Jeffrey Gibson

Why is this a "diversion"? And if it is, why did you engage in it and promote it as you did when you posted remarks from Earl which deal with, and are intent to discuss, this very topic?

And please tell me that you are not saying that the author of Hebrews was a trinitarian in the sense that 4th and 5th century Christians were, and that when he speaks about God and the Son he is thinking along the exact same lines as did, say, the Athanasius or the Cappadocians when they spoke of the father and the son?


And how do you know, as you claim to do, not only what the author of the hymm was up to, but what the reasons were that caused the hymn writer to do what he supposedly did?

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Seems to mean? Does it or doesn't it? And does Bauer believe spirits are "living beings"? If not, what becomes of Earl's "therefore"?

Jeffrey

Ben C Smith

I have now quoted 1 Clement 60.1 a couple of times on this thread. Would you mind explaining to me why the usage of οικουμενη in that passage means a place that includes the realm of spirits (which is what Bauer, as quoted by Doherty, says)? And then would you mind explaining why the usage of that term in that passage means a place that encompasses heaven (which is what Doherty says)?

Also, you find Doherty quoting Attridge in support of heaven meaning an inner heaven. Does anything from any other work, in your judgment, support this usage of the term for heaven? Or is this speculation on the part of Attridge, of Doherty, or even of you yourself?

Finally, let us imagine that the term οικουμενη can indeed encompass the whole of creation, heaven and earth and all. Is that really the same as Hebrews 1.6 using the term to tell us where Christ is to the exclusion of earth itself, the very portion of the universe to which the term usually (and practically by definition) points?

IOW, on your proposed reading Christ apparently enters an outer heaven in 1.6 (unless you are imagining other stops before that point; if so, please specify) then goes from that outer heaven into the inner heaven in 9.24. Yet the text itself looks as if it is saying Christ went to earth in 1.6 and then to heaven in 9.24. Why does the combination of 1.6 and 9.24 look like a typical descent-ascent scenario such as we find with, say, Romulus? And why does the taking on of human flesh in other parts of Hebrews seem to fit in so nicely with this reading?

Why is the heavenly location unambiguous, IYO? What terms or concepts are embedded in the text that allow for no other interpretation?

Ben.

EarlDoherty

Edit. Ooops! I must have pressed the wrong button or something. It seems that instead of sending it as a private message to someone, I have posted it on the board itself, in contravention of my resolution. Oh well, I’ll leave it for now and perhaps it will cast some light on the matter of Jeffrey’s contentions.


Bauer’s Lexicon: “dia” – Def. 2: “w. gen. of the person.—a. denoting the personal agent or intermediary through (the agency) of), by….

Personal agent. Hardly an “instrument” in some sense of a lifeless tool, which is what Jeffrey is trying to imply. I guess he considers “the Son” to be some hammer and chisel in God’s hand.

Galatians 3:16 – “The Law was ordained through [dia] angels…” I guess God shaped a couple of angels into paper airplanes, loaded the Law on their backs, and sent them sailing down to Moses. No activity by the angels there, obviously.

Romans 2:16 – “This will take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel says.” God will judge men’s secrets through his agent Jesus Christ, the latter to actually conduct the proceedings, in keeping with the expectation of the arrival of the Son as judge in both the epistles and, for example, in Matthew 25:31f. (In this connection, Bauer defines “dia” thus: “In this case dia comes close to the mng. represented by.”)

Proverbs 8:22-30, according to Jeffrey, has Wisdom merely a bystander during God’s creation of the world, perhaps cheering him on and bringing him mint juleps when he got winded. First of all, this was written centuries before Christianity and probably without any influence from Platonic ideas of the Logos. It’s an example of what I say in my Hebrews article about ancient traditional Jewish ideas of higher-lower world verticality being quite a bit simpler than later Platonism, or even later Jewish ideas influenced and enriched by that Platonism. Proverbs 3:19, which Jeffrey does not quote, says (LXX) “By wisdom God founded the earth, and by prudence he prepared the heavens,” which is an incipient development of personified Wisdom as an hypostatization given a role and activity of her own.

Jeffrey would have been advised to actually look at the treatment of Wisdom in the later period when Hellenistic Judaism had absorbed the Platonic Logos. Wisdom of Solomon 7:22f (LXX):

“For Wisdom, which is the worker of all things…she is the breath of the power of God…the unspotted mirror of the power of God…she spans the world in power from end to end, and orders all things benignly.” (the latter phrase is the NEB’s translation of the Hebrew version).

