Episode 131: Pete & Jared – Did the Bible Get it Wrong?

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Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People. The only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns.

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

Jared: Welcome everyone to this episode of the podcast, today you get just me and Pete.

Pete: Yeah… sorry…

Jared: Maybe not “just”.

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: Maybe it’s okay.

Pete: We’ll see, I guess.

Jared: We’ll find out.

Pete: We’ll find out.

Jared: Time will tell.

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: Well, what are we talking about today Pete?

Pete: Yeah, we get some questions at “Ask Pete” on our website, and we went through them and we just noticed some themes, and we thought we would look at some of those on the topic of ‘Did the Bible Get It Wrong?’ Good topic.

Jared: Yeah. I mean, I –

Pete: The answer is yes. Next question. Anything else?

Jared: The answer is yes?! Oh, man. Someone’s gonna sound bite that.

Pete: Anything else we can get to? Yeah, no. So, we just thought we’d, ya know, look at some of these and you know, riff on them a little bit. We don’t necessarily have final answers, but I think sometimes even just framing the question differently might help.

Jared: Yeah, so these are questions that came to us on the website and so they’re independent questions, but we found some themes that are really around, questions around particular passages and what do we do with this? Does it mean the Bible got it wrong, or how do we need to change how we think about it? And I think, maybe we’ll get to a little of both of those in some way or another. So, what’s our first one?

Pete: Well, the first one is about the imminent Parousia. It has to do with the presence of the arrival of someone. It’s usually a term used for the second coming of Christ, and the question is “were the New Testament writers and were Jesus and the apostles, were they expecting an imminent Parousia?” In other words the end, the second coming is going to come very soon. In other words, they weren’t sitting around thinking, “well, this could be a while.” We would be here for a few thousand years, who knows. Or were they expecting it to be pretty soon? And –

Jared: Well, and when we say “it”, I just want to be clear, because we’ll go into some passages –

Pete: Well, that’s the question, what is the “it”, right?

Jared: Yeah, because we’ll go into some passages that Jesus seems to be thinking something is coming quickly –

Pete: Right.

Jared: And it doesn’t seem to be his death and resurrection, it seems to be something else, the kingdom of God, this other language –

Pete: Yeah. Well, what is that passage? Which is –

Jared: In Matthew…in Mark, Mark 9:1 and in Matthew 10:23. There’s a few of these passages, maybe we can just read those to help set the stage a little bit.

Pete: Yeah, and also Mark 13. That’s an important one too.

Jared: Yeah, Mark 13 starting there in verse 30 it is. And if you, in the NIV you know, there’s these headings. So right before this it talks about “the day and the hour is unknown,” and for me that was all end times stuff.

Pete: Right.

Jared: But if you back up a few verses, Jesus says this, “truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” So, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.”

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: And in history, we would have interpreted, or the history of interpretation, at least in the last thirty years in my tradition –

Pete: Right.

Jared: Would have interpreted this to say this is about the end times.

Pete: Yeah. Jesus’ return, I guess. That’s usually what people, but it’s often times what people assume.

Jared: Yeah, because if you back up it’s talking about these, and I have like these flashbacks to when I was a kid.

Pete: [Laughter]

Jared: In those days, following distress, it’s like, pre-tribulation of the end times.

Pete: Right.

Jared: “The sun will be dark, and the moon won’t give it’s light. The stars will fall from the sky.” And it was interpreted literally –

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: Like these things are going to happen. Like, the stars are going to fall, it’s going to be this crazy… “And at that time, people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds of great power and glory,” and that’s the context. And then Jesus says, “truly I tell you, this generation is not going to pass away until these things have happened.” So, if you read it carefully, like this person who asked the question, you’re kind of like, well, what gives?

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: This generation clearly passed away before Jesus came back.

Pete: Right, yeah.

Jared: So, what do we do with this?

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Pete: Yes, that gets us back to what the “it” is. I mean, and there are a number of passages that sort of talk about something happening pretty soon. Yeah, I mean, this is a little bit different of a passage than some of the others that talk about, like, the imminent or soon to come appearing or arrival of Jesus, because this one probably deals with, as others gospels have it too, the destruction of the temple which happened in the year 70. And you might think, like, well, that’s not such a big deal, this has to be about Jesus’ second coming. Well, that was a big deal for Judaism. That’s like, this is the Babylonian exile sort of happening again with the destruction of the temple and where is God and what is God saying about God’s presence with the children of Abraham? And this was a cataclysmic moment, and you know, Jesus is talking about that. So, that symbolizes, you know, the beginning of a new era, the beginning of the new age. So, in that sense, it’s an appearance, right, of the presence of God with the people. So, that’s a little bit different though, than some of these sound like, you know, like Paul – don’t get married. Don’t buy life insurance, just, you know, this could end any minute and it probably will. And the question is, you know, do we sort of take that like, were they wrong? Do we take that literally? And my opinion, you know, Jared jump in here, but I think that we really have to sort of take them at their word here, because they, I mean, I cannot imagine, for example, a Jew who believes the Messiah is in their midst. When the Messiah is in their midst, that means the end is here and the kingdom is being set up. Now, there’s a little problem with the New Testament: Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. So, where’d he go? Well, he’s coming back real soon. Yeah, but what if, like, any of us happen to die in the meantime? Paul says, they’re gonna be fine, don’t worry about that. And that’s, the hope is something that’s gonna happen rather soon. There isn’t a hint in the New Testament, in my opinion, of you know, we could be here for a long time. So, I think the expectation was something soon, pretty soon, and I don’t blame them, because this is part of Jewish eschatology. It’s not like, it’s not a heavenly existence, it’s an earthly existence, and once Messiah shows up, it’s the beginning of the end.

