\n<\/p>\n
Jesus certainly had an interesting way of handling his Bible in debates with the religious leaders of his day.<\/p>\n
One of these is found in John 10:34-36.<\/p>\n
Jesus is in the temple and he is getting grilled by \u201cthe Jews\u201d\u2013John\u2019s less than delicate way of referring to the religious elite who opposed Jesus, which obscures that Jesus was a Jew, too. Anyway, his\u00a0opponents\u00a0are challenging him to get stop being so coy and just tell them plainly whether he is the messiah. Of course, what they mean by \u201cmessiah\u201d\u2013a military holy man to liberate the Jews from Roman control\u2013is being redefined by the Gospel writers around Jesus, but now I\u2019m really getting off the point.<\/p>\n
Jesus responds that, if they believed, they\u00a0wouldn\u2019t\u00a0need to ask the question. Typical Jesus.\u00a0He doesn\u2019t take the bait and try to justify himself. He just tells them that they\u2019ll never understand the answer unless they commit first.<\/p>\n
Jesus\u00a0concludes with a comment that I can\u2019t imagine is\u00a0designed\u00a0to do anything other than stick it to the man and pick a fight right then and there: \u201cThe Father and I are one\u201d\u2013one of John\u2019s expressions of Jesus\u2019 unique intimacy with God<\/p>\n
His audience took this as blasphemy, a claim by Jesus to be God, and so they got ready to do the proper thing, according to the Old Testament<\/a>, and stone Jesus into oblivion.<\/p>\n Jesus defends himself by quoting the first few words of Psalm 82:6, and with that we finally get to the point of this post.<\/p>\n Verse 6 begins, \u201cYou are gods,\u201d and Jesus clearly takes \u201cyou\u201d to be the Israelites, those \u201cto whom the word of God came\u201d (vv. 34-35). So, Jesus reasons, if Israel can be called \u201cgods\u201d in Psalm 82, and \u201cthe scripture cannot be annulled\u201d (v. 35), they shouldn\u2019t have any problem with Jesus claiming to be one with God.<\/p>\n His audience didn\u2019t buy the argument and tried arresting Jesus, but Jesus \u201cescaped from their hands.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s interesting here is that Jesus says, \u201cthe scripture cannot be annulled,\u201d but he seems to bend the particular scripture in question, Psalm 82, beyond its breaking point.<\/p>\n Seminarians and other Bible students are taught to respect the context of a passage to make sure you\u2019re not reading something into the text that\u2019s not there. If you look at Psalm 82, it becomes immediately clear that what Jesus says it means isn\u2019t what the psalmist Asaph meant.<\/p>\n The entire psalm is set in the heavenly \u201cdivine council,\u201d sort of a\u00a0heavenly\u00a0board of directors with Yahweh as CEO, COO, and any other title like that with a C in front of it. (A better-known example of this divine council is the first two chapters of the book of Job.)<\/p>\n Apparently, there is a problem with the rulers of the earth, the kings of the nations (see v. 8). They rule unjustly, show partiality to the wicked, ignore the poor and needy\u2013their actions are so bad that \u201call the foundations of the earth are shaken.\u201d The members of the divine council\u2013the lesser gods (maybe angelic beings) of Yahweh\u2019s court\u2013are to take this message to the rulers.<\/p>\n I say \u201cYou are gods, <\/em><\/p>\n sons of the Most High, all of you; <\/em><\/p>\n nevertheless, you shall die like mortals <\/em><\/p>\n and fall like any prince<\/em>\u201d (vv. 6-7).<\/p>\n The \u201cyou\u201d refers to these rulers of the nations<\/strong>, who are \u201csons\u201d of God, but God will hold them accountable for their actions and so die as mere princes.<\/p>\n Ancient kings were thought to have a pipeline to the gods that others didn\u2019t. \u201cSon of god x\u2026\u201d was a way of describing that. Israel had the same ideology, as Psalm 2 makes clear enough: at the king\u2019s coronation, he is \u201cbegotten\u201d of God and \u201cbecomes\u201d God\u2019s \u201cson.\u201d<\/p>\n Anyway, in Psalm 82, \u201cyou are gods\u201d is not a prooftext that Israel was \u201cdivine\u201d but a nod to ancient royal ideology, and what Israel\u2019s God, the high God, is going to do to put these kings in their place.<\/p>\n With that, if you go back to John 10:34-36, you can\u2019t help but see some disconnect between what the psalm means and what Jesus takes it to mean. How is Jesus\u2019 use of Psalm 82 \u201cnot annulling\u201d scripture?<\/p>\n It may help to know that anchoring one\u2019s views by means of creative handling of scripture was part and parcel of Jewish interpretation for generations before Jesus came on the scene. One of those creative techniques was to deliberately isolate a few words or a verse from its surrounding context and work it to make a point.<\/p>\n Jesus seems to be quite at home with this type of creative use of the Bible, not just here but elsewhere in his debates with the religious leaders.<\/p>\n But in formal biblical education in the modern world\u2013especially inerrantist\/evangelical\/fundamentalist education\u2013this type of move is called \u201ceisegesis,\u201d reading meaning into\u00a0<\/em>the Bible rather than getting meaning from<\/em> the Bible (exegesis).<\/p>\n So here\u2019s my point for today. When I see this sort of handling of the Bible within the Bible, it makes me ask whether what we are taught about how to read the Bible properly is actually biblical\u2013or more a modern glitch.<\/p>\n If how we are taught to handle the Bible \u201cproperly\u201d can\u2019t account for the Bible\u2019s own inner interpretive<\/a> dynamic, and if we claim to \u201cfollow the Bible,\u201d we probably need to think about whether we actually are.<\/p>\n If one\u2019s \u201cdoctrine of Scripture\u201d sits awkwardly with how\u00a0Scripture\u00a0actually behaves, one needs to rethink one\u2019s doctrine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nIf the opposite of \u201cannul\u201d is \u201cuphold,\u201d is Jesus \u201cupholding\u201d scripture here?<\/h2>\n