section iv – b14 (mark 7:31-37) · web viewexcerpts from the great physician. for study related...

CSDirectory.com Weekly Bible Study Resources — December 14 - 20, 2009

Weekly Bible Study Resources

Excerpts from The Great PhysicianFor study related to the Bible Lesson December 14 - 20, 2009

Introductory Note – The Great Physician, Vols 1 & 2 were written by Vinton Dearing, Christian Scientist, who was Professor of

English at UCLA where he taught the English Bible as Literature for forty years. The book is a composite translation of the four

Gospels, organized by event rather than book, and includes a commentary. Because of the composite nature of the translation and

commentary, the excerpts below may cover more topics than the citation in the Lesson. The paperback two-volume set of books is

available for purchase on amazon.com and a hardback study edition available through amazon.com and at vintondearing.com.

SECTION I – B4 (Luke 1:26 … 47)

JESUS’ BIRTH

Luke 1:1-80Luke begins his biography of Jesus with the conception of John the Baptist, after a brief

address or dedication to a certain Theophilus, about whom we know nothing else for certain except that Luke dedicated the book of Acts to him also. The name Theophilus means lover of God or beloved of God, so he may represent any Christian, but Luke addresses him, in effect, as “your excellency,” so he may have been a public official. He may have been Luke’s patron.40 Luke writes to him as follows.

“Inasmuch as many took in hand to organize a narrative about the deeds that have been accomplished among us, just as they who were from the beginning eyewitnesses and under-officers of the word [that is, Jesus’ teaching] handed [them] on to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things accurately from the start to write [them] for you in sequence, most excellent Theophilus, so that you will know the certainty of [Jesus’] words, about which you were told.”

Although described by A. T. Robertson as a splendid example of literary expression, “not surpassed by [the dedication] in any Greek writer,”41 the foregoing passage is in fact extremely difficult to understand. For instance, what I have translated as “in sequence” may only mean “in a connected way,” or even “in good grammar,” or it may mean “in my turn.” What I have translated as “the word [that is, Jesus’ teaching]” may mean instead “the Word [of God],” which may mean, then, either Jesus himself, the Word made practical in human experience, as it does at the beginning of John, or divinely inspired records of him. What I have translated as “[Jesus’] words” is usually translated as “[the] things” (with no comma following).

The rest of Luke’s first two chapters is the least literary passage in his Gospel in the sense of conformance to the Greek idioms of his time. Therefore some scholars believe its less idiomatic quality may reflect sources of information in Hebrew or Aramaic, the latter a language commonly used by the Jews in Jesus’ day. Others believe the passage was not part of the Gospel as first written but was inserted in revision.42

Continuing then with Luke. “It happened [that there was] in the days of Herod [the

Excerpts from The Great Physician by Vinton A. Dearing 1with the permission of the Vinton A. Dearing Estate

Blue: Composite Translation Black: Commentary Green: Footnotes

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Great], king of Judea, a certain priest, Zechariah by name, of Abijah’s division [of the priesthood, which rotated with the other twenty-three divisions in serving in the temple in Jerusalem for a week at a time.] And his wife [was, like himself,] of the descendants of Aaron [Moses’ brother, the first high priest of the Israelites], and her name [was] Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, going [through life] blameless in [respect to] all the commandments and laws of the Lord. And they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and they both had advanced in their days.43

“And it happened [that] while he was serving as priest in the succession of his division before God, according to the custom of the priesthood, it was his lot to burn incense, going into the temple of the Lord.” The Talmud, the authoritative record of Jewish tradition, says the priest who burned incense was chosen from those who had not done so before, and this has sometimes been understood to mean that he would burn incense only once in his life. Other calculations suggest that twenty years would pass before his turn came again. In either circumstance, the burning of the incense would be an especially sacred experience. The Talmud tells us that only priests were allowed to enter the temple building, and that the one who burned the incense was alone when he did so.44

The temple in Jerusalem played a large enough part in Jesus’ life, up to and including the day of his crucifixion, that we may well take a moment here to visualize it. It was built on the ridge of Mt. Zion slightly to the south of its highest part. To its east was the Kidron valley with the Mount of Olives beyond. To its south and west in roughly a square mile were the houses and palaces of the city on the same ridge and on other hillsides and valleys. To its north was a fortress with four corner towers. On all sides of the temple Herod had built a great stone platform supported on the three sides where the ground fell away by interior arches and earth fill and by exterior walls of very large squared blocks. The whole of this platform and the buildings Herod built on it constitute the temple as the Gospel authors normally refer to it. Their word for it is hieron, which I have translated as “temple precincts.” Zechariah was officiating in the temple proper, the building that stood on the site where Solomon had built the original temple. The Gospel authors use the word naos to refer to this building specifically. This was the third temple on the site, for in 20 or 19 B.C. Herod had taken down the temple built after the Babylonian captivity and replaced it with a building that had a grand colonnade and a great doorway on the east side. Its stonework was of the finest, and it was richly decorated with gold.

The main rooms of the temple were the same as in the earlier buildings. The first room, called the holy place, contained the altar on which Zechariah burned the incense, together with a seven-branched lamp stand and a table where the weekly bread offering, the showbread or bread of the Presence, was set out. Behind the first room and separated from it by a curtain across the door was another room, called the holy of holies, that is, the most holy place, which was empty. The corresponding room in the original temple had held the ark of the covenant, that is, the box holding the Ten Commandments written, according to the book of Deuteronomy, by God himself on stone tablets. Its name reflects the fact that keeping the Commandments was a fundamental requirement in the covenant or contract God made with the Israelites after they escaped from Egypt, “You keep My laws and I will supply your every need.” The original contents of this room had disappeared, perhaps when the Babylonians destroyed the temple, and no attempt was made to duplicate them. Only the high priest went into the holy of holies and then only once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to sprinkle blood from two atoning sacrifices, one offered for himself and one for all who had sinned without realizing that they had done so.




In front of the temple building was a large altar, with a raised walkway around it, where sacrifices to God were burned daily, at sun up and in mid afternoon. Lay people were excluded from this part of the precincts also. Male Jews could approach it when bringing sacrifices or praying, the women had to stand farther back, but had balconies from which they could see the sacrifices and join in the prayers that were led by the priests. Also in the temple precincts were a treasury, a slaughtering place for the sacrifices, a bakery for the weekly bread offering, and rooms for the priests on duty, some of whom mounted guard at night. Gentiles were allowed in an outer precinct, but there was a barrier with inset notices in Greek and Latin telling them they would lose their lives if they went farther.

A colonnade ran around three sides of the platform and a sizable basilica called the Royal Colonnade made up the fourth (south) side. The eastern colonnade was called Solomon’s, because it was believed that Solomon had built the wall which sustained that side of the platform. The enclosed space was trapezoidal in shape, and its 172,000 square yards made it the largest temple area of its kind in the ancient world. Its buildings were still not completely finished when the Romans captured the city in A.D. 70, that is, construction had ceased but further work had been planned.

The Romans destroyed the temple and the other buildings on the platform but left the platform itself relatively intact. Then in 638 the Arabs captured the city; in 691 they completed a shrine called the Dome of the Rock on what their traditions identified as the site of the temple; and in 1537-1541 their successors the Turks built the present walls of the old city and raised those around the platform to their present height. Suras 17:1-2 and 53:13-18 of the Koran refer to a single night’s journey Mohammed made from Mecca to the presence of God in heaven and return, coming and going by way of the site of the temple in Jerusalem and accompanied by the angel Gabriel. Islamic tradition says that it was on this occasion that God told Mohammed men should pray five times a day. For a brief period early in the history of Islam, pilgrimage was made to Jerusalem instead of to Mecca when Mecca was in the hands of unbelievers. Jerusalem is therefore sometimes called the third of the holy cities of Islam, after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

The Dome of the Rock is so called because it is built over a rock 56 feet long and 42 feet wide on which, both Muslim and Jewish traditions say, Abraham was preparing to sacrifice his son when God told him he need not do so. The same traditions say that the temple was built over this rock. The Jews would like to rebuild the temple, of course, but whether they will be able to take down the Dome of the Rock remains to be seen. One Jewish archaeologist has proposed that the temple was in fact somewhat to the south of the Dome of the Rock, another has proposed that it was slightly to the north, and one of these views may eventually win acceptance.

When the Romans destroyed the temple, they took the seven-branched lamp stand and the table for the bread offering to Rome, where they were carried through the streets in triumph. Although the objects themselves vanished thereafter, the Romans recorded their appearance in the representation of the triumphal march carved on the Arch of Titus in their capital city. What the rest of the temple and most of its appurtenances looked like in detail we can only imagine. The drawings in various publications and the models in various places are all architects’ conceptions, based on the remains — interestingly, two of the notices warning Gentiles to keep out of the inner precincts have survived — and on the remembrances of temple worship recorded by Josephus and in the Talmud, particularly the tractates Tamid and Middoth. It is probably not wrong to think of the whole area as resembling the Roman forum or the agora at Athens, with pitched roofs on




most of the buildings, but the temple proper may have been higher than it was wide, with a flat roof.

Zechariah was wearing linen breeches reaching to the knees under a tunic girdled with a sash, and a turban on his head, all of the best and most beautiful materials. The altar at which he was officiating was made of acacia wood overlaid with gold, 18 inches square and a yard high, with a raised edge around the top that rose to points at the corners above gold rings in which were inserted carrying bars of acacia overlaid with gold. It stood in front of the curtain that shut off the most holy place. The incense was a unique product — nothing like it was allowed to be made — composed of equal parts of four spices, stacte (native to the country), onycha (made from mollusks in the Red Sea), galbanum (from Iran), and frankincense (from Yemen), ground together in a mortar.45

Continuing now with Luke. “And the whole number of the people was praying outside at the hour of incense. And an angel of the Lord was seen by him [Zechariah], standing at the right side of the incense altar. And seeing [the angel] Zechariah was disturbed and fear fell on him.46

“But the angel said to him, ‘Don’t be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer was heard and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you’ll call his name John [that is, in Hebrew, Johanan, meaning “Yah has been gracious”]. And he’ll be a joy and rejoicing to you and many will joy at his birth. For he’ll be great in the eyes of the Lord and he’ll not drink wine or strong drink [that is, he will be a Nazirite, and not cut his hair either]. And he’ll be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb.47 And he’ll turn many of the children of Israel back to the Lord their God. And he’ll go forward [or, first] in His eyes in [the] spirit and power of [the prophet] Elijah, to turn the hearts of fathers to children and the disobedient to the understanding of the righteous, to prepare for the Lord a people that has been made ready.’ [The prophet Malachi had said that Elijah would do these things on his return from heaven before the day in which God destroyed all evil, on which day the Messiah would come.]48

“And Zechariah said to the angel, ‘By what earnest shall I know this? For I’m an old man and my wife has advanced in her days.’

