Abide: Christmas

Joseph Stuart: It's Christmas, and this might feel like an awkward lesson to have in the discussion of the Old Testament, at least that's how I felt initially. But in considering the topic more deeply, I can't think of a better way to prepare for celebrating the Savior's birth. We spent a year reading the scriptures that he read, that he fulfilled that he discussed, and recognizing the ways that ancient Israel expected a Savior to redeem them. In this week's episode of Abide A Maxwell Institute podcast, we discussed the Old Testament in light of the promised Lamb of God, who came in the person of Jesus Christ. My name is Joseph Stuart, I'm a public communications specialist of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for religious scholarship at Brigham Young University. Kristian Heal, a research fellow at the Institute. And each week we discuss the week's block of reading from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Come follow me curriculum. We aren't here to present a lesson but rather to hit on a few key themes from the Scripture block, so as to help fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to inspire and fortify Latter Day Saints in their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, and engage the world of religious ideas. Today, we are once again joined by Abby Ellis, a research assistant here at the Maxwell Institute. Abby is a junior at BYU from Kaysville, Utah, studying editing and publishing. Her interests generally revolve around stories, watching them, reading them and telling them, and after she graduates she hopes to help others tell their stories too. Welcome back, Abby.

Abby Ellis: Thank you.

Stuart: So Kristian, despite what I said at the top, I am still in some ways having misgivings talking about the Old Testament at Christmas time. What are some things that we should know that may give me a better perspective on this?

Kristian Heal: So the Jesus whose birth we celebrate this Christmas season was an Old Testament Prophet, Priest and King, an Old Testament judge and deliverer. It may sound odd to describe Jesus this way, but I think it's important to think of Jesus in these terms. Why? Well, among other reasons, it helps us recognize the importance of the Old Testament in understanding Jesus. The book that we have read over the course of this year, was likely read every year by Jesus, he studied it, taught it, quoted from it, and ultimately, of course, was the fulfillment of its most important prophetic foretelling. We cannot understand Jesus and His ministry, or his message, if we do not understand the Old Testament. And this applies not only to Jesus, but also to the gospel writers to Paul and to the writers of the rest of the New Testament, epistles and books. The Old Testament was the soil in which the New Testament was planted. And the roots go down deep binding the two together as one testament of the Lord God, who came down among the children of men to redeem His people.

Stuart: So what happens between the Old Testament and the New Testament because there's quite a large gap between Malachi and Matthew?

Heal: That's a great question, and we often think of this kind of vast wasteland. So the last book of the Old Testament in terms of the chronological narrative, are indeed Malachi, and Ezra, Nehemiah, they are set in the fifth century BCE, after the Jews begin to return to Judea from exile. However, scholars date the composition or final form of some other biblical books to as late as the third or even the second century BCE. So in this period, the Bible was still being written. It used to be that our earliest and best evidence for the shape of the Old Testament before Jesus was the translation of it into Greek that was undertaken for the Greek speaking Jewish community in Egypt in the third and second centuries BCE. Interestingly, this ancient translation included some books that were not in the Hebrew Bible, as preserved within later Jewish tradition. And most of these books are quoted, evoked, or alluded to in the New Testament. So this ancient Greek translation still has the distinction of being the first of several Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible. But it's no longer our oldest witness to the ancient Hebrew text. That distinction now falls to the biblical manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Stuart: So I have heard a lot about the Dead Sea Scrolls and have seen them mentioned on the History Channel. But why are they so important to those who study the Old Testament or ancient Israel?

Heal: So the Dead Sea Scrolls did once evoke more wonder than perhaps they do today. There still something that we're kind of aware of. But we used to have exhibits and a lot going on a number of scholars here at BYU, working on editing them, but they're no less important, despite their absence from the public eye, we could say. This cash of scrolls discovered in the Judean Desert just after the Second World War significantly enriched our understanding of Judaism before the time of Christ. They provide essential context for the origins of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. And for decades, scholars focused on the newJewish sectarian texts discovered among the scrolls Trying to understand the community that wrote them. More recently, attention has turned to the astonishing collection of biblical manuscripts. The Scrolls record all or part of all of the books of the Hebrew Bible, except for Nehemiah, and Esther. Only one scroll is preserved in this entirety, however, this is the great Isaiah scroll, which is over four meters long, there are multiple copies of most books, including 30 copies of the book of Deuteronomy, which was clearly a favorite for them if it isn't for us. This collection of biblical texts gives us a very clear sense of what the Bible looks like in the time of Jesus. Interestingly, copies of the Bible also were found in Greek and Aramaic showing that this was a multilingual world that Jesus was born into in first-century Palestine. So we have some sense then tracking these various things that the Bible continued to be written there has been translated, and that it's being copied actively in communities that are like the Dead Sea Scrolls community looking forward to a Messiah, and hoping for the redemption of their land, and the freedom of it as a Jewish nation.

