In Two Different Worlds

Our brief Gospel lesson presents us with a crux this morning, which opens a window onto the lifeworld of Jesus as few other Gospel passages do. Jesus reveals a mystery having great significance for Christians. Some see a theophany being depicted: God the Father declaring to God the Son in the Spirit. We learn that the exchange has caused a rupture: from that day on, the Pharisees would have no further dealings with Jesus.

But it turns out that most readers of English translations, do not understand why the Pharisees have departed from Jesus and His Disciples finally and forever. English translations imply that Jesus has bested the Pharisees. He has cited Psalm 110, which proposes a riddle they cannot answer. The Greek New Testament, which is drawn specifically from the Septuagint, records what Jesus has said:

You see in both the Greek New Testament and the Septuagint, which it cites, in both cases the word "Lord" is rendered from the Greek word Kúrios, or "King."

Our English translations have the atmospherics wrong. Yes, Jesus does reveal a profound mystery if you accept the Septuagint phrasing. But the Pharisees do not accept this phrasing, and they do not perceive a mystery according to their Bible. And the English rendering — "no one was able to answer Him a word, nor from that day on did anyone dare question Him anymore." — has applied "spin" to St. Matthew's Greek (with respect).

The Pharisees are not bested by Jesus. They depart not because they have lost face in a contest of Bible interpretation. In fact, Jesus and the Pharisees are not debating theology at all. They are debating Bible versions. The Pharisees depart because they do not accept Jesus' version of the Bible, the Septuagint, a third-century B.C. Greek translation. One of the greatest classicists of the twentieth century, Werner Jaeger, pointed out that when Jesus cites Scripture, it is always from the Septuagint and never the Pharisee's Bible (Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, 1961).

The Pharisees famously are committed to their Bible — let us call it the Jewish Bible, the Bible of Judah. They spend their days endlessly debating the meaning of every Hebrew character in it. And they know that Psalm 110, Verse 1 proposes no riddle. Let us read this brief passage from the Complete Jewish Bible:

These words are familiar and unremarkable: "Trust in God, and He will assure your victory."

The first Hebrew noun "Lord" is the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, King of the Universe, while the second Hebrew noun for "master" is Iadonee, whose several meanings include "master of the house," but in this case refer to King David. Certainly no equal sign is being drawn between YHWH and David.

Yes, I know that in the New Testament Kúrios, which is usually translated "Lord," has potentially many meanings. But in the Septuagint, Kúrios is consistently used to translate "YHWH," that is "God and King."

You see, in Jesus' Bible, the Septuagint (its name means "The Seventy" recalling its seventy-two translators), a mystery is proposed. YHWH and David are equated, and in this, Jesus, the Son of David, begins to reveal His Divine Identity. In the Septuagint, Psalm 110 (actually numbered 109) does not make a distinction between the nouns "YWHW" and "master." These nouns are identical: Κύριος / Kúrios or "King" — one and the same, equal.

The reason the Pharisees walk away is that it is pointless to debate with Jesus, for He always replies citing from a Bible different from theirs, which, by the way, He does in this passage from Matthew. In Matthew's Greek, Jesus uses Kúrios for both the first and second nouns following Ps 110/109 in the Septuagint precisely.

How strange! we might say. Why would Jesus and the Disciples use a Greek translation of the Bible? Would not the Bible written in Hebrew be the original and therefore obligatory for all serious students? But this objection presupposes that the Septuagint was translated from the Pharisee's Bible, which is not the case. The Bible the Pharisees use is a Judean Bible. But the Septuagint was prepared by translators representing all Twelve Tribes of Israel equally: six translators from each tribe. So we are right to style the Pharisee's Bible. the "Jewish Bible," arising exclusively from the religion of Judah-ism, a religion begun during and after the Judean exile to Babylon three centuries earlier.

By contrast, the Septuagint, ironically, is the authentic Hebrew Bible (though it is rendered in Greek) arising from the twelve mentalities of the Hebrew tribes, most of whom had never been formed in Babylonian (Mesopotamian) culture or religion. Indeed, the Septuagint is the once-for-all "download" (we might say) of the Hebrew thought-world sampled from every tribe, at least where the Scriptures are concerned.

Do you see this great dividing line? On one side is Judah; on the other is everyone else. Judah has its Judean Bible. Everyone else calls the Septuagint its own.

Now, my next point is a subtle one. The Judeans had been rewriting the Scriptures before, during, and after the return from Mesopotamia. This process of revision is, itself, not subtle nor difficult to discern: Deuteronomy appears out of nowhere during the seventh century just before the deportation. You know the story. King Josiah says, "Oh, look what I found! A new Book of the Torah! It had been hidden in the Temple all along!"

And the Ezra tradition during and after deportation emphasizes the need to revise the Bible. That two of the Sacred Scriptures — the Books of Daniel and Ezra — were written in the Babylonian language (Aramaic) reveals that the deported Judeans did not hesitate to bring the Babylonian thought-world into their most sacred meditations. Local culture, after all, embedded in local language.

