Episode 334: Rony Kozman - The Weird Ways the NT Interprets the OT
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Rony Kozman about how the New Testament interprets the Hebrew Bible, and why the apostles’ approach to Scripture often looks very different from the historical-grammatical method many readers have been taught. They explore how Matthew creatively reads the story of Jesus alongside Israel’s story, how Paul rereads Scripture in light of his encounter with Christ, and how New Testament authors draw on the interpretive traditions of their Second Temple Jewish context. Together, they invite listeners to embrace the Bible’s historical complexity, recognize the creativity at work in its interpretation, and reconsider what it means to read Scripture faithfully in light of the ways the biblical authors themselves read their sacred texts.
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Pete: On today's episode, we're talking about weird ways the New Testament interprets the Old Testament with Rony Kozman.
Jared: Rony Kozman is an assistant professor at Samford University and has done his own share of podcasting as a co-host of the Two Testaments podcast.
Pete: And I have to say, Jared, this topic is very near and dear to my heart.
Investigating this deeply for the first time in my doctoral work changed everything in terms of how I look at the Bible. So for me, it's a fascinating topic.
Jared: It’s eye-opening for sure the deeper you dive in.
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: So let's get into it.
Rony: I think often when Matthew talks about, "This was said in order to fulfill what the prophet said," it's often in the sense of the story of Israel is kind of filling up the meaning, the symbolism, the significance of Israel's story in his life.
It's this kind of creative engagement with Israel's scriptures to show the brimming full meaning of Israel's scriptures in the life of Jesus and the church.
Jared: Rony, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.
Rony: Hey. Thanks for having me on.
Jared: Absolutely. We're gonna do some deep dive into, um, something really interesting that I think a lot of people maybe haven't thought about that much, and that is how does the New Testament interpret the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, and what can we learn from that in terms of how we read our Bible?
So when most people today talk about interpreting the Bible, what do they mean? So let's start with a baseline of today, what do people mean by interpreting the Bible?
Rony: Yeah. I think people can mean all kinds of different things. So some people don't mean anything by interpreting or reading the Bible, right?
Jared: That's rude. That is rude, Rony.
Rony: I mean, no, some people will say, "I don't want to hear your interpretation," right?
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Rony: I just want to hear what the Bible has to say. Right? Um, you know, let's let the Bible speak for itself. That's, that's a very common, I think, way of thinking about the Bible, is that, um, the Bible discloses its meaning to us kind of in an automatic way, and all you have to do is read it and it'll be self-evident what it says, right?
And so sometimes that idea can come out as, like, the Bible will judge all the interpretations, if that makes sense. As though there's no interpretation of the Bible that you're using to adjudicate other interpretations. So that's one. Um, some people, you know, when they're talking about interpreting the Bible, and I don't know about your own kind of, like, church context or upbringings or backgrounds, but when I was in church communities that I've been in, you sometimes go around a circle, you read a passage, and then, you know, people talk about what the Bible means to me, right?
So there's at least an understanding there that we're actually trying to interpret the Bible. Um, but we might have all kinds of different ways of reading and interpreting the Bible.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: And it becomes a very personalized kind of, you know, what it means for my life, or something like that.
Pete: Mm-hmm. The people you just described, the second category, do you think they'd be saying, "We're just trying to interpret the Bible," or are they saying, "We're just trying to understand it, what it's actually saying"?
Rony: Yeah, I don't know. I think you probably get a mix of both.
Uh-huh. I think some people think they're just, they might fit that first category also.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Um, but I think there will be other people who will think they are interpreting, and they might go back and forth, and, you know, sometimes they're agreeing or disagreeing. But often, it has to do with this personal connection-
Pete: Mm-hmm
Rony: right, that the Bible is kind of saying something directly to me or something like that.
Pete: Right. Mm-hmm.
Rony: Um, so maybe that's not really... It's possible they don't think of it as an interpretation but as kind of God saying something specifically to me
Pete: Mm-hmm
Rony: in my situation or something like that.
Jared: Well, let's talk about this third, where I think you're gonna go, is this third option for what we mean by interpreting.
Rony: Yeah, so this third way, right, is what, people call the historical grammatical approach, right? Or sometimes you hear people say historical grammatical exegesis.
