Naaman: Hero of the Faith
After my previous lesson on Habakkuk I was asked to do another and I decided to use Naaman. The following is based on the notes of that second class.
We know from firsthand experience that the Bible is filled with many stories that are instinctively known by many. These are the Sunday School classics that we read or sing about, like Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Red Sea, or David and Goliath. Yet it has many that go unnoticed or overlooked despite having just as much meaning as these more noticeable episodes. We might vaguely recall them, or more likely have never heard of them, but they certainly are important. The life of Naaman is one such story that we find in Scripture. Let me ask, who even thinks of Naaman all that often? Naaman doesn’t have his own book, in fact he only appears in one chapter of one book as an episode in someone else’s story. Habakkuk, who I discussed before, at least had his own book and is a bit more familiar. With Naaman, he just doesn’t seem to matter.
However, to earnestly think that would be quite wrong. You see, we are told that every part of Scripture is important (2 Tim 3:16-17). Every, not all, and that’s a very important distinction, because “all” refers to a group in toto, it is a generalizing term, while “every” is more specific, referring to each member of a complete group. It is not Scripture in general but every piece of Scripture that’s important. Indeed, the wisdom of the ancient Christians who went before us proves ever prudent in this regard. As Basil of Caesarea once wrote:
Shall I not rather exalt Him who, not wishing to fill our minds with these vanities, has regulated all the economy of Scripture in view of the edification and the making perfect of our souls? … [I]n the inspired words, there is not one idle syllable.1
Since God has inspired the whole of the canon the one who skips over Scripture or who reads it lightly cannot be considered serious. This is a serious temptation for many Christians today, that they’ll come across some peculiar or unfamiliar passage in Scripture and rather than probing deeper they will merely shrug and go, “Well, I can’t understand that, I will be sure to avoid it in the future!”2 Once more, it is every Scripture that is to be accepted by us, not just the parts that “make sense” to us. Peter charges us to “yearn like newborn infants for pure milk from the Word, so that by it you may grow up to salvation” (1 Pet. 2:2). We’re like infants, but we may, or, rather, we must “grow up to salvation,” we must be weaned at some point and made ready to receive the meat from the Word. But what is there to find in Naaman’s story? How can such a little story as his be profitable? Doesn’t this challenge our notions? This is what we will be learning today.
We will, of course, begin with Naaman. His story is primarily situated in 2 Kings 5, a small part of the overarching story of Elisha. The chapter begins with a simple yet insightful introduction to Naaman’s character (v. 1):
Now Naaman was the commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man before his master and highly regarded, for by him Yahweh had given victory to Aram.
So, it is immediately established for us that Naaman is no random guy, he’s a military leader of the Arameans and a favored one of the king. He’s a big deal! However, just as soon as this is established the Bible goes on to add an important detail about Naaman (v. 1; emphasis added):
Now the man was a mighty warrior, but he was afflicted with a skin disease.
If it hasn’t struck you yet, this is quite powerful. What it demonstrates to us is that for all that Naaman is, he is a leper. It’s quite Ozymandian if you think about it (I am referring here to the poem by P.B. Shelley). While a proud and powerful man, a warrior of Baal, Naaman is sickly all the same, and he must come begging a mere prophet of Israel’s alien god for aid.
Scripture itself seems to point towards this sentiment as you can detect Naaman’s wounded pride in his response to Elisha not coming out to directly treat him (2 Kgs. 5:11-12):
But Naaman became angry and he went and said, “Look, I said to myself, Surely he will come out, stand, call upon the name of Yahweh his God, and wave his hands over the spot; then he would take away the skin disease. Are not the Abana and the Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all of the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them that I may be clean?” Then he turned and left in anger.
He’s insulted by how he’s been treated. Mighty Naaman has had to come all the way from his homeland to the lands of the Hebrews seeking their aid, and the guy he’s supposed to meet with can’t even come to entreat with him directly. However, at the advice of his servants Naaman is persuaded to do what he was commanded by Elisha. He returns and goes to the Jordan as instructed by Elisha and “plunged into the Jordan seven times.”
