Episode 289: Pete Enns & Jared Byas - Pete & Jared Ruin Prophecy (Christmas Edition)
In this festive finale of The Bible for Normal People Season 8, Pete and Jared unwrap a big question: does the Old Testament really predict Jesus’s birth? They dive into Matthew’s creative storytelling, explore what prophecy and fulfillment actually mean, and break down some common assumptions about the Christmas story. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What does prophecy mean in the context of the Hebrew Bible?
How does the New Testament use the Old Testament to talk about Jesus?
What does “fulfillment” mean in Matthew’s Gospel?
How did prophets in the Old Testament function, and what were their roles?
What was the immediate historical context of Isaiah 7:14, and how does it relate to Jesus?
Why does Matthew use a Greek translation of Isaiah to refer to a virgin birth?
What is the significance of the phrase “Out of Egypt I called my son” from Hosea 11:1 in Matthew’s narrative?
How do Jewish interpretations like Midrash influence Matthew’s Gospel?
Why does Matthew tie Jesus to texts like Micah 5:2, Jeremiah 31:15, and Exodus 4:19?
How does Jesus "fulfill" the story of Israel without being explicitly predicted?
What does this approach to prophecy mean for modern interpretations of the Bible?
QuotableS
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
“Prophecy in the Old Testament is not so much prediction—at least not prediction of something way off in the future. It's really a proclamation. The prophet's job was to interpret the times, what's happening. Interpreting the invasion of the Assyrians, for example, from a divine point of view.” — Pete Enns
“Fulfilled doesn't mean predicted. You can fulfill something without being predicted. Jesus fulfills kingship, the kingship of the Old Testament doesn't predict Jesus. Jesus is, for Matthew especially, a new Moses—but the story of Moses doesn't predict Jesus.” — Pete Enns
“Jesus fills these roles or these archetypes that have been set up in our tradition. That's fulfilling it. That doesn't mean that [the author of] particular passages was zapped by God and had a vision of a future person named Jesus, and then gave us this vague encoding of it.” — Jared Byas
“When we think of fulfilling, we should think of how later authors are tying traditions and their story into their religious tradition. Prediction is the past predicting the future, where fulfillment is future authors, if you will, or present authors trying to tie themselves back in meaningful ways to the tradition.” — Jared Byas
“Matthew is participating in that prophetic tradition. I think it oversteps when we say there are particular passages that predict Jesus’s birth.” — Jared Byas
“The New Testament authors are taking the Old Testament passage out of context, but that's what people in their context did. That's the conundrum. And this is why I think one of the most powerful things to engage is how the New Testament actually uses the Hebrew Bible. It's not friendly to certain views of inerrancy or certain ways of thinking of biblical authority.” — Pete Enns
“You could say Jesus embodies Israel's story, even from the earliest part of Israel's story from the Exodus.” — Pete Enns
“If we want to get to that ancient context and how the ancients would have read texts or heard texts, they aren't interested in the question ‘Is it true?’ We are obsessed with that question. How does this impact how we live as faithful members of the community? How do we connect our stories to our ancestors? Those are real concrete questions that [they were] asking and wrestling with. And I think it would just do us well to maybe be less afraid of that question for our time.” — Jared Byas
“Matthew is exploiting the grammatical ambiguities of the text and lifting it up out of its original context and placing it in a totally different one. That is very offensive, I think, largely for modern readers. We just don't read like that. If you want to understand the Bible in context, which we all want to do, understanding how they interpret a text is important.” — Jared Byas
“Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. It's not like a “Where's Waldo?” in the Old Testament. ‘There he is, and there he is, and there—do you think Jesus is over here?’ I don't think that's a satisfactory way of looking at how the New Testament ties Jesus to Israel's story. And that's why just simple prediction doesn't really explain that. It doesn't really cut it.” — Pete Enns
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: December class “A Manger Misunderstanding” taught by Pete Enns
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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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.
[Intro music plays]
Jared: Hey folks, this is the LAST CALL to Pay What You Can for our December class: "A Manger Misunderstanding" taught by our very own Pete Enns.
Pete: This class will take you into the 1st-century Jewish context of Jesus’s birth especially in Luke’s gospel, challenging popular, modern assumptions about the nativity story. And we’ll tackle questions like: What were 1st-century Jews really expecting from a Messiah? And why does the rest of the New Testament stay so quiet about this pivotal moment?
Jared: The class is happening live on December 18th, 2024, from 8:00–9:30 PM ET, with a bonus Q&A from 9:30–10:00 PM ET for members of our online community the Society of Normal People. If you can’t make it live, no worries, you’ll still get access to the recording and slides afterwards.
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Pete: Hey everybody, on today's episode, the last episode, Jared, of The Bible for Normal People Season 8, it's just us. And the topic today, we're talking about whether or not the Old Testament predicts Jesus's birth.
Jared: Well, before we get into that, we just want to thank you for tuning in this year, continuing to support us by listening and all the other ways that our community supports us.
Pete: Yeah. It's something we've wanted to do since the beginning. And not just me and Jared talking to each other, but actually building a community of people who find a home and maybe a sense of camaraderie having some of the same questions and just a great place to hang out.
Jared: Yeah. And you know what, after eight years, even recording this episode, we still have a lot of energy, a lot of passion about what the Bible is and what we do with it and how we can continue to give people aha moments around this thing that they've been around their whole life and maybe have always looked at from one particular way.
Pete: And always keep discovering, always being curious.
