1' History of Old Testament Theology

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1. History of Old Testament Theology

• APTS BIB566/THE566

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1.1 Introduction
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1.1.1 Difficulties in Approaching O.T. Studies

• 1.1.1.1 Historical barriers
• 1.1.1.2 Literary barriers
• 1.1.1.3 Theological / Hermeneutical barriers
• 1.1.1.4 General unfamiliarity with the O.T.
• 1.1.1.5 Scholarly barriers

• Paul R. House, Old Testament Theology.

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Further Difficulties

• Pluralism Pluralformity
• Historical Critical Issues the Historiography
• Sect / Denominational Issues
• General presuppositions when approaching the O.T.

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The Bible as a Problem for Christianity

• "If the equation is made between the biblical
  representation of Yahweh and the God of creeds of
  theology, then major problems arise. It is the
  theological appropriation of the Bible, or,
  alternatively, the invasion of religion by
  philosophy (which produces theology in the first
  place), which constitutes the problem, and which
  makes the Bible such an uneasy object in the
  temple of theology." Robert P. Carroll

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1.1.2 Five Possible Starting Points

• 1.1.2.1 The Old Testament itself
• Intra-Testamental Michael A. Fishbane, Biblical
  Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 1985.

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Inner-Biblical Exegesis

• Michael Fishbane has argued that the first steps
  toward exegesis begins in the Scriptures
  themselves
• "The Hebrew Bible (HB) is thus a thick texture of
  traditions received and produced over many
  generations. In the process, a complex dynamic
  between tradition (traditum) and transmission
  (traditio) developed since every act of
  traditio selected, revised, and reconstituted the
  overall traditum. To be sure, the contrast
  between authoritative traditum and ongoing
  traditio is most clear at the close of ancient
  Israelite literature."

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1.1.2 Five Possible Starting Points

• 1.1.2.2 Version Analysis LXX, Qumran, Samaritan
  Pent., MT, etc.
• N.B. Brevard Childs chooses the MT via a
  Reformation bias.
• However each textual trajectory has its own
  theological commitments.

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Versional Analysis

• The Era of Pluriformity
• The period 250 BCE 100 CE was an era when the
  Scriptures were pluriform.
• The "proto-Masoretic," "proto-Samaritan
  Pentateuch," Old Greek with its Hebrew Vorlage,
  the Greek translational emendations, Targumic
  beginnings, rewritten Bibles, possibly sectarian
  versions (?)?
• Some OT scholars have argued that the "all/every"
  scripture of 2 Timothy 3.16 referred to the
  pluriform state of the Scriptures.

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Versional Analysis

• Different Approaches to the so-called Canon
• Qumran Community
• Pharisees
• Sadducees Samaritans
• Septuagint with what F. F. Bruce called the
  Septuagint Plus
• What was the role of the Rewritten Bibles?

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Septuagint

• "The problem of the historical and theological
  relation of Old Testament and New Testament is,
  to a large extent, understood as the relation
  between the Biblia Hebraica and the Novum
  Testamentum Graece. It is symptomatic that in
  academic education, the Hebrew original text of
  the Old Testament receives a lot of attention in
  contrast to the Septuagint, the Greek translation
  produced in the Egyptian Alexandria. But during
  the process of translation a certain shift
  occurred toward Hellenistic thinking Based on
  this translation, a considerable Hellenizing of
  the Old Testament cannot be denied, even if the
  extent may be debatable. In the Septuagint the
  spiritual attitude of Hellenistic Judaism in the
  diaspora is expressed one may refer to its
  greater emphasis on universalism." Hübner

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1.1.2 Five Possible Starting Points

• 1.1.2.3 New Testament
• "For the New Testament authors the Scripture of
  Israel was not the Old Testament. The correct
  formulation can only be the New Testament
  authors were theologically dealing with the
  Scripture of Israel which for them exclusively
  was holy Scripture and, thus, the literal word of
  God announcing Christ by divine authority."
  Hübner

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Robert L. Hubbard, Jr. Doing Old Testament
Theology Today

• 1. "First, one must remember that, compared to
  the OT, the NT has a narrower focus. It is does
  not set aside, revise, or update the OT rather,
  its primary preoccupation is to interpret the
  significance of the Christ-event and to set up
  the fledgling Christian church on a solid
  footing. . . . the point is that the NT does not
  see itself as replacement of the OT, so that
  latter retains full authority for Christians."