We got some big words there, right? So we're gonna interpret the text in its kind of historical context according to the grammatical rules, right, that the author is using and playing by, and then exegesis, right, which means, like, interpreting. We're getting the meaning out of the text. When we follow these kind of historical rules. And I think, the main idea here is that while there aren't usually, I'm obviously I'm gonna stereotype a little bit, but there aren't usually multiple meanings, right? Typically, this approach says there's one single historical grammatical meaning, and that meaning is the meaning intended by the author.
There's kind of an original authorial meaning or intent. It's the meaning that, like, is governed by the rules or grammars of the text and its ancient cultural context, and it's the m- one meaning that the audience would have understood.
Jared: So if someone were to, like, go back to an older podcast that we had, and Pete has a certain phrase that he uses, and we said, "What did he mean by that?"
You're gonna, look at the context clues around what did he say right before that? What did he say right after that? Yeah. What was going on at the time if it's, like, a political statement or so? It's like, what was happening in the political moment of that time? And we're gonna use all of those context clues to say, "This is probably what he meant."
And that's kind of that grammatical, historical, author intent, authorial intent way of talking about what something means. Is that fair as an analogy?
Rony: For sure. Yeah.
Jared: Okay.
Rony: Yeah, that's for sure. And now look, I think that in the academy too, this is kind of the approach that reigns really.
I mean, sure, you, we have, you know, people who are interested in history of the interpretation of the text and how the text has been used. But if I'm going to submit a journal article to the Journal of Biblical Literature or to the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, you know, it's probably the meat and bones of that article is going to be operating in this kind of way of reading the text.
Pete: I mean, there's one analogy, like Jared just said, about me in the present time and interpretation. Are there barriers to this historical grammatical way of looking at things when we're dealing with such deeply ancient texts that we simply cannot put ourselves into that place?
Rony: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there are all kinds of cultural barriers, for sure.
We are not ancient Israelites, we're not ancient Near Eastern people, we're not ancient kind of, you know, ancient people from the Greek or Roman world. But, I think what this approach is doing is it's trying to get there, right? Mm-hmm. It's trying to get rid of our contemporary assumptions, our Western kind of contemporary values and all that, the ways we load a particular term, like righteousness or whatever that is.
We want to kind of disrupt that and replace it with kind of the ancient assumptions and ways of thinking. So that's really what this approach is getting at, right? We wanna compare Genesis 1 with other ancient Near Eastern creation texts, like the Babylonian or Egyptian texts. We wanna think about what, uh, a word means in its ancient context, how that author liked to use that word, or how a grammatical phrase and how the words relate to one another and the meaning that you get from paying attention to that.
So, I think that's kinda the rules by which this way of interpretation goes. And I, have sympathies. I have major sympathies to this way- of reading the text 'cause, as much as we can, I want to try to understand kind of, let's say, Paul, on his terms as much as I can because I, I don't...
I suppose I do think that there is something beyond simply power and desire when we read texts.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Not that those things don't come into play, but that there is something there that we're trying to grasp ahold of. So I think there's something that, there is something that commends itself about this reading, for sure.
Jared: Yeah, and what we wanted to bring you on to talk about is, is actually, you know, that's kind of the water we swim in. It is kind of how we think about interpreting texts and the Bible. But then when we apply that to the New Testament, we come out with some interesting things. And it doesn't, the Bible itself in the New Testament doesn't seem to always play by those rules.
So let's dive right in and talk about some of these examples that maybe are head-scratchers if we're thinking, well, the right way to interpret a text is with all these rules and grammatical, historical, and context and authorial intent, and that seems to be the right way to read a text. And then we say, "But what's the New Testament doing?"
So could you bring out some of those examples and show us how they're interpreting texts?
Rony: Yeah, and I should say also that in order to do this and show the weird ways in which the New Testament authors don't operate by this kind of historical grammatical approach, I'm going to have to use a historical grammatical approach.
Pete: Exactly, yeah. Well, maybe as you do this, you can flesh that out a little because that's a really interesting conundrum there, but I agree with you.
Rony: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so maybe, like, one example might be to think about how Matthew, the Gospel of Matthew, reads the story of Jesus in light of the story of the Exodus, you know?
And he'll kind of go back and forth between how God rescued Israel out of Egypt, and the different figures and events and elements of that story correspond to different elements in Jesus's telling the story of Jesus, so we've got, Herod, right, in the opening chapters of Matthew, who's killing the babies, and he's like Pharaoh, who's killing the babies in the Book of Exodus.