Jared: Alright, well let's get into the episode.
[Music plays over teaser clip of hosts speaking]
Pete: “I think one of the most powerful things to engage is how the New Testament actually uses the Hebrew Bible. And it's not friendly to certain views of inerrancy or certain ways of thinking of biblical authority.”
Jared: “It sparks the conversation in the community of how is Jesus a continuation of our tradition?”
Pete: “Yes.”
Jared: “And that is a very interesting conversation.”
Pete: “I mean you could say Jesus embodies Israel's story.”
[Ad break]
Pete: Well everybody, here we are. Jared, we're at the end of year Christmas episode once again. This is our, I'm losing track, 8th?
Jared: 8th?
Pete: 8th one. Yeah.
Jared: That's right.
Pete: So we're going to do something Christmassy again. And we're going to talk today about whether the Old Testament actually predicts Jesus. That's the key.
Jared: The birth of Jesus.
Pete: Yeah, does it predict the birth of Jesus.
Jared: This is Christmas after all.
Pete: This is Christmas. We're not going to talk about Easter.
Jared: No, no, no.
Pete: We'll do that later.
Jared: We'll get in trouble from our liturgical friends if we start talking about Easter.
Pete: “Dude, you get your seasons all screwed up.” I don't know, what difference does it make. No, but about the birth of Jesus and whether the Old Testament predicts it. And we're going to focus on Matthew, there are four passages in Matthew we want to focus on. And the reason is, uh, you know, cause Matthew does a lot of quoting of the Old Testament. I mean, actually quoting the Old Testament and saying, “here's what it says. This is fulfilled in Jesus in some circumstance surrounding Jesus.”
Jared: Matthew is most explicitly trying to connect some dots.
Pete: He’s really, really trying to connect those dots. Well, in a certain way, I mean, Luke does it too—
Jared: Differently It’s—
Pete: But a very different, I think differently.
Jared: Yeah.
Pete: Yeah. But Matthew is like saying he's quotes something and he uses the word fulfill, right? And what does that mean? That's a tricky word, but here's the thing. Prophecy. Let's get to prophecy in the Old Testament here. Prophecy in the Old Testament is not so much prediction, at least not prediction of something way, way, way off in the future. It's really a proclamation. It's—the prophet's job was to interpret the times, what's happening. Interpreting, you know, the invasion of the Assyrians, for example, from a divine point of view.
Jared: It's like reading the signs of the times.
Pete: Right.
Jared: Which is not saying they have some divine knowledge inaccessible to everyone else, but they are wise to read the tea leaves so to speak, this is what's coming on the horizon.
Pete: And they do speak for God, you know, “thus says the Lord.” kind of thing. That's, that's a prophetic function. But the big thing to remember is that they're not really interested in the far off future. I'd say they're essentially not interested in it. When they are, it's very general. It's very vague. It's like, you know, one day the lion will lie down with the lamb kind of thing, you know, which is great. It's like, eventually God will come through and make everything right. But for the most part, prophets are people usually chiding kings for not getting the times.
And that's important to know. You know, when we look at how Matthew uses the Old Testament, I'm going to put it that way, how he uses the Old Testament, keeping in mind the nature of prophecy is going to be very helpful to, to understand what the Old Testament is talking about, and then, well, what's Matthew doing with it?
Jared: Yeah, so, let's—
Pete: And prediction doesn't describe that.
Jared: Right, well, let's slow down. You just went, like, everywhere.
Pete: We're done now, folks.
Jared: In, like, three minutes.
Pete: I know.
Jared: So, let's slow down, go back,
Pete: I don't want to.
Jared: And talk about just prophecy and prophets first. Because I think when people talk about, say, the gospel of Matthew predicting, they will say that's prophetic. Like, the Old Testament was prophetic. And we just have to make sure we unpack what that means first because I think if we don't undo what people's common conception of prophetic and prophecy is, then when we go to Matthew, it's gonna be hard to undo it. So I think understanding some of those concepts that you said very accurately, but very speedily. So let's maybe unpack it for a second.
Pete: Well they can just slow down the sound, right?
Jared: Yeah. So if we hear you say it slower, it’ll sink in better. So one of the things that you said was that prophets don't predict the future, they chide kings. But maybe we can take a minute and talk a little bit more about that.
Pete: Okay.
Jared: So what's the office of a prophet? In the Hebrew Bible, we kind of think of them as fortune tellers. They're sitting around telling the future. But if you've ever read, say, books like Isaiah or Ezekiel or Jeremiah, the major prophets, even the minor prophets, but they're not, if you're reading those, that's not what they're doing most of the time.
They're not sitting around just telling the future. So, maybe even give us a little, pick one, maybe Isaiah or something. Give us a little structure on what is a prophet doing then, if not just predicting the future.
Pete: Well, I mean, different prophets just sort of do different things, but many of the prophets are called court prophets. They're in with the king, and their job is to ideally speak the word of God to them, that the king doesn't have access to on his own, but the prophet does. Sometimes you have prophets who tell kings what they want to hear and other prophets come along saying, don't listen to him. He's going to screw everything up. This is what God really wants.
So there's court prophets. There are also prophets who are sort of outsiders. Amos is an example of that, who is not a court prophet, but a townsperson or a shepherd or something not official. But their job is still to call the kingdom into account for their failure to obey the covenant, the laws, especially, especially the law of worshiping false gods. That's, that's like the worst thing you can do.
Jared: But a big function is, maybe a word or term is theopolitical.