Jared: I think, just to back up, because I think when we’re talking about these collection of Bible verses, because this is what we do in biblical interpretation at least, at an everyday level, we sort of have a theory and then we find these verses and we put them all together and they seem to provide this coherent whole. So, what I hear you saying is if we look at a text like Mark 13, that seems to be talking about the destruction of the temple.

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: And that’s what’s going to be coming. So, the “it” is the destruction of the temple.

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: Then we have these other verses that Jesus mentions like in Matthew 10 and in Mark 9 where he’s talking about an “it”, but he’s talking about it where he says like in Mark 9, “some of you who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” So Jesus, and then Matthew 10 uses “you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.” So, he uses Son of Man coming and kingdom of God language.

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: So, that seems to be a second category –

Pete: Right.

Jared: And then you have the New Testament writers like Paul talking about Jesus coming back. So, they’re really talking about three different “its” here. And I think that’s important because for a lot of people, they may, their churches –

Pete: Collapse them all together.

Jared: Collapse them all together into this one big event.

Pete: Right.

Jared: So, even to say, “were they wrong or not,” we have to figure out exactly what they were talking about.

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: So in Mark, Jesus seems to be talking about the destruction of the temple, and that did happen before that generation passed away. And then the kingdom of God coming in great power, we don’t know yet, because that, I mean, that’s kind of a vague thing to say. And then we have the New Testament talking about Jesus coming back, which is a pretty practical thing and a concrete thing that we would be able to see happen.

Pete: Right.

Jared: And so that’s what you’re speaking to now is Paul’s and the other New Testament writers expecting Jesus’ imminent return in their lifetime to set up a physical kingdom of God on earth and when that didn’t happen, there’s questions.

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Pete: Right, right. And the part about “some of you here will not taste death until you see the Son of Man coming in power,” and you know, that could be, I mean, I think that’s probably talking about the resurrection faith in the Gospels where that’s, you’re going to see that some of you will see this, and, you know. But, you know, does it mean Jesus’ second coming, because if that’s the case, then this is like, really, really wrong. But it depends on what the “it” is, it depends on what’s being talked about. And so, Jesus, you know, is raised but then he leaves. Like, okay! So, now what do we do? You know, so, “I’m coming back, don’t worry.” Okay, like when? And I think what we’re seeing, maybe, is the biblical writers working things out just a little bit on that, and the, again, I think it’s warranted for us to think of that would be assumed that this is not gonna be a super long period of time. It’s, you know, the Lord is near, Philippians 4:5 and Romans 13:12 about, you know, salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed. What’s that salvation, well, it’s probably the consummation of the kingdom with the return of the king as it’s supposed to be, right? So, you know, there isn’t really a notion of the end goal of this is someplace “up there.” The end goal of this is what’s happening right here, the people are suffering, and that’s the book of Revelation fits into that. Like, people are suffering, and the slain lamb of God is on the throne, and when is this all going to come to end? Well, “behold I saw a new heaven and a new earth, and everything was recreated.” Again, a new creation is there, and there’s like a Jerusalem there, and there’s a garden of Eden. It’s very corporeal, and very earthly. And that’s the way you would think of the Parousia, the coming, the appearing, God’s presence among you. That’s how they would think about it, and so, they’re looking at it from that point of view, and I mean, there’s some people that think that happened but in more of a symbolic way.

Jared: Right.

Pete: And I’m just, you know, there’s so many angles to go with this, but I think generally speaking, we have here something that didn’t come about, right? It just didn’t come about, but we understand why they would say that, but the reality takes us beyond the Jewish apocalyptic way of thinking. Because you mentioned in Mark 13 where the sun and the stars will, you know, drop out of the sky or something. That’s apocalyptic, that’s not literal at all. That’s apocalyptic language. That means something big is happening, there’s a change, there’s a change of regimes of ages and you talk about that in very sort of –

Jared: Well, and even the language Son of Man, which is Daniel apocalyptic language –

Pete: Yes. Right.

Jared: Well –

Pete: And it’s about restoration of the kingdom and with the true king on the throne, and I think that’s really the New Testament eschatology. And we can talk all about like, timing, and this and the other thing, but that is the overall vision, and that’s the thing that we have to grapple with, is that, the end goal –

Jared: Hasn’t happened.

Pete: Or yeah, or therefore, is that the end goal or is that the language of the consummation for a first century Jewish audience? This is what meant something to them, and do we have to translate that into other language for who we are and maybe that’s what we have to do. So, it’s not a matter of right or wrong so much, it’s a matter of context and what’s happening in the world and stuff like that.

Jared: Right, well, and I think we can’t underestimate too, you mentioned the New Testament writers trying to figure it out how, the resurrection, it seems in this context, would’ve been a bit problematic. Because if you’re, and we see this in the Gospels, that the disciples, after the resurrection they kind of, they –

Pete: [Quiet laughter]

Jared: Well, after the death, the resurrection, they don’t…it’s, yeah. It’s confusing.

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: It’s a confusing time of what this means.  

Pete: Yeah, like, what are we doing with this?

Jared: Because we thought it was going to look like a bodily, you’re going to be here with us now forever –

Pete: Right.

Jared: And then that’s the resurrection. That’s great, but then Jesus ascends –

Pete: “I gotta go!”

Jared: Yeah.

Pete: “Don’t worry, I’ll send the Spirit!” Right, so –

Jared: Yeah.