We've got Jesus as a Moses-like baby, right, who escapes from the Pharaoh-like murder. We've got Jesus as not only a Moses-like figure who escapes, he's also, like, presented like he's Israel, the people, right? In that he's described in the opening chapters as God's son, right?
Matthew's gonna quote from Hosea chapter 11, "Out of Egypt I called my son," and apply that to Jesus.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: So Jesus is going to then go into, um... He comes, we can talk a little bit about this, what does it mean that he comes out of Egypt in the opening chapters of Matthew? I think that's kind of weird, too, what he does there.
Um, but he's going to come through the water in the baptism, as many New Testament scholars have pointed out, kinda like Jesus... It's kinda like Israel comes through the Red Sea, and then he's gonna go into the wilderness like Israel does. He's going to be tested in the wilderness like Israel is tested in the wilderness.
Um, and then he's going to come to the mountain and we get the Sermon on the Mount, which is presenting Jesus as a Moses-like figure who gives this interpretation of the law of Moses. So what Matthew's doing is he's taking the story of the Exodus, and I think of Matthew as kind of like a painter, and he's got his palette, and he's got these Old Testament figures, events, and stories, and language, and he's using these as the colors that he's using to kind of paint the story of Jesus.
Richard Hayes, you know, who's done phenomenal work on this stuff, but Richard Hayes calls this figural exegesis, where you are reading two events or two passages or two stories in light of one another, and you kinda go back and forth. So you go to the Exodus, you go to the story of Jesus, and you go back and forth, and they both kind of mutually illuminate one another.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Now, one of the things I think that's really interesting about this is... Well, how many Moseses are there in the Book of Matthew? Like, you know, we might think we go to Exodus and we could see, oh, so Jesus is the Moses figure. But Joseph, Jesus' father in the opening chapters, is also likened to Moses when the angel comes and tells him, "Hey, the people who are after your life are now dead.
You can now return back to Egypt." So there's no problem for, you know, for Matthew to have a kind of multiplicity of meanings, if that makes sense.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: You can also think about this, like how many exoduses are there in the New Testament? We definitely have, "Out of Egypt I called my son," as Jesus is entering into Egypt, which is weird.
Why does he say it when he's going into Egypt-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Rony: and not when he's coming out of Egypt? So the placement of that fulfillment quotation is odd. Um, but it could be that Matthew is thinking of, well, he's just painted Herod as a Pharaoh-like figure, and so it may very well be that Matthew is operating in a really kind of rhetorically charged kind of critique of Herod, depicting the land of Judea or Israel as far bad as Egypt, right? And so Jesus has to come out of that Egypt and has to go to, you know, the geographic Egypt to get out of that other Egypt, and then he's gonna come out of that Egypt also. Mm-hmm. So maybe we have...
I don't know, maybe we have multiple exoduses there. And then we also have, of course, the exodus, um, you know, the Last Supper during the Passover, the gospel authors like to present Jesus's death or departure, like the Transfiguration in Luke will say, as the future exodus in Jesus' death or departure from the earth and resurrection kind of thing.
Jared: Well, maybe can we focus on that, specifically that Hosea 11, "Out of Egypt I have called my son," because I would have grown up in a tradition that was pretty intent on Jesus is predicted in the Old Testament and every time it says it was written, that's a fulfillment in some ways that Jesus was predicted in the Old Testament.
Pete: 'Cause Hosea meant that.
Jared: Yeah, and he meant that. Yeah exactly. That when we're talking about what the authors meant and authorial intent, they would say, no, Hosea had a vision of Jesus when he's writing Hosea 11, and it came true when Jesus came out of Egypt. And what I hear you saying is that doesn't seem to be, according to these rules of a historical grammatical approach.
It seems that Hosea 11 is not talking about Jesus. Um, it seems pretty obvious, I mean, I don't wanna spoil it, but it's pretty obvious that it's talking about Israel in retrospect. And so, can you just kind of unpack based on what we said at the beginning and why this passage doesn't fit what we would expect it to, to fit?
Rony: Sure. Like you said, we often read the Old Testament as though it's giving these specific predictive prophecies about the coming of Jesus and say, "Oh, you see the New Testament authors, they're just reading these predictions and finding them fulfilled in Jesus." I think sometimes you do get that, right?