As for being a “creator” force, Wisdom of Solomon has this to say in 9:1f (LXX)

“O God of my fathers, and Lord of mercy, who hast made all things with thy word, and ordained man through thy wisdom…give me wisdom, that sitteth by thy throne…”

Here, the last phrase, and the commonality of vocabulary used of personified Wisdom throughout these chapters, shows that these emanations and hypostatizations of God who are responsible for creation are not impersonal, abstract instruments. They are living entities who have become the active agents of creation on God’s behalf. Wisdom has progressed beyond the cheerleader and cocktail waitress envisioned by Jeffrey.

This kind of language and thought is also to be found in the New Testament epistles, notably in 1 Corinthians 8:6, “…for us, there is…one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came to be, and we through him.” And the hymn of Colossians 1:25-20, “And he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth…all things have been created by him and for him…”

In what way does Jeffrey envision God’s Son/Word/Wisdom being an agent of creation, if that entity does not perform tasks of creation? He is a “subcontractor” if you like, the one who actually does the work, since God (so the philosophers had decided, leading to the invention of the intermediary Son/Logos concept) could not sully his own pure hands by contact with matter. Consequently, it becomes absolutely valid for one to say, whether based on Hebrews 1:2 or any of the other similar passages in the epistles, that Christ created the world, even if that direct language is not used. As I said, the grammatical presentation of the thought is irrelevant, and Jeffrey’s objection (based solely on the grammar) is indeed baseless for arguing against the idea (voiced by Clive) that the Son could be thought of as an actual agent of creation.

But then, there is another class of “Christian” document, one apparently Jeffrey is unaware of, which does not avoid that kind of direct language: the second century Christian apologists. (Translations taken from the Donaldson of Ante-Nicene Fathers)

Tatian: Apology Bk.5:

“And as the Logos, begotten in the beginning, begat in turn our world, having first created for Himself the necessary matter [καὶ καθάπερ ὁ λόγος ἐν ἀρχῇ γεννηθεὶς ἀντεγέννησε τὴν καθ' ἡμᾶς ποίησιν αὐτὸς ἑαυτῷ, τὴν ὕλην δημιουργήσας,]…”

And Bk.7:

“For the heavenly Logos, a spirit emanating from the Father and a Logos from the Logos-power, in imitation of the Father who begat Him made man an image of immortality…[Λόγος γὰρ ὁ ἐπουράνιος πνεῦμα γεγονὼς ἀπὸ τοῦ πνεύματος καὶ λόγος ἐκ λογικῆς δυνάμεως, κατὰ τὴν τοῦ γεννήσαντος αὐτὸν πατρὸς μίμησιν εἰκόνα τῆς ἀθανασίας τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐποίησεν,].”

“The Logos, too, before the creation of men, was the Framer of angels [ὁ μὲν οὖν λόγος πρὸ τῆς τῶν ἀνθρώπων κατασκευῆς ἀγγέλων δημιουργὸς γίνεται,].”

Direct statements of the Son/Logos as creator. A couple of others, perhaps not quite so direct:

Athenagoras, who says (ch.10):

“But the Son of God is the Logos of the Father, in idea and in operation; for after the pattern of Him and by Him were all things made, the Father and the Son being one…but inasmuch as He (the Son) came forth to be the idea and energizing power of all material things…”

The Son is part of and an emanation of God, so if God creates the world, the Son does too, especially when it is consistently said that creation is performed through the Son, an entity in himself. Jeffrey seems to want to imply that the Son as agent of creation is no more than the Father’s fingers and opposable thumb.

Theophilus is more in keeping with the epistles’ language, but he too is pretty clear that the Son is more than a mere ‘instrument’: Bk.2, ch.10 says:

“God, then, having His own Word internal within His own bowels, begat Him, emitting Him along with His own wisdom before all things. He had this Word as a helper in the things that were created by Him, and by Him He made all things.”

And every one of the statements quoted here (and others I have not quoted) was made without benefit of any accompanying statement that this cosmic Son who created the world was incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth of Gospel fame. Many documents, many authors, all of them silent on the earthly identity of God’s bowel-begotten Son, or even that he had come to our fair shores. Amazing, what? Not a problem, of course, for those whose methodology, tried and true, has been to simply read the Gospels into such documents.

And another observation in this regard. Why is it that the earliest Gospels, the Synoptics, have nothing to say about their Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary crucified by Pilate, as the creator and sustainer of the universe? Perhaps because their Jesus essentially grew out of the Galilean Kingdom of God preaching movement, whose purported founder had nothing to do with such a philosophy, and the very attachment of such elevated concepts to him would have seemed ludicrous to anyone. It is equally ludicrous that, as a result of later Christian syncretism, we today are still led to perform that attachment. Of course, theologians (probably beginning with the later editor of John) have had centuries to work their magic and ease the ludicrous element into our minds.

