Unlocking the Bible: A Layperson's Guide

By S.H. Smith

Unlocking the Bible is essentially a lay-persons guide to biblical interpretation. Its thesis is that understanding the text requires a prior understanding of critical technique. With this in view, the book examines historical, literary and cultural issues which are essential for an appreciation of the Bible today, and suggests that a consideration of the authors primary aims is key to an accurate exegesis of the text. Unlocking the Bible, although intended for general consumption, should be of particular interest to evangelical Christians whose approach to the Bible can often be ad hoc or arbitrary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Dec 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483667294

S.H. Smith

Stephen Smith holds an MA in Religion and Philosophy from Heythrop College, London, and for many years taught philosophy of religion at Bennett Memorial Diocesan School in Tunbridge Wells. His previous publications include A Lion With Wings: A Narrative-Critical Approach to Mark’s Gospel (Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), and Unlocking the Bible: A Layperson’s Guide (Xlibris, 2013). He now lives in retirement in Sheffield.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by S.H. Smith.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Rev. date: 10/02/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

0-800-056-3182

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

[e-mail]

521272

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 What Are The Problems?

Chapter 2 Is There A Definitive Biblical Text?

Chapter 3 What About Source Criticism?

Chapter 4 What Is Biblical Prophecy?

Chapter 5 What Is Biblical History?

Chapter 6 Can We Recover The Historical Jesus?

Chapter 7 What Did Jesus Say?

Chapter 8 Are Biblical Miracles Authentic?

Chapter 9 What About The Resurrection?

Chapter 10 What Is Apocalyptic?

Chapter 11 Does The Bible Contain Myth?

Chapter 12 What Can We Conclude?

Bibliography

PREFACE

The majority of Christians, especially evangelicals, have a much too simplistic view of the Bible. This includes not only the typical member of the congregation but many of the clergy as well. Because the Bible is seen to be the Word of God, liberties are taken with it that would never be taken with any other literature. Let us consider Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays, for example. If a literary critic wishes to analyse Hamlet, he will do so chiefly by reference to the internal structure and characteristics of that play rather than by reference to some other play in the canon. He would not interpret Hamlet in the light of, say, Julius Caesar. Possibly he might shed light on the author’s methods and purposes by considering illustrations from previous of his plays which happen to impinge on the one under consideration, but each play in Shakespeare’s corpus is a play in its own right, fully able to stand on its own as a work of art.

Now the Bible is a corpus of sixty-six books, and these lay claim to be more disparate than the plays of Shakespeare. For Shakespeare was, at least, a single author (although others had a hand in a few of his works), always wrote in English, and over a comparatively short period (around thirty years, from 1584-1613). The Bible, on the other hand, as we shall note in Chapter 1, was written by many different authors in three different languages, in different countries, and to vastly different audiences over a period of more than 1,000 years. Yet because it is believed to be the Word of God, it is taken by most Christians to be a homogeneous whole which can be dipped into at will. Some preachers adopt what I call the ‘cherry-picking’ method, constructing an argument by diving at random into the Scriptures and perhaps emerging with texts from books as disparate as, say, Leviticus, Job, and Revelation, completely disregarding the very different genres and characteristics of these works. That is certainly not the most profitable way of deriving meaning from the Bible. Each book should be taken as an entity in itself, and it is vital that we try to ascertain the purpose of the original author before we can consider what a work may mean to a modern reader far removed from the author in time, location, and culture. Without that, any attempt to understand a text is bound to be fraught with difficulty because it will remain unanchored in the author’s original intention, leaving the meaning to be guessed at in a purely arbitrary manner.

The purpose of this book is essentially a first-order one. That is to say, it is not so much concerned with what the Bible—or particular books in the canon—means as with the primary techniques involved in ascertaining that meaning in the first place. For instance, before we can understand the meaning of prophetic texts from the Old Testament, or the quotations from the Old Testament by the early Christian writers, we need to understand the nature of prophecy itself. Before we can establish whether some event in the Bible is historical, we must know what ancient history is and how it differs from our modern idea of history. And before we can decide whether or not Jesus performed miracles, we must understand the nature of the miraculous according to those who produced the miracle stories in the first place. What did they think they were doing when they produced such accounts? So our approach will be to examine the tools of biblical scholarship rather than the texts themselves, although, naturally, we shall be referring to a number of texts and even analysing a few of them, by way of illustration.