“And the angel said to him in reply, ‘I am Gabriel. I stand in the sight of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And [as earnest] you’ll be silent, you see, and not be able to speak until the day when these [things] happen, because you didn’t trust my words, which will be fulfilled in their [proper] time [that is, in nine months].’

“And the people were waiting for Zechariah and were wondering at the time he was spending in the temple. And when he came out he was unable to speak to them, and they recognized that he had seen a vision in the temple. And he was making signs to them and was remaining dumb.”

It is not easy to decide what the Bible means when it mentions angels. We shall see at the end of our narratives that the Gospel authors sometimes use “men” instead of “angels.” In so doing they use language found in the Hebrew Bible from Joshua to Daniel. Most people regard these “men” as metaphoric rather than real beings, either because “there are no such things as angels” or because they know their angelology and count it a sub-form of mythology, or for the following reason. The root meaning of both the Hebrew and Greek words for angel is “messenger,” but whenever we sense the impersonality of the messenger — and we may do so even when the angel has a name, such as Gabriel — we may reasonably understand “angel” to mean “message,” that is, in the case of God’s angels, “a divinely inspired thought.” Luke, as we have just seen, refers to




the angel which appeared to Zechariah as a “vision,” indicating that the appearance was mental, not physical, and if we wish we may similarly understand all the other references to angels.49

Continuing with Luke’s account of Zechariah. “And it happened [that] when the days of his service were fulfilled he went off to his house. [Tradition says he lived in Ain Karim, a hill town two or three miles west of Jerusalem.] And after these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and hid herself away for five months, saying, ‘Thus [the] Lord has done for me in the days in which he gave attention to taking away my reproach among people [for having been barren].’50

“And in the sixth month [of Elizabeth’s pregnancy] the angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin who had been engaged to a man named Joseph, of the house [that is, lineage] of David, and the virgin’s name [was] Mary. And going in to her he said, ‘Rejoice, favored [one], the Lord [is] with you.’51

“But she was much disturbed at [his] word and was wondering what this greeting could be. And the angel said to her, ‘Don’t be afraid, Mary, for you found favor with God. And behold, you’ll conceive in your womb and bear a son and you’ll call his name Jesus. He’ll be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he’ll reign over the house [that is, lineage] of Jacob [the Jews] into eternity and there will not be an end of his kingdom.’

“But Mary said to the angel, ‘How will this be, since I don’t know a man?’“And the angel said to her in reply, ‘[The] Holy Spirit will come upon you and the Most

High’s power will overshadow you, and therefore the [child who is] begotten will be called holy, [the] Son of God. And, behold, Elizabeth your relative, she has conceived a son even in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her called barren, because no statement coming from God will be powerless.’

“And Mary said, ‘Behold, [I’m] the Lord’s handmaid. Let it be to me according to your statement.’

“And the angel went off from her.”Thus Mary advanced from self-doubt to a natural disbelief and then to acceptance of her

responsibilities as a mother and a joyful understanding that she could not be separated from God.When most of Christianity decided that Jesus was born on December 25 it decided that the

angel visited Mary on the preceding March 25, now called Annunciation Day. I shall consider the question of Jesus’ virgin birth when we have examined what Matthew has to say on the subject.

Continuing with Luke. “And Mary stood up in these days and went into the hill country with haste into a city of Judah. And she went into Zechariah’s house and greeted Elizabeth, [“Hello, Elizabeth; it’s me, Mary”]. And it happened [that] as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting the baby in her womb jumped.

“And Elizabeth was filled with [the] Holy Spirit, and she raised her voice with a loud cry and said, ‘You’ve been blessed [by God] among women and the fruit of your womb has been blessed. And from what source [is] this [granted] to me, that the mother of my Lord will come to me? For you see when the sound of your greeting came to my ears the baby in my womb jumped for joy. And happy is she who trusted, because there will be a completion of the things that have been spoken to her from the Lord.’ [A loving welcome in every sense.]

“And Mary said,

My soul magnifies the Lord




and my spirit rejoiced over God my Savior, because He looked on the humbleness of His handmaid,

for, behold, from now on all generations will bless me, because the Mighty did great [things] for me,

and His name [is] holy, and His mercy [extends] from generation to generation

to those who fear [that is, worship] Him.He made strength in His arm,

and scattered those proud in their heart’s thought,He brought down the powerful from [their] thrones

and exalted the humble.The hungry He filled with good [things]

and the rich He sent empty away.He aided His child [or, servant] Israel,

remembering His mercy, just as He spoke to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to his seed forever.”

Mary’s poem is called the song or psalm of Mary or the Magnificat, which latter is its first word in the Vulgate translation. She had inherited a rich tradition of praising God, so it is not surprising that many phrases in the poem come from the Hebrew Bible.52

“And Mary remained with her [Elizabeth] about three months, and returned to her house.“And the time was completed for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. And the

neighbors heard and her relatives that the Lord magnified His mercy to her, and they were rejoicing with her.

“And it happened on the eighth day [that] they came to circumcise the child. [Circumcision on the eighth day shows that the baby was healthy and had not been born at twilight; babies born at twilight were circumcised the ninth day, and sickly babies were not circumcised until they were well.53] And they were calling him by the name of his father, Zechariah.

“But his mother said in reply, ‘No; he shall be called John instead.’“And they said to her, ‘There’s none of your relatives who’s called by this name.’ And

they nodded toward his father, [indicating that he should show them] what he intended it to be called.54

“And asking [by signs] for a tablet he wrote, saying, ‘John is his name.’“And they all wondered. And his mouth was opened at once, and his tongue, and he was

speaking, blessing God.“And fear came on all living around them, and all these things were being discussed in

the whole hill country of Judea [which rises abruptly from the Dead Sea on the east and reaches to the wide coastal plain on the west, filling the eastern half of ancient Judea from north to south]. And all those hearing [these things] put [them] in their heart, saying, ‘So what will this child be?’ For the hand of the Lord was certainly with him.

“And Zechariah his father was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying,

Blessed [be] the Lord God of Israel,




for He oversaw and made redemption for His people, and roused up a horn [that is, a power] of salvation for us

in the house [lineage] of His child [or, servant] David, just as He spoke through the mouth of His holy prophets always,

salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all those hating us,

to do mercy with our ancestors and remember His holy covenant,

an oath, which He swore to Abraham our ancestor, to grant us, rescued from the hand of our enemies,

to worship Him fearlessly in holiness and in righteousness in His sight all our days.

And you too, child, will be called a prophet of the Most High, for you’ll go forward in the sight of [the] Lord to prepare His

roads, to give knowledge of salvation to His people

in canceling of their sins through the merciful heart of our God,

in which the sunrise shall oversee us from on highto shine on those sitting in darkness and [the] shadow of death,

to guide our feet into a road of peace.”

Zechariah’s prophecy of the coming Messiah and John as his forerunner is called the song or psalm of Zechariah or the Benedictus, the latter from its first word in the Vulgate translation. Like the Magnificat, many of its phrases come from the Hebrew Bible.55

“And the child was growing and was being strengthened in spirit and was in the deserts until the days of his manifestation to Israel.” The deserts where John lived are like our Great American Desert, uninhabited areas of great natural beauty, with plants and animals adapted to arid conditions. Nature programs on television have made them familiar to many. The sandy deserts are further east and south.

Many readers sense that Luke deliberately exalts women by giving Mary and Elizabeth so large a part in his narrative. They observe also that, according to Luke, Mary responded with more faith than Zechariah did to the words of Gabriel, and that Luke tells how Elizabeth recognized the significance of Mary’s pregnancy, saying nothing about the response of Joseph, her husband to be. These readers sense the same exaltation of women throughout the Gospel. Mary and Elizabeth are only the first examples.

Footnotes40. ABD, VI, 511-512.41. Robertson, Word Pictures, II, 7.42. See ABD, III, 414-415.43. Zechariah: the King James Version gives the Greek form of his name, Zacharias. An English form is

Zachary. The male descendants of Aaron comprised the priesthood; priests were born, not made. They might then choose a political/religious alliance. Josephus, born a priest, became a Pharisee. He regarded the Law of Moses as forbidding Jews to marry Gentiles (Antiq., 8.7.5 [VIII, 190-196]; see




Deuteronomy 7:3-4), but others took a more lenient view. In any case, Zechariah was not required to marry another descendant of Aaron. Since Elizabeth was a cousin of Jesus’ mother (Luke 1:36), it may be that Mary was also a descendant of Aaron (IDB, II, 93; III, 290).

Abijah’s division: the eighth of the twenty-four divisions; see the Talmudic tractate Ta‘anith, 26a (IV, 2), 27a-b, and I Chronicles 24:3-4, 10. See Chapter II, note 1, for the Talmud reference numbers.

44. Numbers 18:2-6 and Exodus 33:9-11 say that only Moses, Joshua and the priests entered the tent of God (as opposed to its courts) but Numbers 1:50-51 says that when the tent was moved, the Levites moved it and its contents. The rule was transferred to the building that replaced the tent. The whole subject is confused and obscure, and practice changed over time. See the articles “Tabernacle” and “Temple, Jerusalem,” in IDB or ABD. I accept the evidence of the Talmud for Jesus’ time. Josephus gives similar information in Antiq.. 3.6.4 and 3.7.7 [III, 122-125 and III, 181].

Incense was offered in the afternoon (sometimes spoken of as the evening) and in the morning; see Exodus 30:7-8. The Bible tells of changes in the practice of who offered the incense; the rules in Jesus’ day were presumably the same as those recorded from memory in the Talmud more than a century after the temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 (see especially Tamid, V, 2; VI, 3, and n. 8 on p. 30 of the Soncino edition). Estimates as to the number of priests, based on the Talmud and other sources, may be found in Jeremias, pp. 198-207. In Against Apion, 2.8 [II, 108], Josephus says each priest served only one day in the temple (so Jeremias; Whiston’s and the Loeb translation have “certain days,” not “one day”). Jeremias discusses Josephus’ statement on pp. 204-205. If, as Jeremias concludes, there were about three hundred men in each of the twenty-four divisions, or about 7200 in all, then strict rotation in office day by day would mean a cycle of nearly twenty years before a priest would burn incense again.

45. The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac to God is told in Genesis 22:1-18. God is there said to have been testing Abraham’s faith (by requiring of him what other peoples were willing to do — see Deuteronomy 12:31 and II Kings 3:26-27). I prefer to understand the story as a dramatization of Abraham’s coming to realize that God did not demand child sacrifice, just as the story of how he bargained with God about the people of Sodom (Genesis 18:17-33) is a dramatization of his coming to realize that God does not destroy the righteous with the wicked (God destroyed the city, but not before he had summoned its one righteous family out of it; see Genesis 19:15-25). James says specifically that God does not test people, they are tested by their own longings (James 1:13-14). In Abraham’s case that would be a longing to be closer to God. The Islamic tradition rests on Sura 37:99-111 of the Koran.