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Robert L. Hubbard, Jr. Doing Old Testament
Theology Today

• 2. "Second, however, a well-intentioned desire to
  retain the value of the OT and the unity of the
  testaments should not blind one to the glaring
  differences between them. That is, besides
  fulfilling the OT, the NT goes beyond it."
• 3. "Most important, Jesus does more that simply
  fulfil OT prophetic hopes - He actually exceeds
  their expectations by radically reforming
  Israels religion and by inaugurating a new era
  of Gods dealings with humanity."

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Robert L. Hubbard, Jr. Doing Old Testament
Theology Today

• 4. "Fourth, the principle of analogy is the key
  link that unites the testaments. In other words,
  both share analogous concepts with each other-
  e.g., a self-revealing creator-God, a people of
  God, gifts given to them by God, concepts of
  salvation, etc."
• 5. Fifth and finally, one must define how Jesus
  Christ relates to the OT since He is the heart of
  the NT. Obviously, Christians regard Him as the
  fulfilment of some OT theological ideas. . . . On
  the other hand, Christ provides a new, final
  interpretive key for the Bible. Christians view
  everything within the Bible from the point of
  view of Christ."

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1.1.2 Five Possible Starting Points

• 1.1.2.4 Early church fathers, medieval
  interpreters and leaders of the Reformation John
  Calvin and Martin Luther, etc.
• David C. Steinmetz Precritical Exegesis
• Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old
  and New Testaments Theological Reflections on
  the Christian Bible, 30-51.

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Steinmetz Theology Exegesis

• 1. The meaning of a biblical text is not
  exhausted by the original intension of the
  author.
• 2. The most primitive layer of biblical tradition
  is not necessarily the most authoritative.
• 3. The importance of the Old Testament for the
  church is predicated upon the continuity of the
  people of God in history, a continuity which
  persists in spite of discontinuity between Israel
  the the church.

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Steinmetz Theology Exegesis

• 4. The Old Testament is the hermeneutical key
  which unlocks the meaning of the New Testament
  and apart from which it will be misunderstood.
• 5. The church and not human experience as such is
  the middle term between the Christian interpreter
  and the biblical text.
• 6. The gospel and not the law is the central
  message of the biblical text.
• 7. One cannot lose the tension between the the
  gospel and the law without losing both law and
  gospel.

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Steinmetz Theology Exegesis

• 8. The church which is restricted in its
  preaching to the original intention of the author
  is a church which must reject the Old Testament
  as an exclusively Jewish book.
• 9. The church which is restricted in its
  preaching to the most primitive layer of biblical
  tradition as the most authoritative is a church
  which can no longer preach from the New
  Testament.
• 10. Knowledge of the exegetical tradition of the
  church is an indispensable aid for the
  interpretation of Scripture.

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Precritical Movement

• Four Fundamental Assumptions Governing the
  Difference Between the Precritical versus the
  Historical-critical Exegesis
• 1. "First, unlike the historical-critical
  exegesis of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
  twentieth centuries, the older exegesis (whether
  of the patristic, medieval, or Reformation eras)
  understood the historia that is, the story that
  the text is properly understood to recount to
  be resident in the text and not under or behind
  it. In other words, the "story" is identified
  with the literal or grammatical sense."

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Precritical Movement

• 2. "Second, quite in contrast to modern
  historical-critical exegesis, the older exegesis
  assumed that the meaning of a particular text is
  governed not by a hypothetically isolable unit of
  text having a Sitz im Leben distinguishable from
  the surrounding texts or from the biblical book
  in which it is lodged. Instead, the meaning of a
  text is governed by the scope and goal of the
  biblical book in the context of the scope and
  goal of the canonical revelation of God. In other
  words, Christian exegetes traditionally have
  assumed that a divine purpose and divine
  authorship unite the text of the entire canon."