My chief aim will be to encourage the reader to ‘think outside the box’ and, by providing an introduction to the tools of the trade, enable him or her to begin reading the Bible with a more critical eye than hitherto—not in the sense of negative, destructive criticism, but in order that the reading experience might be enriched, for the more perceptive the reader is, the deeper the truths that will be uncovered and the greater will be the reader’s reward. A more scholarly approach to the Bible is likely to deepen one’s appreciation and faith rather than diminish it.

I am pleased to thank the staff of my publisher, Xlibris, for their guidance and encouragement throughout the publishing process and for their care in ensuring a professional finished product.

CHAPTER 1

What Are the Problems?

What is the Bible? Ask most Christians that question, and they will tell you it is the Word of God. Many will be content to leave the matter there, but of course, this simply raises the further question: What is meant by the Word of God? Is the Bible the product of God’s virtual dictation? Some think it is. Or should we see God’s Word in terms of authorial inspiration? We may say that Shakespeare was an inspired playwright without believing that he wrote at the dictation of any external agency. In fact, we know that he often made use of existing written sources, using them as part of his own invention. Something of his genius can be seen in the fact that today his plays are far better known than the sources he used in writing them. Yet it is difficult to determine precisely why this is so. Inspiration is a slippery word and cannot easily be defined. In much the same way, the authors of the Bible were ordinary human beings writing in human language, but their words have come down to us as Scripture. How could these ordinary men have produced works that, with hindsight, have been regarded by millions of people as God’s holy Word? I say ‘with hindsight’ because in most cases these authors would not have been conscious that they were producing Scripture. Perhaps they felt conscious of the divine as they wrote without necessarily feeling that the words they were writing were holy in themselves. The apostle Paul is an interesting case here. The letters he wrote to his various churches were largely pastoral and instructive, with some theology worked into many of them; his chief aim was to advise and encourage. He often quoted from Scripture—that is to say, the Torah—but he never dreamt that he was in the process of writing Scripture himself. We can see this in the fact that he felt free to include comments that he admitted were not from the Lord. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 7: 10, 12, he wrote:

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband… To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her.

If Paul had felt that he was writing at God’s express dictation, he would hardly have felt free to add his own ad hoc comments. It is true that some writers of the New Testament—John, for example—felt rather more constrained than Paul, warning against adding or subtracting from what had been written (cf. Rev. 22: 18-19), but on the whole, Scripture can be said to have arisen out of sustained reflection rather than from the conscious claims of those who wrote it.

Of course, if the Bible is really the Word of God, it must be true, but different Christians have very different ideas about what this means. At one end of the spectrum stand the extreme liberals, those who argue that the truth of the Bible is entirely metaphorical or symbolic and does not depend at all on whether the events it describes really happened. The Exodus, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection—these all have symbolic value. But did they really happen? Most liberals would say: probably not. Many Christians, however, will argue that this is an unwarrantedly sceptical view to take. Clearly, many biblical authors, such as the so-called Deuteronomistic historian, who is credited with the editorship of Deuteronomy—2 Kings, and Luke (the author of Luke-Acts), did think they were writing history and that God had somehow broken into those events. We shall see that although history was then regarded somewhat differently from history today, it was, nevertheless, history.

At the other end of the spectrum, the extreme fundamentalists insist that the Bible must be taken as literally true throughout. Of course, when they say this, they overlook the fact that some portions were never meant to be taken literally—the so-called poetry books (Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Song of Solomon) for instance. There is a good deal of metaphorical and symbolic language in the Bible which was always intended to be so. The fundamentalist may then retreat on to firmer ground by insisting that what should be taken literally are the historical records—the story of how God has acted in the history of his people. But here, too, there are problems. Sometimes what is presented as history is based on a discredited world view. To illustrate, in Joshua 10: 12-14 we are told that Joshua (with God’s approval, naturally) commanded the sun to stand still in the sky and that it did so for about a day. The sole purpose of this unprecedented feat was to allow Joshua more daylight hours in which to rout Israel’s enemies. However, a moment’s thought should tell us that such a feat would have been practically impossible.¹ It is now certain that the sun’s apparent movement is caused by the earth’s rotation on its axis, so if anything stopped at all, it must have been the earth’s rotation. And if Joshua managed to stop the earth’s rotation, it is remarkable indeed that such a stupendous event, which of necessity must have been witnessed the world over, was not recorded by any other of the world’s cultures at the time.