Josephus describes the temple in Antiq., 15.11 [XV, 380-425] (see also 8.3.9 [VIII, 95-98] and 20.9.7 [XX, 219-223]), and War, 5.5 [V, 184-247]. The tractate Middoth gives a great many exact measurements, but admits as to some uncertainty in the tradition. A complete example of the warning inscription in Greek was discovered in the nineteenth century and is preserved in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. Modern excavations in Jerusalem have produced a fragment of another, also in Greek, which is preserved in the Rockefeller Museum there. Photographs of one or the other are to be found in Bible dictionaries and guidebooks to Jerusalem. BAR reports periodically on the results of excavations in the temple area; see for example, Benjamin Mazar, “Excavations Near Temple Mount Reveal Splendors of Herodian Jerusalem,” VI:4 (July/ August 1980), 44-59, with excellent illustrations. See also Kathleen and Leen Ritmeyer, “Reconstructing Herod’s Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” BAR, XV:6 (November/December 1989) followed by briefer articles by each of the Rittmeyers, pp. 23-53 in all, also issued separately in 1995; IDB, IV, 408, 534-560; ABD, VI, 350-369.

For other proposals as to the location of the temple see Asher S. Kaufman, “Where the Ancient




Temple of Jerusalem Stood,” BAR, IX:2 (March/April 1983), 40-59, and Ernest-Marie Laperrousaz, “King Solomon’s Wall Still Supports the Temple Mount,” BAR, XIII:3 (May/June 1987), 34-44. For some objections to Kaufman and his reply see BAR, XXII:2 (March/April 1996), 20.

The dates I have given for the Arabs and the Turks are those in ABD, III, 762-763.The specifications for the priestly garments Zechariah was wearing are in Exodus 28:40-43 and

Leviticus 8:13; also in Josephus, Antiq., 3.7.1-3 [III, 151-158]. The specifications for the incense altar and incense are in Exodus 30:1-6, 34-38 and 37:25-28; also in Josephus, Antiq., 3.6.8 [III, 147-150]. In War, 5.5.5 [V, 218], Josephus says 13 spices from the sea made up the incense. See also ABD, III, 406-407.

46. Isaiah saw and conversed with God in the temple (ch. 6); Berakoth, 7a [I, 1], records a tradition that R. Ishmael b. Elisha (first-second century) said he did so also when he was preparing to offer the incense (R. is the abbreviation for Rabbi, b. is for “ben,” son of).

Lachs, p. 17, objects that there is no other evidence than Luke’s that people would have been praying outside the temple building when the incense was burned, but he overlooks or differently translates Berakoth, 11b [I, 4]. The incense was burned after the daily whole burnt offering had been brought to the altar and before it was put on the fire. After the burnt offering was brought to the altar, the priests recited a benediction, the Ten Commandments, Deuteronomy 6:4-8, Deuteronomy 11:13-21, and Numbers 15:37-41. Then the people joined in pronouncing three more benedictions, the last one being Numbers 6:24-26 (Berakoth, 11b [I, 4], Soncino translation; also Tamid, V, 1, Danby’s translation, but not the Soncino or Neusner’s). It is not unreasonable to suppose that devout people continued to pray while the incense was being burned, for the priests assembled afterward and pronounced Numbers 6:24-26 on the people (Tamid, VII, 2). At this pronouncement, Zechariah was found to have lost his power of speech.

Yoma, 53b (V, 3), tells of a priest who prayed in the temple for an unusually long time and who was then told, “Do not make a habit of doing so, for thus have we learnt: He would not pray long lest he terrify Israel.” Luke, however, says only that the people were amazed, not that they were terrified, at Zechariah’s delay.

In Acts 3:1 Luke speaks of Peter and John entering the temple precincts at “the hour of prayer,” which he says was the hour between 2 and 3 p.m. The afternoon offering of the daily whole burnt offering was slaughtered at 2.30 and burnt at 3.30 (Pesahim, 58a [V, 1]; the morning offering was at daybreak: Tamid, III, 2). We cannot tell whether Zechariah burned the incense in the morning or the afternoon, but there is sufficient evidence that the people would have been praying in the temple precincts at either time.

47. Numbers 6:2-21 gives the basic rules for Nazirites (the King James spelling is Nazarites). The tractate Nazir in the Talmud tells how the rules were applied and expanded in later times. Some scholars do not believe John was a Nazirite because Luke says nothing about his hair; I believe the Gospel of John refers to his hair later, but see note 122 below.

NIV and NRSV, for instance, differ as to whether John was filled with the Spirit before his birth (see NIB, IX, 44). Because, as we shall see, John responded to the presence of Jesus when both were in the womb, before his birth is better.

48. Malachi 4:5.49. Angels: see Kittell (one-volume edition), pp. 12-14. Daniel 9:21 speaks of Gabriel as a man. See also

Joshua 5:13-14. The book of I Enoch (probably written between the second century B.C. and the first century A. D.) says that when angels so desire they appear as men (17:1). II Enoch (late first century A.D.) speaks of angels in the form of men with wings (1:5). The winged creatures of the Hebrew Bible




have mingled human and animal characteristics (Isaiah 6:2, Ezekiel 1:5-14). For seeing a thought, and the definition of angels in Christian Science see Eddy, Science and Health, pp. 86 and 581. For the skeptical view, see a description of a religious painting of the Italian renaissance: “Angels, as they do sometimes, were flying around the room blowing trumpets” (Iain Pears, The Titian Committee, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company [1991], p. 132).

50. Ain Karim: See Clemens Kopp, The Holy Places of the Gospels, pp. 90-96.“My reproach”: in cases when the husband was able to impregnate another woman God was

thought to have prevented conception in the wife (Genesis 16:2; I Samuel 1:5); otherwise it was understood that the disability might be in the husband (Deuteronomy 7:14). Because children were regarded as a blessing, barrenness was a deprivation at a minimum. Hannah’s barrenness was a special trial to her because her husband’s other wife taunted her (I Samuel 1:6-7). Perhaps, inasmuch as barrenness could be healed by prayer (Genesis 20:17, 25:21; I Samuel 1:27), Elizabeth had been distressed because her and her husband’s prayers and blameless life had not brought them a child. Her words suggest that she felt, if she had not experienced, some kind of censure, perhaps self-reproach.

51. As noted on p. 25, many Christians wish to put a comma after “virgin,” making Mary a descendant of David.

“Favored [one]”: occasionally I have felt it better to use “favor” instead of “gift” or “[free] gift” where others use “grace”; but in this instance my problem is simply the stylistic awkwardness of “[freely] gifted [one].” We have seen John describing Jesus as “full of grace [God’s free gift of spiritual understanding]” (John 1:14). More immediately, in the second paragraph below, “you found favor with God” means “you received a gift from God” (“found favor” has become standard English; originally it was a literal translation from Hebrew, as it is in Luke’s Greek). God gave Mary the privilege of bearing Jesus, it was not a right she had earned by herself. The meaning is similar when Luke says that Jesus advanced in “grace [or, favor] from God and people” as he grew to manhood (Luke 2:52). For a last example, in I Corinthians 2:12, what the King James Version translates as “the [things] that are freely given to us of God” might be more literally rendered “the [things] graced [or, favored] to us by God.”

52. Some Latin manuscripts of Luke together with Latin manuscripts of the third- and fourth-century church fathers Irenaeus and Origen put Elizabeth’s name instead of Mary’s at the head of the Magnificat. IDB, II, 93, inclines to accept Elizabeth; ABD, II, 474-475, inclines to accept Mary.

Note 8 describes one kind of parallelism in Hebrew poetry. The Magnificat has several kinds. Although normally everything gets said twice, the second line of each couplet repeating what is in the first but in different words, sometimes the second line opposes what is in the first point by point. Also, the repetition is not always complete, and sometimes the second line adds something not in the first. The rules being flexible, scholars sometimes disagree as to how lines should be divided.

53. Genesis 17:12 gives the basic rule of circumcision. The tractate Shabbath in the Talmud tells how the rule was applied and expanded in later times.

54. Instead of “they nodded toward,” the King James Version has “they made signs to,” and other translations are similar. Such an interpretation supposes that Zechariah was deaf as well as dumb (as some commentators also believe, e.g., IDB, IV, 943), or else that those who made the signs forgot that he could hear. I prefer to suppose that the nod was a silent admonition to Elizabeth. Luke is sometimes said to have recorded Elizabeth’s words to show that she chose John’s name (e.g., ABD, II, 475), but of course she was merely telling the others what Gabriel had said the name would be.

55. For God’s promises to Abraham see note 16 above. For canceling sins see p. 201. The word I have




translated “heart” refers to the inward parts in general. The Old Testament writers thought the liver was the seat of the emotions. Wycliffe’s translation from Latin into Middle English has “science of helthe” (“science and health” in William Pickering’s edition, London, 1848) instead of “knowledge of salvation.”

SECTION II – B7 (Luke 2:1 … 14))

Luke 2:1-21Continuing with Luke. “And it happened in those days [that] a decree went out from

Augustus Caesar for all the earth [that is, everyone in the Roman empire who was not a Roman citizen] to be registered. This first registration happened when [Publius Sulpicius] Quirinius was governing Syria. And all were going to register themselves, each to his own city.

“And Joseph, also, went from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth into Judea up to David’s city [birthplace], which is called Bethlehem, because he was of David’s house [lineage] and family, to register himself, with Mary, who had [formerly] been engaged to him [and was now his wife, and] who was pregnant.

“And it happened while they were there [that] the days were completed for her to give birth, and she bore her firstborn son. And she wrapped him up and laid him in a manger [in an inn yard], because there was not a place for them in the inn.”

Our narratives regularly speak of going “up” to cities on hills, even from places that are also on hills and even on higher hills. Both Nazareth and Bethlehem are on hills.

I agree with those scholars who understand the registration mentioned by Luke as that of A.D. 6 or 7, ordered by the Romans when they deposed Archelaus, the son of Herod the Great, and included his part of his father’s kingdom under the governorship of Quirinius. I also believe Luke was wrong to say Jesus was born at the time of this registration and that Matthew was right to say Jesus was born toward the end of the reign of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. Others suppose the registration Luke refers to was earlier than and similar to that of A.D. 6 or 7. The great difficulty in harmonizing Matthew and Luke, it seems to me, is the unlikelihood that the Romans would have taken a census of the Jews under Herod. In antiquity the purpose of a census was to determine expectable taxes and military conscripts, whereas Herod did not pay annual tribute to the Romans nor did his people have to serve in the Roman army. That difficulty aside, it is possible that there was an earlier registration, even though we have no confirmation of it or of Quirinius as sharing in the government of Syria at that time. Neither point of view rests on positive evidence; that is, we do not know for sure that there was no registration toward the end of Herod’s reign, and we do not know Quirinius’ whereabouts at that time. In short, we cannot confirm or absolutely deny what Luke tells us, and it is therefore not necessarily wrong to say we do not know when Jesus was born.64

No description of an inn in Israel has survived from Jesus’ time. The so-called inn of the good Samaritan on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, a structure of uncertain date, is a small building with a large walled courtyard. I have supposed that the manger in which Mary laid Jesus was in the courtyard of the inn or caravansary at Bethlehem, but Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, had a different idea.

