Exploring Our Matrix

Reading your post, I couldn’t help but think about some of the Mari texts that deal with infection — one letter mentions placing a town under a form of quarantine, to avoid infecting the whole country, and another describes a woman whose cup, chair, bed, and physical presence should be avoided for fear of contracting her disease, which are rather pointedly described as muštaḫḫizum or “infectious.”  This sort of medical knowledge was already accessible in the 18th c. BCE.

On a related note, I’m still waiting for an explanation of how the thousands of pathogen-borne diseases that afflict humans survived the Flood without human carriers. (Unless, of course, Noah and his family were infected with all of them.)

It wasn’t so much the absence of medical advice in the Bible, as the presence of some very questionable medical advice that bothered me. For example, the complicated ritual required to make a leper “clean” in Leviticus 14 is either the product of a very ignorant god, or a very (medically) ignorant tribe of humans. I think learning to appreciate the Bible as it is has been far more rewarding than trying to squeeze the Bible and Jesus into little doctrinal boxes.

Thanks, Charles, for pointing out that some more advanced medical knowledge than seems to be reflected in the Bible was indeed available before the texts in it were composed.

Daniel, I would put the terms “medical” and “leper” in your statement in scare quotes, since the concern in Leviticus is with ritual purity, not medical treatment, and the term used for leprosy does not seem to have denoted the disease that we refer to by that term, but a variety of skin diseases such as eczema. 

Ritual purity or not, it still makes absolutely no sense. Lev 14:6-7 and Lev 14:13-14 uses blood for cleansing. And throughout the whole bible, blood is considered “unclean”. So no consistency whatsoever. The necessary ingredient is the priest, and since the priests wrote Leviticus, it is their guaranteed meal ticket, since they couldn’t own land.

or how all the saltwater species survived or the fresh water species survived the flood, not to mention the omission of dinosaurs.

Just because the Bible does not touch on a specific subject matter, in regards to particulars that you point out, does not in anyway diminish the accuracy and depth of information that is contained in the Bible. In the realm of medical knowledge, the Bible does discuss appropriate nutrition and cleansing rituals. Additionally, assuming the Biblical message is a reliable message from God our creator, does not require for you to believe the earth is 6000 years and 7 days old…anyone who has taken standard college physics knows that time is relative…therefore when a time frame is mentioned in the bible…you have to ask relative to what…The Science of God by Dr. Gerald Schroeder is a thought provoking book on this subject. Anyone who doubts the Bible should do an indepth study on fulfilled Biblical Prophesy before they deny Jesus Christ. The dead sea scrolls were a major boost to the accuracy of biblical prophesy and textual transmission.

I think you are mistaking both what the washings in the Bible were for, and what ancient Israel’s prophecies were. If you take the passages quoted in Matthew 1-2, for instance, and read them in their original context, you will see that they were not predictions about Jesus. Matthew presumably understood that, and viewed them in terms of typology, not prediction.

James

I’ve no particular axe to grind here, but what exactly do biblical scholars mean by saying that Matthew viewed his NT prophecies “in terms of typology, not prediction.”

Though it’s clearly demonstrable to anyone with a bible that these “prophecies” have nothing to do with Jesus in their original context, there are still Christian fundamentalists who insist that these verses were miraculous predictors of Jesus.

So how would a late 1st century or 2nd century hearer or reader have taken these “prophecies”. Did the Christians in this early era really have a way of understanding these verses as typologies without mistaking them for predictions? Did the writer of Matthew really expect his readers not to see these verses as miraculous predictions?

I just have this nagging suspician that giving Matthew’s “prophecies” a vapid descriptor like “typology”, is just a way of excusing either his ignorance or deceipt regarding the original context of these passages.

I would have no problem in principle saying that Matthew was trying to pull a fast one. My main reason for taking the view that I do is that I am not convinced that if Matthew had indeed claimed these were predictions about the Messiah when they obviously were not, he would have gotten away with it – although modern Christians who view him in that way do admittedly provide counterevidence. But it seems that the texts work so well in connection with Matthew’s clear typological treatment of Jesus through the lens of Moses/Israel in the wilderness, that it is better to view the problem as being more with fundamentalist interpreters who do not look up the source of Matthew’s quotations, rather than what Matthew understood himself to be doing in his own time and context.

I’ve gone back and forth on this one, and so I am open to the possibility that I am wrong!

Even accepting that the writer of Matthew is following an OT motif, it’s hard to read “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet” without hearing the writer say that the prophet is prophesying events in the life of Jesus. I’m not a scholar of the original language: am I missing something in translation?

And I have no problem in believing that the writer of Matthew could have gotten away with it. Just look at the ridiculous claims people get away with in our own information age. The overwhelming majority of Matthew’s 1st or 2nd century audience wouldn’t have been able to read. And those that could would not have ready access to ancient scriptures. And even those that did would not have had handy chapter/verse references with which to dig up the passages.

And even if someone discovered the misuse of the passages, how would they communicate and explain the problem to the laity of all the cities where the book of Matthew had circulated?

Lack of literacy is one reason I think that many might have been aware of the original contexts of some of these texts – if they were to get anything from the intertextual echoes at all, it would have to be through hearing, not reading.

Then again, Matthew does seem to have been trying to pull a fast one with his “He shall be called a Nazarene” prophecy that didn’t exist. So perhaps our disagreement is only about just how many fast ones we think Matthew was trying to pull at once?

;^)

Isaiah 46:10, depending on your translation reads “I am God, and there is none like me.  I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come.”  I believe I have heard it stated that as much as one third of the bible is prophetic in nature (though I have not determined this myself).  One of the prophesies that intrigues me the most in relation to the Christ is Daniel 9:24-26.  If you come to the conclusion that the referenced decree in the above verse is the decree of Artaxerxes in Nehemiah 2:1 and based on your conclusion as to what the “sevens” refer to…then an educated person might become fairly comfortable that this is a date predictor of when the Christ would come. Additionally, utilizing Ezekial 4:5-6, Ezekial 5:10 and not ignoring Leviticus 26:18 and 26:21, you might come to the conclusion that the re-establishment of Israel in 1948 as a country may have been fortold in the bible (utilizing a decree of King Cyrus as the starting point).  Without devoting much thought to prophesy in the Bible, it may be easy to disregard this concept.  However, prophesy is throughout the bible in regards to Cities such as Petra, rulers such as Cyrus, Alexander the Great and his generals, and can be extremely convincing if you choose to look at them in-depth and with an open mind. 

The reference to 70 weeks of years is, of course, itself a reinterpretation of Jeremiah’s prediction of 70 years of exile. The first century AD saw a lot of anticipation, since people were aware that they were living in the time Daniel spoke of. And so, while it doesn’t fit precisely, it certainly is possible that the Daniel prediction inspired John the Baptist, Jesus, and others of their contemporaries. Daniel itself, of course, had events leading up to the Maccabean revolt in view.

In the case of the creation of modern Israel, we have another case of people believing certain things were prophecied and thus making them happen, too.