Consequently, all Septuagint translators would have been exposed to Judean influences for three the hundred years before they began their work. Unavoidable, So while scholarly study of the centuries just before and just after the birth of Jesus reveal wide diversity in Hebrew beliefs and practices, the hegemony of powerful Judah had, at least, influenced nearly every Hebrew from every tribe.

Nonetheless, the antipathies between Jesus and the Judeans runs very deep. Outcroppings of this appear everywhere in the Gospels — the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the rioting of Jesus in the Temple, and this morning's Gospel lesson are but three examples. And as we learn this morning, Jesus and the Pharisees would never speak to each other again following this latest conflict.

As reflections posted from the Hermitage have emphasized, the Judah-ists (St. John calls them "the Jews" sixty-six times in his Gospel) and the Hebrews lived in two different worlds, rooted in two different religions, and having two very different conceptions of God.

These fundamental differences are wholly compatible with St. Matthew's sentences as we read the Greek original. Consider a different translation of Mt 22:46:

You see rage reaches a boiling point.

This rendering of the Greek suggests something entirely different yet remains faithful to the language written by St. Matthew.

Few passages in the Gospels are as misunderstood as this one. And this is a shame, for few passages afford so clear a window into this culture of two opposing worlds, Judean and non-Judean. Without this understanding, we fail to grasp what is meant by the lost sheep of Israel. And we fail to comprehend the why and when of the Incarnation of God.

These issues are mostly hidden from non-specialists. Christians refer to the Old Testament as the "Hebrew Scriptures." Protestants, indeed, have translated their Old Testaments from the Pharisee's Bible when it finally reached a steady state (it would continue to be revised through the Middle Ages). This Judean Bible would become the basis for Protestant belief at least concerning Old Testament content.

St. Jerome altered the Septuagint for his Vulgate, imagining that Hebrew language is preferred over Greek language. This is natural, I suppose, as the Septuagint is, after all, a translation. But, in fact, the opposite case pertains as we have just discussed.

As we have considered many times, the religion, customs, and language of Judah were fundamentally altered by the Exile to Babylon. One-third of the Judean population, including the ruling elite, spent two generations in Mesopotamia. When they returned, the Hebrews could plainly see that they had become strikingly Mesopotamian. They spoke a Mesopotamian language (Aramaic), They worshiped after the style of Mesopotamians, offering blood sacrifice to appease their deity (i.e., for "salvation"). It is a historical fact that Mesopotamian Persians financed and directed the construction of the Zion Temple, whose daily life would revolve around sacrifice, which Jesus famously interrupted and overturned (Jn 2:13-19) .... at least for one afternoon.

I have told you the story of the mass of Hebrews who fled to the Elephantine in Egypt to construct a faithful Temple. The Persians pursued them and threatened to destroy them if they did not offer blood sacrifice.

I have told you the story of the Essenes, one of the many sects of diverse Hebrew belief, who refused to enter the Temple to offer blood sacrifices, but instead made the acceptable offering of a transformed mind and spirit. We see very plainly that Jesus and the Apostles were in this tradition. And we think of St. Paul, who was obviously influenced by it (Rom 12:1, et al.).

Jesus came out a Hebrew background. He called His Disciples out of that same non-Judean lifeworld .... except Judas, whose name is a variant spelling of Judah. These men prayed different prayers and observed different festivals. St. John declares the Jerusalem Passover to be "their festival, not ours!" (Jesus and His Apostles seem to have observed the same Passover as the Essenes featuring not the butchering of a lamb but an offering of your mind and soul, described by the first-century author Josephus.) Jesus and the Apostles were reared in the religion of the Patriarchs. This was the ancient and original religion, rejected by Judah, who was promoting their new thing, which continued to be a client state to a great Mesopotamian power (Persia), until the Romans supplanted Persia as Judah's master. Please remember that the Romans also favored sacrifices offered to the pagan gods.

During the century preceding Jesus' birth, Judah-ism, which is the basis for Jewish religion today, began to assert itself as as the dominant religion of the Levant seeking to marginalize the many patterns of Hebrew belief to be found across Israel. Synagogues were built everywhere strictly governed by Zion Temple authorities. We know these stories from the Gospels. We recall the ruler of the Temple being nervous because one of the Zion Temple authorities was present while Jesus was there.

But a century earlier, the King of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.), invited six translators from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel to Alexandria. He wanted the fullness of the Hebrew mind and spirit in all its prismatic diversity distilling it into a Hebrew Bible rendered in Greek. We could read between the lines and speculate that he rejected the Jewish Bible. Otherwise, he would simply have invited Judean experts to develop a Greek-language Bible for him.