So I think with, you know, the one example is, when Herod is going to find where the birth of the Messiah is going to be, and then he goes to the scribes, and the scribes, I think they, what they pull from-
Pete: Micah
Rony: Is it from Micah or from Malachi?
Pete: Yeah, one of the M's. Micah? That's right. Now, I'm confused. Yeah. One of the M prophets.
Rony: Yeah. Right. Yeah, that specifies it's gonna be from Bethlehem, right? Uh, so that's one way that Matthew does see this kind of, a future prediction of where the Messiah will be born. But the Hosea 11 one, I think often when Matthew talks about this was said in order to fulfill what the prophet said, it's often in the sense of the story of Israel is kind of filling up the meaning, the symbolism, the significance of Israel's story in his life.
I think that's often, in fact, more often, how the New Testament authors will use and read the Old Testament. It's this kind of creative engagement with Israel's scriptures to show the brimming full meaning of Israel's scriptures in the life of Jesus and the church or something like that.
Pete: Well, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. I just wanna sort of summarize a little bit here. Would it be fair to say that Matthew is not tremendously interested in a grammatical, historical reading of the text? He's doing something different and more creative.
You know, some might quote Midrash or something like that. But he's being very creative. He's not really in line with this notion of grammatical, historical interpretation to get at the meaning of texts, and there seems to be a rather significant tension then between what Matthew is doing and what they've been taught by pastors or by teachers about what good biblical, really a legacy of the Reformation, about what really good interpretation is.
Mm-hmm. And that seems to cause some tensions, I think, and it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around that.
Rony: Yeah, I think that it definitely causes problems for that. Because we often want to say that if you get the right historical, grammatical reading of the Old Testament passage, then you're going to see exactly what the apostles are doing, right?
Pete: Yes.
Rony: I think that's kind of the default assumption. And, my kind of sense is that actually I think the New Testament authors are very creative in how they read Old Testament passage, and that's what ancient authors often did. They were creative readers of these texts. Um, however, let me push back a little bit.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Which is to say, I do wonder if Matthew, sometimes I wanna say, yeah, the ancient author, Matthew or Paul, is not doing historical, grammatical exegesis, but then they do actually pick up on something in the text that they're latching onto-
Jared: Right ...
Rony: that gives them some kind of, like, reason by which they go in the way they do.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: So it's not entirely, like, totally unmoored. Yeah. There's something in the text that they grab on, that other Jewish authors do, do as well, right? Mm-hmm. So if you go to Hosea 11, what you'll see, and again, I don't know if Matthew's doing this, I'm kind of trying to reconstruct what some of the hermeneutical kind of moves might be.
Again, I'm totally happy with him just doing a kind of creative thing because that's what ancient interpreters did. But if in Hosea 11 you have this, "Out of Egypt I called my son," in 11 verse 1, and then he, the movement in chapter 11 becomes, "And then they will return to Egypt." Right? So they came out of Egypt, then they will return back to Egypt.
And then if you keep reading down in Hosea 11, you then get a kind of new exodus of the people coming out of Egypt again.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: So it might be that Matthew is discerning some kind of literary pattern in Hosea chapter 11. Um, again, maybe I'm getting too creative in my reading of Matthew.
But there is some, that kind of pattern there in Hosea 11, and it might be that he then sees this kind of double exodus playing out in Jesus's life as well. He comes out of Egypt from, you know, from Pharaoh, when he escapes Pharaoh, goes into Egypt, and then he comes out of Egypt in a geographical sense.
Mm-hmm.
Pete: Well, I mean, the way I've heard it expressed is it's not so much, when you think of the Old Testament, Hebrew Bible, New Testament, it's not this thing in the Old Testament is what we see in the New Testament.
Rony: Sure.
Pete: More like it's like that, right? Yeah. So, they're drawing these analogies. But wouldn't, isn't that, that very process something beyond a grammatical, historical approach to the text.
Looking for patterns, for example. Like, why would we look for patterns? And by the way, I think Matthew has tons of patterns. I think it's fantastic.
Rony: Sure, yeah.
Pete: It's great reading. You know, he's a very creative theologian. But we have these patterns, but these patterns are exactly the point, you know?