The word translated “inn” means more literally, “place to unloose,” that is, to unharness one’s animals or to relax oneself. Justin says, “And at the time the child was born in Bethlehem, because Joseph had nowhere to unloose in that village, he unloosed in a certain cave quite near




the village, and then while they were there Mary bore Christ and placed him in a manger where the magi from Arabia found him when they came.” The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built originally in the fourth century at the command of the Roman emperor Constantine, has a crypt under the altar that may have been a cave. In it are two very similar niches, one where Jesus may have been born, and one that may have been the manger or where the manger may have been (the manger may now be in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome).65

Two small groups of spiritually alert people immediately recognized the light of truth which Jesus’ birth brought to the universe, sought out the newborn child, and told others that he would be a savior and king. Besides the magi whom Justin speaks of there was a group of shepherds. The magi were Gentiles, Zoroastrian priests perhaps and certainly astrologers, watching the sky at night. The shepherds were Jews, standing nightly guard over their flock, and some have supposed that their spiritual mindedness came to them because they had devoted their lives to raising unblemished animals for sacrifice to God as required by the Pentateuch. It would seem that the prophet-shepherds, as they have been called, sensed only light and angelic voices, the astrologer-magi said they had observed a star. In the seventeenth century John Lightfoot, the foremost English student of Hebrew in his day, concluded that shepherds and magi might have been guided by the same phenomenon.66 Those who accepted his conclusion could then say that the shepherds had seen a star and that the magi had heard angels, and even that the light of truth shines today.

It is Matthew who tells of the magi, Luke tells of the shepherds:“And shepherds were living out of doors in the same district and protecting their flock at

night. And an angel of [the] Lord stood by them and [the] glory of [the] Lord shone around them, and they were very frightened.67

“And the angel said to them, ‘Don’t be afraid, for, behold, I bring you the good news of a great joy which is for all the people, because today a savior was born to you, who is Messiah [the] Lord, in David’s city [birthplace]. And this [will be] the sign to you: you’ll find a baby who’s been wrapped up and is lying in a manger.’

“And suddenly there was with the angel a number of the heavenly army praising God and saying,

Glory in the highest [places] to God, and on earth peace among men of good will.68

“And it happened as the angels went off from them into heaven [that] the shepherds were speaking to each other, ‘Let’s go now to Bethlehem and see this report [that is, this reported event] that has happened, which the Lord told us.’ And they hurried and went and found out both Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. And after they saw [them] they told [others] about the report spoken to them about this child. And all those who heard wondered about what was said to them by the shepherds. But Mary was protecting all these reports, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all [the things] which they heard and [which] they saw, just as it had been spoken to them.”

The word I have translated “protecting,” which is its primary meaning, may also be translated metaphorically as “keeping” or “treasuring.” I think Mary was protecting the fulfillment of what she had heard, on the one hand by not talking about it and on the other by praying in support of it.




We shall see Jesus telling those he healed to take the same steps to protect their healings, and we shall soon see that the child Jesus needed protection.

Luke’s words here may mean that Mary was his informant.“And when eight days were completed, [the eighth day being the day] for circumcising

him, his name was called Jesus also, which he was called by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” Once again, circumcision on the eighth day means he was a nice healthy baby.

Footnotes64. The words I have translated on p. 41 as “This first registration happened when . . .” (Luke mentions

the second in Acts 5:37) are literally “This registration earliest [prôtê, an adjective] happened, Quirinius governing Syria.” The words have also been rendered “This registration happened before . . . ,” understanding prôtê as “earlier” instead of “earliest” (see Moulton, Grammar, III, 32) but ABD, I, 1012, disagrees.

Reiling and Swellengrebel, p. 105, say Quirinius supervised a census that dragged on from 12 B.C to A.D. 16 , during which he was governor of Syria probably in 3-2 B.C. and certainly in A.D. 6-16. They prefer the translation in NEB, Luke 2:2, “This was the first registration of its kind; it took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria,” saying that “when Quirinius was governor” may mean 3-2 B.C. or “contain a somewhat incorrect reference to the whole period” 12 B.C.-A.D. 16. They refer the reader to Sandmel’s article in IDB, III, 975-977, for a full discussion. Sandmel cites Luke 2:2, which says Jesus was born when Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria, ordered an enrollment of the Jews; and Josephus, Antiq., 17.13.5 [XVII, 355], 18.1.1 [XVIII, 1-2], which says Quirinius ordered an enrollment when the Romans removed Herod’s son Archelaus from being tetrarch of Judea. The title tetrarch originally meant ruler of a fourth part. Herod divided his kingdom between three of his sons and his sister, but not equally (Josephus, Antiq., 17.8.1 [XVII, 188-189]). The enrollment when Archelaus was removed came in A.D. 6 or 7. Robertson, Word Pictures, II, 21-22, summarizing an argument in his Luke the Historian, which was in turn based on various books by Sir William Ramsay, supposes that there was an enrollment in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire every fourteen years and that Herod managed to put off for two years or so what should have been the enrollment of 8 B.C. In fact, we do not know whether the 14-year enrollment of later times in Egypt was ordered in these earlier times in Judea. Also, if we are to suppose that Quirinius ordered an enrollment in 6 B.C., we must suppose, as Ramsay does, that he was somehow associated with Caius Sentius Saturninus, who was Roman governor of Syria from 9 to 6 B.C. According to Josephus, Antiq., 17.5.2 and 9.3 [XVII, 89 and 221-222], Publius Quintilius Varus followed Saturninus and was still governor when Herod died in 4 B.C. The problem of dates is further complicated by the possibility that Josephus may be inaccurate, on which subject see BAR, XXIII:5 (September/October 1997), 62-63.

Sandmel also wrote the article “Herod (Family)” in IDB, II, 585-594, in which he further discusses the date of Jesus’ birth; G. B. Caird, in the article “Chronology of the NT” in IDB, I, 599-607, differs from Sandmel. We may perhaps take their disagreement as evidence that the editors of IDB could see no way to decide between their two contributors, but perhaps they did not notice the discrepancy. ABD, after a thorough survey (I, 1012-1013) says Jesus was born before Herod died and very likely shortly before. Luke 3:23 taken with 3:1 says that Jesus was about 30 years old in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, which was, as we have seen, A.D. 28 or 28-29 or 29. From A.D. 6 or 7, after the Romans replaced Archelaus, to A.D. 28 or 29 is much less than thirty years.




We have no evidence that the Romans required people to be registered in their ancestral homes, but no evidence that they did not. Luke may mean no more than that Bethlehem was Joseph’s “home address,” as Rome might be said to be the home address of Roman citizens in the provinces, who were counted in the Roman censuses. These censuses were supposed to be taken every five years, followed by a special sacrifice in Rome (whence our English word “lustrum” for half a decade), but there had been lapses.

65. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 78, my translation. The word in Luke that I have translated “manger” could be translated “stall” or “stable,” but I see no need to do so. For a brief discussion see ABD, VI, 182. ABD points out that some mangers rested on the ground and some were raised above it. For a full account of the traditions about Bethlehem see Kopp, The Holy Places, pp. 1-47.

Robertson, Word Pictures, II, 23, thinks the crowds assembled for the enrollment had taken up all the rooms in the inn before Joseph and Mary arrived.

66. John Lightfoot, Works, 1684, II, 109, 111.67. “Very frightened” is literally “feared a great fear.”68. “In the highest [places]”: Luke 19:38 parallels “heaven” and “the highest,” so I add “places.” Another

possibility is “among the highest [beings],” that is, the angels.“Men of good will”: the King James translation in Luke 2:14, “good will to men,” rests upon the

many manuscripts in which eudokia, good will, is in the nominative case; in the oldest manuscripts it is in the genitive case. It is not clear, however, whether the genitive is subjective or objective, that is, whether men express or receive the good will. Those who opt for the latter possibility then translate “men on whom his favour rests” (NEB) or something similar, which has essentially the same meaning as “good will to men.”

SECTION II – B8 (Matthew 2:1,2,11)

JESUS’ BIRTH

Matthew 2:1-12Continuing then with Matthew: “And after [or, when] Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Judea,

in the days of King Herod [the Great], behold, magi from the east arrived at Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is [the child] born king of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east and came to bow before him.’” Presumably they first found their way to the royal palace and then asked to see the newborn.

“And King Herod was troubled when he heard, and all Jerusalem with him. [Herod was troubled at the prospect of a coup, the people at the prospect of wholesale slaughter when Herod sought to prevent or suppress a takeover.] And gathering together all the high priests and scribes of the people he was asking them where the Messiah was to be born.” That is, Herod assembled the full judicial body or Sanhedrin, one of whose tasks was to try those accused of being false prophets. We shall see that it was the full Sanhedrin of a later day which tried Jesus when he was so accused. Whether Matthew recognized how Jesus’ life was bounded by assemblies of the whole Sanhedrin is not clear.

“And they said to him, ‘In Bethlehem, Judea, for it has been written by the prophet [Micah] thus:

And you Bethlehem [in the] land of Judah




are not least with respect to [providing] the governors of Judah.For a governor will come out of you

who will shepherd My people Israel.69

“Then Herod privately calling the magi ascertained from them the length of time of the star’s appearing, and sending them to Bethlehem he said, ‘Go and search out the facts about the child, and when you find [him] tell me, so that I may come and bow before him too.’

“And after they heard the king they went [to Bethlehem], and, behold, the star that they saw in the east went ahead of them until it came and stood over where the child was. And seeing the star they rejoiced [with] very great joy. And coming into the house [where the family was now staying70] they saw the child with Mary his mother and falling [on their knees] they bowed before him, and opening their treasures they brought out gifts for him, gold and frankincense and myrrh. [Frankincense and myrrh are sold today, so it is not necessary to try to describe their sweet smells.] And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod they went away to their country by another road.”

Matthew does not say how many magi searched for Jesus, he does not say they were kings, nor does he give their names. Christian traditions on the subject differ between west and east, eastern Christians saying there were more men and with different names than in the western tradition. The western tradition came to center on the cathedral of Cologne in Germany, where the relics of the Magi are said to repose. In 1611, the year of the King James Version, Thomas Coryate published at his own expense what he titled his Crudities because he was humble about his learning and his prose style. The book is a diary of his travels in Europe. Coryate found in the cathedral of Cologne an account of the Magi as western Christianity had come to understand them, and, he wrote, “because every man that will read this cannot (I am sure) understand it in the Latin, therefore, that he might not be deprived of so notable a matter as this is, I have done my endeavor to translate this history into English, desiring thee whatsoever thou art (gentle reader) to pardon me if I have not so exactly done it as thou wouldest require at my hands. For as I told thee in my epistle to thyself, which I have prefixed before my book, I neither profess myself a scholar, nor acknowledge myself worthy to be ranked amongst scholars, but only wish to be accounted a friend and lover of the Muses.” In the spirit of Coryate I have modernized his spelling according to American rules, but I have not undertaken to delete occasional repetitions. His translation is as follows.