We do not have the Hebrew originals from which the Septuagint translators worked. But the Gospels attest the deep and long-standing ill feeling between Judah and the other historic tribal regions. You see, none of these outlying peoples were included in the deportation. They had gone on with the life they knew, which was the traditions of the Patriarchs. We can imagine how these Hebrews would have responded as the Judeans returned from Babylon — speaking an unintelligible language: Mesopotamian; worshiping after the Mesopotamian example, building a Temple supervised by Mesopotamians, and rewriting the Scriptures to conform to their foreign beliefs. So deep ran these antipathies, that Judeans, who of course would have been mocked as phonies, would destroy the ancient Hebrew Temple at Mt. Gerizim in 112 B.C., destroyed the holiest site outside of Judah.

The Septuagint would be completed in stages, the first around 247 B.C. and the second during the 100s B.C. ("Septuagint," Britannica). According to the mythos surrounding the translation, each translator was led to his own cell and received the same instructions. Months later, each emerged, miraculously, having rendered an identical translation. Every translation was the same! All seventy-two! Whether this story is historically accurate is not our preoccupation this morning.

What is manifestly Divine is the timing of all this. The translation was carried out precisely as Judah-ism began its aspiration to stamp out all other expressions of Hebrew culture and religion. And the "Twelve Tribes Bible" (we might call it) was completed on the eve of the earthly Nativity of the Son of God, Who then used it exclusively. The timing of this is stunning!

The Incarnation would point back to the religion of the Patriarchs, rejecting the religion of Judah. The Disciples Jesus called also came out of this tradition. The interchange we witness this morning between the Pharisees and Jesus can only be understood in the context of these basic differences.

But it is not the friction between these two groups which interests us; it is their fundamentally different conceptions of God — one arising from Mesopotamian "blood-sacrifice" and the other from a tradition of attaining purity, whose Father is Abraham, a tradition of intimacy with a very present God, received (we might say) amongst the Oaks of Mamre .... whose religious practice is theosis, becoming more and more like Father God. Abraham dominates the New Testament .... as Moses does not. Indeed, it is this same Abraham vs. Moses controversy which Temple authorities adduce for killing the Proto-martyr, St. Stephen (Acts 6:14). For Moses had been appropriated as spokesman for the Judah-ist movement while Jesus and His followers (including St. Paul) devoted themselves to Abraham.

I hope that no one sees this morning's reflection as a dry history lesson nor a detour into academics. What we have before us is nothing less than the living, breathing heart and soul of our faith: living sacred pictures from the family album. These differences are not mere footnotes or historical background material. They run through Christianity today. For nothing so divides Christian belief as the doctrine of "blood sacrifice" for salvation versus intimacy with God leading to Divine union. The former is the basis for Christian Evangelical belief: "There's nothing I can offer!" the Evangelical says. "Jesus offered it all on the Cross!" Meantime, the Roman Catholic believes that Jesus is sacrificed at the Altar during Holy Mass expiating our sins. But these are not Orthodox teachings.

Orthodoxy is firmly rooted in the ancient and the original. It is grounded in intimacy with God, fellowship with one's appointed angel, and a sense of adventure. My spiritual guide in seminary, a Roman Catholic nun, told me, "Following God is the last great adventure." How right she was! And everything else in my life ever since as fallen away as meaningless, as cotton candy, as caramel-covered popcorn .... save my particular love for special people and my striving to love everyone according to the Great Commandment. At the center, holding all, together is God Who styles us His son or His daughter .... and, of course, our my strivings to live up to these beautiful expectations.

But it all begins with the religion of the Patriarchs. It begins with the Incarnation of God, Which announces the "Kingdom of Heaven" (a phrase never before heard). It begins with earnest men reared in this tradition from the hinterlands beyond Judah, who dropped everything they were doing, even their whole lives (Mt 19:27), when they heard a mysterious man say,

Look in the Jewish Bible to find analogues to such promises. But you will find nothing. For the Saduccees forbade mention of angels and did not believe in an afterlife Heaven.

But these holy words would have burned in the ears of the young men who first met Jesus. Their hearts would have burned within their chests. And their young imaginations would have been transported back to the time of their grandparents, even back to Jacob's Peniel:

Holy Orthodoxy. It is the Gate of Heaven. It is the ancient and the original. It is the way of Christians still hanging on in the Holy Land, living out a faith traced back to their forebears in unbroken succession. For it has not swerved from the original course set by Jesus and the Apostles. It has not accepted the Jewish Bible. It has not accepted the Scholasticism that refined this idea of "the sacrifice of the mass." It was specifically to one side of the ascendancy of Judah-ism in the Levant opposing it. And the eyes of Orthodoxy continue to be on Jesus' life, not fixated upon His death. And its goal, as it had been for the Apostles, is union with the Living God as the Father and the Son are One and we are One with them (Jn 17:21).

The path of purgation, taking out our personal garbage. The path of enlightenment, because light will flood into every corner and space within us when we have done that. And the path of union, for nothing now shall separate us from the love of God. No quick fix. No blood sacrifice for salvation. No "this" for "that." But Heaven. For as a great saint once said, "It is nothing but Heaven all the way to Heaven.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.