These are not patterns that ancient authors might have been thinking about, but, you know, later writers do, motivated by Jesus as they are. And, the result is, I think, beautiful literature, frankly. It's really good. I keep feeling that tension, though, and then teaching college students who were raised in a certain way of thinking about the Bible, and . . .
Rony: Sure, sure.
Pete: how to, we'll get into this later maybe, but just how to make peace with that for some at least, you know?
Rony: Right. I agree with you. I think that we need to let students see that they read, that the apostles do read scripture in a way that's different than how we are trying to read it in a historical, grammatical way.
I think that's right.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: But then at the same time sensitizing them to the kinds of patterns that ancient authors were kind of looking for-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Rony: as well, and finding or discovering, and putting together, you know, in ways that we might not. So in this case, right, why would Matthew identify Jesus as Israel, right?
We're going from an individual, right, to a kind of corporate identity, right? And so Matthew's able to slide very easily between that. Uh, maybe it has to do with this kind of ancient notion that the Messiah or the king in one sense embodies or represents the people, right? So, that's possible. Um, but Matthew can slide no problem also between Jesus as a Moses-like figure, right? As kind of the leader, the interpreter of the Torah, and Jesus as the people of Israel. And, like we said, he can reconfigure those identifications as well.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Right? So when, when Jesus is in the wilderness in Matthew, just like, Israel is in the wilderness and disobeys, well, now Matthew's going to configure Jesus as the obedient son, right?
That's repeatedly-
Pete: Right ...
Rony: the question. "If you are the Son of God," right, and then you get these tests. So, Matthew is not simply following exactly, right, the, in terms of the correspondences between the Exodus and what he sees in the life of Jesus. He can also kind of recast and reconfigure for his own theological purposes.
Pete: I mean, I'm playing a little bit with fire here maybe, but, um, if we did that sort of thing today-
Rony: Mm-hmm ...
Pete: we do all the time, people just don't know it. But if we did that sort of thing today, people might accuse us of eisegesis-
Rony: Mm-hmm ...
Pete: reading into the text. And, so let me put that to you. I mean, just in your opinion, how do you handle that issue? To what extent is Matthew not exegeting anything, but eisegeting, starting with his answer, which is Jesus, and going back and reading the tradition in a fresh way, which is almost the definition of eisegesis, which is bad. It's wrong. That's the worst thing you can do if you're an American Evangelical is eisegesis, and maybe we see that sort of thing in the Bible.
Rony: Sure, sure. No, I think that's right, and I think this is, you know, Hayes' insight too, in his... You know, he's written a lot on this kind of thing. But, the title of one of his books is Reading Backwards.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Right? So this idea that, you know, the apostles, they have this, like, conviction, this encounter with Jesus or with the resurrected Christ, and then they're now going to go back, right, in light of the Christ event to read Israel's scriptures anew. Kind of like what you see on the Emmaus road at the end of Luke. Jesus is now going to show them all the things in the law of the prophets, right, and how they kind of relate to him or they're about him. So I think there is this... Well, you could think of the Apostle Paul too as this kind of example, right? Who is an educated Pharisee, right? He has a particular mode of interpreting the scriptural text according to particular Jewish traditions, and then he's going to, even with all those ways of interpreting text, prior to his encounter with Christ, he's not, like, reading Israel's scriptures and be like, "Oh yeah, yeah, you guys are right. Jesus must be the Messiah."
Jared: Mm-hmm. Let's take an example from Paul. And I don't know which one you wanna talk about, but I immediately think Galatians with the seed and the kind of the collective noun versus the-
Rony: Sure, sure.
Jared: Yeah ... it does seem very much like Paul is sometimes taking his experience with the risen Christ and then reinterpreting and trying to figure out how does this all fit in light of this experience that I've had?
Rony: Yeah, it's definitely retrospective reading that Paul is now engaged in, right? He now reads, you know, his ancestral scriptures and texts in light of his encounter with Christ. Well, yeah, I think Galatians is a great example with the seed language.
That the seed is, is singular, and so therefore it must be Christ. But then he can also talk about the Christ believers as also being seed insofar as they participate in Christ. Um, so that's interesting. But actually, you know, one thing that I really find really interesting is the Colossian hymn and how that interprets, uh, Genesis 1, which is I think really creative, right?
So if we can go there, that might be-
Pete: Yeah, go ahead.