Stuart: It seems pretty clear then that Jews were still writing scripture, even after what we have canonized in the Old Testament, that period ended.

Heal: Yeah, exactly the Dead Sea Scrolls are evidence that religious Jews didn't stop producing scripture in the fifth century BCE. These early scriptures were copied and translated, but new scriptures but also written continuing trends and themes that we find in these last books of the Bible, these kind of apocalyptic and the different kinds of prophecy and a hope for a renewal of full freedom and full independence of a Jewish state. They were new apocalyptic texts with angelic guides, showing Prophets the end times such as the Book of Enoch, there were new poetic texts extending the book of Psalms and new narrative texts such as the book of Jubilees, and the books of Maccabees. In fact, the Second Temple period, as it's often called by scholars, this period after this building of the Second Temple, going from the fifth century down up until 70 AD was perhaps an even more productive time for the writing of Scripture than the First Temple period. However, none of these books were included in the Jewish canon despite their popularity, and despite the fact that they're copied and transmitted from one generation to another. They're actually often preserved in Christian texts in Christian manuscripts. Now, examples of the continued effort to write scriptures in the Old Testament mode can be found in the two volumes edited by James Charlesworth entitled Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. And the more recent one entitled Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: more non canonical Scriptures.

Stuart: In what way are the people that we meet in the New Testament and the teachings that we encounter in the New Testament planted in the soil of the Old Testament?

Heal: The writers of the New Testament recognize the authority of the books, they cited, the books that we Christians call the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. They consider them to be scripture. And when Paul said to Timothy that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works, he was referring specifically to the Old Testament. The New Testament writers were completely immersed in the language and text of the Old Testament. And as they wrote in Greek, it seems most likely that they were immersed in the language and text of the ancient Greek translations of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, mentioned before. Martin Luther, for example, said regarding Paul's epistle to the Romans, there is no doubt that he who carries this epistle in his heart carries the light and power of the Old Testament with him. The extent of such usage has been dealt with in two wonderful volumes by Richard Hayes, and recently in the more than 1000 pages that make up Beale and Carson's commentary on the New Testaments use of the Old Testament.

Stuart: So Kristian, do you have a personal favorite example of how the Old Testament is connected to the New?

Heal: My favorite example of connecting these two worlds actually comes from extra biblical sources, and it's one that is most appropriate for this Christmas season. So several years ago, while cataloging manuscripts in the Vatican Library as part of a BYU project, I was then working on, I came across a homily on the Magi that was copied in the sixth century manuscript among a collection of homilies that were attributed to a Syriac author called Isaac. This homily turned out to be a narrative poem describing the journey of the Magi from Persia to deliver gifts to Jesus, who they recognized as the new King of the Jews. I have been working on publishing the first ever addition and translation of this poem for several years. And this research involves exploring the fascinating traditions about the Magi preserved in Syriac sources. So I want to share a few lines from my translation of this poem. But first, there are two ancient traditions about the Magi in the Syriac tradition that connects this group of Zoroastrian sages that turns up to worship Jesus with the Old Testament. The traditions concerned the origins of the gifts which they presented to Jesus, and the origin of their knowledge about the birth of Jesus. So in an ancient Syriac apocryphal text, called the revelation of the Magi, we learned that the Magi knew about the coming of Christ, because the meaning of the star that would shine brightly in the sky was explained to them in books that they had received from Adam, passed down from Adam through Seth and his descendants. These books were passed down from generation to generation, preserved by Noah and the ark and were eventually placed in the cave of treasures, which other texts tell us that this cave of treasures is where Adam and Eve were buried, and also where Adam placed several treasures taken from the Garden of Eden before the fall, including gold, frankincense and myrrh. The book instructed the magi to take these gifts to the Son of God when the sign of his birth appeared. This is a remarkable tradition and a sort of an interesting way in which we find the bridge between Adam and the second Adam, Christ, linked in this tradition. In this ancient Syriac text called the cave of treasures, we learn more about the Magi's journey and their expectations as they approached the birthplace of Jesus that reads as follows: While they were on their way, they said to one another, that once they arrived, they would see great marvels as is befitting the arrangement and order within a royal mansion as soon as the king was born, thus they thought, they would find in the land of Israel, a king, a palace, golden beds arranged with carpets, a king and Prince wrapped in purple, rank and file of the King soldier standing in awe the kingdoms nobleman honoring him with presents, royal dining, tables being prepared with dainties arranged upon them and servants and maids attending in fear. This the Magi expected to see, but they did not.