Pete: And that’s why you have Paul, who we could call him the grand interpreter of what that means. He goes, well, it’s a two-stage coming. He came the first time, he left, and he’s going to come the second time. So now, we’re living in the new age, it’s sort of inaugurated by Jesus’ coming and then resurrection and ascension. But there’s a second stage where the new age is going to be completed, and it gets really confusing and it doesn’t help that the Dead Sea Scrolls talk about something similar. So, all this stuff is mixed up, and  I just, I mean for me, I just can’t stress enough the notion of trying to understand the Jewish milieu and how that might affect why they talk about ultimate reality the way they do, and then the burden is on us to say what do we do with that.

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Jared: You know, it reminds me a little of the episode we had with Meghan Henning about the afterlife hell and that they had these concepts, but it’s messy because it’s not fully articulated yet.

Pete: Right.

Jared: And I think that’s similar to what we’re doing. It feels like people using metaphors or grabbing things from their tradition and bringing them forward and trying to grapple with this reality that there’s really not clear, yet, systematic thought for.

Pete: Right.

Jared: And I think that’s important to recognize that, because then when we impose systematic thoughts, that’s what we’re doing is imposing system onto something that probably was more fragmented and more improvised in the moment given the reality that they were seeing.

Pete: Yeah, less structured or something.

Jared: Yeah, yeah.

Pete: I think Matthias Henze also talked about that a little bit in Jewish apocalyptic expectation.

Jared: Right.

Pete: Yeah, we’ll leave you to that stuff. But yeah, that’s why, you know, I definitely appreciate the question “was it wrong?”. Well, in a literal sense, yeah, I guess it was. And it’s on the level of meaning, and what would’ve meant something to the people then. I think this is the way you have to talk when you’re talking about ultimate reality, God, you’re going to wind up being not precise, maybe, and not always right. And I want to say, I think that includes the biblical writers, you know, and I think for them to try to work it out is, you know it’s interesting that the disciples in the book of Acts when Jesus is about to ascend into heaven and they say, “is now the time that God’s gonna deliver the kingdom into our hands?” And Jesus basically says, that’s up to God. But it’s a stupid question, because they still have a mentality that Messiah means taking over Rome, and that’s not the case. So, you have those expectations being sort of squashed, but there are new expectations that’s really not part of the script and they’re trying to deal with it. And I imagine they could not have imagined Jesus is not coming back in our lifetime. That’s what, you know, Paul has this thing about, you know, those who’ve died, they’re going to be raised, it’s going to be okay. They’re not going to be forgotten. But it’s like a problem that came up that no one like, had thought about before until it actually happened, then Paul says well, it’s going to be okay. They’re fine.

Jared: Because the expectation was no one’s gonna die, because this is gonna happen right away –

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: And now people are starting to die, what do we do with these people?

Pete: Yeah, maybe weeks, months, a year or two or three or five, but ten goes by. Fifteen, thirty, fifty, and it’s like, you know –

Jared: Well, and it seems like Paul maybe, isn’t always on the same page with Paul in some of that too, because, you know, in 1 Corinthians 7, it does seem clear that there’s this expectation that Jesus’ coming is imminent in the sense that, hey, if you’re not married, don’t get married. He has this kind of treatise on marriage, and it’s sort of like, hey, just things are going to be done here pretty quick, so, don’t do anything rash. Don’t do anything big. We’re just kind of waiting it out here a little bit and then that doesn’t happen. So, things evolve.

Pete: And so, that, which is one reason, not to get off track here, but that’s one reason why the pastoral epistles are often times, you know, understood, and typically understood by scholars not to have been written by Paul but later, because there’s already a church structure involved. There are bishops and elders. That’s like, a long haul kind of thing to do. Where it’s like, okay, we may be here for a while. Or John’s gospel where, you know, doubting Thomas says I’m not going to believe unless I see, and Jesus says, okay, just, you know, touch my side, right? And what do you think now? And he goes, you know, I believe. And blessed are those who, you believe because you’ve seen, blessed are those who haven’t seen and still believe. That’s something to say to people who, okay. This is taking a long time here, and all you guys met Jesus, and you know him, and maybe John, you did, or whoever, but we don’t. And it’s an indication of time that has passed and having to deal with that unexpected turn of events, the length of time, right? So, you know, I guess it just humanizes this text. Again, we use that word a lot. Right, Jared? It’s humanizing the text that these are people writing and theologizing and thinking and, you know, what God is doing seems to be always a few steps beyond what people, the containers we have for God, so –

Jared: Well, I think that’s a good segue into this next question, which is, you know, “how literally do we take a passage like Matthew 27? In verse 52 it talks about more than just, which may be a surprise to some people if you haven’t read closely. It’s not just Jesus who’s raised form the dead –

Pete: Yeah, a whole bunch of people.

Jared: It’s a whole bunch of people that, it, the text explicitly says, “and were seen by many people.”

Pete: Right.

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Jared: And so, they mention Matthew 27 and they mention again in 1 Samuel, which we’ll maybe touch on in a minute, in chapter 28 where we have this person who’s a medium or a psychic, or, you may know the Hebrew that kind of fills that out more, but someone who can conjure people from the dead and so the spirit is raised from the dead and, so –

Pete: Oh, the Bible, it’s always doing this stuff to us. But I think, you know, Matthew, to me, is a little more straightforward and is this meant to be taken literally? No, I think it’s meant to be taken symbolically. And even saying, “and they were seen by many people,” that’s just the part, that’s just the graphic nature of the storytelling. Again, I don’t think we should take that literally as like, people are actually dead and walking around. That would’ve made the news, somebody would’ve heard about that. So, they were seen by many people? I just, I can’t help but thinking of like, Walking Dead scenes. It’s like, people with suits hanging off them. But I’m, you know, that’s not right. But this is typically understood as a symbolic way of talking about something that Ezekiel talks about in chapter 37, right? The valley of the dry bones, and this is a metaphor, because we know that because Ezekiel tells us exactly it’s a metaphor for returning from exile. The valley of the dry bones, that’s exile, but then their bones are put back together again and they become living, breathing, humans and Ezekiel says, yeah, that symbolizes, you know, returning to the land after the exile. And a return from exile, I think, is definitely a theme in the Gospels. And we know this because all of them begin by introducing John the Baptist by referring to Isaiah 40 –

Jared: Wilderness.