Rony: an interesting place. So when we're reading Genesis 1, like historically, grammatically, right? We go like, in the beginning, right, we got this phrase, we've got in, you know, humans made in the image of God, right?
So we've got these like big phrases, and so with in the beginning, you have like scholars even are puzzling over what is this like grammatical construction, right? And does it mean in the absolute beginning? And, you know, most grammarians today, I think, would say, no, it doesn't mean that.
It probably means something more like, in the beginning of God, of when God was creating the heavens and the Earth, and then you get a parenthetical remark, the Earth was formless and void, and darkness was hovering over the deep. Or, you know, another kind of grammatical possibility is something like, in a beginning, God, or, in a beginning when God ordered the world, and then you get a parenthetical, and that could open the possibility of multiple beginnings or multiple ratios.
So that's kind of like, you know, historical, grammatical, trying to nerd out on this like the syntax of this verse-like phrase. We also have, you know, the language, humans made in the image of God. Right? So you talk to even lots of Old Testament scholars, right? You talk to them, right?
Who are doing great work trying to situate the Old Testament in this ancient Eastern context, and what does it mean that humans are made in the image of God? Uh, well, humans are the images of God, right? Is the language that many people will say. Humans are the image of God, and well, what is an image, right?
In the ancient world, in the ancient Near East, well, an image, maybe it's an idol. So God has made humans as his idols who he's placed in his cosmic temple, or an image is a king. Royal figures are described as images of the deity. So this is a democratization of this concept in the Hebrew Bible, that all humans are these royal figures.
So something like that. Those are a couple of options.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: But when you get to Colossians, I think you get this really kind of fantastic, bizarre, weird, strange way of interpreting Genesis 1. So you get, right, this explosive hymn, He is the image of the invisible God. The firstborn over all creation.
You get this language, "He is the beginning". Uh, he is the, you know, the head of the body, right? He is the creator of all authorities and rulers and powers, right? So we get all this kind of really big language, and what this hymn does is it's a reflection on the opening language of Genesis.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Rony: But it's kind of like the hymn almost-- whoever authored the hymn went to a lexicon and looked up the phrase in the beginning and maybe started with the preposition in. Okay, what the heck does in mean in Greek? You know, and you go to the lexicon, and you're like, "Oh, in, if I go to my BDAG, in can mean inside. In can mean with. In can mean beside. In can sometimes mean on, or in can sometimes mean towards or for." So you got all these meanings of the preposition in. And then you've got the phrase like arche in Greek, the beginning, right? And so you open the lexicon again, and you go there.
And you say, "Oh, well, arche can mean beginning. It can mean first. It can mean head. It can mean ruler. Or powers." And so now if I'm operating in my historical grammatical mode, I gotta pick one of them. I can't have all of them. What kind of, like, historical grammatical reading is that?
But I think the hymn actually says, well he is the beginning. Christ is that arche in Genesis 1:1 through whom all things were made. So it instrumentalizes Christ as the means through which God creates the world. Uh, he was, you know, in other... Like in John 1, you have the same thing.
In the beginning was the Word, was the Logos. So he's there in the beginning. All things are made through him. You see that play on the preposition through him and for him. Uh, he is the head of the body. There's playing on that word for beginning, you know, firstborn. All those things are, I think, things that are explosive ways of basically saying all these different meanings find their truest kind of, you know, fulfillment or fullness in Christ.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: So is that historical grammatical? Probably not. But it's really interesting and fascinating.
Pete: Yeah. Well, you know, when we're talking like this, I think it's important for our listeners and viewers to understand something, that we're not dissing the Bible, you know?
We're trying to understand how it's functioning and what it's doing. And one of these things, and you've alluded to it already, is the context of the New Testament and the Jewish and Greco-Roman context and what it meant to interpret text at that time. And I've always found it a pleasant irony that a grammatical, historical understanding, not just of the text, but of the hermeneutic of the New Testament writers.
Putting that in its context changes a lot in how we think about things. So could you riff on that a little bit? The Second Temple Jewish hermeneutical interpretive context, and how that might influence the New Testament writers.
Rony: Sure, sure. Like, can I... Let me come back to one thing, Pete, if I may.
Pete: Sure.
Rony: Which is that, you know, when we were talking about the historical grammatical meaning of what it means to be made in the image of God, right?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Um, if you're, like, a Hebrew Bible person, humans are the image of God. Well, for Paul, like, and the point I really wanna draw out here is Christ is the image of God.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Right? Humans may bear the stamp of the image of God.