Actually, let me correct myself here, because Naaman isn’t actually plunged. Can you make any guesses as to what actually happened to him? Some of you might get it, but I’ll tell you anyway. Get ready to put on your Greeking caps, however, because we’ll need to dive into the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) for this. In the Greek text of 2 Kings 5:14 the exact wording is “Kai ebaptisato en to heptakis.” The literal translation of this would be, “And he baptized himself in that [the Jordan] seven times.” In fact, in the original Hebrew, the word here, tabal (טָבַל), is commonly received into Greek as baptizó (to immerse, baptize). The baptismal connection is captured also in Elisha commanding Naaman to “rakhatz,” or wash himself in the Jordan. A search into the occurrences of rakhatz elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible proves illuminating:
Isa. 1:16—“Wash! Make yourselves clean! Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes! Cease to do evil!”
Psa. 26:6—“I will wash my hands in innocence, and I will walk about your altar, O Yahweh.”
We should also be familiar with the commands to ritually purify oneself through washing.
Rakhatz is often received into Greek as louo (λούω), and we find that this word also has a ritual purification aspect. However, there is more to it, especially when we turn to the New Testament, as you can see below:
Heb. 10:22—“let us draw near with a sincere heart in the assurance that faith brings, because we have had our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water.” (I wonder what that refers to?)
Rev. 1:5—“To the one who loves us and has set us free from [or washed us of] our sins at the cost of his own blood.” (This washing is related to the cleansing of our souls.)
Tit. 3:6— “He saved us not by works of righteousness that we have done but on the basis of his mercy, through the washing of the new birth and the renewing of the Holy Spirit.”
Well, with what is said in Titus is there any doubt as to what louo is synonymous with now? What we see in all this is that baptismal symbolism permeates the story of Naaman. This connection was recognized by teachers through Church history, like Irenaeus (a very early example), who wrote:
It was not for nothing that Naaman of old, when suffering from leprosy, was purified upon his being baptized, but [it served] as an indication to us. For as we are lepers in sin, we are made clean, by means of the sacred water and the invocation of the Lord, from our old transgressions; being spiritually regenerated as new-born babes, even as the Lord has declared: “Except a man be born again through water and the Spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”3
Irenaeus here somewhat echoes Basil from earlier, for as Basil said that no part of Scripture is futile in like manner Irenaeus says that Naaman’s “baptism” “was not for nothing.” It served a purpose, one in his own time and in a time following his own, as designed by the Spirit.4
There are also two other symbols of importance that can be found in Naaman’s story, those being the number seven and the Jordan. Seven is widely recognized as an important symbolic figure and plays an important rule in Hebrew/biblical numerology. It is generally taken to symbolize (divine) perfection or completion, such as a divine mandate being fulfilled. We can find seven or iterations of it in the days of creation, the Jubilee cycle (seven shmitas), the Menorah (its seven branches), the Seventy Nations (as a multiple), the prophecies of Daniel and beyond. As it relates to Naaman the number seven would evince the notion that Naaman has been completely cleansed (by God) through his washing. With regards to the Jordan River, in Old Testament times this river served as the place where Israel crossed over into the Promised Land out of captivity, which Joshua was commanded to commemorate by the erection of twelve stones by the river (Josh. 4).5 In New Testament times the Jordan would be the place where Christ was baptized by John, prefiguring all future believers and their own deliverance into the Church out of the captivity of Sin. It is precisely that which is the reason why Naaman couldn’t just go to the Abana or Pharpar to be washed/baptized, because only the Jordan had the greater prophetic and Messianic meaning.
Thus, what we find in Naaman’s story is that he undergoes a prefigurative baptism covered in leprosy (sin) and arises washed of his sickness (sin). Indeed, after being washed it is said that “[Naaman] came and stood before [Elisha] and said, ‘Please now, I know that there is no God in all of the world except in Israel. So then, please take a gift from your servant’” (2 Kgs. 5:15). When Naaman arises he has seen the glory of Yahweh and he makes a declaration of faith before Elisha. We should all be familiar with the practice of newly baptized Christians making a declaration of faith, something that has been present throughout all Church history, as dictated by the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19 (in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit). Indeed, the Church has formulated many creeds that have summarized the core principles of the faith, creeds that were often used not just liturgically but ritually in the administration of the sacrament of baptism (the Nicene Creed of 325 is perhaps the most famous example of one). This is what Naaman is doing, he is making a confession of faith to God upon his being baptized.
