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The first three sessions in this introductory course covered broadly factual questions – how the Bible is arranged, when it was written and put together in its present form, the difference between different translations, and how it has been read in different ways.
 
The fourth session was more subjective, and drew out two of the “big ideas” or themes in the Old Testament: the idea of a covenant between God and God’s chosen people (and how this is linked to the idea of God’s Law as God’s gift to his people), and idea of exile and return (from slavery in Egypt under Moses, and from exile in Babylon around 500 BC).
 
The final session looked briefly at how these two ideas helped to shape the way the first Christians – familiar as they were with Old Testament theology – thought about Christ and tried to make sense of his life, death and resurrection.
 
Law and Covenant
 
Most of the session was spent thinking about how Christians had reinterpreted the idea of law and covenant. We began by looking at Romans 4, in which Paul looks back at God’s first – and unconditional – covenant with Abraham when he was still called Abram (Genesis 15.1-6). The critical point for Paul (verse 3, and repeated in verse 22) is that “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”. In other words, Abraham trusted in God’s love and salvation, and that was enough – he didn’t need to earn God’s love by slavishly trying (and failing) to obey the law, although trying (however imperfectly) to love others in the same way that we are loved by God is the way we naturally respond when we trust in God’s love.
 
This idea – that we can’t earn God’s love by our own actions (that we can’t buy our way out of Hell by bribing God to save us) – was the central insight of several of the 16th-century reformers. Luther popularised the idea of “justifcation by faith” – “justification” being another way of translating “reckoned as righteous”. Calvin, who came after him, went further in asserting humanity’s powerlessness: some extreme Calvinists even claimed that people were “predestined” by God to be either saved or damned, and could do nothing about it – an idea abhorrent to most Christians. Paul, together with most modern Christians, would argue that God’s love and forgiveness is freely and unconditionally available to all, and that all we have to do is to accept or receive it, trying to respond by loving and forgiving others in our turn, and admitting our inevitable failure to live up to its demands.
 
We went on to look at Hebrews 8, written for Jewish Christians. The first part of the chapter (vv.1-7) contrasts the Jewish priests who offered sacrifices in the Temple for the forgiveness of sins with Christ (our “great high priest”) who had offered himself so that other sacrifices were no longer needed. Verses 8-12 are a quotation from Jeremiah 31.31-34 promising a “new covenant” in which God will be merciful towards his people and will “remember their sins no more”.
 
A suggestion for Holy Week
 
The third passage we looked at was John’s Gospel, chapters 13 to 16. This is Jesus’s “farewell discourse” with his disciples at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday evening. Its central idea is found in verse 13.34: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you”. It is a commandment embodied in the action of washing one another’s feet (13.14-15), and is repeated at 14.15 and 15.12-15. (The word “Maundy” in “Maundy Thursday” comes from the Latin for “commandment”.) The four chapters of “discourse” are followed by Jesus’s “high priestly prayer” for his disciples (and for us) in chapter 17. It would be a good practice for Holy Week to read slowly and reflectively the whole of John’s Gospel from chapter 13 to the end, following the events of Holy Week and Jesus’s death and resurrection.
 
Exile and return
 
In Week 4 we briefly considered the idea of exile and return in the Old Testament. There are several places where this idea is picked up and used in the New. One is when in Matthew 2.13-23 Joseph flees with his family to Egypt as a refugee from Herod’s persecution, recalling Jacob’s family fleeing to Egypt as refugees from famine, preceded by another Joseph (Genesis 42.1-5). Another is Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness before the start of his ministry, recalling Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness before they reached the promised land.
 
For Christians, however, there is another exile and return. In Romans 5.12-21 Paul develops the idea that just as Adam was the archetype of sinful humanity, exiled from Paradise in Genesis 3.22-24, Jesus is the “second Adam”, another archetypal human being, who has restored us to eternal life through the free gift (the “grace”) of God’s love and forgiveness: a return to Paradise.

St Mary Church, Banbury

The first three sessions in this introductory course covered broadly factual questions – how the Bible is arranged, when it was written and put together in its present form, the difference between different translations, and how it has been read i...