Pete: Mm hmm. Yeah. That’s a big word, Jared.
Jared: It's, it's interpreting political things through the lens of what God is or isn't pleased with and how God is or isn't acting or reacting to the things that the monarchy is doing. The politicians at the time.
Pete: And it's sort of like today, I'm trying to think of an innocent example. You know, in our day, but where people say, okay, let's pick a maybe hopefully a neutral example. “There's hunger in America.” And someone stands up and says, “The Lord says, these people have to be fed. If you don't take care of them, you're, you're disobeying the covenant of God. And there will be retribution from God if you don't do X, Y, and Z. If you do X, Y, and Z, it's going to be fine. If you don't do it, blah, blah, blah.”
So prophets do a lot of warning. Yeah. When a prophet comes to your town, it's not like, oh, good. There's a problem, right? Something's not right. And that is, you know, I think largely the function of prophets in the Hebrew Bible. And some of them get elevated, you know, I would say mystically, maybe, get elevated and speak a word to the generations to come. Right?
Or, like, for example, Nathan, who's the prophet in David's court, says that you're gonna die, your son's gonna take over, and your house, and your throne, and your descendants will go on forever. Which doesn't happen, but that's, that's like a long range kind of thing. But it's not specific. It's somewhat vague at that point.
But that's what prophets do. I sort of think of them sometimes as like people on street corners putting those signs, you know, uh, “the end is coming” or something like that. It's sort of what prophets are like.
Jared: But, but speaking of that, I think this is important because when we get to the New Testament—because sometimes when we think about the predictions, quote unquote, about Jesus's birth, it's often heralded as good news. This good thing is coming. So when you're talking about prophets, we've talked about the bad news that they bring oftentimes. But usually, at least in how our prophets, the books of our Bible are structured, there is usually a message of hope intertwined with that. It is, yes, you're doing these things wrong and you will be punished. But if you endure and become faithful again, there is hope. And then there's usually these pictures painted of a future of restoration and hope.
Pete: Idyllic, kind of.
Jared: And I think that's an important, uh, flow to these prophetic texts, because that's, I think, what some of the momentum around interpreting, you know, Matthew as kind of predicting these good things. It's almost like those texts of Ezekiel or Isaiah, when we talk about hope, or Jeremiah, I think of, of homecoming and hope. I think that kind of messaging is what gets laid onto these pieces in Matthew. It's a tradition I think that- nI'll say it this way. I think that the, uh, the author of Matthew, um, the text of Matthew is, is playing into that tradition a little bit as being a part of this hope and restoration and how Jesus is part of it.
Pete: Oh yeah, yeah. And the key word there too you mentioned is, in Hebrew it's b'sorah, it's good news. And prophets bring good news, namely the battle's over or the king has restored order or a new king is on the throne. And that is—you know, Jesus, the gospel, the good news, what makes it good news, well, there's a king here now. And so there is that, absolutely that connection, but that's a very different thing from saying that the Old Testament is predicting Jesus.
Jared: Yes. And that's, I think, to say that Matthew is participating in that prophetic tradition, I think is fair to say. I think it's, it oversteps when we say there are particular passages that predict Jesus’s birth. Because, in our modern understanding, whenever I was told that as a kid, there was an apologetic function. That the Bible is to be trusted. There is this magical quality. Because of its inerrancy and its straight-from-God-ness, we can trust it. Well, how do we know we can trust it? Well, look here. It predicts the future.
Pete: “Who else can do that? Hundreds of years in the past. How could they do that?”
Jared: Right. Exactly.
Pete: So, but the thing is, I mean, the other thing to talk about just briefly to mention, we don't have to talk about it at length is that, you know, Matthew does use the word fulfill. “Thus is fulfilled what is written by the prophet” and everything turns on, well, what, what does fulfill mean?
Yeah. And just to get us started here, folks, fulfilled doesn't mean predicted. Right. You can fulfill something without being predicted. Okay, Jesus fulfills kingship. There's no, like, the kingship of the Old Testament doesn't predict Jesus. Jesus is, you know, for Matthew especially, he's a new Moses, but the story of Moses doesn't predict Jesus. Jesus still fulfills it, but it's not predicted.
Jared: Yeah, maybe it's, uh, Jesus fills these roles or these archetypes that have been set up in our tradition. That's fulfilling it. That doesn't mean that there are particular passages that the intention of that author was, you know, zapped by God and had a vision of a future person named Jesus, and then gave us this vague encoding of it.
Pete: And that's true, also true of anything like Messiah in the Old Testament, right?
Jared: Like the language of Messiah.
Pete: When we see the word of Messiah, we see the word there, people right away jump. That's gotta be about Jesus. He is the Messiah. Well, you know an anointed one, kings, you know, others were anointed as well. And Jesus is Messiah-
Jared: Yeah to connect the dots when you say anointed one, that is the actual word Messiah.
Pete: Yeah, exactly. Right.
Jared: So we have that word given to others throughout our Bible. That's not just reserved for Jesus. So it's important to know that because yeah, we read back in, we see Messiah, we assume Jesus. But that's a title or a description rather than Jesus.
Pete: Right. Yeah, those are all sorts of interesting ties, like thematic and theological ties between how Jesus is described and all sorts of things from the Old Testament.
I think that's, I think that's very intentional. I think that's true. But that's not prediction. That's just it. And I think if we can sort of decouple, you know, like a train or something, decouple the idea of fulfilling and the idea of predicting, which I know sounds like an awfully subtle thing to say, but maybe it'll become clear when we look at a couple of examples.