Indeed, if we look to Peter we find that he too identified baptism as having been prefigured, and, now fulfilled in Christ, serves as “the pledge of a good conscience to God—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 3:21). Baptism is a loyalty oath, a sign of the covenant we have in Christ by His blood (cf. Matt. 26:28). It is a sign of allegiance rather than a sign of salvation, because, as Peter says, this takes place “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” because that’s what saves, the Resurrection. Baptism symbolizes the burying of Christ (immersion) and the raising of Christ (as we rise out of the water), this being the actual source of our salvation.6 Thus, we see that Naaman, a pagan Gentile, has now been grafted into Israel and become a child of God (cf. Rom. 11).
Clearly, in contrast to whatever our preconceptions might’ve been at the outset, there is a lot to glean from Naaman’s story. Don’t think that it ends here, however, because as we now turn to the Gospels we can see that there is more to find there. Where we must go to now is Luke 4, which is also known as “Christ’s inaugural address,” for, in Luke’s narrative, this is the first sermon Christ preaches and the commencement of His earthly ministry. It should be self-evident that the very first sermon Jesus ever preaches is going to be important and insightful, so we will take a look at it piece-by-piece from the beginning.
As we read, Jesus attends synagogue worship (“as was His custom”) in his hometown of Nazareth (v. 16) and is given the opportunity to preach and He reads from Isaiah, specifically 61:1-2 and 58:6. As it reads in Luke (vv. 17-19):
He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and the regaining of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
The implications of the Isaiah quote are big. As we read, Jesus proclaims that, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled,” indicating that Jesus Himself is actively and presently the Spirit-anointed messenger of God referred to by Isaiah. In other words, He is the Christ. What He affirms by doing this, then, is that He is the One Who will proclaim good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, regain the sight of the blind, set free the oppressed, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Understandably, “All were speaking well of Him, and were amazed at the gracious words coming out of His mouth.” Furthermore, by speaking from Isaiah, Jesus invokes the entire witness throughout Isaiah to a hope for Israel’s restoration (especially since that is explicitly spoken of in Isa. 61) and by placing Himself at the center of this He doubly makes clear that He will be the restorer of Israel. Reading directly from the text of Isaiah will help make this clear. First, Isaiah 56:8-9:
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall grow quickly. And your salvation shall go before you; the glory of Yahweh will be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and Yahweh Himself will answer. You shall cry for help, and He will say, “Here I am!”
What Isaiah is doing here, through the same Spirit that inspired Luke 4 mind you, is drawing from the Exodus narrative. It can be subtle at first, but when you read through the two passages that Isaiah is alluding to here it becomes unmistakable. These passages are, first, Exodus 13:21-22:
And Yahweh was going before them by day in a column of cloud to lead them on the way and by night in a column of fire to give light to them to go by day and night. The column of cloud by day and the column of fire by night did not depart from before the people.
And, second, Exodus 14:19-20:
And the Angel of Yahweh Who was going before the camp of Israel set out and went behind them. And the column of cloud set out ahead of them, and it stood still behind them, so that it came between the camp of Egypt and the camp of Israel. And it was a dark cloud, but it gave light to the night, so that neither approached the other all night.
Do you see the correspondences? If not, let me assist. The passage from Exodus 13 begins with the statement “Yahweh was going before them by day,” which is clearly echoed in Isaiah stating that “your salvation shall go before you” (both Isaiah and Exodus show an awareness that God is our Savior; cf. Isa. 12:2; Isa. 17:10; Ex. 15:2; Ex. 14:13). Following this it is said that God took the form of “a column of fire to give light to them to go by day and night,” this being echoed in Isaiah’s statement that “then your light shall break forth like the dawn.” In the final statement in the Exodus 13 passage it is said that, “The column of cloud by day and the column of fire by night did not depart from before the people,” and Isaiah’s allusion to this takes the form, “You shall cry for help, and He will say, ‘Here I am!’” Just as the columns of cloud and fire never departed so will God never depart from us, He will always be here to declare, “Here I am!” In Exodus 14 much of this language can be found again, but what is unique to it is its first verse, that “the Angel of Yahweh Who was going before the camp of Israel set out and went behind them,” which Isaiah echoes in stating that “the glory of Yahweh will be your rear guard” (i.e., the glory will go behind [in the rear of] us).
