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  • From: Bruce Gardner <b.gardner AT abdn.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Saturating the airwaves...
  • Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2001 10:41:22 +0000

Dear Dan and Harold,
                                 
The arguments for NT interpretation of the OT/HB are very like the arguments surrounding the anthropomorphic principle in Creation. One says: the universe is created by God because it is designed to produce Man. The other: the universe produces Man who sees that fact as central.

Here it is, in this case:
 
 EITHER:

(a) The OT is designed to be fulfillled by the NT.

OR:

(b) The NT is designed to fulfil the OT.

Since the NT is a product of reflection on the HB tradition, of course it looks like the solution.

It is obvious that the NT makes a habit (e.g., Isa 7:14; 11:1f) of reinterpreting texts in a very Jewish way. But then the Qumranians and the Rabbis both saw themselves as the fulfillers of past hope too. As a result, you find tree stumps growing again outside the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, to commemorate not the Christian Messiah but the miracle of Israel for whom that application of the HB text is (equally self-evidently) about Israel's ethno-religious survival.

Also, while I do set aside the J/E debate as too inconclusive, and prefer the D(euteronomistic tradition followed by P(riestly Writer) and then the C(hronicler) I cannot ignore there is growth and development in the HB/OT corrresponding to D, P and C, for to reject that is to reject the evidence in favour of a fiction that the ancient Hebrew scriptures are exactly historical. Only the person who has not actually read the Bible can claim that with confidence. The holding of that opinion in the face of facts as simply 'things not yet understood' can seem a self-deception, and most of all give Christians a bad name as people who think they can afford to be irrational.

Consider, for example, two views of a plague on Jerusalem: 2 Samual 24 and 1 Chronicles 21. Is there NO sign of development there?  Are there no fresh perspectives to be noted at all?

Bruce Gardner.







------------
Bruce Gardner
b.gardner AT abdn.ac.uk


  • Saturating the airwaves..., Bruce Gardner, 03/03/2001

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