Again, we are told in 2 Kings 20: 9-11 that God reversed the sun’s shadow ten paces up the steps of Ahaz as a sign to King Hezekiah that he would be cured of a terminal illness. But this would have required a reversal of the earth’s rotation which, again, would surely have excited comment from other cultures.

These examples are sufficient to show that when we claim the Bible is true we need to use our intelligence. True in what sense? It certainly does not involve believing the practically impossible. Indeed, if we concern ourselves unduly with the question: ‘Did it happen?’ we miss out on symbolic and spiritual truths which, in all likelihood, are far more important.

It has been given to relatively few people to spend a lifetime in biblical study, and those who have researched the Bible in depth are well aware of the problems and pitfalls of over-literalism. For my own part, I find that the more I study the Bible, the more aware I become of my own ignorance. Unfortunately, it is usually the well-meaning evangelical Christian, with little or no formal biblical training, who imagines that he or she has an in-depth knowledge of the Bible. Often it is said that formal Bible study, using scholarly resources, is unnecessary because the Holy Spirit will reveal the true meaning of Scripture. Well, I do not mean to denigrate the work of the Holy Spirit in revealing the meaning of Scripture. A person who is filled with the Holy Spirit will no doubt be spiritually sensitive to his or her reading of Scripture and may well benefit in a way that a person who merely subjects the Bible to objective analysis will not. However, if one wishes to engage seriously with biblical exegesis, I am afraid that there can be no substitute for the spadework of academic discipline. We cannot simply shut our eyes and hope that the essential meaning will leap out of the text; it requires dedication and application.

In this book, I wish to demonstrate to the non-specialist the problems and issues which make it impossible to take the Bible at face value. I must reiterate that this is not to deny that the Bible is the Word of God in some sense or that it contains some essential truths. In fact, once we understand the Bible as it is meant to be understood, we shall be able to identify its status as the Word of God more clearly and accurately. The usual over-simplistic approach taken by so many evangelicals obfuscates the very truths they are seeking. The object here is to explode myths and overturn presuppositions in order to reveal the Scriptures in their true light so that the truths they have to reveal about God’s dealings with mankind become all the more evident.

Most Christians assume the Bible to be ‘true’ (whatever that means) without recognising that there is a prior question to be posed, namely, Is the text of the Bible reliable? For before we can begin to consider the first question, we must discover whether or not the text we have inherited is substantially the same as that written by the original authors. This problem is the domain of a branch of study known as textual criticism. Clearly, we do not have any of the autograph manuscripts—the originals—so we must work with what we do have. What happens when we compare different early manuscripts of the same text? Do we find a large measure of agreement, or are there some significant discrepancies? And are some families of manuscripts more reliable than others in the quest to recover, as far as possible, the original text? These issues will be the concern of Chapter 2.

Several books in the Bible are clearly source-dependent; they were not simply written from scratch but were compiled from earlier sources by people who were really editors rather than authors per se. This is certainly true of the Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy), the Deuteronomistic history (Joshua-2 Kings), and the Synoptic Gospels. In Chapter 3, we shall be taking the Pentateuch and the Synoptic Gospels as examples of how source criticism operates in the field of biblical study.

Another important issue is the nature of prophecy. Evangelicals often take the simplistic view that the prophets were messengers sent by God to tell the future and that many of these foretold events would come to pass hundreds of years later. An obvious example of this thinking is associated with Isaiah 7: 14, which reads:

Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Most evangelicals assume that this is a prophecy related to the Virgin Birth of Jesus, but they do so because they fail to appreciate the context of this verse, which relates not to the distant future but to the political situation at the time of King Ahaz (732-716 BC). Prophecy, on the whole, is a child of its time and is intended to change the attitudes of the original hearers rather than outline the distant future in which none of the prophet’s contemporaries would have had the slightest interest. These issues will be examined in Chapter 4.