Since in Isaiah’s immediate context he is providing a Messianic prophecy and in doing so is reaching back to the Exodus what he is doing here is comparing the coming of the Messiah to a New Exodus, wherein the children of God will be liberated again from the yoke that their enemies had placed on them. This is the beauty of typology in Scripture, which is an incredible testimony to its eternal and divine design. Several dozen books, several dozen authors, across several centuries, you can’t expect any mere human to create so many connections, foreshadows, and resonances.7 What the Old Testament’s story constitutes is the history of God’s people, them being placed in bondage under Pharaoh, which God responds to by raising up Moses by whom He reaffirms His covenant through Passover, coming to liberate His people through crossing them over the Jordan and entering the Promised Land. In the New Testament we also find God’s people (all of them) in bondage under Satan, which God responds to by raising up Christ (as the ultimate prophet) by Whom He reaffirms His covenant through the Crucifixion/Eucharist, coming to liberate His people through them crossing the waters of baptism and entering the Promised Land (the Church).
All of this is what constitutes the “the year of the Lord’s favor” that Jesus quotes from Isaiah, the coming of Christ and the restoration of Israel. The year of the Lord’s favor typically meant the Jubilee year, wherein slaves were released, property was restored, and debts were cleared (cf. Lev. 25). By extension, then, by His application of the Exodus-Jubilee language in Isaiah to Himself, what Jesus had come to proclaim was that God (He Himself) was ready to free our bondage, restore what was ours, and clear our debts.8 This, we should recognize, is all New Testament language: Christ is our liberator (Rom. 8:2; Gal. 5:1; Col. 1:13-14), restorer (1 Pet. 5:10; Acts 3:19-21; Jl. 2:25-26; Ps. 23:3; Matt. 12:13), and forgiver (Matt. 6:12; Col. 2:14). Cyril of Alexandria affirmed this, saying,
What does preaching the acceptable year of the Lord mean? It signifies the joyful tidings of his own advent, that the time of the Lord—yes, the Son—had arrived. For that was the acceptable year in which Christ was crucified on our behalf, because we then were made acceptable to God the Father as fruit borne by Him. … Truly He returned to life on the third day, having trampled on the power of death. In it we were received into his family and were admitted to Him, having washed away sin by holy baptism, and been made partakers of His divine nature by the communion of the Holy Spirit.9
In Luke 4 we witness a master orator at work. Christ, as told through Luke, embeds His sermon with such richness and power that we find a hundred colorful threads are being woven together by the same needle at once. A more modern author, Richard B. Hays, wrote regarding this passage that,
The density of intertextual interplay in this passage is characteristic of Luke. A single short scriptural quotation, placed on the lips of Jesus at a programmatically crucial moment in the narrative, evokes at least three layers of scriptural memory. As one reads backwards from Luke’s citation of Isaiah 61 and 58 they are Israel’s new exodus ending the Babylonian exile, the Jubilee Year commanded by Moses, and the first exodus out of Egypt. Readers informed within Israel’s encyclopedia of reception will perceive that Luke’s Jesus is announcing that the time has come for all three of these prototypes to be brought to fulfillment in their hearing as Jesus performs the reading of Isaiah, both orally and in the acts that follow in the narrative. And Jesus Himself takes center stage in the role of the Servant Who makes God’s liberating power effectual for Israel.10
Now, as we read in Luke 4 this sermon incenses Christ’s Jewish listeners leading to Him fleeing (vv. 28-30). The exact reason why this beautiful message is rejected is silly, but often man’s rejection of God is just that: silly. As we’ve observed, Jesus is telling those listening to Him that He is Israel’s restorer, liberator, savior, and Messiah. This is exciting. Jesus then tells them that this is being fulfilled in their presence, in His ministry. This is also exciting, for it means that they are witnessing and hearing the words of the Messiah. However, Jesus knows the heart of the Jews in His time, that they have, at-large, turned from God’s love and likewise have turned their love away from others.