Jared: Yeah, I think it will, but maybe would it be fair to say this? When we think of fulfilling, we should think of how later authors are tying traditions and their story into their religious tradition. Where prediction is a past, uh, it's the past predicting the future. Where fulfillment is future authors, if you will, or present authors trying to tie themselves back in meaningful ways to the tradition. I think that may be a good way to separate those out.
Pete: And by tying it, it's almost like for them, Jesus is the ultimate expression of these Old Testament offices or events or whatever. In that sense, fulfill. That has nothing to do with prediction.
Jared: And that's what we want to dig into. So I think that's a really good way to set up some of our understandings or assumptions as we go through these passages. So we wanted to start kind of with the understanding of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. Start with the understanding of prediction and fulfillment. And now we want to read some Matthew.
[Ad break]
Pete: Let's go in order.
Jared: Let's go in order of Matthew.
Pete: Matthew, right. So, Matthew.
Jared: You want me to read the first one?
Pete: Why don't you read the first one? This is Matthew quoting a passage from Isaiah.
Jared: Yeah. So, here's the Matthew part of that.
“All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel, which means God is with us.’”
It's clear that Matthew is quoting from Isaiah 7:14. This may be the most famous one that we'll talk about today. I think most people have, have gone to Christmas services and heard this. And I think what's going to be important here is for people to actually look at the context. Surprise, surprise, we're telling people to look at the context.
Pete: Mmhmm.
Jared: Because when you just look at the text, some of this stuff is going to be pretty obvious.
Pete: Mmhmm. Right.
Jared: Like, I just think people don't go back and read the original source of what Matthew's talking about. And then it's easy to kind of layer that on to just tradition and understanding. But if you just look at the context, some of it's going to be obvious, some of it not, and that's what we, we hope to give.
Pete: So, so Matthew is quoting Isaiah 7:14 very famously, but it's always helpful to read the surrounding context and, you know, we have a little passage here for you, part of it. Give me a minute to set up what's going on.
Jared: Yeah, get us to Isaiah 7 here.
Pete: This is happening in like, the last part, the last quarter, last 30 years of the 8th century. Here's the problem: the mighty Assyrians are flexing their muscles and eventually in a few years, in 722, they're going to invade and take the entire Northern Kingdom away.
So people are freaking out and here's what happens. They're coming and you have the nation of Judah, which is in the South. Right above that is Israel and above that is Aram Damascus. You've got these three nations, Israel in the north and Aram Damascus are freaking out like, Tiglath Pileser is coming. That's the warring king who was taking over everything.
And they, those two kings, were wanting to get the Judean king Ahaz to work with them.
Jared: Build a coalition.
Pete: A coalition to push the Assyrians away. And they said, okay, Ahaz, oh, by the way, and if you don't want to do it, we'll just go after you. And so Ahaz, you know, basically, long story short, goes running to Isaiah and says, what's going on here? And he says, It'll be fine. And, um, you know, ask the Lord for a sign. He'll give you a sign to make sure that you know that you're going to be safe from all this, you know, political warring shenanigans.
And he says, Ah, I can't really do that. And Isaiah says, Well, now you're just ticking me off. So I guess God himself will give you a sign. And that is where Isaiah 7:14 comes in. It says, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel.” And right there, if you look at both of those passages side by side, notice that it doesn't say “the virgin will conceive.” It says “the young woman is with child.” It's something, it's not a prediction of a future birth. It's a conception that's already happened.
Jared: Yeah, it's clearly not a virgin because she is already with child.
Pete: She's with child, right? And she's, yeah, exactly. She is with child and she shall bear a son. Of course, in the course of time she'll bear a son and you'll call him Immanuel, which means God with us. “Whoa, whoa. That means, that means the child is God.” No, you have, Immanuel literally means with us God, Im-Anu-El, with us God. That “el” ending, you have the divine name or some divine particle as part of a name. So you have Israel, Ezekiel, Emmanuel, it doesn't mean the child is God. It means the child represents God. God is with them in, with, with Ahaz specifically.
Jared: It's a sign that God is with you.
Pete: Right. That's nothing to do with the identity of the child.
Jared: You can be comforted when this comes to pass because you can see that means God is with you.
Pete: Yeah. And so the miraculous thing, let's put it this way here, is not the nature of the birth itself. It's what comes after it, right? So let me just read 15. “He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.” Curds and honey are, uh, things you eat when it's, uh, more peacetime, you know, you have more luxury in farming and, and, and things like that. And, you know, before he knows to refuse evil and choose good, like, how old will he be at that point? Yeah, I don't know, three, five, I don't know, it doesn't matter.
Jared: It's like, by the time he's of weaning age.
Pete: Yeah, something like that, right?
Jared: Essentially.
Pete: It's not like, in, in 700 years, right? It's just in, in the course of time. “For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. The Lord will bring on you and your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah, the king of Assyria.”
So, very specifically mentioning this is what's happening, the king of Assyria, they're in trouble, Ahaz is freaking out, He gets a sign, and the sign is, “you see that pregnant lady over there, right?” Whoever it is, right, and we're not exactly sure, it could be somebody's wife, he has his wife, Isaiah's wife, I don't know. But the child, the woman's pregnant. When she has the kid, and by the time that child is old enough to know right from wrong, this is not going to be a problem anymore. That's what it means.