Given that large tracts of the Bible purport to relate historical events, it is important to know precisely what is meant by ‘history’. One thing that is beyond doubt is that the ancient idea of ‘history’ is very different from the modern one. Even today, the writing of history is not simply a case of recording what took place; there are perspectives to consider. A British history of the Second World War, for instance, will be very different from a German one, and we are all aware of the old Soviet tendency to ensure that only ‘history’ as sanctioned by the state was taught in Soviet schools. In that sense, ancient history is no different. Historians then had axes to grind, too. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote a long history of the Jewish War of AD 66-73 from a largely pro-Roman stance, even though he had been a leading participant on the Jewish side. When he surrendered to the Romans and was taken to Rome, he obviously found it expedient to treat the role of his captors with some tact. Much the same can be said of Luke’s treatment of the Roman authorities in the Acts of the Apostles. A great deal of biblical history—so called—is coloured by overriding theological considerations as can be seen in the work of the Deuteronomistic historian.

One of the chief difficulties for the student of ancient, as opposed to modern, history lies in the largely fragmentary nature of the sources. Scholars must often work with scraps of papyrological, archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence and extrapolate from these. Here, too, there are dangers of evidential misinterpretation by the unwary. Sometime ago, I noticed an advertisement placed by a local evangelical church in one of the London underground stations in which responses were made to common objections to Christianity. In response to the objection that the Bible ‘is nothing but a load of old myths and legends’, it was said, ‘No one can say that, considering all the impressive archaeological evidence’. This, of course, is a common fallacy—that archaeology somehow proves or at least verifies the historicity of the Bible. Archaeology undoubtedly has its uses, but it would be a mistake to press them too far. In Chapter 5, we will be dealing with this and other essential issues facing the ancient—and in particular the biblical—historian.

Some of the biggest headaches for the student of the gospels lie in the attempt to recover the historical Jesus. Clearly, the gospels are not biographies in the modern sense. Attempts have been made to compare them with the so-called ancient biographies by Xenophon, Plutarch, and others, but when Mark wrote his Gospel somewhere between AD 65 and 70, he was essentially creating a new literary genre—one soon to be followed by Matthew, Luke, and John, and later by the apocryphal Thomas, Peter, Philip, Bartholomew, and others. Mark had started quite a trend. But in no sense can the canonical gospels be called biographies as we understand that term today. Imagine a biography about Sir Winston Churchill that devoted half a page to the first sixty-five years of his life and the remaining 400 pages to the period after he became prime minister! Yet this is precisely how the gospels treat the life of Jesus. Only Matthew and Luke devote any space at all to his life prior to the age of thirty when he began his public ministry and then only to his birth (apart from the curious story in Luke 2: 41-52). Then, by way of contrast, a seemingly disproportionate amount of space is devoted to the final week of his life. Out of the 666 verses in Mark, for example, 242 are devoted to this period—roughly 36 per cent of the whole. What kind of biographer would treat the life of his subject so disproportionately?

This should alert us to the fact that the gospel authors were men of faith with axes to grind and had particular Christian communities in view. Their purpose was not to write a biography of Jesus, which in any case, would already have been known in broad outline, but to present the Christ of faith. The gospels were not there primarily to present the facts of Jesus’ life, but to deal with pastoral issues in the communities for which they were written and, above all, to encourage and increase faith (John 20: 30-31). This, of course, raises the problem of what we can know about the historical Jesus and whether it really matters anyway. These are the issues we shall be addressing in Chapter 6.

More particularly, can we know what Jesus actually said? In one fairly obvious sense we cannot. Jesus almost certainly spoke Aramaic (although there has been some scholarly debate on the matter) and all our earliest gospel manuscripts are written in koiné Greek, with little suggestion that they are translations from earlier Aramaic documents (although, again, there has been some debate about it). The likelihood is, therefore, that Jesus’ words were first memorised by those who heard them and passed on by way of oral tradition for some thirty years or so before they were finally committed to writing. It is possible that there was at least one collection of sayings predating the gospels, commonly known as Q. The only firm evidence for such a collection is a body of sayings shared by Matthew and Luke, which is largely absent from Mark, and the extant apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, a third-century Coptic gospel consisting of 114 sayings, many of which also appear in some form in the Synoptic Gospels, shows that such sayings collections could and did exist. If Q existed as a document, and not simply as a body of oral tradition, it may have been written in Aramaic as some scholars have argued. However, it must be reiterated that there is no hard evidence that a Q document ever existed, and we can only work with what we do have.