Jesus therefore castigates them with explicit references to two Old Testament characters: the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian. These two were Gentiles and yet they received great favors from God. This is impactful because not only did Elijah and Elisha work during times of severe apostasy in Israel, indirectly commenting on Israel’s state in Christ’s day, but, secondly, it suggests that Gentiles were more worthy of the Christ than the Jews were.11 Given the intense dislike of aliens and pagans at the time by Jews this would’ve, understandably yet inappropriately, angered people, and it did!
Using the example of Naaman specifically, since we’ve looked into him, we see that Christ is saying, “The Gentiles have always been worthy of God’s love, as Naaman was made a son of God in the years of Elisha, yet you reject My mission to the Gentiles?” If the Jews could honor and venerate Elisha and Elijah, despite the grace they offered to Gentiles, how much more honor and veneration should they owe the Messiah? This is the climax of Christ’s sermon, what His central message is. “What I am doing has been prefigured, in the restoration of life and the remission of sins among the Gentiles in the days of Elijah and Elisha; as it was in their days, so shall it be in mine and far greater.”
Now, this talk about Gentiles, God’s children, and the mercy He extends to all brings up an important issue, that being God’s behavior in the Old Testament in (alleged) contrast to the New Testament. So much time and effort has been sunk into this issue, with modern Christians tending to fall into one of three (quite problematic) factions: the liberal historical-critic (a.k.a., the neo-Marcionite or dismisser), a Christian mostly informed by modern liberal-humanist academic values, thus possessing no reverence or notion of the holy and supernatural, who freely excises the entire Old Testament from the Bible due to it upsetting his secular morals; the Judaizer (or Legalist), who sees his faith as still informed by the Mosaic law and that its prescriptions must still carry weight by virtue of being inspired just as the New Testament, for if the inspired New Testament has authority so much the equally inspired Old Testament, thus inspiration is conflated with authority (this is often expressed in Reformed and theonomic circles that fully accept Mosaic civil and moral laws); and the Centrist (a.ka., the Moderate or Middle-Roader), who has and wishes to have no skin in the game, finds the whole matter of covenants and inspiration and ethics to be tiring, vaguely affirms some sort of distinction but still blindly quotes from the commandments of either covenant to affirm his personal morals (Prov. 13:24 to punish his child, but never Deut. 21:18-21; Lev. 20:13 on sexual immorality, but never Jn. 8; Col. 3:11, or Eph. 3:6, for fair treatment of immigrants and outsiders, but never Deut. 20:16-17).12 The issues with any of these factions should be obvious and be based on theological, biblical, logical, and ethical grounds, which says a lot as these three represent most Christians today (the Middle-Roaders are certainly the most prominent, constituting much of mainstream Protestant/evangelical Christianity). While it’s certainly a hard and complex issue that doesn’t mean it’s unaddressable, and in fact as scholarship and biblical literacy has improved in recent decades wonderful solutions (although tending to be broken up between the insights of several different scholars) have appeared. The most comprehensive and thoroughgoing school of thought, the cruciform theology of Greg Boyd, provides the most orthodox, historically-grounded, and non-compromising treatment of the issue I have ever found, addressing various theological, biblical, and ethical concerns and opposing views/arguments in a Christocentric fashion; it constitutes Boyd at his best.13
Now, as for a biblical, rather than strictly academic, solution, we find it in Naaman himself. He demonstrates in his story with Elisha that this isn’t a difficult question, for God has always cared about all mankind. After all, why wouldn’t He? Didn’t He create all mankind as well at the beginning? What logical reason would He have to abandon them and exert discriminatory and preferential treatment toward one group of His equally made children at the expense of all others?
Here’s the thing: what we must understand about the Old Testament isn’t that it’s “One” Testament and the New Testament “Another,” but that it is old and the Gospel new. But this is nuanced, and it must be so we don’t fall into the errors of the three factions described above. If we, for example, say that the New Testament is equal to the Old Testament, then why did it need to be fulfilled?14 If we say that the Old Testament is better than the New Testament, then why does Paul say Christ set aside “the law with its commands and regulations” (Eph. 2:15)?15 If we say the New Testament is better than the Old Testament, why does the entire Gospel bear witness to it and emphasize that Christ is the fulfillment of it?16 After all, who’d want to proclaim that they had come to fulfill garbage?
