You Find What You're Looking For

Fifteenth Tuesday after Pentecost

 Our Bible Study today is Acts 4:23-26. You need to read it before you read this any further.

It's another one of the Acts speeches. As with the last one, it's unclear exactly whose speaking, Peter or John. Scholars, self included, tend to think that the speech is a free composition of Luke, attached to the Apostles. This was common practice in ancient times. The ancient Greek historian, Xenophon, in his book Anabasis, explains that though he cannot know exactly what Cyrus the Younger or Artaxerxes II actually said, he can write speeches that approximate what they might have said in the situations they were in. All the ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian historians did this. 

Another ancient writers' common practice was to take a quotation from another writer out of its own context and refashion it for the present context. Here in verses 25-26 we find Luke quoting from Psalm 2:1-2:

    "The kings of the earth took their stand,

         and the rulers gathered together.

         against the Lord and against his anointed" [messiah, Christ].

In the 10th century BC context of the Psalm, the anointed one is clearly David. But when Luke reads the Psalm, he understands it as prophetically speaking of Jesus Christ. If you're really into this Bible Study, you might check out Psalm 2. The NRSV translates the Hebrew word meshiaho as "his anointed." Then look back to Acts 4:24, the NRSV translates this time as "his Messiah." I think the NRSV did a good joh of translating here. The word had one meaning for the author of the Psalm and another meaning for Luke when quoting the Psalm. In fact, the LXX (Septuagint Greek translation of the OT) translates the Hebrew word meshiho as "Christou," our word for Christ. 

When I was first learning these sorts of things fifty years ago I thought, and was taught, that this was basically the ineptitude or sometimes the dishonesty of the NT writers,  to quote OT completely out of context. Nowadays, blessedly, Divinity Students and Graduate Students learn a much more open view, that is, it's ok for NT writers to look for Christ in the OT. They did not work on our understandings of proper context for a quotation. It's not that the Psalmist is right and Luke is wrong. It's that a text can have more than one meaning, that the reader's context is as legitimate as the writers context. Welcome to post-modernity. (30 years ago I would not have said anything like this). 

A professor for whom I was twice a TA (teaching assistant) at Duke 40 years ago was adamant with his students that we read the OT strictly in its own context. He did not allow anyone to speak of Jesus in class. He frequently noted that the OT was a Jewish book, not a Christian book. My, how times have changed. 

I would put it this way. The OT is a Jewish book for Jews; a Christian book for Christians. Over the last few years I've had to relearn the way I read the OT. This last time I'm reading  through the OT, I'm reading it as an early Christian would read it, looking for Christ wherever I can find him. It's an astonishing read for me. I'm doing precisely what I was trained not to do. You tend to find what you're looking for, and I'm finding it, just as Luke found it when he read the LXX two thousand years ago. Christ is there. 

Faithfully,

Christian