The study of sayings ascribed to Jesus (Logia-forschungen, as the German scholars call it) is an extremely complex one. On the one hand, many of these sayings are clearly seen through the eyes of faith and may even have been created by the Church as a vehicle for its own theological reflections about Jesus. Some sayings could only have been uttered by the Christ of faith. Occasionally, there are inter-gospel disagreements about what Jesus said. Again, it is sometimes difficult to see how his exact words could have been recorded. How can we know what he really said in his private audience before Pilate (John 18: 33-38), for instance, or during his prayer to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane when the disciples were some distance away and, in any case, fast asleep (Mark 14: 35-37; Matt. 26: 37-40; Luke 22: 41-46)? On the other hand, some of Jesus’ sayings do smack of authenticity, especially those in which he distances himself from God in some way (Mark 10: 18) or admits to a limitation of his knowledge (Mark 13: 32), which would hardly have been composed by a devoted Church. We shall examine the key issues in Chapter 7.

Chapter 8 deals with the nature of miracles in the Bible. Once again, evangelical Christians generally have a one-dimensional view of miracles as events that supernaturally violate the laws of nature. However, we shall see that this is largely a post-Humean view that does not correspond to the biblical one. The term ‘miracle’, in fact, is not used at all in the Bible where ‘sign’, ‘wonder’, and ‘mighty work’ are the preferred terms. The suggestion is that, according to the writers of the Bible, these are events that point beyond themselves to the presence of God in the world. They never happen for their own sake but symbolise deep spiritual truths, irrespective of whether, according to the modern classification, they are regarded as nature miracles, exorcisms, or physical healings. As a means of understanding the nature of miracle narratives in the Bible, we will be looking in some detail at the different presentations of the two sea miracles in the gospels: the calming of the storm (Mark 4: 35-41; Matt. 8: 23-27; Luke 8: 22-25) and the walking on the water (Mark 6: 45-52; Matt. 14: 22-33; John 6: 16-21).

The climax of all four gospels is, of course, the resurrection. However, the accounts seem to be somewhat confused. While there are some obvious similarities, there are more disagreements about the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances than between any other parallel passages in the rest of the gospels. Why is this? And how does Paul fit into the picture? In 1 Corinthians 15: 3-8, he refers to the risen Lord’s appearances to several individuals or groups, some of whom are mentioned nowhere else, and concludes by claiming that the risen Lord appeared to him also. But since his own experience was a visionary one (Acts 9: 1-9; 22: 4-16; 26: 12-18), does he mean to say that the appearances to the other apostles were visionary as well? Would those other apostles have been prepared to forfeit their lives on the strength of a vision? In Chapter 9, we shall attempt to unravel some of the mysteries caused by the empty tomb and post-resurrection narratives.

Chapter 10 deals with the thorny question of apocalyptic. The two chief apocalypses in the Bible are Daniel and Revelation, although there are apocalyptic passages elsewhere. We shall see that what passes for prophecy in these works is largely pseudo-prophecy—that is to say, descriptions of events which have already taken place written as if they are yet to happen. Moreover, it will be shown that apocalyptic is a literary genre rather than an accurate description of what is to take place at the end of time. Once again, when we take such passages literally, we miss out on their true meaning.

One of the most trenchant rearguard actions mounted by evangelicals is against the view that the Bible can contain any myths. This opposition is due in part to a misunderstanding of what myth is. Unfortunately, myth belongs to that category of language that has become distorted or defiled through modern usage. Today the term ‘myth’ has come to be applied to anything which is considered to be untrue or fallacious. If someone says it is a myth that lemmings commit suicide, they mean that although there is a common belief that they do, this belief is misplaced. Now, of course, this understanding of the word could be applied to biblical events. It might be used of the resurrection to mean that although it is widely believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, it did not really happen. But the Greek word mythos is far richer in meaning than that and has nothing to do with whether or not the story is literally true. It can mean ‘tale’, ‘story’, ‘fable’, ‘speech’, ‘talk’, ‘conversation’, or ‘word’. Thus, in religious terms, it does not discriminate over whether or not an event really took place; it is that which conveys by word the truth underlying a story or proposition and passes no judgement on whether or not that truth should be taken literally. To call the resurrection a myth, then, is not to establish one way or the other whether it really happened, but to call attention to its underlying truth, whether that be symbolic or otherwise. Understood in this sense, the term ‘myth’ should become less threatening. We shall be taking up this question in Chapter 11.