Rather, the Old Testament must stand and be understood on its own merits. In contrast to any facetious factions and traditional bibliology the Old Testament is the interplay of God and man. The narrative we find in the Old Testament, spread and unified across 39 books and more authors, isn’t one-sided but two-sided. Men speak in the Old Testament just as much as God, and God speaks with the same voice He has always had. Many Christians have a view of the Bible as having fallen out of heaven bound in gold and written in King James’ English, but, as various portions of the biblical narrative affirm,17 it was a long-lived, collaborative, and intense effort to collect, combine, and canonize the various autographic documents of the biblical prophets. Human hands made and wrote the Bible, but a divine Spirit carried those men along to the final product (2 Pet. 1:21; cf. Dr. Heiser’s series on inspiration). The Church has understood this relationship, with Tertullian (an early witness) saying:
Now we believe that Christ did ever act in the name of God the Father; that He actually from the beginning held intercourse with (men); actually communed with patriarchs and prophets; was the Son of the Creator; was His Word; whom God made His Son by bringing Him forth from His own self. … It is He who descends (to inquire into Sodom), He who interrogates [Adam and Cain], He who [makes demands of Moses], He who swears [an oath with Abraham].18
This is significant because this comes from Tertullian’s work Adversus Marcionem, written against the heretic Marcion who rejected the Old Testament chiefly, among other reasons, for having a “harsh” and “unjust” depiction of God. The spirit of Marcion survives today, as seen in both the marginalization and misappropriation of the Old Testament, in the desire by some so-called “theologians” to “unhitch” the Church from the Old Testament.
What these people don’t realize or appreciate enough is that the Holy Spirit is the same Spirit from all eternity, so what He inspired the prophets to say is the same that He inspired Christ to say, but while Christ perfectly followed the will of His fathers humans haven’t, so what the Old Testament comprises is the story, from the very beginning to the new beginning, of God working with mankind to get us to work with His salvation, painstakingly and patiently laying the foundations for the coming of God’s Messiah. In this sense, then, it is not God Who is harsh, it is man. Thus, we see repeatedly in the Old Testament as many moments becoming of Christ as we see those seemingly “unbecoming,” like Naaman and the widow at Zarephath.19
To conclude, here is all that we’ve learned: Naaman is a story that stands on its own merits, as the story of an Israelite prophet extending grace to a pagan outsider who had warred against his people and learning to love and obey God as a result. It teaches the importance of grace and mercy, of God’s possession20 of these virtues, and of the extension of them to even the “strange” and “alien.” However, it is more than that, because Christ reveals it to be a prefiguration of His own works and ministry, of His cleansing and freeing of the lost and their submission to Him. As Elisha went out to Naaman to baptize him, so are we to “go and make disciples of all peoples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” It reveals the merciful and just character of the Almighty God from everlasting to everlasting, shining through human failures and overcoming us as well. Naaman provides hope for all people that, wherever or whoever they are, God loves them.
Dr. Michael Heiser was driven for most of his career by a desire to counter and treat this issue. He has told the story of when he visited a church and listened to a sermon by its pastor that was part of a series in 1 Peter, and on that particular day they got to 1 Peter 3, but the pastor announced that he was going to skip it because it was “too strange.” Suffice to say, Dr. Heiser never returned (for his own analysis of 1 Peter 3 see here). Many of his books were intended to medicate this issue. See especially his Supernatural (or The Unseen Realm) and I Dare You Not to Bore Me with The Bible.
I am not someone who appreciates stretching Scripture and gleaning some obscure and esoteric “meaning” from every single part of it. This was the error of the Origenists, condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople and whom the ire of Basil (such as in his earlier quote) was directed at. This exegetical error is also present in modern Christians. However, what I’ve done here is exegetically valid, because what I am doing is reading the Old Testament in light of what Christ has revealed. You see, while the Israelites didn’t know what they were doing/typifying in all the laws and rituals they followed the Holy Spirit did, because it was the same Spirit Who inspired the ritual animal sacrifices in the Law that would later reveal these to be fulfilled in Christ’s ultimate sacrifice (Heb. 10).
Twelve is another numerological figure, primarily relating to Israel (in its twelve patriarchs and twelve tribes; cf. the apostles).