That is the original meaning. Matthew, right? He reads that, and he calls it a fulfillment. So what do we do with that?
Jared: It's a good question.
Pete: I know.
Jared: Okay, so let's just go back, because this is really important to understanding what Matthew's doing and not doing, and maybe what Matthew's trying to do, and the question is, does Matthew succeed, or does Matthew not succeed in doing this, you know, what do we think, kind of in our modern way of reading this, but we have to start with that context of Isaiah.
That it's very clear from just looking at it and then your explanation of it that, and when we tie that to what we have come to expect of other prophetic texts, this is right in line with the kind of things that prophets do. They're giving comfort. With a sign that is right on the horizon. Like you said, it's almost like it's right around the corner.
Hey, this person, they're already pregnant. So, you know that I'm not talking 10 years from now that things are going to be okay. It's by the time that kid can know good from evil, which is not too far off, you're going to be good. So that's clearly the context. So, when Matthew, it says, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord.” So, Jesus’s birth took place in order to fulfill what's been spoken by the Lord through the prophet? What does that mean?
Pete: Well, I mean, one thing before we forget, I'm gonna answer that in a second.
Jared: Oh yeah. That's good.
Pete: It says, you know, Matthew has here, “the virgin shall conceive.” The Hebrew has “the young woman is with child.”
At least the virgin part, Matthew is getting from the Greek translation of Isaiah, which for some reason, well, it has a word that typically means virgin. And it's a little bit confusing because the word that is used in the Hebrew, it really typically means a young woman of marriageable age. She might be a virgin, but that's irrelevant.
Jared: But, and also that is not available given the context where “she is with child.” So, it could mean virgin if you had a context that warrants it, but Isaiah clearly isn't trying to communicate a virgin, if she's with child.
Pete: “The virgin is with child” is illogical, I would say.
Jared: Right. But then, you're saying that the Greek translation makes it more ambiguous.
Pete: Well, actually the Greek translation makes it less ambiguous by using this Greek word Parthenos, which means the Parthenon in Greece, you know, it means virgin. Now, could it mean something else? Maybe, but I mean, when people say, but it says in the Greek virgin, it's like, yeah, you got a good point, but that doesn't do anything with the context of Isaiah itself.
Jared: Well Isaiah wasn’t written in Greek.
Pete: And the thing is like, maybe that's Matthew's language. Maybe this is the Bible that he has, and he sees this word. And he says, well, there it is. So that, I mean, that's, that, that brings up all sorts of interesting issues to talk about. Like, you know, was Matthew getting it wrong? Was he just relying on the Greek? He didn't know Hebrew? What's going on here? All that kind of stuff.
Jared: But then the second part of that is the verb in the Hebrew in Isaiah is present tense, is with child. And then in Matthew in the Greek, we have, “will conceive.” So we've changed that now to the future as well. Whether that's intentional, whether that's Matthew reading the Greek, there's a couple of changes here that are made.
Pete: Yeah, at the very least we should say that it's possible that Matthew can tie Jesus to the Isaiah story more easily because he's reading the Greek.
Jared: Yes.
Pete: And that's, that's interesting. That's a whole different issue, but that's one very much worth discussing. The point is that the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew in the Old Testament is not predicting something other than in the natural course of events, right? There's nothing, in other words, there's nothing miraculous about the birth of the child in Isaiah.
Jared: So what, what's the purpose? I mean, I think for some of these, there's some where Matthew's intentions are more of that fulfillment that we talked about earlier, tying it to a tradition where it's obvious when we get down to, say, Hosea 11:1. It doesn't at all seem to be predicting any, I mean, the contexts are so varied that it's like, you really can't make the case that there's a prediction in that sense. But here, with Matthew chapter one, there does seem to be a little bit more of that intention.
Pete: Right, right. And that's even interesting because sometimes Jared, like you said, there is clearly nothing predictive in the Old Testament, yet Matthew calls it fulfillment.
So that raises the question, what does he mean by fulfill? And I honestly think that's, that's a tricky thing to really talk about and explain, but I would, as simply as I can put it this way, Jesus embodies Israel's story. That's different than saying Jesus predicts it. So, Jesus is the ideal king. He embodies kingship.
He embodies the prophetic tradition. He embodies the priestly tradition. He embodies the sacrifice. He embodies the temple. He embodies creation. He embodies Eden. He embodies all these things. And in that sense, Jesus is fulfilling the Bible. You know, I remember, Jared, we both went to the same seminary, and I think this is something they did a really good job of as far as I'm concerned, because where do we find prophecies of Jesus in the Old Testament?
And one answer is all over the place.
Jared: Right.
Pete: It's not predictive, but Jesus is in the New Testament claim to embody so much of the Hebrew Bible and of the, of the Israelite people and of the traditions. He's the new Moses in Matthew, you know, he's not predicted again, but he's the new Moses.
So I think fulfill in that sense, if we just sort of pump the brakes a little bit and not assume that prediction is going on in Matthew's mind even, necessarily, I mean it might be, I can't read his mind, but what I know is that he's using a text, he's saying fulfilled, but that doesn't mean, and this was foretold and predicted, right, that's a different matter.
Jared: In Luke's gospel, there's a story: and Jesus says on the road to Emmaus, sort of, “all these things point to me.”