A History of the Magi, gathered out of the Holy Scriptures, and ap- proved Writers of the Church.

1 The Magi, which first of all the Gentiles adored the infancy of our Savior Christ in Bethlehem the thirteenth day after his nativity, were three in number. And if we believe Epiphanius, they derived their pedigree from Abraham, descending from his sons which he begot upon his handmaid Keturah [see Genesis 25:1-2]. Neither is it anything repugnant unto this that Origen and Chrysostom do refer the pedigree of the Magi to Balaam, a heathen prophet. For both he and the Queen of Sheba drew the original of their stock from the same sons of Keturah. [For Balaam, who lived in Iraq, see Numbers 22:1-24:25, and for the Queen of Sheba (Yemen) see I Kings 10:1-13; their ancestry is not fully stated in the Bible but was deduced from Genesis 25:6, which says that




Abraham sent the sons of his concubines eastward into the east country.]2 What their names, age, and countenance were, and what gifts each of them offered,

Venerable Bede (according as he had received it by the tradition of his forefathers) expresseth the matter in these words.

The first, quoth he, is said to be Melchior, an old man with a long beard and hair. He offered gold to the King our Lord.

The second, whose name was Gaspar, a beardless young man and ruddy, honored God with frankincense, as being an oblation beseeming God. [Christian theologians had decided that Jesus was God at the Council of Nicaea in 325.]

The third, called Balthasar, being tawny and fully bearded, by myrrh signified that the Son of man should die [those who prepared Jesus for burial after he died on the cross put a mix ture of myrrh and aloes in the cloths with which they wrapped his body; John 19:39]. But in that one of them is wont to be painted black and as an Ethiopian (as it appeareth by many and those very ancient pictures amongst us), hereupon it seemeth to be grounded, both that Bede affirmeth that the third was tawny as also that in the 72nd Psalm it is sung in the Church upon the Kings’ Day [Epiphany], “The Ethiopians shall fall down before him” [see verse 9, which in the King James Version reads, “They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him,” but which in the New English Bible reads, “The Ethiopians shall crouch low before him”].

3 That they were not of any obscure place or degree, but princes, yea kings, which doth greatly illustrate the glory of Christ, it is a part of piety to believe. For it is agreeable both to the figure of the old law which went before in Solomon [apparently this refers to the gifts the Queen of Sheba gave to Solomon, who was the “figure and type,” words meaning “advanced appearing,” of Christ; see below and I Kings 10:1-13], and to the prophecies of the Prophets, especially of David and Isaiah; whereof the one saith, “The Kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents, the kings of the Arabians and of Saba [Yemen] shall bring gifts” [Psalm 72:10, which being accepted as a prophecy meant that David was accepted as a prophet]: the other saith, “And nations shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising up” [Isaiah 60:3]: which things are understood by the Church and the holy fathers, of the calling and oblation of the Magi. This also is confirmed by the fear of Herod, and of the whole city of Jerusalem at the time of their coming, by those precious gifts which they are said to have opened out of their treasures, and by the tradition of our forefathers, by writings, speeches, songs, hymns, and pictures as common, so very ancient. Neither doth this make at all to the matter that the evangelist hath not called them kings, but Magi. For that was done to great purpose, in regard that Christ’s glory and our religion seemed to be established rather by the testimony of Magi or Wisemen than by the power of kings. [In English usage in 1611 a “wiseman” was a sorcerer, but see what follows.]

4 As concerning their profession, albeit there are some that by the name of Magi do understand wicked persons, and those that practice magic arts: yet the opinion of them ought to prevail more with us that think they were wise astrologers, who by the mathematic art (as Cyprian speaketh) knew the force and course of the planets, and by certain rules of experience observed the nature of the elements, and the offices of the stars. Wherehence it came very conveniently to pass that the divine Wisdom, which doth sweetly dispose all things, drew them unto it especially by the token of a star, as being men skillful in the art of astronomy: whereunto was added both the light of the divine grace, and also a demonstration of men out of the Holy Scriptures. For they were instructed by the scribes out of the prophet Micah concerning the place where Christ should be born [see Micah 5:2], and they received it as a certain tradition of their forefathers out of the




prophecy of Balaam, that the same star did signify the birth of the Messiah [see Numbers 24:17, “there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of Israel”].

5 That they came out of Arabia Felix [Yemen] (as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Epiphanius have written) it seemeth very probable. Both because Arabia, in respect of Judea, is situate towards the east (according to the testimony of Tacitus) and also because it yieldeth plenty of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Finally for that this opinion doth agree with the prophecy of Isaiah, “All they of Saba (which is Arabia, as Jerome doth witness [in his commentary] upon that place, and in the book of his Questions upon Genesis) shall come, and bring gold and frankincense” [see Isaiah 60:6]. And with that of the prophet David, “The kings of the Arabians and of Saba shall bring gifts,” and again, “unto him shall they give of the gold of Arabia” [see Psalm 72:10, 15].

6 Moreover they presented unto Christ the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, because Arabia aboundeth in these things especially, and gloried therein. Also the Queen of Sheba, whom authors do write to have been of the stock and family of these Magi, bestowed the like gifts, namely gold and spices (unto which she added precious stones) upon King Solomon as being a figure and type of Christ [see I Kings 10:2]. Again those gifts which Abraham in the 37th [chapter] of Genesis is said to have given to the sons of Ketura, Epiphanius writeth (according to the tradition of the Hebrews) to have been garments, gold, and myrrh. Lastly, they did it not so much to follow the manner of their nation and the examples of their forefathers, but also for a mystical reason’s sake. For this that they believe with their hearts they protest with their gifts; they offer frankincense to God [that is, Jesus as God], myrrh to a man, and gold to a king. And they provide themselves such gifts that when they worship one, they declare to the world that they believe at one time in three distinct persons [that is, they believe Jesus was three persons in one]; seeing they honor the kingly person with gold, the human with myrrh, and the divine with frankincense. [This is not the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as we see in what follows.]

7 And after Christ’s ascension they were more fully instructed by St. Thomas the Apostle in the faith of Christ, and also baptized, yea (which is more), they were ordained pastors and doctors [that is, teachers], or bishops of the people amongst whom they lived, and brought a great company of Gentiles to the worship of Christian religion; and even as a plentiful harvest doth follow the firstfruits: so the faith of an innumerable multitude of people, as [if] it were most abundant corn [that is, grain], followed the Magi that were the firstfruits of the believers of the Gentiles; and thus the prophecy of David is fulfilled, who after he had prophesied, “The kings of the Arabians and of Saba shall bring gifts” by and by [that is, immediately] he addeth, “And all kings shall worship him, and all nations shall serve him” [Psalm 72:11]. Also, “All nations which Thou hast made shall come and worship before Thee, O Lord, and shall glorify Thy name” [Psalm 86:9].

8 After that in their old age they had departed out of this life, their bodies being brought first to Constantinople by the means of the Empress Helena [the mother of Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome], then to Milan by Eustorgius, bishop of that city, at last in the year after the incarnation of Christ 1164, being translated thence to this city [Cologne] in the time of Reinold, archbishop thereof, . . . they were reposed in this place [the chapel of the Magi in the cathedral, which in other chapels houses the bones of three martyrs] . . . . Since which time Cologne began to be no less famous for the relics of these three kings and of other saints than Jerusalem was for Stephen [see Acts 8:2], Rome for Peter and Paul, or Spain for James [another apostle, the son of Zebedee, who is buried, according to tradition, in the cathedral of Compostela],




or France for Martin and Hilary [these two saints were among the first who were not martyrs; Martin was an outstanding exorcist, a long-established office in the church, to which office Hilary appointed him].

9 Let us acknowledge in the Magi that were the worshippers of Christ, the firstfruits of our calling and faith, and let us adore him being omnipotent in the heavens, whom they worshipped being an infant in his cradle. They found him wrapped with little base clouts [rags], they saw him lying in a hard manger, or lulled in the lap of his poor mother; yet those barbarians that were as yet utterly ignorant of true piety and faith, being nothing offended with these things, fell down and worshipped him. Let us then that are citizens of the kingdom of heaven imitate these barbarians at the least: and whereas we have known the majesty of Christ, his power, admirable acts, and the mysteries of Christian faith, let us confirm our faith by their example . . . .

There happened a thing unto me presently [that is, immediately] after I had written out these memorable matters of the three kings and the three martyrs [that is, as he copied the Latin account in the cathedral], that yielded unto me a kind of recompense for my long labor of writing. For one of the canons of the church that stood near unto me when I had almost ended my writing, supposing that I was a stranger, and observing that I loved antiquities, invited me with a kind of courteous and civil importunity to his house, though we never saw each other before, and entertained me with much variety of good cheer.

Thus much concerning the Monument of the three Kings.71

All efforts to identify the Magi’s star with a heavenly body have failed, not surprisingly, since no such body could have gone before them and stood over a particular house. Try to decide, some night, which house in your neighborhood the North Star stands over, or, if your memory serves, which house the comet Hale-Bopp was pointing to. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what various persons have proposed as the “real” star.

Our knowledge of astrology in Jesus’ time is incomplete, but we know that the Romans began to identify comets with kings when a comet appeared immediately after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. Among later pictorial representations of the magi we may note that Giotto painted a comet above their heads in his frescoes of the life of Jesus in the Arena Chapel in Padua.72

The term comet — “having hair” — was also applied to celestial bodies without tails, that is, to meteors, and possibly to novas (stars whose explosion makes them suddenly and briefly brighter). The position of a comet could be matched with the positions of the sun, the moon, and the constellations of the zodiac. If it did not appear among them, its angular position in the northern or southern sky could be equated with theirs. Astrologers believed that the sun, moon, and zodiacal constellations indicated the countries in which prognosticated events would occur — but there was no standard list of countries. A commentator on Ptolemy’s Almagest said Judea and Palestine were indicated by Taurus, another astrologer said Palestine was indicated by the moon (both writers came after Jesus’ time). The Babylonians had said that Mars indicated lands to their west.73

All we can say, then, is that if the Magi had seen a physical phenomenon it was a comet, meteor or nova in a quarter of the sky they identified as referring to Judea, and so concluded that a king of the Jews had been born. Other astrologers may well have interpreted the same phenomenon differently. Not all those who thought a king of the Jews had been born would




necessarily have come to bow before him. Hence we need not wonder that only some of the magi came to Jerusalem.