Week 5:  How the New Testament builds on the Old

In introducing the Old Testament in Week 1, we said that it had only been put together in its present form in the last three or four centuries before Christ. This is relevant, because not only the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible that contain the Law or “Torah” that was believed to be God’s particular gift to the Jewish people) but also most of the “histories” (Joshua to Esther) cover a period well before the stories took their present form, so there may be quite a lot of hindsight and reinterpretation in the re-telling. For example, the god of Israel known by the unpronounceable name YHWH was probably thought of as just one god among many until the 6th century BC; see Psalms 82, 95 and 97 for survivals of this idea.
 
So bearing this in mind – and remembering that some stories about the early history of Israel may only have taken their present form many centuries after the period they purport to describe – we can examine two of the recurrent themes or tropes found in the Old Testament. Next week, we will consider how these ideas might have helped New Testament writers find a way to describe their experience of Christ.
 
The idea of a covenant
 
Covenants are undertakings – promises – by God. Some are unconditional, but others are conditional on human obedience.
 
One of the first is an unconditional covenant with Noah and his family to save the ark from the flood (Genesis 6.18), followed shortly afterwards by an equally unconditional one with the whole of creation not to allow another general extinction (Genesis 9.8-17). Then there’s an unconditional covenant with Abraham when he’s still called Abram (Genesis 15.1-6), of which Paul was later to make a lot of theological use.&nbsp; It is followed by a conditional covenant (Genesis 17.1-8) which is the basis of Jewish identity as YHWH’s chosen people. The requirement placed on God’s people to obey God’s Law is amplified in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20.1-17) and the so-called “Book of the Covenant” (Exodus 20.22-23.33). It is repeated in Deuteronomy, where the covenant made explicit at Deuteronomy 26.16-19. Deuteronomy was almost certainly the “book of the law” found when builders were working on the repair of the Temple during the reign of Josiah around 620 BC (2 Kings 22.8), and Josiah – who as a result instituted a dramatic programme of religious reform – is recorded in 2 Kings 23.1-4 as making all the people of Judah reaffirm their commitment to keep their side of the bargain.
 
The idea of exile (and return?)
 
The first exile recorded in the Old Testament – which is going to carry more theological weight in the New Testament – is the expulsion from Paradise (Genesis 3.22-24).
 
 The most important ancestral myth of the Jewish people is their escape from oppression in Egypt, their miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, the destruction of their pursuers and their forty years wandering in the wilderness before they achieve freedom in the promised land (a story told at length in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua).
 
 It was a myth that gained extra relevance when in 586 BC (not long after the reign of Josiah) the kingdom of Judah was defeated by Babylon (present-day Iraq), Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple destroyed and the leaders of the kingdom exiled (see 2 Kings 25). They were able to return and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple only after Babylon had been defeated by Persia in 539, a story told in Ezra and Nehemiah.
 
 The theological question that this raised was how – given Josiah’s insistence on Judah’s obeying the covenant – God had allowed this to happen. Whose fault was it? This question dominates a lot of the Old Testament, much of which was written or re-written around the time of the exile. Examples include Psalms 44 and 80 (the former is particularly powerful in its accusation of abandonment by God and its questioning of covenant theology). Similar thoughts are found elsewhere in the psalms, in the later parts of Isaiah (from chapter 40 onwards) and most explicitly in the book of Job.
 
 The branch of theology dealing with this question – defending God against the charge of allowing evil to exist – is known as “theodicy”. It is a question that arises inevitably as soon as God is seen as all-powerful, and the Old Testament can be seen as struggling to find a satisfactory answer. For Christians, the answer will be found in the New Testament.

Orange megaphone mounted on an orange wall, casting a shadow.

In introducing the Old Testament in Week 1, we said that it had only been put together in its present form in the last three or four centuries before Christ. This is relevant, because not only the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible that...

Week 4:  Some Themes in the Old Testament

Ways of reading the Bible
 In the ancient world, important literature (religious or secular) was written on scrolls made from animal skins, while less important writing was written on sheets of paper loosely bound together (rather like a modern book). The Hebrew scriptures (our Old Testament) were written on scrolls, while rabbinic commentary on them (known as midrash) was written on paper. The New Testament, however, was always written, like midrash, on leaves of paper. Why might this have been?
 
 Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in the same God, but Jews believe that God definitively revealed himself<a href="https://app.churchdesk.com/#sdfootnote1sym" class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote1anc">1</a> to human beings in the Law, as recorded in the first five books of the Bible (the “Torah”); Muslims believe that God’s definitive revelation was the Qur’an, dictated word-for-word by God in Arabic to the Prophet Mohammed; but Christians believe that God’s definitive revelation to human beings wasn’t anything written, but was the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. For this reason, the New Testament does not have the same status for Christians as the Qur’an does for Muslims or the Torah does for Jews – it’s not “scripture” in the same sense.&nbsp; Although the NT is hugely important (because it gives us the evidence for Christ’s life and resurrection), it doesn’t matter that we have four different gospels that often disagree about the details. If anything, it’s helpful. It’s like having four different witness statements about a police incident. They will differ in detail, because different people always remember things differently: if they all agreed about everything it would look like collusion. The fact that they don’t agree suggests that they are independent witnesses, and that the big things that they do agree about did actually happen. As a result, it’s important to read the New Testament as a whole to get a sense of who Jesus was, and what he actually did and said, and not to take short passages or sayings out of context.
 
 Recommended Books:
 
<ul> 	<li> 	Helen-Ann 	Hartley (who is now the Bishop of Ripon): Making 	Sense of the Bible (SPCK, 	2011)
 
</li></ul>
<ul> 	<li> 	Nicholas 	King: The New 	Testament freshly translated with a cutting-edge commentary 	(Kevin Mayhew 2006)
 
</li></ul>
 	<a href="https://app.churchdesk.com/#sdfootnote1anc" class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a> 	or 	“Godself” - God is neither male nor female!

Ways of reading the Bible

In the ancient world, important literature (religious or secular) was written on scrolls made from animal skins, while less important writing was written on sheets of paper loosely bound together (rather like a modern bo...

Week 3:  Ways of reading the Bible

Word-for-word translation
Some translations try to get as close as possible to the original, without attempting to modernise the ideas and images, even if they are hard to understand. The most famous word-for-word translation of the Bible is the Authorised (or King James) Version, published 400 years ago. The one that is most popular today (which we use at St Mary's) is the New Revised Standard Version.&nbsp; The most recent attempt to catch the character of the original Greek (and not to smooth out the differences between the different gospels into a uniform "biblical English") is a version translated by Nicholas King.
 
Sense-for-sense translation 
Other translations attempt to make the Bible easier to understand by paraphrasing it: that is, by trying to understand what the original language is trying to say, and expressing it using modern ideas, images and language.&nbsp; One danger of this is that it can introduce too much of the translator's own interpretation into the text, particularly when there is disagreement about what a particular passage means.&nbsp; Another danger is that by modernising some ideas and not others it conceals the very different thought-world in which the Bible was written, and risks confusing metaphors and literal descriptions.
 
A spectrum of different approaches 
Over 50 different English translations are currently available.&nbsp; Some (though by no means all) of the sense-for-sense translations are written from a very partisan doctrinal point of view, while most of the word-for-word versions try to be as objective (and therefore as ecumenical) as possible.&nbsp; In practice, most translations lie somewhere on a spectrum between the two extremes.&nbsp; The following eight examples are placed in an approximate order, starting with the most carefully word-for-word, and ending with the freest paraphrase:
-&nbsp; &nbsp;"The Bible newly translated by Nicholas King" (2006)
-&nbsp; &nbsp;The Authorised ("King James") Version (1611)
-&nbsp; &nbsp;The New Revised Standard Version (1990)
-&nbsp; &nbsp;Today's New International Version (2004)
-&nbsp; &nbsp;The New Jerusalem Bible (1985)
-&nbsp; &nbsp;The New English Bible (1961)
-&nbsp; &nbsp;The Good News Bible (1966)
-&nbsp; &nbsp;The Message (1993)

Word-for-word translation

Some translations try to get as close as possible to the original, without attempting to modernise the ideas and images, even if they are hard to understand. The most famous word-for-word translation of the Bible is the ...

Week 5: How the New Testament builds on the Old

Week 4: Some Themes in the Old Testament

Week 3: Ways of reading the Bible

Week 2: What is the difference between different translations of the Bible?