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Precritical Movement

• 3. "Third, the older exegetes understood the
  primary reference of the literal or grammatical
  sense of the text not as the historical community
  that gave rise to the text, but as the believing
  community that once received and continued to
  receive the text. The text is of interest above
  all because it bears a divinely inspired message
  to an ongoing community of faith and not because
  it happens also to be a repository of the
  religious relics of a past age. . . . The
  precritical exegete . . . did not understand
  these historical or contextual issues as
  providing the final point of reference for the
  significance of the text. . . . the precritical
  exegete understood the text, but its very nature
  as sacred text, as pointing beyond its original
  context into the life of the church. 'Literal,'
  therefore, had a rather different (and fuller)
  connotation for the older exegetical traditions
  than it does for many today."

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Precritical Movement

• 4. "A fourth point amplifies the third. The
  Reformation-era exegete, like his medieval and
  patristic forebears, never conceived of his task
  as the work of an isolated scholar on the
  shoulders of whose opinion the entire exegetical
  result could be established and carried. Instead,
  the exegete of the Reformation era indeed, even
  the Protestant exegete of the later
  sixteenth-century, who held as a matter of
  doctrine that Scripture was ultimately
  self-authenticating as the highest norm of
  theology understood the interpretive task as an
  interpretive conversation in the context of the
  historical community of belief."

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1.1.2 Five Possible Starting Points

• 1.1.2.5 Rabbinic scholars
• Jon D. Levenson, "Why Jews are not interested in
  Biblical Theology."
• Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, Emil Fackenhiem

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Levenson, "Why Jews are not interested in
Biblical Theology."

• 1. "The sad truth is that Old Testament
  theologians have generally treated the themes
  that appeal to them as more pervasive in the Old
  Testament and the religion of Israel than is
  warranted. Historians of religion without
  theological commitment would, instead, be
  inclined to acknowledge the diversity and
  contradiction of biblical thought frankly. They
  would feel no need to concoct a spurious "unity."

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Levenson, "Why Jews are not interested in
Biblical Theology."

• 2. "One reason for the distance Jewish biblicists
  tend to keep from biblical theology is the
  intense anti-Semitism evident in many of the
  classic works in that field."
• 3. "Historically, biblical theology has been not
  only non-Jewish, but actively Protestant."
• Karaism's "search out the Torah thoroughly" and
  the anti-Oral tradition yielded a pursuit of the
  peshat (plain sense) reading of the Bible, but
  this was annomolous. There was not ad fontes
  (back to the sources!) movement in Judaism.

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Levenson, "Why Jews are not interested in
Biblical Theology."

• 4. "The effort to construct a systematic,
  harmonious theological statement out of the
  unsystematic and polydox materials in the Hebrew
  Bible fits Christianity better than Judaism
  because systematic theology in general is more
  prominent and more at home in the church than in
  the bet midrash (study house) and the synagogue."

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Levenson, "Why Jews are not interested in
Biblical Theology."

• Susan Handelman "One of the most interesting
  aspects of Rabbinic thought is tis development of
  a highly sophisticated system of interpretation
  based on uncovering and expanding the primary
  concrete meaning, and yet drawing a variety of
  logical inferences from the meaning without the
  abstracting, idealizing movement of Western
  thought."

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Levenson, "Why Jews are not interested in
Biblical Theology."

• Gershom Scholem "not system but commentary is
  the legitimate form through which truth is
  approached."
• "It is hard to see how a biblical theology that
  did not respect the doctrine of the priority and
  normativity of the Pentateuch could be authentic
  to the Jewish tradition."

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Levenson, "Why Jews are not interested in
Biblical Theology."

• 5. "It is precisely the failure of the biblical
  theologians to recognize the limitation of the
  context of their enterprise that makes some of
  them surprised that Jews are not interested in
  it."