As we have seen, Matthew says that the Magi were or arrived “from the east” and Justin Martyr says more specifically that they came from Arabia, but magi were to be found throughout the Roman empire, even if they were not only astrologers or sorcerers but were also Zoroastrian priests. By Jesus’ day, one of the old Persian gods whom Zoroaster had demoted to the rank of angel had been restored to divinity and was in the process of becoming the major deity of the Roman empire. His name was Mithra or Mithras, and he was worshipped in central Turkey, in Egypt, and wherever soldiers were stationed, including, eventually, Londinium, modern London, and Hadrian’s wall along the modern border between England and Scotland.

Epiphany, the name of the day the Magi saw Jesus, means “manifestation,” that is, the showing of Jesus to the Gentiles, represented by the Magi. All Christians celebrate Epiphany on January 6, but Armenian Christians continue to believe that the Magi arrived in Bethlehem the day Jesus was born, whereas the rest of Christianity decided Jesus was born on the day worshippers of Mithra observed as the birthday of their god. When western Christians made the decision, Armenian and Syrian Christians accused them of adopting a pagan holiday. Syrian Christians later changed their minds, but various reforming Protestant groups have agreed with the old argument and refused to observe Christmas. Puritans, Baptists and Presbyterians in England, Scotland and New England were able to suppress the observance of Christmas for a time in the seventeenth century, and in New England the festive aspects of Christmas were not introduced until about 1875, that is, about the time when some Christians began to think of Christmas as not merely reviving “the dearest memories in human history” but as renewing gratitude to God, through whose love the Word brings the light of truth to everyone, giving life and health to body, mind, soul and spirit — gratitude that the divine principle of harmony and the practice of healing in Jesus’ way are once more within the grasp of all.74

Matthew may have chosen to tell of the Magi and their quest for “the king of the Jews” so as to reinforce the artistic symmetry of his narrative. As we shall see in Chapter V, all the Gospel authors agree that the Roman governor Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?” and thereafter spoke of him as such and affixed that title to his cross, but the other writers use the phrase nowhere else. As Matthew uses it, it serves as a thematic frame for his narrative. He may be saying to us that from the beginning to the end Gentiles recognized Jesus as a king.

Herod and the people of Jerusalem responded to the Magi in different ways. The Jews did not believe in astrology, so it is not surprising that the people’s initial fears wore off and that they did not follow the Magi to Bethlehem. When the Magi did not return to the city with news of the child, the people would have believed that their quest had been mistaken, or at worst, that they were charlatans. But Herod, says Matthew, did not forget the Magi, and he eventually decided to take no chances that Jesus might become the center of an underground movement against him.75

Footnotes70. Some scholars believe instead that Matthew thought the family had always lived in Bethlehem.71. Thomas Coryate, Crudities, 1611, pp. 600-606. The Latin original of “The History of the Magi” has

many footnotes which Coryate omitted from his translation. They range from citations of Roman authors for such things as descriptions of frankincense and myrrh to recently published legal and historical works.

In section 1 of the “History” the note to the statement that the Magi arrived in Bethlehem the thirteenth




day after Jesus’ nativity cites the harmony of the Gospels compiled by Ammonius of Alexandria, the chapter on the Epiphany in Alcuin’s On Church Duties, Anselm’s commentary on chapter 2 of Matthew, and Book I of Nicephorus’ Ecclesiastical History. The note to the statement that the Magi were three in number cites sermons on the Epiphany by Pope Leo I and Augustine, and Rupert’s commentary on chapter 2 of Matthew. The note to Epiphanius cites his Compendium of Christian Doctrine. The notes to Origen and John Chrysostom are to their homilies, and the note to Chrysostom adds a reference to Book II, chapters 4 and 48 of Petrus de Natalibus’ Catalogue of Saints.

In section 2, the quotation from Bede is from his Collectanea.In section 3, the “holy fathers” are Chrysostom and Leo, and “our forefathers” are Tertullian (Book III, chapter 9, of

Against the Jews), Isidorus (chapter 15 of On the Lord’s Passion), and Anselm and Theophylact (commentaries on chapter 2 of Matthew); “see,” adds the note, Cicero’s On Divination; Book III, chapter 1, of Pliny’s Natural History; Adam Sasbout’s homily on the Epiphany; and Volume II, paragraph 3, of Francisco Suarez’ Tractate on St. Thomas [Aquinas]. The footnote to Matthew’s “purpose” in calling the three kings magi cites Book XI, chapter 5, of Francisco Melchior Cano’s On Theological Proof Texts; Hector Pinto’s commentary on chapter 2 of Daniel; and Book I of Cesare Baronio’s Annals of the Church from the Birth of Christ to the Year 1198.

In section 4, those who think ill of the Magi are Justin Martyr (Against Trypho), Origen (Book I of Against Celsus, and homily 13 on Numbers), Chrysostom (homilies 1 and 14 on Matthew), and Augustine (sermon 2 on the Epiphany). Those who think the contrary are Chrysostom again, in another homily (number 2 in his Select Works), Leo I (sermon 4 on the Epiphany), Jerome (commentaries on chapter 2 of Daniel and chapter 47 of Isaiah), and Anselm and Rupert (commentaries on chapter 2 of Matthew). The reference to Cyprian is to his sermon on the Star and the Magi. The note to “the divine Wisdom . . . drew them” cites chapter 8 of The Wisdom of Solomon. The note to Balaam (see Numbers 24) cites Origen again and Leo’s sermon 4.

In section 5, the notes to Justin, Tertullian, Cyprian and Epiphanius are the same as before, with the addition of chapter 13 of Tertullian’s Against Marcion. The note to Tacitus cites Book V of his History. The note to frankincense and myrrh cites chapters 30 and 42 of Tertullian’s Apology in defense of Christianity, and Book II, chapter 14, of Pliny’s Natural History.

In section 6, the note to Epiphanius is the same as before. The note to the statement that the Magi by their gifts “declare to the world that they believe at one time in three distinct persons” is to Leo’s sermon 2 on the Epiphany.

In section 7, the note to the statement that Jesus’ apostle Thomas baptized the Magi cites Chrysostom’s homily 2 in his Select Works; an ancient list cited in Part II, chapter 21, of Hector Pinto’s Dialogues on the Idea of the Christian Life; and Petrus de Natalibus as before.

In section 8, the note to bishop Eustorgius’ bringing the relics of the Magi to Milan cites Book II, chapter 8, of the History of English Affairs by William of Newburg (Gulielmus Petit); Book VI, chapter 24, of Saxonia by Albertus Krantz; Petrus de Natalibus as before and Book IV, chapter 45; and Book CXL of the History of the Kingdom of Italy by Carlo Sigonio.

In section 9, the note to the opening words, “Let us acknowledge,” cites Leo’s sermon 2 on the Epiphany. The note to “Let us . . . imitate” cites Chrysostom’s homily 24 on I Corinthians and homily 6 to the people of Antioch.

72. See Sarel Eimerl and the editors of Time-Life Books, The World of Giotto c. 1267-1337, New York: Time Incorporated [1967], pp. 114, 120 (scene 18). The appearance of Halley’s Comet in 12-11 B.C. has been proposed (see ABD, III, 411).

73. A. Bouché-Leclercq, L’Astrologie Grecque, Paris, 1899, photocopied ed., Brussels, 1963, pp. 328ff, 344, 360. Bouché-Leclercq’s is the fundamental work on the subject; see Otto Neugebaur and H. B. Van Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes, Philadelphia: American Philological Society, 1959 (Memoirs of the American Philological Society, v. 48), p. 2. See also BR, XVI:6 (December 2001), 52.

On the question of whether the magi were Zoroastrian priests see Joseph Bidez and Franz Cumont, Les Mages Hellénisés, Paris: Société d’Éditions “Les Belles Lettres,” 1938, I, 131-150. Also Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra,




trans. Thomas J. McCormack, Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1903 (a translation of the French second edition of 1903), pp. 119-126. For some questioning of Cumont’s interpretations see Mithraic Studies, ed. John R. Hinnells [Manchester, Eng.]: Manchester University Press [1975], I, xii. Hinnells’ own work, Persian Mythology [London]: Hamlyn [1973], gives much information as well. More recently, David Ulansey, in The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, Oxford, 1989, has challenged Cumont’s conclusion that Mithraism grew out of Zoroastrianism, and has convinced such scholars as Howard Clark Kee (BR, V:6 [December 1989], 12). See also Ulansey’s article, “Solving the Mithraic Mysteries,” BAR, XX:5 (September/October 1994), 40-53, 79. According to Ulansey, Mithraism was an astrological religion. If so, then it does not much matter whether the magi were Zoroastrians or Mithraists.

Our uncertainties about Greek and Roman astrology, not to mention Zoroastrian, did not prevent Felix freiherr von Oefele from casting a horoscope for Jesus: “Das Horoscope der Empfängnis Christi mit den Evangelien verglichen,” Mitteilung der Vorder-asiatische Gesellschaft, VIII:6 (1903).

Johannes Kepler, who observed a nova that appeared next to the conjunction (apparent near approach) of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in 1604, thought that perhaps the star of Bethlehem had similarly appeared at the conjunction of 7 B.C. (De Stella Nova in Pede Serpentarii [On the New Star in the Foot of Serpentarius], Prague, 1606, ch. 26 and App. II. An English translation of the relevant passage in ch. 26 may be found in M. W. Burke-Gaffney, Kepler and the Jesuits, Milwaukee, MN: Bruce Publishing Company [1944], pp. 29-30). Kepler presented a copy of his book to James I of the King James Version. His drawing of the position of the star and the planets in 1604 may be seen in Walter Gerlach and Martha List, Johannes Kepler, Munich: Ehrenwirth [1971], p. 107.

Subsequent theorizers have opted either for a nova or for a planetary conjunction. Beside the conjunction of 7 B.C. there was a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in 3 B.C.; the Chinese observed a nova in 5 B.C. (see ABD, III, 411). Those who rule out a nova say it would not have remained bright long enough to guide the Magi to Bethlehem. It hardly seems likely that astrologers would mistake a conjunction of planets for a star, but some suppose that anything like a star would have been obvious to all. As I have said, Lightfoot concluded that the Magi had seen the same light as the shepherds had, the light which Jesus’ birth brought to earth.

74. Clement of Alexandria (c. 200) knew those who dated Christmas May 20, April 19 and April 20; he preferred November 17. Later January 6 and March 25 were widely favored. December 25 won universal acceptance in the middle of the fifth century, but the Armenians returned to January 6 afterward. See “Christmas,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1961 ed., V, 642-644, and James H. Barnett, The American Christmas, New York: Macmillan [1954]. “Dearest memories”: Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 256.