Pete: Which is like, the return from exile passage. So clearly, this has something to do with returning from exile, but it’s a different kind of exile. It’s not returning to the land to have a king again. It’s a more of a spiritual exile, and coming back to, you know, communion with God in Christ, and maybe that’s one way of understanding it. But bringing in Ezekiel 37, it’s sort of nice because in Matthew’s gospel it sort of begins with an exile allusion and it ends with an exile allusion as well. Like, in other words, Jesus is raised, the exile of Israel is now over. You’re really back in the land now. You haven’t been back in the land for a long time because there hasn’t been a king. You’ve had a temple you’ve been in the land, but you’re not in the land because you didn’t have the structure set up the way they should be. You need a king. Well, the king’s here. The king’s been raised. So now, you know, these, the dead come back to life again. And again, if you think of even how Matthew’s gospel begins with that boring genealogy, it’s really weird, but it’s like, three segments of fourteen, and it goes from Abraham to David, David to the exile, and exile to Jesus. And it’s really weird to have exile in a genealogy, but that tells us something about the importance of exile thinking for Matthew. So, to me, it all sort of hangs together and to take that literally is the same thing as like taking the genealogy literally. Like, really? Three segments of fourteen?

Jared: Yeah. It happened to work out that way.

Pete: And it doesn’t remotely match, it really doesn’t remotely match Luke’s genealogy in chapter 3 of Luke. So, you know, it’s just, this symbolic nature of this stuff, it’s something that we sometimes should just assume and try to work with what’s the symbolism of it.

Jared: And I think, just to further that, you know, Matthew in particular of the Gospels, relies heavily on this symbolism, not just of exile, but also the Exodus.

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: And it recapitulates the story of Israel throughout Jesus’ story, and so, you were reading carefully along in that way, and you pick up on all those allusions, which may be difficult if you’re not, you know, a first or second century Jew who has a tie to some of these events and traditions in that way, you may not pick up on it. So, by the time you get to Matthew 27 it just feels like it comes out of left field when all along, maybe it doesn’t if you pick up on some of these.

Pete: Right. And I think that’s an important point because the question worth asking is did the writer of Matthew’s gospel write that part and say, I hope you will take this literally, or was this part of the symbolism that he’s working with all along? And that’s not, like, a bad question to ask, that’s actually trying to understand the nature of the literature and what we have the right to expect from it. So, you know, I’m sure there are other answers to that people give. That’s the one that I’ve always sort of, just made complete intuitive sense to me, that this is what’s happening there.

Jared: And if we go back to then, 1 Samuel 28, again, where we have another person being raised from the dead, so to speak –

Pete: Yeah.

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Jared: We can answer that in some ways similarly by asking what purpose does this section have in the larger narrative of Samuel, and what’s trying to be – because when I read it, it strikes me as kind of coming out of left field.

Pete: Right.

Jared: And so, when I read that, I think, well, I think this has a, this is a little bit harder because it’s hard to know with such an old text what was the author trying to say or not say.

Pete: Well, just the passage itself, okay. So, Saul is like, got a Philistine thing happening there. He wants advice, he goes to God. God doesn’t answer him, right?

Jared: Which is important. He goes to God, and God’s the one who doesn’t answer Saul.

Pete: So, what does he do? He says, I gotta figure this out. So, the witch of Endor conjures up the next best thing! The spirit of Samuel comes up from Sheol, I guess. Nobody’s happy about this. You know, he said, “what are you doing?? I was resting!!” You know, so.

Jared: [Laughter]

Yeah! Samuel is not happy.

Pete: He’s not happy. So, he hasn’t been happy with kingship since the beginning.

Jared: Right.

Pete: And 1 Samuel 8, he was very unhappy about kingship. He sort of begins and ends the story. He’s not a happy fellow about this kingship stuff, especially Saul.

Jared: So, it’s interesting that Saul brings Samuel back of all people, but –

Pete: Yeah! Cause he’s the one who anointed him king, and you know, that’s the prophet. That’s the one who spoke to him from God. That’s the one who was with him at the beginning, and then abandoned him with David, you know. So, that’s his like, I gotta figure out, he’s trying to understand what God wants him to do, that’s the thing. So, like, he’s not, he’s not, you know, I guess I’ll go consult with Baal, the god of the Canaanite’s.

Jared: Right.

Pete: I’m just going to stick with this. He’s actually trying…

Does he know God rejected him?! I mean, everybody else knows, but does he really know that? I mean…

Jared: So yeah, I think it’s interesting that Saul tries multiple ways to get God to hear him. It says, “the Lord didn’t answer him by dreams or by Urim or by prophets.” It’s like, the guys trying everything! He’s trying to do it the right way, and God just keeps rejecting and rejecting and rejecting.

Pete: Which of course, is like, the total rejection of Saul, but he’s trying the right channels.

Jared: Mm hmm.

Pete: And he wants to know what to do. He says, you know what, I know people who can do this for me.

Jared: So, what would lead us, then, to not read this text literally?

Pete: What do you think?

Jared: For me, this rejection by God of Saul is an important point of the story in the larger narrative that’s trying to convey we’re done with Saul. Saul needs to be recognized for who he is or isn’t, and David is the legitimate person here. And so, if we read the Samuel narratives, it’s not that David is always portrayed in a good light, but it is clear that there is a bit of propaganda going on in some of these narratives.

