real corruption of the text ("corruption" in the technical sense, not in the mean-spirited way), that is to say, an insertion. It is the passage that explains how an angel comforted Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and how Jesus was "in agony":

An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

Wow, a very famous passage indeed. But it is an insertion; it was added by a copyist in the second or third century. It is a verifiable fact that the human beings who copied these texts always made small (although occasionally larger) changes. For the vast majority of cases these were accidental and without serious consequence. This is one of the very few larger changes that is neither accidental nor without significant consequence, and can be shown by

1. its absence from the best and oldest manuscripts
2. the otherwise symmetrical structure of the paragraph
3. the context of Jesus' "suffering" in Luke.

We can sometimes have the unfortunate habit of flattening the events of the life, and especially the death and resurrection of Jesus into one single account comprising four sources. This prevents us sometimes from some quite remarkable discoveries. Here's a whopper: if you only read Christ's passion in Luke, you can arrive at the astonishing conclusion that - WITH THE EXCEPTION OF LUKE 22:43-44 - Jesus didn't really have to suffer. Every time that Mark stresses that the situation was heavy and painful for Jesus, Luke, who has access to the Markan text, removes the agony and shows a Jesus who is in control, capable of conversation, reflective, profound exhortations, who does not cry out to God about why he has been forsaken, and so on. Honestly, the arguments for a corruption of this passage are coherent on multiple levels.

But one question remains, and I asked it to Dr. Ehrman: why would Luke have so intentionally described an absence of Jesus in his "passion"? I also made a fated suggestion, that I myself do not really believe but I just want to find an explanation for this reality if I can:

If in other parts of Luke we can indeed observe a connection between the Son of man and suffering, and if Jesus was referring to another, apocalyptic character such as observed in Daniel chapter 7, could not Luke have been avoiding the confusion between Jesus and the Son of man?

Ehrman's first response was "good idea". But the problem with my suggestion was that if Luke was the culprit for making Jesus appropriate the title of The Son of man, why would he seek to remove any trace of the Son of Man's suffering, since the Son of Man, for Luke, IS Jesus? Surely that could not be attributed to scribal corruptions!

Ehrman responded a second time with a brief alternative explanation I can give in the next post...