75. In saying that the Jews did not believe in astrology, I may have somewhat overstated the case. Deuteronomy 4:19 prohibits worship of sun, moon, stars and “all the heavenly army,” and Isaiah 47:13-14 and Jeremiah 10:2 denounce astrology, but we find stars on Jewish coins as early as the reign of Alexander Janneus (Ya‘akov Meshorer, Ancient Jewish Coinage, I, 60) and ‘Abodah Zara, 17a [I, 8], says that R. Eleazar b. Dordia (2nd century), afraid he would die from a curse put on him by a harlot, asked “sun and moon” and “stars and constellations” to pray for him (none would, and he died). Shabbath, 156b, mentions a Rabbi Hanina (third century) who believed in astrology, but the rest of the rabbis cited there reject such a belief. Meshorer, I, 61, alludes to B. Kanael’s suggestion that the Jews thought of a star as a symbol of monarchy because of Numbers 24:17:

There shall come a star out of Jacob and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.

By the laws of Hebrew poetry, “star” and “scepter” are synonymous here, just as “Jacob” and “Israel” are. Possibly the Jews of Jesus’ time did not make the connection but thought of the stars on




their coins simply as having pleasant connotations or being decorative. The same explanation may be correct with respect to mosaics of the zodiac on the floors of synagogues; see ABD, I, 453-454; Lucille A. Roussin, “Helios in the Synagogue: Did Some Ancient Jews Worship the Sun God?” BAR, XXVII:2 (March/April 2001), 52-56. It seems to me possible that the figure driving four horses though copied from representations of the Greek god Helios nevertheless represents the God of Israel, who is depicted repeatedly in the Bible as the blessed source of [spiritual] light that guides us and that we reflect.

There are horoscopes among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q186 and 4Q561), but it seems clear enough that the owners were a minority in Israel.

SECTION III – B10 (Luke 2:52)See B7.

SECTION III – B11 (Matthew 15:30,31)

MANY HEALED

Matthew 15:29-31Continuing with Matthew alone: “And going up into the hill [country] he sat down, and

many crowds came to him, having with them [people who were] lame, blind, crippled, dumb, and many others, and they threw them at his feet, and he healed them, so that the crowd wondered, seeing the dumb speaking, the crippled healthy, and the lame walking and the blind seeing. And they glorified the God of Israel.”

SECTION III – B12 (John 6:16-21)

WALKING ON WATER

Mark 6:45-52 Matthew 14:22-33 John 6:14-21Next comes the best-known event in Jesus’ ministry, his walking on water. Luke for some

reason does not include it.Continuing with Mark: “And immediately he made his students get into the ship and go

ahead to the other side [of the sea] at Bethsaida while he sent the crowd away, and when he had said goodbye to them he went off into the hill to pray.”

John says Jesus sent the students to Capernaum, a detail we shall come to later. More importantly, he tells us why Jesus sent the crowd away: “So the people who saw the sign that he did were saying, ‘This is truly the prophet who is coming into the world [as was promised by Moses].’7

“So Jesus, knowing that they intend to come and seize him to make him a king, went away again into the hill [by] himself alone.”

Thus we see that the Jews expected a messiah who would lead them against the Romans and restore their kingdom, and that Jesus’ doings made him a focus for their expectations. He was to disappoint those expectations, and right now he had to prevent them from putting him at the head of a rebellion. His enemies, on the other hand, as John points out later, were very doubtful of his intentions, or his ability to short-circuit the intentions of others. They were very doubtful that a




rebellion would succeed, and feared that an unsuccessful revolt would leave them in worse circumstances than ever. They were wrong about Jesus, but what they were afraid of did happen within forty years. The Jews did revolt unsuccessfully and the Romans destroyed their temple, which has never been rebuilt.8

Continuing again with Mark: “And when it became evening the ship was in the middle of the sea and he [was] alone on the land. And seeing them straining at the oars, for the wind was against them, between three and six o’clock in the morning or thereabouts [when they had rowed about three or four miles] he comes to them walking on the sea. And he was intending to pass by them [without attracting their attention], but they saw him walking on the sea, and thought it was an apparition, and cried out, for they all saw him and were troubled.9

“But he immediately spoke with them and says to them, ‘Cheer up, it’s I; don’t be afraid.’“And he got up into the ship with them, and the wind ceased.”Matthew alone says that Peter walked on the water also. “But Peter said to him in reply [to

his words of cheer], ‘Lord, if you’re you, order me to come to you on the water.’ [As soon as Peter’s foot touches the water he will know whether he is seeing only an apparition.]

“And he said, ‘Come.’“And Peter got down out of the ship and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But

seeing the wind strong, he got frightened, and beginning to sink he said with a loud voice, ‘Lord, save me!’

“And Jesus stretched out [his] hand immediately and grasped him and says to him, ‘Little-trust, why did you doubt?’

“And when they got into the ship, the wind abated. And those in the ship bowed down to him, saying, ‘Son of God you truly are.’”

Mark ends his account as follows: “And they were wondering in themselves far beyond the norm, for they did not understand [the principle] governing [the multiplication of] the loaves [and the walking on the water], but their heart had been hardened.” John continues from Jesus’ words “it’s I; don’t be afraid” as follows: “So they were intending to take him into the ship, and immediately the ship was at the land to which they were going.” Perhaps “intending” should be translated “willing” and “immediately” should be translated “instead,” rarer meanings for both words.

Not unnaturally, many readers have been unable to accept the foregoing accounts as literally true. Those who do not wish to reject them outright sometimes seek to explain them by saying that everyday events came to be exaggerated in retelling stories which were originally of moral significance only. For example, they may say that when the people saw Jesus was willing to share the little he had they were ashamed of themselves and took out their sandwiches.

Franco Zeffirelli with the special effects of cinema was able to show a fountain of fish shooting up as people excitedly grabbed for them, but that cinematic symbolism is no more satisfactory than the idea that the people took out their sandwiches. As John makes clear a little later in his narrative, many of the people were unaware of how Jesus had provided their food, and indeed it would have been entirely uncharacteristic of him to show off. He was not showing off when he walked on the water, as Mark makes clear, any more than the character Chauncey the gardener in the movie “Being There” who was shown walking on water in a special effect intended to symbolize his complete innocence (in the theological sense). That Chauncey is a gardener is also an allusion to Jesus, whom Mary Magdalene mistook for a gardener after his resurrection.




Rudyard Kipling made effective use of her mistake in his story, “The Gardener.”10Those who accept Jesus’ statement that God supplies our every need, particularly if they have

some experience with spiritual healing, are not inclined to write off the stories but draw inspiration from them as outstanding examples of God’s provision for those who trust Him. The feeding of the five thousand was only a larger example of what happened when the flesh of the man’s withered hand was restored. Nor do these people try to explain the narratives by minimal adjustments to physical law, such as imagining solid water, for to do so would be tantamount to insisting that God must act in man’s way. If they are idealists, philosophically speaking, they feel that Jesus was showing that matter is neither real nor powerful when understood. When spiritual healing is instantaneous, clearly bypassing and not just speeding up normal processes of recovery, it supports the idea that God may act in his own best way and that Spirit, not matter, is the only true substance.

Footnotes7. Deuteronomy 18:15.8. John 11:49-50.9. “Straining at the oars”: literally, “being tortured in rowing.” “Between three and six o’clock in the morning

or thereabouts”: literally, “around the fourth watch of the night.” Matthew does not have “around”; John does not give the time at all. The inserted “three or four miles” is from John 6:19 and is literally, “twenty-five or thirty stadia.” A “stadium” was 607 feet.

10. John 20:15. Kipling: Debits and Credits, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1926, pp. 337-352.

SECTION IV – B15 (Matthew 14:14-21)

FEEDING FIVE THOUSAND

Matthew 14:13-21 Mark 6:30-44 Luke 9:10-17 John 6:1-13All four Gospels tell of the first event in the year. John says it occurred at Passover time,

which comes in March or April, on a hillside where there was much grass. Mark’s statement that the grass was green supports John’s date, for at most other times of the year the grass would have been brown.

Matthew says this first event occurred when Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, but the other Gospels show that it occurred somewhat later.

Continuing with Mark as usual: “And the apostles are gathered together to Jesus and reported everything to him, whatsoever they did and whatsoever they taught.

“And he says to them, ‘Come to a desert place by yourselves and rest yourselves a little,’ for many were coming and going and they were not finding opportunity to eat.

“And they went off in the ship to a desert place by themselves. And many saw them going and recognized them and ran together there on foot from all the cities and got there before them. And when he got out [of the ship] he saw a great crowd, and had pity on them because they were ‘like sheep not having a shepherd,’ and he began to teach them many [things].”2

The other Gospels do not mention the teaching. Matthew and Luke say instead that Jesus healed those who were sick, John says the crowd followed him because they had seen his




healings.“And now when many hours were [past] his students came to him and were saying, ‘The

place is a desert and now many hours are [past]. Send them away to go off to the fields and villages round about and buy themselves something to eat [Luke adds, “and find a place to rest”].’

“But he said to them in reply, ‘You give them [something] to eat.’“And they say to him, ‘Shall we go off and buy two hundred denarii’s worth of bread and

give [it to] them to eat?’ [A denarius, as we shall see, was a day’s wage for a worker in a vineyard. The apostles may have been objecting to the expense, or saying they didn’t have enough money.]3

“But he says to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go see.’“And when they knew they say, ‘Five, and two fish.’”John gives more details: “He says to Philip, ‘Where shall we buy bread, so that these

[people] will eat?’“He was saying this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.“Philip answered him, ‘Two hundred denarii’s worth of bread is not enough for them to

each receive a little something.’“Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, one of his students, says to him, ‘There’s a little boy

here who has five barley loaves and two small fish, but what are these [divided] into so many [portions]?’”4

Continuing with Mark: “And he ordered them all to recline in parties on the green grass. And they fell to in groups, a hundred [groups of] fifty [each]. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up into heaven and blessed [God] and broke up the loaves and was giving [them] to his students to put [them] beside them. And he divided the two fish for all. And they all ate and were filled. And they picked up twelve wicker-basketfulls of broken pieces [of bread] and of fish. And those who ate the loaves were five thousand men.”5

In telling the foregoing incident, the four Gospels differ in many small matters, of which the following may be noted. Mark alone says Jesus took the apostles to a desert place to rest. Matthew, although his chronology is wrong, may still be correct in implying that they went where Jesus’ followers could come to him in safety, or where Jesus could seek divine guidance in private: “And when Jesus heard [of John the Baptist’s death] he went away from there to a desert place by himself.” Thus Matthew explicitly opposes a triumph of evil in the case of John the Baptist with a proof of God’s irresistible power and His care for men. Luke says Jesus and the apostles went to Bethsaida, but he anticipates: they went to the desert, or deserted, place first. John alone says that it was Jesus who directed the apostles to pick up the scraps “so that nothing will be lost.” Abundance does not warrant wastefulness.