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: And this one is no different, and it seems to play an important role in the narrative transition –

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: For why God rejects Saul and then David is now the legitimate king.

Pete: Yeah, I mean, it’s another sort of nail on his coffin because he’s been rejected since the beginning, well, the middle of the book when… You know, he was king for like from 1 Samuel 9, and then like in chapter 15, it’s already pretty much over, and then chapter 16 is when David is anointed sort of secretly and at that point it says, you know, David receives the spirit of God, but God sent an evil spirit on Saul. Which some interpreters like, some sort of psychosis or something because that’s when David plays the lyre and calms him down whenever he has these fits. So, it sounds like he’s basically manic depressive or something like that, but. The fact is that, I mean, the switch has already happened and it goes on like this for, you know, ten, twelve chapters or more where it’s just the story of the rejection of Saul and the clarity of that rejection and here at the end, I mean, is there a little pathos here? I mean, poor guy! He’s like, sort of really trying to do the right thing and God is nowhere to be found. And so, he takes matters into his own hand and gets a tongue lashing for that too, so. So, you know, I guess, I mean if you have to ask me, I would say no, I don’t think this is a literal depiction of events.

Jared: It’s not proof for an afterlife, say, or that people can be raised from the dead.

Pete: Well, yeah. I think it’s typically taken as why you should not engage in necromancy and magic. That’s typically how this is taken. And okay, that’s sort of the lesson. But again, the point of this is not a moral lesson for you or a moral lesson for me, or here’s proof that this or that happens –

Jared: Right.

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Pete: Again, the story nature, the story quality of the Bible is, it’s uncontested. That doesn’t mean things aren’t sort of real or historical. Especially in like, the Samuel narratives, 1 & 2 Samuel, there’s, you know, there are historical echoes and circumstances, people agree with that. That doesn’t mean every element of it is a depiction of time and space reality. It could be a vehicle for communicating something of theological proof.

Jared: Well, I think that’s a great way to get into the next question, and maybe you can read it. Because all I wrote down here was “was David a man after God’s own heart?” And we’re talking about his passage from 1 Samuel 28 and a lot of our depiction of David comes from 1 Samuel as well –

Pete: Right.

Jared: Of course, there’s other parts as well. So, was David a man after God’s own heart? Or how did this –

Pete: Yeah, the question was “I’ve always struggled with David was a man after God’s own heart. Really? David? Do you believe David was a man after God’s own heart? And what then, knowing who David was, does that mean?” So, I mean, he’s alluding to things that, David’s not a choir boy, you know. He, the whole Bathsheba thing. He was okay, I guess, at times, but you know, basically coming into power he, it got away from him pretty quickly and you know, he sends messengers to summon Bathsheba which means she doesn’t have a choice. He’s using his power, it’s technically rape, and has her husband killed to cover up the fact that she’s pregnant with his child. Way to go, David. And then two chapters later, David has two sons, Absalom and Amnon. And Tamar is the sister, the full sister of Absalom, Amnon connivingly rapes her and ironically, David delivers Tamar to Amnon not knowing what was going on in the same way that Bathsheba was delivered to his house. It’s very ironic and it just sort of really drives home, like, David, come on, but he was pretty clueless. The fact is that, you know, that she was raped by Amnon who then rejects her, and Absalom, the full brother of Tamar, is not happy. And he’s like, Dad? What are you going to do about this? And David just really cried. He lamented and he was sad, but he wouldn’t do anything because “he loved his firstborn son Amnon,” which means, I have a covenant obligation to him because he’s my firstborn son. I can’t do anything. And that starts everything going down the toilet for poor David for the rest of his life, and he dies sort of an old man in his bed, sort of clueless. And this is the backstory, I think, behind the question. Like, a man after God’s own heart? Are you kidding me? There’s no way! So, I mean, what, that’s in 1 Samuel 13. What does that even mean? I mean, Saul’s rejected, and God says, I have somebody else, a man after my own heart, and that’s, Samuel goes and anoints him as king, but what does that mean for goodness sake?

Jared: Yeah, and I like how he, the person, phrased the question because if that’s true, we have to kind of reverse engineer it –

Pete: Yes, exactly.

Jared: Because his moral exploits aren’t great. I love going back to the very beginning, at least one of the beginnings. David is introduced a few different confusing ways here in the text, but in one of them with the David and Goliath story when David’s really kind of hoisted into the public scene for the first time, and I love that the first question David asks, which we maybe miss if we don’t read it carefully. But the first question he asks when he gets to, you know, he’s bringing his brother some lunch and he just happens upon this Goliath who’s taunting the Israelite army. And we’re taught to think like, he was really all about God’s honor in that. But the first question he says is “what do you get out of this?”

Pete: [Laughter]

Right.

Jared: “If someone kills this guy, what’s the king gonna do for me?”

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: And they tell him, well, he’ll give you a wife.

Pete: Which means you’d be in the royal family.

33:19

Jared: You’ll be in the royal family! And so David perks up. And it almost seems as though, because in the very next verse is his oldest brother. It says this, “his older brother heard him speaking with the men, you know, asking them what happens if I kill this guy, what do I get out of it? And his older brother burns with anger and asks, “why have you come down here? And with whom did you leave these few sheep in the wilderness?” Kind of like, you’re abandoning your duty.

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: Because you know you’re going to get something out of this. I know how conceited you are and how wicked your heart is.

Pete: [Laughter]

Jared: You came down only to watch the battle. And so, for me, it’s just funny because I was taught to read that as like, the jealous older brother who totally misreads David.