Pete: Right.
Rony: But they are not the image of God, right? Paul's gonna say later in Colossians that humans are renewed in knowledge according to the image.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: So the image is then, this brings us to the Jewish background, too, right?
Is that for Philo, when he is talking about the language of beginning or image, he actually can say those two things are the same thing. So the arche is the icon, is the image.
Pete: Hmm.
Rony: And all that is the logos or the wisdom of God.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: And so this hymn in Colossians 1 is actually a kind of, we can think of it as a Christianized version-
Pete: Yeah
Rony: of a Jewish reflection on wisdom.
Pete: Yeah.
Rony: Uh, or logos kind of theology, but it's going to find its fulfillment in Christ, right? He is the logos, or the wisdom, who is the firstborn. Philo describes wisdom as the firstborn, too. Philo describes wisdom as that which kind of reconciles all things, right?
So what's fascinating is that the New Testament authors, like you said, Pete, they are participating in a kind of Jewish hermeneutical matrix.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: So they have very similar assumptions. They bring together similar passages from Scripture when they make interpretations. They make very similar interpretive moves, but then of course, just as Jewish authors disagree with themselves in the first century, right?
Paul, as a Jew, in light of his encounter with Christ, he can also disagree and turn his tradition in a particular way also- in service of the gospel that he proclaims, right?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
What you just described with Colossians, it's fascinating to me. It's just absolutely fascinating to watch these minds think through the implications of their tradition for their context, which is a Jesus context. Mm-hmm. And they're thinking through it. And then on top, the layer on top of that, the way in which they reflect is part of the Jewish context itself.
So, there's not a lot that they're making up from scratch. They're applying a mindset almost, and that really complicates matters, I think, you know, for everyday innocent readers of the Bible who've been told, "Just get the meaning from the text, and that's all you have to do."
Jared: Did we, as a field, like biblical scholarship, grew a lot in their knowledge of this stuff with the Dead Sea Scrolls, where it's like there isn't a lot to go on in terms of what this context is. And so in some ways if it's, we're like, "Well, the grammatical historical is the way we do it," then we're trying to kinda shoehorn that.
I think that gets harder when we now have these, like, loads upon loads of manuscripts from around that time and you start kind of reading more of like, "Oh, these look similar." Mm-hmm. "They're doing similar kinds of things to what our New Testament is doing."
Pete: Right.
Jared: Like, there, like you said, there's a hermeneutical context, meaning there is a way of reading texts that are for a particular period, and that's, it seems like the New Testament fits right in.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Jared: And I think that could be unsettling for people who are used to this way of thinking. Even though we notice these peculiarities, we're apt to say, "Well, the New Testament authors are inspired, so they can do that." Paul can make this argument about seed being collective, and now seed is actually, you know, an individual and that's how we know, because Paul's got this insight. He's, like, inspired and all of that. And so I think it's unsettling for people to actually, it's like, "Oh no, actually, there's other texts that kind of pull similar moves."
Pete: If there's anything that's not inspired, it's his hermeneutical approach to texts in a sense, you know, I mean, that's a bit of an overstatement, though.
Jared: But meaning, in terms of, like, sort of having no context, kind of reading from nowhere. Right. It's like no, we see in these new Second Temple period texts that this is kind of how reading texts work.
At least religious texts of importance.
Rony: Yeah, yeah. No, that's right. I mean, I think, you know, part of what this pushes back against as well is that the New Testament authors are not encountering scriptural text kind of de novo, as though they're encountering it for the first time and as though it's purely naked, so to speak.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Rony: So when they read Genesis or any other text, they're reading it through the lens of a kind of like, Pete, you used the language of encyclopedia, right? They kind of have, like, a cultural encyclopedia . . .
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: of traditions. They have a way of understanding Adam. They have a way of understanding Exodus traditions.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Rony: And so, that's not to say that Ancient Jewish or Christian authors couldn't distinguish scriptural text from tradition. Like, we have examples where authors do this. Like you have Pesherim, right?