Everything that came before is pointing to me. So, in that sense we can say, like what we said in our experiences, yeah, we can find the fulfillment in this broad sense of everything points to Jesus in some way, finds its ultimate expression in Jesus. Or we can say none of it's predicted and it's all, what we can't do is kind of go in between and say this very precise scientific idea of foretelling of the future is what we find in the New Testament or in the, in the Hebrew Bible towards the New Testament.
Pete: Well, also, I mean, that just triggered something that people might be familiar with, but Tom Wright, I mean, 30 years ago, he wrote this book called The Climax of the Covenant. Jesus is the climax of the covenant or he is to throw a Greek word around the telos. Telos means the final complete stage, right?
So in that sense, Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. Not, it's not like a Where's Waldo in the Old Testament. Well, there he is, and there he is, and there, do you think Jesus is over here? Well, I don't think that's a satisfactory way of looking at how the New Testament ties Jesus to Israel's story. And that's why just simple prediction doesn't, it just, it doesn't really explain that.
It doesn't really cut it.
Jared: Yeah, and again, I would, I think what we're trying to dance around is growing up with an understanding where there are traditions that really hinge the authority and accuracy of the Bible on its ability to tell the future accurately. And that falls apart when you look at these contexts and see what Matthew's trying to do.
Pete: The next one is in Matthew 2:6 where he is quoting Micah, Prophet Micah 5:2. And this is after Jesus is born in Bethlehem, wise men came from the east asking, “where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed a star and it's rising,” blah, blah, blah. And when Herod heard this, he was frightened and all Jerusalem with him, because, you know, he's afraid of somebody taking his job and causing a revolt or something.
And calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. And they told him, “in Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet. And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah. For from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.”
And I mean, there are a lot of things happening there, but the very thing that just, that Herod is asking the chief priests and scribes inquiring about where the Messiah was to be born. And again, I think as Christians we read that, they say, well, the one who's going to die on the cross and be raised from the dead.
No, the Messiah is someone who is going to come and set things straight. And I think the context here certainly suggests fear of some sort of military action.
Jared: Yeah. I mean, that seems to be Herod's fear.
Pete: Exactly. And he has a right to fear that because that's, that's one of the many connotations of what a Messiah is supposed to do.
I mean, Tom Wright would say, if I can allude to Tom Wright, the Messiah has a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other. You know, it's like bringing faithfulness to the covenant, but also getting the Romans out. So, he's concerned about that. So, when they say, well, in Bethlehem, the Messiah is supposed to be born, well, that's true.
Micah says that. But he doesn’t mean this.
Jared: And I think that it's a little bit more nuanced. But if we read Micah 5. Even just the beginning if we start with verse one “now you are walled around with a wall. Siege is laid against us. With a rod, they strike the ruler of Israel upon the cheek.” It feels imminent. It’s, it’s now.
Pete: And that's the Assyrian conflict of the 8th century, right? Same thing Isaiah is dealing with.
Jared: And then it goes into “But you, Oh Bethlehem, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from old,” from ancient of day, or “from ancient days.”
But again, it's a little more nuanced. It does feel like it could fit a little bit more in that future sense, but I do think understanding the larger context of Micah, understanding the imminent language of this passage, they're looking for resolution now against the Assyrians.
Pete: Pete Right, to reunite the people, so you don't have, like, a rump state of Judah left over, but, um, you know, they divided, but they were still you know, uh, relation between the parts. Between the two nations. So this is another example. There's a historical context that's very, very specific. Now, maybe we can bring this up too, Jared.
What some people say is that, okay, the human author intended this to be understood as part of the Assyrian conflict, but the divine author has other ideas. And, you know, I do hear that a lot, I sometimes say, well, what do you know what the divine author is? Well, cause it's right there in Matthew, he's telling us what the divine intention is of this text.
That sidesteps an awful lot of stuff in Second Temple Judaism, like Midrash.
Jared: Well, maybe do you want to say a little bit about Midrash and maybe when we get to, I mean, that opens up a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Pete: But it's important because that's, that is, you know, Jewish approaches to scripture in, in this time period and before.
It was very creative, and it was about bringing that ancient text, which was written at a different time, different place, for different circumstances. You still want to connect to God through it, and so you creatively bring it into your own moment and your own context. The New Testament does this a lot.
So did everybody else in the Second Temple world. That's how they read the Bible, not for its literal meaning, but for its deeper meaning. I mean, later on, the church would call it allegory.
Jared: Right. Well, and not just allegory, like a moralistic allegory, but it was to tie-
Pete: The story.
Jared: The story and the people together, because the connection to the community, are we God's people is a constant question, especially given the disruptive nature of Israel's history.
It's a constant question. Are we still God's people? And so you're trying to find these connections. But then I think of, there have been some more conservative scholars who even got in trouble for suggesting that Matthew is doing some Midrash here. And I think that's important. Like you said when you say it sidesteps Midrash I think it's important to realize that In the same way, not to open another can of worms, we say Genesis 1-3 looks a lot like the kind of creation myths we find in the area.
What Matthew's doing in the first couple of chapters here looks a lot like what we find in other texts, even extra biblical texts, and how they're interpreting the Hebrew Bible.
Pete: And you could put it somewhat pithily like this, the New Testament authors are taking the Old Testament passage out of context, but that's what people in their context did.
You know, that's the conundrum. And this is why I think one of the most powerful things to engage is how the New Testament actually uses the Hebrew Bible. It's, it's not friendly to certain views of inerrancy or certain ways of thinking of biblical authority.
Jared: Well, and one of them it's not friendly to is the idea of prediction.
Pete: Yeah. Right.