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: And now that I know more about David, I’m like, actually, I think maybe he’s telling the truth here…

Pete: Yeah. He’s got, clearly, David’s character is, let’s say, ambiguous at least.

Jared: Yeah.

Pete: And you know, after he’s confronted by his brother, Eliab I think is his name –

Jared: Mm hmm.

Pete: But you know, we’ll just go back, you know, you’re conceited, blah blah. And David goes, “what?! I was just asking a question.” And so, typical brother is like, “What? What?! What do I mean?” And then what’s the next thing David does? He asks somebody else. “Tell me again what happens.” Right?

Jared: [Laughter]

Pete: So, David is like, not the most upstanding fellow. He’s like, I’m gonna kill Goliath. I mean, the story is so, it portrays David in this light that, and plus, it describes David physically. He’s ruddy and handsome and that’s after God got done saying when Samuel thought maybe Eliab would be the king that God would anoint. No, not him. People look at the outside, God looks at the heart, right? So, David is a man after God’s own heart. So, and Saul was described physically. So, they want a king that looks the part and so David, well, he clearly doesn’t look the part but he’s described physically again in a way that’s reminiscent of Saul, so you’re reading the story, and like, okay, I’m really not sure what kind of a guy I’m dealing with here. And like, well, welcome to the story of David. You never know what you’re dealing with, and he hangs out with Philistines when he’s running away. He gets a mercenary army that actually winds up helping Solomon take the throne away from the elder brother Adonijah. It’s the stories are so complex. So, no. I would not look at David as a man after, a person I want to emulate my life –

Jared: And maybe there’s a distinction there, right?

Pete: Yes.

Jared: To be a man after God’s own heart, we have so much baggage for what we mean by that. That means someone we should emulate, we should model our life after, but that’s, I just want to name, that’s actually not in the text.

Pete: That’s not what the text says, right?

Jared: It just says a man, we don’t know what that means. I just thought, maybe you could expound. When we were talking earlier, you had a good idea about that in terms of how kings are portrayed in terms of how they worship.

Pete: Yeah, David really doesn’t get a negative evaluation. You know? He does a lot of wrong stuff, but as in terms of his kingship, you know, Solomon screws up at the end, and pretty much everybody. There are two kings, really, that almost get a complete positive evaluation and one is David and the other one is Josiah who is later on. But what unites them both is that, okay, one thing they never did was worship other gods. So, they were faithful to God and you know, David captured –

Jared: Maybe not ethically or morally faithful to God–

Pete: No, not ethically, no.

Jared: But in terms of actual worship.

Pete: Right. They didn’t conjure up, you know, spirits from Sheol.

And that may be what’s going on, and that fits with the general view of scholars that this is part of what’s called the Deuteronomistic history. It’s a history of Israel and everyone is evaluated on the basis of the book of Deuteronomy. And the book of Deuteronomy, it has certain rules for what it means to be king, and it’s basically teaching the people Torah, which means, and being faithful to Torah, primarily the proper worship of God in a specific location, which is Jerusalem. And what David did is he captured Jerusalem, he made it the capital. He didn’t build the temple, Solomon did, but he got it going. So, David is somebody who is from the point of view of the worship of God, faithful. And it’s not that God lets him off the hook, so to speak, for the Bathsheba thing, although he sort of does. I mean, their child hangs on for a week, and then dies. And then Solomon’s the next one. So, okay. The child died, but David, you murdered somebody basically. You rape and you murder, and what’s going on? And that is without question for us, we should be bothered by that. We should, what is going on here, and is God like that? That’s really the question. Forget David. Is God like that, he sort of condones this. And again, in my opinion, and chime in here if you agree or disagree Jared, but this is part of, I think, the nature of this literature that it’s really not about moral lessons for us to learn, it’s about the struggles of kingship and what does God think of kingship, and those views change in Israel. They’re not always the same. Sometimes God is very pro, sometimes he’s very against, and by the end he’s pretty sick of it.

38:42

Jared: Well, I think it’s a complicated question –

Pete: Very complicated.

Jared: Because when you say that’s not what it is, I think we have to kind of splice that out.

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: Like, are we talking about the context in which it was, it wasn’t written to be a moral guide in that way.

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: We now, in a lot of churches in a lot of contexts and traditions, use it that way. And I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s necessarily wrong or bad –

Pete: Right.

Jared: But I think without respecting that that wasn’t the original intent, it’s very easy to get into predicaments you don’t want to be in.

Pete: Yeah, and that is an important point, because when like, say, churches read these stories for their own moral guidance, that’s something people have been doing for a very long, I mean, since literally before Christianity. And I actually, I’m not against that, right. I’m not saying you should never do that. But I’m saying be careful how you get your moral lessons. And you also need to sort of struggle with these texts, not just, well, it’s there, we just have to do it. I think we have to struggle with these texts and sort of make them our own. The biblical warrant for that, if I can put it this way, is the book of 1 Chronicles which rewrites David’s story completely. And basically, David does nothing wrong there, right? And that’s David’s take on the fact that okay, this story the way it’s told doesn’t serve the people here, so let’s look at it differently. So, you know, Chronicles was written probably at least two, three hundred years even as much after the time of when maybe 1 Samuel was written, and it’s a different take as times have changed and people are looking to these stories for hope for the future as opposed to maybe looking at these stories as God’s critique of kingship.

Jared: Right, to explain why we’re in the mess, and then later to explain –

Pete: Right. The mess being exile.

Jared: Right. Exile.

Pete: And then Chronicles, post-exilic. And again, looking at context, actually I think also helps us do theology. It helps us think of how these stories can be engaged by us in the life that we life. And that’s a complicated issue. That’s why I don’t want to get into like, here’s the right way to read this story. But –

Jared: But at the very least what I’m hearing is there needs to be respect given, like, I do think it’s, it is troubling to talk about being a man after God’s own heart, David, without reading just what the text says about what David was involved in and what David was doing.