This provides important comments on the theological issue of baptismal regeneration, which posits that baptism actually saves us (1 Pet. 3 is often used as a prooftext for it, but, as we’ve just seen, it isn’t; similar misunderstandings permeate much of the doctrine’s “exegesis”).
J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps the most detailed and industrious author in history (dedicating decades of his life to producing a self-sustaining and fully animated secondary world), nevertheless had some plot holes and errors in its narratives. Cleverly, Tolkien explained these errors as actually constituting a narrative device, namely by explaining that his books were a translation of the Red Book of Westmarch and any literary issues were the consequence of historical and scribal mistakes. But this alone attests to his depth and majesty, for he conceived of a whole world in another language and script (Westron) and then remade it into ours to be published. I strongly recommend you read about Tolkien, because just as it took him decades to create his world it has taken everyone else decades more to understand what he created. See especially Carl Hostetter, The Nature of Middle-Earth; Christopher Snyder, The Making of Middle-Earth; and, for a primary source, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader.
Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 228-29.
Quoted in Arthur Just, Luke, ACCS-NT 3, 81.
Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 229.
Ibid., 237f., 273-74.
Greg Boyd adequately surveys and critiques the different takes on the Old Testament among modern Christians in The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (2 vols.), 2:279-414.
Here is my mini-review of Boyd: While an open theist and something of a theological liberal (which are certainly concerning things) Boyd can be an excellent scholar when he needs to be. Usually, in his formally published and academic works his logic and rhetoric is best represented and he doesn’t get into any “weird,” unorthodox territory (although some of his academic works have been on open theism). Boyd’s cruciform theology is most comprehensively set out in his 2,000-page masterpiece The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, which is a blast to read, so much so that, despite its verbosity, I strongly recommend it to the lay reader, because its length isn’t owed to its complexity but rather to its incredible breadth. Nonetheless, Boyd has published two condensed companion volumes to CWG (much like he did for his series on theodicy in Is God to Blame?), those being Cross Vision and Inspired Imperfection. However, since these are more “popular” (or plebeian) in content and not held to an academic standard they do have more weirdness in them, such as Boyd demonstrating a greater sensitivity toward liberal-progressive issues (like women and race, which are perfectly fine subjects but always come off as disingenuous when from a liberal source, as liberalism disingenuously handles all issues, contrary to Gospel truth) and, most bafflingly, opting to refer to the Holy Spirit as a woman (which he attempts to ground historically/patristically, something I’ll have to address elsewhere). Still, having read all three works, I can say that these two companion volumes are just as good and these weird parts can be easily ignored by the conscientious reader, and the only substantive issue I find in either is that I feel Boyd cut off too much meat and each could easily be 100 pages longer without proving too taxing or verbose. Boyd also has a personal website which he writes and podcasts for frequently, and so since the publication of CWG in 2017 he has produced much auxiliary content simplifying or fleshing out what he wrote in CWG and, most importantly (for me), answering critics. These additional works on cruciform theology are tagged under “Crucifixion of the Warrior God” and “Cruciform Theology” and constitute dozens of articles and episodes. As these are popular-level as well the same concerns apply to them as to Cross Vision and Inspired Imperfection. In short, in Boyd, while being wary of some of his theological (but far less so exegetical) issues and grounded in Church history (orthodoxy), one can find one of the most satisfying treatments on biblical violence and ethics.
Weakening the Judaizers.
Weakening the Judaizers and the Middle-Roaders.
Weakening the neo-Marcionites and even some similarly inclined Middle-Roaders.
The simplest and most obvious being the recording of Moses’ death in a book commonly said to have been entirely written by him and the repeated statements of certain events and places being known “to this day,” indicating the text we are reading was handed down and edited at a later date.
The more you think about this the more examples you can find. E.g., Jonah being castigated for rejecting his mission to the Ninevehites (Jon. 4), God relenting from His wrath at Moses’ request (Ex. 33), God seeking the salvation of the Gentiles (Isa. 56), etc. See Boyd, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, 1:463-512, 2:641-763. On the biblical theology and theme of God’s concern for and mission to the Gentiles (especially in the Old Testament) see David Filbeck, Yes, God of the Gentiles, Too; Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God.
Or, rather, grounding.