Finally, why is it so important to tackle the issues raised in this book? In my view, it is a question of faith. The intention here is not to undermine faith but to underpin it. I once led a Bible study on David for Christians in my church and happened to point out that although David is widely credited with killing the Philistine Goliath (1 Sam. 17), 2 Samuel 21: 19 credits the otherwise unknown Elhanan with this feat. This titbit of information apparently proved too much for one member of the group who never appeared again. But surely, running away from apparent contradictions of this kind does not enhance faith, but weakens it. After all, the apparent contradiction is not mine, but the Bible’s own.² Nor is this inane and immature approach to the biblical text confined to members of the congregation; it is increasingly found to be proclaimed from the pulpit by lay readers and ordained clergy alike who seem to have little idea of biblical method and how to apply it. It is not unusual these days to find preachers reading their own presuppositions into the text (eisegesis) instead of drawing as far as possible on the text itself (exegesis). So often, the Bible passage(s) on which the text is supposed to be based seems to be included as an afterthought. Indeed, many charismatic churches, despite declaring the Bible to be the Word of God, express little interest in its content and much prefer to receive God’s Word through the movement of the Spirit—words of knowledge, gifts of prophecy, and so on—despite the fact that it is impossible to verify that such ‘words’ do in fact derive from God. As proof of how the Bible is misinterpreted in such churches, I offer two brief examples involving two different members of the clergy serving in the same church.

The church in question had recently produced a three-year ‘vision’ plan, and although a sensible move in itself, the vicar sought to evince biblical support by quoting Proverbs 29: 18 in the Authorised Version: ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ This may seem reasonable enough at first sight—but why the AV in a modern church whose members used New International pew Bibles? The answer becomes clear when we check the NIV translation of this verse: ‘Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint.’ Obviously, the AV translation served our vicar’s purpose much better than the NIV, although he did not disclose as much to the congregation. The Good News Bible would not have served him any better: ‘A nation without God’s guidance is a nation without order.’ When the Bible is treated too superficially—or even dishonestly, as in the present case—it can be made to serve any purpose. This is why it is so vital to exegete the text—to discover as far as possible what it is the original author was trying to say. Now, in the present case the variety of translations indicates that the Hebrew is open to a variety of meanings and interpretations, so how do we decide which the author himself intended? We can look at what the key word generally means in other contexts and, crucially, we can examine how they fit into this context. This is precisely what our vicar did not do; he either did not know or chose to ignore the fact that Proverbs 29: 18 is a typical example of antithetic parallelism in which the second line of the proverb is intended to contrast with the first—but in this case only the first line was quoted, which is somewhat akin to quoting only the first line of a rhyming couplet in English poetry and then wondering why we cannot derive any meaning from it. Let us, therefore, begin to rectify the situation by quoting the entire verse as it appears in the AV: ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish, but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.’ Remember that these two limbs of the proverb must be kept in tension and are not meant to be understood separately.

Now we turn to the two key words in the first line: ‘vision’ and ‘perish’. The first of these translates the Hebrew ḥazōn and is normally used for visions received from God, including night visions or dreams (cf. Isa. 29: 7), or for divine revelation. These usually have to do with the disclosure of God’s plans or God’s will to his people. The other word pār’ a in Hebrew has a variety of meanings, but the AV rendering ‘perish’ is perhaps the least helpful because it conjures up images of death and destruction, whereas the more natural rendering is ‘to let loose’ or ‘to (let) run wild’ or ‘go astray’. We can now begin to see the gist of the first part of Proverbs 29: 18; without God’s guidance (through visions or revelation), people run amok—they wander aimlessly. The antithesis of this is to be under God’s guidance, for which he has provided his people with his law—the Torah. So, as a consequence, ‘. . . he that keepeth the law, happy is he’, or as the NIV has it, ‘. . . blessed is he who keeps the law’. So, the verse as a whole stresses the antithesis between abiding by God’s law, the Torah, and going one’s own way without God. Ironically, we could say that Proverbs 29: 18 is more about adhering closely to God’s Word in the Bible, which so many charismatic churches fail to do sufficiently, than about developing long-term plans for the church, which usually have more in common with human endeavour, however well meaning, than with God’s vision or will.

Our second example is provided by the same church, but a different preacher, and concerns John 14: 11-12 in which, according to the NIV, Jesus says:

Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father.