Jeffrey got himself into all this trouble because, as is his wont, he seized on some technicality of grammar to try to discredit something that Clive said which was quite valid, thereby demonstrating his own lack of insight and knowledge into the question—or perhaps simply once again hoping to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. The issue is not what the rules of Greek grammar say about the literal meaning of Hebrews 1:2, which is definitely that “God created the world"—but "through the Son." The issue is what the latter signifies and the meaning to be drawn from it. We will all note that Jeffrey has so far not gone into that, since this would reveal the actuality of the matter and his own objectionable misrepresentation of Clive’s statement.

As I have said many times, Jeffrey is not interested in contributing anything to the discussion, let alone to the pursuit of knowledge, but merely to obfuscate and interfere with that pursuit, especially one that might well end up showing that the mythicist case has a lot more going for it than he would care to admit.

Better add my name, too
Earl Doherty

Toto

Cross posted with Earl's statement above. People try to kick the IIDB habit, but they can't. . .

I only intended to clear up some confusion on your part.

This is way off topic. The issue that was raised originally was whether the author of Hebrews locates the Son in heaven at the beginning of time, or the beginning of the world. The Trinity is a confused doctrine that I would not try to explain.

Do you contend that the text says that God created the world through the agency of the Son, but the Son cannot be located in heaven?

Ben C Smith

Welcome back, Earl.

Ben.

gstafleu

How about 8:1 "Now this is the main point of the things we are saying: We have such a High Priest, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens"? Seems to me that "in the heavens" is reasonably unambiguous.

Gerard Stafleu

Jeffrey Gibson

I see now that the "therefore" is not Earl's but Bauer's. But note that what Baurer is doing when he says " οἰκ. seems to mean the whole world (so far as living beings inhabit it, therefore the realm of spirits as well [p. 561])"is noting what Johnston, in his article on κόσμος, has argued is the meaning that the expression τὴν οἰκουμ�*νηον ἔκτισας, not the word οἰκουμ�*νη has.

So what do we make of Earl's claim that "we are entitled to take oikoumenē" in Heb. 1:6 "as having, as Bauer’s Lexicon calls it, “an extraordinary use.” Bauer applies this not to Hebrews 1:6, but to 1 Clement 60:1, “where oikoumenē seems to mean the whole world (so far as living beings inhabit it, therefore the realm of spirits as well)”? and that Bauer's not seeing "that this definition should be equally applicable to the Hebrews verse" is due to a "preconception" of what the word οἰκουμ�*νη means?

It is grounded in ignoring the context in which Bauer's statement appears, a selective quotation of what Bauer actually says, and a misrepresentation of what Bauer is talking about (the expression, not the word), not to mention a skating over the data in Hebrews that shows that when the author of the Epistle wants to give οἰκουμ�*νη a sense other than what the noun ordinarily meant or was used to signify, he uses qualifiers.


For reference, here's the whole of the DBAG entry:

Jeffrey

Ben C Smith

I agree. But, then again, I see the earth as pretty unambiguous in this epistle, too. Which is why I am asking you about heaven.

In this verse the term high priest certainly does not put Jesus in the heavens; the right hand of the throne of majesty sounds like heaven, but the throne of God is also sometimes located on earth; and in the heavens sure sounds like heaven to me... but, then again, the inhabited earth sounds like earth to me in 1.6. So what do I know?

Here is how I see Hebrews as a whole. In 1.6 we are told that Christ descended to earth; while on earth he was in the form of flesh and blood, similar to his brethren, the seed of Abraham, in every way; in 9.24 (possibly among other places) we are told that Christ ascended to heaven; in 8.1, 4 we are told that he is not (currently) on earth.

In all of this the usual meanings of words are employed. Earth is earth, flesh is flesh, heaven is heaven. What do you find in Hebrews that would contradict the scenario I have outlined?

These observations and the questions I asked in my previous post ought to do for now.

Oh, and one more question. It is clear from Hebrews 5.7-10 that Christ becomes a priest only after his perfection, which in 2.9-10 means his suffering death. Why, in your judgment, does the author not make Christ a priest before his death, that is, in the very process of sacrificing himself? Why the awkward sequence of offering the sacrifice then being made priest?

Ben.

Jeffrey Gibson

Please show me in what way I misrepresented Clive's statement.

Jeffrey