Mark says, literally translated, that the people grouped themselves “by hundreds and fifties.” Luke says “in groups of fifty.” British scholars, including the translators of the New English Bible, point out that one hundred times fifty is five thousand. We can then see how the apostles were able to calculate the number of men in the crowd. Matthew says women and children were also present; presumably they ate by themselves.6

Footnotes2. A tradition possibly traceable to Egeria (late fourth century) says the place was Tabgha, on the

northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee (ABD, VI, 301; Egeria’s Travels, p. 196, a part of Peter the




Deacon’s book [1137] that “may come from Egeria,” ibid., p. 180). The quotation is Numbers 27:17 or a similar passage.

3. Value of denarius: see note 91.4. Although the words I have translated “little boy” and “small fish” are diminutive in form, there is some

question whether they are diminutive in meaning; see Newman and Nida, pp. 179-180.5. “Blessed [God]”: John has “gave thanks,” Luke says Jesus blessed “them,” that is, the bread and the

fish, but Luke was not a Jew. The Talmud gives a series of blessings for various kinds of food, all of a later date but all blessing God for the food (Berakoth, 35a [VI, 1]).

6. NEB translates “a hundred rows of fifty each,” because the noun prasia, “party,” also means “garden.” The Jews planted fields in rows, but planted their garden beds in plots arranged along the sides and in the middle according to the Pharisaic interpretation of the Mosaic law against mixing kinds of seeds (see Kil’ayim, III, 1-2). The fact that 50 x 100 = 5000 has not struck everyone as significant (see Bratcher and Nida, p. 207), but those who scoff at the arithmetic should note that the only times we have numbers assigned to the crowds who heard Jesus, 5000 here and 4000 later, he had them sit down and fed them.

91. Mendel Nun, “Cast Your Net Upon the Waters: Fish and Fishermen in Jesus’ Time,” BAR, XIX:6 (November/December 1993), 48-51. For the value of the denarius or dinar see the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, Matthew 20:1-16. Denarius is translated “penny” in the King James Version, and contrariwise, “pence” was represented by d. in the old way of writing English monetary values, where 6d. meant sixpence. For the high price of fish in antiquity see Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “Fishers of Fish, Fishers of Men,” BR, XV:3 (June 1999), 24.

SECTION V – B19 (John 9:1 … 32)

THE HEALING OF A MAN BORN BLIND

John 9:1-38The denunciation of right ideas and effective practices by those who do not understand them,

and even by those who do, is a commonplace of history. Our next narrative is as dramatic as the last. It gives us another vivid picture of the open and concealed opposition to Jesus’ healings that he and his patients had to face and how they might deal with it.

Continuing then with John. “And passing by he saw a man blind from birth [and spoke with him]. And his students asked him, saying, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this [man, in his thoughts in the womb] or his parents, so that he was born blind?’58

“Jesus answered, ‘This [man] didn’t sin, and neither did his parents, so that the works of God will be made manifest in him instead. We [you and I] must work the works of Him who sent me until it’s [full] day. Night comes when [that is, if] no one can work [such works]. When I’m in the world, I’m the light of the world [because I do God’s works].’59

“After he said these [things], he spat on the ground and made mud out of the spittle and smeared the mud on his eyes, and said to him, ‘Go, wash yourself in the Pool of Siloam’ (which is translated ‘that which has been sent’ [because the water came there through conduits]).” We have already said that Jesus may have been expressing his contempt for the idea that man was made of spit and dust and telling the man to wash away that belief. No doubt John thought it was interesting that Jesus sent the man to a pool named “that which has been sent.”60




“So he went and washed himself and came [back] seeing.”I think we also have here one more instance of Jesus’ protecting his patients. As we shall see,

this healing put the man under great pressure to deny its divine cause. I believe that Jesus sent the man away from his usual post for the same reason he took other blind men aside or out of their village, namely, to remove him for a time from an atmosphere of opposition to the healing. We do not know how far the man had to walk to the pool, but presumably he would be firmly convinced by the time he returned that he really could see. He returned to a hornets’ nest.

Continuing with John. “So the neighbors, and those seeing him before because he was a beggar, were saying, ‘This is he who sits and begs, isn’t it?’

“Some [who replied] were saying, ‘This is [he].’“Others were saying, ‘No, but he’s like him.’“He was saying, ‘I’m [he].’“So they were saying to him, ‘So how were your eyes opened?’“He answered, ‘A man who is called Jesus made mud and put [it] on my eyes and said to

me, “Go to Siloam and wash yourself.” So I went and washed myself and I saw.’61“And they said to him, ‘Where is he?’“He says, ‘I don’t know.’“They brought the former blind [man] to the Pharisees. And it was a Sabbath on the day

Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. So the Pharisees also were asking him how he saw.

“And he said to them, ‘He put mud on my eyes, and I washed myself, and I see.’“So some of the Pharisees were saying, ‘This isn’t a man of God, because he doesn’t

guard the Sabbath.’62“But others were saying, ‘How can a man [who is] a sinner perform such signs [proofs

that he does God’s work]?’“And there was a split among them. So they say to the blind [man] again, ‘What do you

say about him, because he opened your eyes?’63“And he said, ‘He’s a prophet.’“So the Jews [Judeans] did not trust [what was said] about him, [namely] that he was

blind, and saw, until they called the parents of him who saw. And they asked them, saying, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? So how does he see now?’

“So his parents said in reply, ‘We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. But we don’t know how he sees now, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him. He’s old [enough], he’ll speak about himself.’

“His parents said these [things] because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone would acknowledge him [Jesus, as the] Messiah he would be excommunicated from his synagogue. This is why his parents said, ‘He’s old [enough], question him.’

“So they spoke to the man who was blind a second time and said to him, ‘Give glory to God [that you have chanced to gain your sight]. We know this man’s a sinner.’

“So he answered, ‘I don’t know if he’s a sinner; I do know one [thing], that being blind [formerly] I now see.’

“So they said to him, ‘What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?’“He answered them, ‘I told you already, and you didn’t hear. Why do you intend to hear

[it] again? You don’t intend to become his students too, do you?’




“And they showered abuse on him and said, ‘You’re his student, but we’re students of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but we don’t know where this [scofflaw] is from.’

“The man said to them in reply, ‘What? It’s an astonishing thing here, that you don’t know where he’s from, and [yet] he opened my eyes. We know [from Psalm 66:18-19, for example] that God doesn’t hear sinners, but if anyone is a worshipper of God and does His will He hears him. From the beginning of time it was never heard that anyone opened the eyes of one who had been born blind. If this weren’t a man of God he couldn’t do anything.’

“They said to him in reply, ‘You were born completely in sin [as your blindness showed], and do you teach us?’ And they threw him out [of the synagogue].

“Jesus heard that they threw him out, and when he found him he said, ‘Do you trust in the Son of man?’

“He said in reply, ‘And who is he, Sir, so that I’ll trust in him?’64“Jesus said to him, ‘You’ve both seen by him and it’s he who’s talking with you.’65“And he said, ‘I trust, Lord,’ and bowed before him.”If the Pharisees could have got the man to agree that he was a sinner and so had not deserved

his healing, they would have undermined Jesus’ work. They were willing to give God the credit for the healing, but not the Son of God through whose agency the healing had come. We have seen Jesus protecting those he healed from this kind of attack on his work by telling them not to talk about their healings. In this case, we may note the growing conviction—conviction of Jesus’ righteousness and the divine nature of his healing—with which the man resisted the Pharisees, and how his sense of humor came to his aid. Jesus came to his aid also, of course, when he was excommunicated. He sought the man out and confirmed his trust.

Footnotes58. For another thinking fetus, the future John the Baptist, see Luke 1:44.59. “So that . . . instead”: literally, “but so that”; a literal translation, however, suggests that God made the

man blind so that Jesus could heal him, which is not how Jesus understood God. I take the word translated “so that” to be a syntactic parallel to the same words in the disciples’ question, “who sinned . . . so that he was born blind?” Jesus denied the sin, and then, I believe, denied in the name of God that a man could be blind. To bring out this meaning I move “but” to the end of the sentence and translate it as “instead,” a meaning I gave it also in translating Luke 1:60, “he shall be called John instead.” See Newman and Nida, p. 299.

In speaking of light and darkness here, Jesus may have been thinking of Jeremiah 13:16:

Give glory to the Lord your God before He causes darkness,and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains,

and while you look for light He turns it into deepest shadow and makes it gross darkness.

60. Made mud: it is possible that Jesus’ action had a symbolic significance. The Rule of the Community and other works preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls speak of being made of “spat saliva” as well as the dust of the ground (1QS, col. XI = 4Q264, frag. 1; 1QHa, col. XX; 4Q511, frags. 28 + 29; see The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, ed. Florentino García Martínez & Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar [Leiden: Brill], 1997-1998, pp. 99, 193, 545, 1033). Evidently the members of the Dead Sea community, at a




minimum, had inserted into the biblical story an explanation of how God made Adam from dust, namely that He spat on the ground and molded the resultant mud into a human form (see also note 35 to Chapter III). Jesus’ telling the man to wash off the mud may then have meant, symbolically speaking, wash off the Adam man and reveal the man made in God’s image, whom He saw as good (Genesis 1:26-31). Paul used a similar image when he said, “take off the old man and put on the new man” (Ephesians 4:22, 24; Colossians 3:9-10).

Siloam: the name means “sender,” not “sent,” and refers to the tunnel and channel by which water from the Gihon spring reached the pool. The history of the tunnel is an interesting one, well told in two articles by Naseeb Shaheen, “The Siloam End of Hezekiah’s Tunnel,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 109th year (July-December 1977), 107-112, and “The Sinuous Shape of Hezekiah’s Tunnel,” PEQ, 111th year (July-December 1979), 103-108. Yigael Shiloh and Mendel Kaplan described their excavation of the channel in BAR, IV:1 (March 1978), 42-44; V:4 (July/August 1979), 47-48, and VII:4 (July/August 1981), 29, 34, 37. The present pool is fed only by water coming through the tunnel, but it was once larger, ending in a dam, where water from the channel also fed into it.

61. Saw: anablepô, which in the following dialogue alternates with blepô (both of which I have translated “see”), might mean “look up” or “see clearly.”

62. “Man of God”: here and below “of” is a translation of para; again, I am inclined to understand para as meaning “directly from.”

63. “What . . . because”: in Greek, ti . . . hoti. The sentence structure is hard to understand. Most translations have “that” instead of “because.” Another possible translation would have “why” instead of “what”: “Why do you say about him that he opened your eyes?” The man’s response, “He’s a prophet,” would still fit, but perhaps not so well.

64. “Sir”: the word is usually translated “Lord,” but from time to time “Sir” seems more appropriate. Those who feel that Jesus would strike anyone as a person who should be addressed as “Lord” will prefer the usual translation. I assume here some development of the man’s attitude toward Jesus as he speaks with him, and have made my translation reflect my assumption.



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