Jared: I think. So maybe we can go to Matthew two because this is the more, this is one of my favorite examples of this more blatant Midrashic way of interpreting a text. So Matthew 2:15 says, “then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night and went to Egypt. And remained there until the death of Herod.
This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet. Out of Egypt, I have called my son.”
Pete: There it is.
Jared: There it is, right there.
Pete: Because they're in Egypt fleeing, Herod, right? Because of the massacre.
Jared: They go down to Egypt, which in some ways feels like we only get this so that Matthew can quote this passage.
It doesn't really, I don't know. It doesn't serve a lot of other purposes, but Matthew just was like, “Oh, I found this one. Maybe there's some stuff we can work with you. We've got some more materials,” but then Hosea 11:1, it's very simple. It says, “when Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”
So, I mean, it's very short. When Israel was a child, which is a harking back to Exodus 4 and some other passages where Israel is God's son. “Israel was a child. I loved him. And out of Egypt, I called my son.” Obviously the reference to son is Israel. And this is, I think this is an important example because this is where I feel like if we talk about if the main question of the story of Jonah is Jonah gets swallowed by a whale and can a man survive in the belly of a fish for four or three days, you can ask that question and we get bogged down in the question.
But I feel like you miss the significance of the passage in this one where we tie Israel as God's Son, and Jesus comes onto the scene and is identified with this Israel. We are missing something.
Pete: And as the Son of God. It's really tempting not to put them together.
Jared: It's tying all these together, and it is so significant for the theology of Matthew.
And we miss it if we're just saying, like, see, it's predicted.
Pete: Yeah. So I want to say it's fulfilled. I mean, again, that fluid term fulfilled, it's not predicted. In large part because Hosea 11:1 is not speaking of the future. It's simply, it's an innocent, it's not even the point. It's just an innocent, you know, “when Israel was a child, I loved him and out of Egypt I called my son,” you know, back then out of Egypt, I got you and, and this is how you thank me.
You know, the more I called to them, the more they went from me, they kept sacrificing to the bales and offered incense to idols. It's like they're screwing 11, God says, but I can't turn my back on them.
Jared: What's so funny because Hosea is referencing the past.
Pete: Not the future.
Jared: And Matthew is saying it's referencing the future.
Pete: And I, I, I'm going to just suggest that Matthew's not an idiot. Fulfillment has nothing to do with whether it's predictive. And I think to me, this is the parade example. It's clearly not a prophetic text. It's referred to as being fulfilled in Jesus. So whatever fulfillment means, it doesn't mean predictive.
What does it mean? Well, as soon as he asked that question, you're in a nice adventure and a hermeneutical adventure of trying to understand why ancient people read texts the way that they did. And it's, it's a huge stumbling block again, for some of like a more conservative Protestant view of Christianity.
It's it's a big stumbling block because it's like what's fulfilled, but it's not predictive. Is Matthew wrong? No, Matthew's Jewish. He's a first century Jew and he's writing like this and this is what they did and he's tying these things together. And that would have been, I think, intriguing for Jewish readers.
Jared: It would have been, it would have been novel and creative and interesting to, it would actually incite people to go back to the text. It would motivate them to say, like, “oh, you know, that's an angle I hadn't seen before.”
Pete: It's useless for apologetics in our sense of the word, but it's useful for ancient inciting of the imagination and-
Jared: Sparks conversation and debate.
Pete: The deeper level, Hosea is boring. You dig down the deeper level, you see it in a certain way, all of a sudden it's talking about Jesus. Jesus fulfills it, but Hosea has nothing to do with Jesus.
Jared: And then it sparks the conversation in the community of “how is Jesus a continuation of our tradition?”
Pete: Yes.
Jared: And that is a very interesting conversation.
Pete: And in this sense, it's, I mean, you could say Jesus embodies Israel's story. Even from the earliest part of Israel's story from the Exodus. Right.
Jared: And that has, that has existential significance, right, that I think sometimes modern readers, if we have that more conservative Protestant bend towards apologetics of defending it, it feels flat.
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: Where, because the question is just, is it true?
Pete: It makes you very modern too, doesn't it? Very, like, bookish.
Jared: But I think, I think we just have to, if we want to get to that ancient context and how the ancients would have read texts or heard texts, they aren't interested in the question “is it true? We are obsessed with that question. It is, “how does this impact how we live as faithful members of the community?”
How do we connect our stories to our ancestors? Those are like real concrete questions that they're asking and wrestling with. And I think it would just do us well to maybe be less afraid of that question for our time.
Pete: Yeah, and less interested in imposing our epistemologies and our ways of thinking and proving things onto an ancient text.
Jared: But I think the only way to do that is to let go of-
Pete: Listen to our podcast?
Jared: It's, it's the only way to do it. You have to listen to our podcast. Maybe it's to, you have to let go of the idea that the Old Testament predicts Jesus.
Pete: Mm-hmm. And it better because that's, that's how we know-
Jared: We need the Old Testament to predict Jesus.
We have to let go of that need. Because otherwise we will have blinders on and it'll be very hard to see what the ancient writers were trying to do.
Pete: And as I never get tired of telling my students, the Old Testament doesn't predict Jesus, but Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. That's what the New Testament is doing.
A couple of, one of them is really quick. Actually, both of these are pretty quick, but the fourth one, Jared, they're like, it's Matthew 2:18. And this is Matthew citing Jeremiah 31:15. When Herod, this is the whole Herod thing, right? “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated. He sent and killed all the children in and around who were two years old or under. According to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah. That massacre of the innocents,” as it's called in church history, “fulfills what has been spoken through the prophet Isaiah.