Pete: Right.

Jared: So, there is probably an ethically better way of getting morals and values from Samuel –

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: Than unequivocally baptizing David as the greatest thing ever, and we just emulate exactly how he behaved.

Pete: Right.

Jared: Like that, no matter how you slice it, that seems like maybe a problematic way of doing it.

Pete: And, I mean, yes. And I’m thinking now, you know, we recently had a guest on, Miguel De La Torre, who talked about how people in different contexts hear text. You know, I have female students, and we go about this like, what do you mean he’s a man after God’s own heart? He raped a woman. And then he allowed another rape to go unpunished. I can’t deal with this. Well, okay. It’s not a good reading of the text that ignores that and doesn’t take into account how listeners are hearing a text like that today. And so, we’re in the struggle of biblical interpretation of really engaging texts and interrogating texts so to speak, and really taking them seriously enough to wrestle with them and not just, well, here it is, it’s just the way it is. These texts as moral texts are deeply problematic for people, and people have known that since forever, which is why they do all sorts of interesting things with them, because the text itself doesn’t cut it. You have to do something to the text, which 1 Chronicles does, by the way. You have to do something to it to make it palatable for other times and places.

Jared: Right, and we’re, and I think, because this goes in maybe to the final question that would be good to talk about some, is we had a question, which we don’t need to get into fully, but it talked about right and wrong interpretation. You know, is context and history absolute? And I think it’s more of, you know, there’s this idea of a polarity. You can look it up if you haven’t. But it’s this idea that we can’t come down on one side or the other, we’re always moving between these two different poles. One the one hand, we do have how we respect a text. I mean, we have to understand that this was socially constructed in a particular time and place, and we have to respect it and understand it. Just like any good relationship, we have to understand the person we’re communicating with, but that doesn’t mean it’s all one sided. We also are in a particular time and place, and we also bring our own baggage and our own ethics and morals and filters to the text, and it’s not to say biblical interpretation is right or wrong if you exclude one or the other of those, it’s how we wisely discern between the two.

43:48

Pete: Yeah, and people have talked about the two horizons of the past, the ancient horizon, and the contemporary horizon, and there really is a conversation between those two, and it’s so much more interesting and so much more complicated than just, we’ll just do what it says. Just, what does it say, and it’s sort of there, and it’s just up to you to grab it. Who we are affects everything about how we read this thing, and even to the, you don’t know it always, but it’s there.

Jared: I also find it fascinating that when we acknowledge that we interpret, we actually learn more about what the text actually says because, for instance, I would’ve been taught, you know, you just do what the Bible says, and it says David was a man after God’s own heart. You just do what it says. Well, once you recognize that you come from a context and that you’re interpreting that, now when I go back, I actually read the Bible more carefully, I read it more on its own terms, and I see things that’s now going to impact that new filter I put on it.

Pete: So, you’re putting your own, you’re becoming aware of, let’s say, your bias and you’re able to sort of move it to the side, right? So –

Jared: Right, right.

Pete: Some would say that’s just a mature reading, you know? It’s becoming self-aware. And that’s, I mean, that’s truly, you know, people throw around a term like reading the Bible critically, and a lot of what critical means is you’re not the center of the universe. Your questions, your answers, your assumptions are not the center. You have to put those to the side and that’s why critical biblical scholarship, ideally what it means is like, I want to get into the head of this ancient time and understand what’s going on so that I can maybe think differently about it today, and that’s really what’s behind it, and that’s what we’re talking about here. You know, critical reading.

Jared: As long as, because I do think there’s a tendency to then exclude other ways of reading it too. Or even reading, say, devotionally or for the average person.

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: So, it could become elitist in the sense of, well, I get into the head of the ancient author –

Pete: Right.

Jared: And so, my grandmothers reading, is just completely wrong and how can you…and I think we want to avoid that extreme too.

Pete: Yeah, I think there are, I mean, it’s a little simplistic, but I think in terms of different levels of reading, like if, and I don’t mean higher or lower, I just mean different rooms you walk into. And a lot of what we talk about here at The Bible for Normal People really is sort of that historical room.

Jared: Yeah.

Pete: It’s like, what do these texts mean? And when you’re asking that kind of a question, you don’t read your own situation into it, you try not to. If you’re reading it for, let’s say, a spiritual nurturing or sustenance, or like, an immediate communion with God, Lectio Divina, and just devotional readings, where you’re not trying to analyze the text. It becomes like a means of grace to commune with God. That’s a totally different thing. The Bible works like that and it always has, and it always will. But, if you have a historical consciousness, you ask different kinds of questions. The trick is to, it’s almost like sometimes you have to turn things on and off, right?

Jared: Right. That’s the trick.

Pete: Turn off the historical analysis and move to something else. Yeah, that’s definitely a problem, but that’s a problem with the modern period. We can’t be ahistorical, we’re too oriented toward, like, researching and studying the past because it’s been a lot of past. So, that’s a part of our reality that we have to struggle with, but –

Jared: I think of it some ways, and this may be not a great analogy, but I’ve been recently thinking of metaphors with science where you have kind of the pure science of how does this thing function, we isolate the particle, the wave, how it works. Then you have applied science, and how does this technology or this scientific phenomenon now get applied to make things, make technologies, make products, make these kinds of things and one’s more practical and one’s more pure, and we have to make sure that we’re playing well between those two, and in some contexts, this is the appropriate methodology because of what we’re trying to do with it. And in others, this is the appropriate methodology and I just think it’s important that we don’t over-privilege, because I’ve seen some people who would be kind of anti-intellectual, and they say, “well, that historical critical stuff, that’s just actually getting in the way of the real connection with God.”