Where you get, like, the scriptural text, and then you get its interpretation. So it's not that ancient authors had no way to distinguish scriptural texts from interpretive traditions. But when they're thinking about Adam or Israel, they're just thinking through an interpretive tradition.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Rony: And so when they think about Adam and associating him with glory, right? We don't really see glory in Genesis 1. We don't see that language, but there's a whole tradition of glory surrounding Adam or something like that.
Jared: Well, we do that now. I can't help it, but when I picture Adam and Eve, I picture very white middle Age- like not, not middle-aged, like from the Middle Ages. Because there's a tradition I've inherited. Like, I've seen so many paintings of Adam and Eve in a particular way that whenever I'm reading the text, that's the image that pops into my head, because that's what I've inherited in terms of how I see that.
Well, before we run out of time here, I think it's important to kind of try to put some of the pieces back in the box here. So what does it mean for us today, as we're reading our Bible, that we notice the New Testament authors aren't interpreting their Bible the same way that maybe we're interpreting ours?
What does that mean for us, and what do we do with it as we read our Bibles moving forward here?
Pete: Besides getting therapy. What do we do about that? Or, include that if you want to.
Jared: Yeah, right. Why are you taking that off the table?
Pete: What's wrong with that?
Jared: Geez.
Rony: Sure, yeah, yeah.
Look, I think also what the New Testament authors are doing, I'm not suggesting it's the only way to read the Old Testament. So I think we can and should read the Old Testament in its ancient Near Eastern context. I'm very happy to have multiple meanings or ways of reading scripture, multiple layers of meaning.
But I do think that what the New Testament authors do is they do invite us into a way of reading scripture. And again, I'm gonna invoke his name again because I think he's been so influential in kind of this area of scholarship. Like, Richard Hayes will talk about a gospel-shaped kind of hermeneutic.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Rony: Is that we, you know, especially, like, for Christians or for the church, is that in addition to hearing, let's say, what Genesis has to say for us on its terms, is also thinking about additional meanings. Because I mean, as a Christian, I think the text is scripture, right? And so, there’s an inspiration, right?
And that means that God can intend meanings beyond a single meaning. And so, you know, theologically speaking, I'm very happy to have multiple meanings, as, like, later church fathers will do this, right? They'll have multiple senses of scripture. Um, and so I think the apostles are kind of, they invite us into learning to read scripture in this way also in light of the resurrection of Jesus.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, that's a good way to end this, and I think that's a good thing for people to remember as well. And I'm hoping that if anything, our listeners will appreciate the beautiful historical complexity of this text. And it just can't be boiled down to a bumper sticker of how to handle it.
The text deserves more of our adult attention than that, so.
Rony: Yeah. Maybe also that, like, you know, you could think that people who are in the job of teaching text, especially in formative context, for Christian faith or for other traditions, is that creativity's not a bad thing.
Pete: Right.
Jared: Yeah, that's a good takeaway, for sure.
Pete: Right. Yeah. And, the Bible itself demonstrates that creativity and maybe we can engage that text in a creative way, too, for our context.
Rony: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Jared: Well, thanks Rony, for coming on and sharing with us.
Jared: So every time we do an episode like this one, we hear from our listeners.
Believe it or not, we read every one of those messages, and something we've noticed is that so many of you are saying the same things and asking the same questions.
Pete: Which is honestly what the society is for. We are realizing that more and more people are asking the same questions and wanting to have the same conversations.
Jared: So come join the community and the conversation. Unlike the podcast, it's not just Pete and Jared talking at you, or a class, although you'll find those there, too. It's people like you talking to each other about the stuff that we talk about on the show.
Pete: So find your people in the Society of Normal People.
The link is in the show notes, or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Jared: So I will introduce you to the podcast, and then we'll jump right in. Sound good?
Rony: Sounds good.
Jared: All right. Joel, we set? All right. Excellent. Sydney, we set? Marsha, we set? Just kidding. There are not that many people in here. All right, here we go.
Pete: Legal team, are you set?
Jared: Exactly.
Pete: Yeah. Hold on a second.
Is that thunder? Yeah, we're hearing thunder.
Rony: Oh, are you?
Jared: Wow.
Pete: Wow. That's okay. We can... We're not afraid.
Jared: It's either thunder or someone rolling a trash can.
Pete: Is it really? Is it supposed to rain? Oh, yeah. We have a thunderstorm coming. That's all right. We're fine. You know what? We'll just work that in. It's God agreeing with us from on high.
That, that's all it is.
