Further Thoughts on Ben Witherington's New Book, "The Living Word of God:" Preface
The Preface of The Living Word of God is meant as an overarching introduction to the central question to be tackled in the book, which is "What does it mean to say that the Bible is both fully human and fully divine. Witherington makes clear that he will emphasize the "fully human" portion to the extent that it has been marginalized by much Christian doctrinal thought throughout history. He summarizes his position as follows:
"The Bible, including the New Testament--our primary concern in this study--has always been seen as the word of God in the words of human beings, and the contribution of the latter has normally been recognized as considerable."
And as Witherington develops that position, it becomes clear that the involvement of human beings will introduce a level of "humanness" to the text, which can also be called a level of messiness or instability or (that blasphemous word) subjectivity, not as much personal as cultural/historical. To that end, Witherington notes a fact that has been of the utmost importance to my own Christian thought for the last few year:
"We are not in the position of the early Christians, language or otherwise. I assume these texts were clear to the human authors who wrote them, and probably clear to many in the audience as well. But for them to be clear for us, we must imaginatively enter into their worlds, their forms of discourse, their ways of conveying important truths. It is not enough to roughly translate their words into our common parlance and then just assume we should be able to understand what they say and mean."
Let me illustrate what I think Witherington is saying by one of my favorite examples, one that radically transformed my understanding of the specific issue of "repentance," and generally transformed my perspective on the issue theological precepts that we may take for granted given the interpretations that we have inherited.
The word “repent,” or metanoeíte in its original Greek, has certainly had an interesting interpretative history, with momentous consequences for the lives of believers through the centuries. Jesus’ appeal to metanoeíte kaí pisteúete en toó euangelíoo, “repent and believe the good news,” was for many centuries translated in Latin as “do penance and believe the good news.” This translation colored the Church’s teachings, starting with requiring confessors to say penitential prayers and performing penitential acts of charity, and then spiraling out of control to where people could actually purchase a loved one’s entrance into heaven.
Martin Luther re-examined the meaning of metanoeíte and found that it did not mean “do penance” but had everything to do with a personal, spiritual turning away from sin, with a sinner saying “I’m sorry” to God and rejecting his or her previous sinful life. The consequences of this translation were, as we know, massive.
Luther was right, to a degree. We should be eternally grateful for his insight and his courage in shedding new light on this crucial term, the mistranslation of which had been the impetus for Church teachings that ranged from wrong yet harmless to fundamentally misguided and seriously detrimental. Metanoeíte does have an internal, spiritual component, and the Church and the world needed reminding of that. But does the personal, spiritual meaning catch the full gist of the word? Not if we go back and look at how it was used by others in the same part of the world during the same period of history and with the same cultural background as those to whom Jesus spoke.
And modern Christian theologian/historians did just that. They went back and looked closely at the works of non-Scriptural texts of the time, not to grant them the same status as Scripture, but to better understand Scripture in light of its cultural/historical setting. They looked, for example, at the works of the Jewish historian Josephus. Josephus offers information about individuals, groups, customs, and geographical places that were within precisely the same context as Jesus’ contemporaries. He is widely considered the most important extra-biblical source for studies of immediate post-temple Judaism and, thus, the context of early Christianity, not because of his political or theological perspective, but because of the social, cultural, geographical, and historical setting in which his works were written.
In his autobiography, Josephus describes a time when he was the leader of a small army, and another group had tried to kill him. Josephus captures the enemy leader and says to him these amazing words (astounding when viewed from a twenty-first-century Christian’s perspective, but probably not from a first-century Jewish one): metanoesein kai pistos emoi genesesthai, “repent and believe in me.” Josephus is not asking for a spiritual conversion, nor does he simply mean “turn away from your former erroneous beliefs and actions (i.e., “sins”) and you’ll be all right.” He is certainly not offering the brigand a new system of salvation, or telling him how he can go to heaven after he dies. He was saying, “Forget about your former ways, your beliefs and principles, and the faith with which you once acted upon them, and follow my agenda.” We see that for Josephus metanoeíte meant a turning away from something and a concomitant turning toward something else, something radically different. It meant emptying yourself of one set of ideals, beliefs, principles, and ways of being and filling the resultant void with another. Luther’s definition runs the danger of leaving the void intact. So when Jesus used these same words a mere generation earlier in the same cultural-historical setting, we can rightfully say that He might have, and probably did, mean more than Josephus did, but He certainly didn’t mean any less. Yes, metanoeíte involved an inward transformation, but it was a transformation with legs, a transformation unto something else. The best way I have been able to understand the term is to see that it does not mean a change of heart or a change in beliefs, but a revolution of faith which incorporates both a change of heart and a change in beliefs, but it does not stop there.
And that's just the example of one word.
Think about it.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
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