Our preacher in this case, like many before him, took this to be a promise that the disciples—in the widest sense—would perform greater miracles than Jesus himself. He then proceeded to provide a very dubious inventory of instances where such things are supposed to be happening now—resurrections (or perhaps, more accurately, resuscitations) from the dead, miraculous restorations of missing limbs, receipt of new internal organs, and so on. But, quite apart from the absence of solid, verifiable evidence for such events taking place, the passage itself has absolutely nothing to do with the performance of miracles in the Christian Church. Once again, it is vital that we should see it in context and that the text is understood in detail.

The first point to note is that the word ‘miracles’ in the NIV translation is rather misleading because the underlying Greek word, erga, means ‘works’. When John refers to what we would designate miracles—the turning of water into wine, for instance—he consistently uses the word semeia, ‘signs’ (cf. John 2: 11). So, clearly, ‘works’ and ‘signs’ are not meant to be identical. Jesus promises that anyone who believes in him ‘will do the works that I do’. Then he adds, ‘And he will do greater things than these.’ Now it has become customary in evangelical churches to interpret this as our preacher did and imagine that Jesus promised his followers that they would do even greater miracles than he did. But, as we can now begin to see, this is not what the passage means. The correct interpretation hinges on the term erga, ‘works’. What does Jesus mean by that? Fortunately, we receive a fairly clear answer elsewhere in John. In John 6: 28, the crowd asks Jesus, ‘What should we do in order to be doing the works of God?’—to which Jesus replies, ‘This is the work of God: that you believe in the one he has sent’ (6: 29). So ‘works’ in John’s Gospel refers to a particular mode of belief and not primarily to a particular action, least of all, miracles. It has to do with believing in the gospel and in Jesus as the Son of God.

Now, in John 14: 12b, Jesus tells his disciples that they will do greater ‘things’ than he is doing. Some scholars argue that ‘things’ refers to Jesus’ activity in general, including his miracle-working activity, and it is true that the vague terms of reference used here could be so interpreted. But as John has just mentioned the ‘works’ of Jesus, it is likely that in this case ‘works’ serves as an antecedent for ‘things’, so the greater ‘things’ that the disciples are expected to do are greater ‘works’ than Jesus as that term is understood elsewhere in John. Now there are two ways in which this is obvious. First, they will travel further than Jesus in proclaiming the gospel. Jesus himself was restricted to Palestine, and his ministry was aimed almost exclusively at the Jews—the lost people of the house of Israel. The followers of Jesus, however, were destined to bear the gospel to the ends of the earth (Acts 1: 8)—to all people and all nations—and so their ministry was to be greater in that sense.

But second, the nature of their ministry—its content—was to be greater than that of Jesus, too. Jesus himself focused on the proclamation of the gospel; his claims about himself, as far as we can reconstruct them, were modest. As John the Baptist had pointed to him, so Jesus pointed from himself to God, thereby revealing God’s nature to the world. The disciples also preached the gospel as Jesus had done. But they did something more: They also preached Jesus himself (cf. 1 Cor. 1: 23). In the memorable words of Rudolf Bultmann, the proclaimer became the proclaimed. So in this second sense, too, Jesus’ followers were to do greater works than Jesus.

The clinching statement occurs at the end of John 14: 12 and is frequently overlooked by those who focus only on the ‘greater things’. We read: ‘He will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father.’ Now, why is it that the disciples will do greater things than Jesus only if he first goes to the Father and (by implication) leaves his followers alone? If it were merely a case of performing miracles, there seems to be no reason why they could not have done this while Jesus was still with them. On the other hand, it is absolutely certain that the disciples could not have been released to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth in Jesus’ presence. All the gospels make it abundantly clear how dependent the disciples were on the Master while he was among them. Only Jesus’ permanent absence would enable them to mature as evangelists in their own right and to proclaim not only the gospel message but also Jesus himself.

Finally, in case any doubt should remain about this interpretation, we might wonder, if the all too common interpretation is applied, how the disciples could ever have performed greater miracles than Jesus himself. They might have performed more, but there is no evidence that they walked on water, stilled storms, multiplied food, and turned water into wine as Jesus is said to have done. Even the miraculous healings they are recorded as having performed are really quite modest by comparison with the feats of the Master. On the other hand, it is easy enough, on the alternative explanation, to see how they could have superseded Jesus in the proclamation of the gospel.

After our modest digression into the world of biblical exegesis, it might be objected that the place for textual analysis of this kind is the