Pete: Mm hmm.

Jared: And then other people who would look down on devotional readings and say, “oh, you’re not really getting to what the Bible is all about. To do that you have to read all of these books, and you know, read Greek and read Hebrew, and that’s what the Bible is really about.” And I think they’re both –

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: Like you said, we make a hierarchy rather than seeing them as different rooms with different purposes and different functions.

48:30

Pete: Well, you know, what the Bible is really about, I mean, I just echo James Kugel, my doctoral advisor who said, well what it’s really about is exactly accessing it for personal benefit, because if, otherwise it would not have continued. You actually wouldn’t have a Bible if all you’re interested in is antiquity and understanding the original context or something, because when the context changes, it’s irrelevant, it becomes a relic, and who cares about a relic? It has to always be, you know, the fancy term recontextualized. It always has to be brought into the world of the reader and you have that conversation, and without that impulse, you actually, there’s no impetus to create a Bible. There’s no need for it. There’s no need to sort of have this sacred text you lean on. And so, yeah. That’s, there are ironies, they’re paradoxes here.

Jared: Right.

Pete: It’s like the history, the, you know, I want to know what Jesus is trying to say here. I want to understand what Paul means by this. I want to understand what the Psalm is saying, and that’s the struggle that we have, but on the other hand, we have to somehow find a way to come to peace. I have no trick for this, but to come to peace with that and the fact that regardless of what you come up with, the fact is that you live in a different moment and different time and God has to be as alive for you as God was for these biblical writers. We can’t just lean on the then, it has to be something different.

Jared: Right.

Pete: It’s almost triangulated –

Jared: There has to be a subjective element and that’s actually important, not something to eschew or do away with.

Pete: It’s inevitable.

Jared: Right.

Pete: It’s unavoidable. It is who we are, right? So, the myth of objectivity, we can’t get at the original meaning, but we get to struggle with our horizon and with theirs and well, how do you know if you have the right answer?

All right…

Here we go….

You don’t.

What if that’s okay? What if the multiplicity of interpretations, you know, within certain boundaries which we won’t get into now, but maybe, you know, that kind of thing is basically the history of theology and the history of the church. It’s just the way it’s always been.

Jared: Mm hmm. Well, what I’m coming to as we finish up here is we’re four seasons in and we’re still asking the same two questions.

Pete: Yeah.

Jared: What is the Bible? What do we do with it?

Pete: And what’s Jared’s deal?

Jared: [Laughter]

That’s the third question you ask under your breath at the end of the episode.

Pete: When I’m driving home.

Yeah, and that’s those questions I think we’ll keep asking them, and the rest of the fourth season and maybe the fifth and sixth.

Jared: Well, and maybe just to tie into what you just said, if we’re still frustrated that we haven’t come to an answer, perhaps we’re missing the point.

Pete: Right. Yeah.

Jared: It’s like saying, it’s like going to the gym and saying, like, when are you, like, perfectly strong?

Pete: Ha, right.

Jared: And so that you can stop going to the gym.

Pete: When can you be done? Yeah.

Jared: You don’t.

Pete: When you’re eating healthy and are like, can I stop eating now?

Jared: Exactly, it’s a lifelong exercise to stay sharp and stay wise and discerning about being grounded in a tradition while also having to live in a real context today.

Pete: And being comfortable, I mean, switching the metaphors, but being comfortable with, I used to like, in the Bible, know the truth, and now it’s getting weird, so how can I know the truth again? Well, the point of the journey might be that’s a question you don’t ask in the same way. You might ask it differently, or just the nature of truth changes for you. I know you’ve got some thoughts on truth, but different levels. You even did a podcast on this.

Jared: I did.

Pete: So, and you’ve got a book coming out!

Jared: I do.

Pete: In some time. Like, in a few months or whatever.

Jared: A few months.

Pete: So, yeah. I mean, it’s the struggle of interpreting the text and within our context it just raises all sorts of actually possibilities and not just, oh no! What do I do? It’s like, okay, listen. This is, it’s more complicated than I thought. Okay, I’m aware of that. So, you can relax a little bit and as you’re trying to read this stuff and not feel like we have to sort of get back to that level of a certainty where like everything has to make sense because we have the Bible. If that were the case, people would’ve figured this out a long time ago. There’d be no seminaries, no yeshivas, no Bible colleges or anything like that. It’s like, we would just like –

Jared: Yeah, maybe it’s not a map to the one trail that gets us there, but it gives you a toolkit to kind of make your own path.

Pete: Yeah, right.

Jared: Good, all right!

Pete: All right!

Jared: Thanks so much for joining us again for another episode of us asking the same two questions that continue to be the gift that keeps on giving I think.

Pete: Absolutely, and speaking of that, wash your hands folks.

We were talking about that before too.

Jared: [Laughter]

Pete: Yeah, we’re in the midst of it here, so –

I hope the day comes pretty soon where people won’t understand that joke anymore.

Jared: Yes, I hope so too. It becomes real irrelevant real fast.

Pete: You know, like really, really quickly, and just becomes a dumb thing to say.

Jared: Yeah.

Pete: Anyway. All right folks, see ya!

Jared: See ya.

53:25

Pete: And folks, in closing, just a reminder, we are going to our summer schedule starting this week, which means our episodes will be airing every other week instead of every week.

It’ll be okay. Don’t cry about it too much. You know, I’m sure you can find things to do in the summer, right? Well, so can we. So, every other week starting now, and we’ll be picking it up week by week again in the beginning of September. All right folks, see ya.