“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation. Rachel, weeping for her children, she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” And that looks, I mean, what the heck is that talking about? This is Jeremiah 31, this is all about the Babylonian captivity. And it's about the people of Jerusalem being carted away and becoming no more.
And going into captivity. And Rachel, who's Rachel? Rachel is, you know, the wife of Jacob and the mother, you know, one of the mothers of Israel. Right? And, and, and she's weeping for her children. It's very poetic. It's actually a very moving line, quite frankly, you know, but he, what does Matthew do? He ties that to not the exile, of course, but he ties it to something else because he is, I'm going to put this the way I heard it put when I was in graduate school.
Matthew is exploiting the grammatical ambiguities of the text and lifting it up out of its original context and placing it in a totally different one. That is very offensive, I think, largely for modern readers. Not just evangelicals as a fundamentalist, for modern readers. We just don't read like that.
Well, that's too bad, right? If you want to understand the Bible in context, which we all want to do, you know, understanding how they interpret a text is important. You know, we talk about, evangelicals say, the grammatical historical method context, what do the words say, and what's the historical context, that's very important, it is.
But there's also a hermeneutical historical context of how people understood texts. And, the biblical writers, to impose upon them our categories, is not a high view of scripture. It's a low view of scripture.
Jared: Well, it disrespects how it functions.
Pete: Yeah. It needs to act the way we want it to act.
Jared: So, I mean, I think that's something to explore for just a minute, because I think that's helpful for other aspects of Bible reading. And that is to see, I mean, we see this all over the place. If you want to read Jewish writers of the time, we have a lot of these texts you can read where they are reading so closely.
And they are seeing these ambiguities in the text or grammatical inconsistencies, you might say. And they are getting incredibly creative about that. So, I mean, I think of, in Jonah, there's the dag and the daga.
In one verse, the fish is male. Yes. . And in another verse, the fish is female. And ancient Jewish writers had a field day with that. They had incredible interpretations of how God actually had to send a new female fish who was pregnant to make Jonah really uncomfortable because he was having too good a time in the real roomy, uh, you know, he was in a resort in the male fish and he was never gonna repent.
So, God had to send a pregnant female fish to really squeeze him in. None of that's in the text.
It's all from It's grammatical inconsistency,
Pete: Which they would see as God's invitation to get creative. And that's, that's like when Matthew is creative, it's like, and again, I've, I've heard well meaning Christians say this, like, “well, that's illogical. It would have convinced nobody.”
And I said, well, back then it would, it doesn't convince you, but that's not relevant. It's really meaningful for them back then. That's how they read texts. The church did it for, you know, almost 1500 years before the reformation and before Calvin said allegories are for the devil and squashed it.
You know, that people read texts on different levels because it was the Word of God. It has, it has depth and mystery. The truth is found the deeper you go. There's a surface level, a literal level, that's boring. The real stuff, how you make the Bible relevant for you, you have to dig deep in.
Jared: Yeah, there was an assumed truth, and then you really then got to go into the significance of it.
Pete: And that was important for them because, again, folks, they were trying to connect with God. That's what they were trying to do here. You know, and not like avoiding God, because they're not inerrantists. They were trying to connect with God. This is how, frankly, this is how Judaism and the church have done it for most of its history and for Christianity until relatively recently in our history, the past few hundred years.
Jared: All right. Well, let's, just for the sake of completion, let's look at this last one in Matthew chapter 2, also related to Herod dying. “An angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead.’”
So now we're after the Egypt trip, Herod's dead, and so we're gonna go back up. And it, uh, this is again quoting Exodus chapter 4, which again is just a couple of verses before, Uh, Israel is called God's son, so that's maybe important, but the Lord said to Moses in Midian, “go back to Egypt, for all those who were seeking your life are dead.”
This is another good example of, it's quite obvious if you just read the passage, the Lord said to Moses, “go back to Egypt for all those who were seeking your life are dead.” That's the context. And so this is not, you know, again, necessarily a prophetic-
Pete: The interesting thing here, there's no, as the Lord said, or as there's a softening, it's very soft.
And you get this in Matthew, you get it in Luke all over the place, but this is a different kind of tying. It's not claiming that this is prophetic. But, you know, read commentaries on Matthew or even just a good study Bible with notes. It’ll say, yeah, this is referring, this is tying this to the book of Exodus, to the story of Israel.
Jared: But I think it's, the reason, the reason I say it the way I did is exactly that reason of these are the ones that, when it's obvious, should tip you off to maybe there's something else going on so that whenever I am reading one that could be a, quote, prediction, I'm not putting it in that category because I already know this kind of thing is happening.
Pete: It should calibrate our expectations a little bit. Well, maybe this is all sort of one of the same general hermeneutic or approach to interpretation. And I want to suggest, yeah, that's exactly what it is.
And it opens these stories up in ways that we might not be used to, but I think it actually gets us more in touch with what these authors are trying to do.
Jared: All right. Well, hopefully we have not ruined the prediction passages, but maybe opened up a new way of being creative and in the reading of our Bible over this Christmas.
Maybe we'll say it that way.
Pete: Okay.
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Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you wanna support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just wanna give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.
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Outro: You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don't forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O'Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
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Pete: Everybody on today's episode, this is the last episode, episode, I'll do that again.
