The following is an excerpt from a talk i gave at the civic last year.
“So, uh, one of the arguments against the validity of the bible is that it isn’t historically accurate. Of course, I’ve never heard sensible opponents of the bible use this argument- i usually hear it from christians who are saying that people say it. It sounds like an example of christians making up enemies so they have someone to pray for. (hello soapbox!)
“Really, i think it would be a bad tactic to attack the historicity of scripture. My reasoning for this is completely off-topic, so i digress. If there is a problem with the bible in this regard, it’s that it’s too historically grounded. We are often given a situation in scripture where the historic, cultural context is assumed by the author and we are simply dropped in the middle of the story without really knowing what’s going on. This is a problem for us as students of scripture because we usually end up using our own context to explain what’s happened, and we come up with things that the author didn’t intend for us to come up with.
“A good example of this is the 70×7 thing. (matt.18:21,22) Peter asks Jesus about forgiveness. If we couch it in our own, modern context we are left with a Peter who is trying to quanitify his religious duties (how many times should I…), and a Jesus who says the first thing that comes into his head (seventy times seven!). You can talk about the jewish penchant for exagerration reflected in Jesus’ response, but i have a hard time with that- i just don’t see it used anywhere else.
“It looks to me like you have to go back a couple thousand years before this story to pick what’s going on here. In Gen.10, we have the Table of Nations. The story of the Tower of Babel is nestled next to this long list of names. It’s easy to skip this list of names (geneaology, blah, blah, blah), but it gives us our context for the 70×7 thing. In this chapter, scripture takes a timeout to say ‘Here’s the situation; we’ve got a lot of people on the earth at this point, and they’re pretty much divided into seventy people groups.’ From this point, Jewish Rabbinical tradition will take it’s cue: if you’re going to talk about the people of the world, you have to talk about all 70 people groups. Another way for a scripturally-sound Jew to say ‘Everybody’ is to refer to this passage about the seventy people groups.
“This context sets up a slightly different story when Jesus says to forgive someone 70 times 7 times. When Peter suggests that being willing to forgive someone up to seven times might be a good idea, Jesus takes it further; but why does Jesus have to refernce the whole world here? Because Peter brought it up.
“Peter asks, ‘how many times should i forgive my brother? up to seven times?’. So he’s really asking two questions: 1. my responsibility to forgive is to my brother, right? and 2. how many times should i be willing to forgive those i count as my brothers?
“Jesus doesn’t let him get away with this, and reminds him that in the Kingdom of Heaven, our responsibility is not just to those would normally call our “brother” (by blood, by commonality of any kind) b/c there are no boundaries (in that sense) on this Kingdom, and indicated to Peter he ought to be prepared to call anyone ‘brother’.
“Peter’s questions, i submit, are not bad questions. They are very sensible questions- what is my responsibility? and to whom am i responsible? He is following in the great rabbinical tradition of question- he is a disciple of a rabbi, training to become a rabbi himself someday. The point of the story, i suppose, is that Jesus takes it (whatever the issue) further than we mean it to go. There is always a slightly larger picture, always a deeper understanding to grab hold of, always a little more going on here than we think.”
So…
The Half-Baked DIY:
1. How well do you know your Talmud? Which Rabbis adopted the 70 thing? Can you cite the tracate?
2. How does the Table of Nation fit within the neighboring story of the Tower of Babel? What kinds of parallels can be drawn to Jesus’ words about the brotherhood of men and His Kingdom?
3. Have you given any thought to the idea of Peter as a rabbi in training? Or does this change how you read his writings? e.g., a divinely-inspired talmudic thing?