Stuart: So does the poem that you're translating, aligned with, or present a new narrative about the Magi.

Heal: So this tradition, this interesting tradition of as lovely as a kind of a literary conceit, that the Magi being warned through all of these prophetic books, that there's going to be a king coming present a guest worthy of a king would expect something different. And the poem that I translated, it turns out has a similar theme in it, but with a slight twist. So we pick them, we pick up the story, again, in this poem, when the Magi reach the country in which Jesus is born. So this is how this poem from the Vatican Library goes: they reached the land of Judah. And they passed within the borders of the Hebrews, thinking that they would see crowds entering this place as well. They entered and saw that the place was silent, a people not in a state of rejoicing. A great number of sentient beings were in the land, but they were asleep in the state of the unrighteous. They saw that the villages were quiet and the towns were silent, and they were worried that the sight that they saw was not real. However, they were not lying about the site, nor were they deprived of their truth. They blame the land and its Lords for not being worthy to recognize its God. What is this quiet, the Magi turned to one another, did God only let us know the day of his appearance? Within Persia, there's great excitement, but here a great stillness. In our country, there is a huge festival, but in Judah, a silent respite. God is in this land, but its inhabitants are still sleeping, the Lord of all is among the earthly inhabitants, but the Hebrews are unaware of him. I find this to be a lovely and quite moving image, and those last lines to be particularly poignant. We've seen repeatedly that one of the concerns of the Old Testament is the presence of God in the land, in Jerusalem and in the temple. And now finally, after hundreds of years of absence, God is once again in the land, but only the Magi knew, because according to these ancient Syriac traditions, they carefully kept this knowledge from the time of Adam, until the appearance of Jesus in Judea. This is a lovely example of how Christians understood the intimate connection between the Old and New Testament and believed wholeheartedly, that the birth and life of Jesus were known from the days of Adam, and that this knowledge was passed down for many generations, until it was hid up east in Eden until the sign of the Savior came.

Stuart: Abby, you noted in our production meeting that you see a kind of beauty in beginning the year talking about the creation of the earth and of humanity, Adam and Eve and Genesis and The Pearl of Great Price, and we're now ending the year talking about the birth of Jesus Christ. What did you think as you were preparing for this episode?

Ellis: I found it really fitting like you said that we start talking about, you know, the beginning of time. And then now we're talking about the birth of Jesus Christ, which like Kristian just talked about, has been foretold from the very beginning. And, you know, we began this year with the story of Eve, who partook of the fruit and along with Adam, you know, brought death and sin to the world. And now we're ending this year, and we can talk about a woman, Mary, who gave birth to the one who would bring life and repentance back into it. This Christmas story that we're learning about, it's Mary's story, just as much as it is Christ story. Christ's birth, it was miraculous, and it was rejoiced. But it also brought young Mary's life into upheaval. You know, she had plans to get married, but she always had to get married sooner than she thought. She had a child probably sooner than she thought and no doubt she had to fight off the whole fair share of rumors that came with it. She was given by God a very important task to raise his son. In like this Old Testament we've grown this year. You know, Mary wasn't the only woman given a task to raise an important son. We have Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel to name a few. And but Mary's calling and her story, they're kind of different from theirs. Her understanding was different than theirs. And I think we can learn something by comparing them. So looking at Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel. All of their pregnancies were miracles or answers to prayers. Sarah was 90 years old when she got pregnant far past the age that she should have been able to get pregnant. And Rebecca and Rachel's pregnancies were also miraculous. Maybe not, in the same way, Sarah's were, they were older, but to them at least it was a miracle, you know, they'd waited years for their prayers to be answered, and eventually one day they too conceived. Now, Mary's pregnancy was also a miracle. But unlike the others, she wasn't waiting for it. Her prayers to the Lord, she wasn't wishing for a child. She wasn't struggling with the same infertility, that the mothers of Isaac, Jacob and Joseph were, she obviously probably plan to have children one day, but it wasn't even something that was on her radar. So where Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel actively sought for a child and were denied, you know, for a time, Mary was visited by an angel of the Lord and told that she a virgin would conceive and bear a son, and that he was great and, and he shall be called the Son of the Highest. So as joyous as Sarah and others were at their pregnancies. I don't know if I would have rejoiced if I was married, you know, not initially anyway. But Mary accepts his calling and to Elizabeth she says, And my soul, my soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. What Sarah Rachel and Rebecca sons were called to do, they reflect what Christ, Mary's son would do in the end. But at the end of the day, their stories differ from what Christ would go through. So Sarah, she gave birth to Isaac, and her long awaited son would be required by her husband to be sacrificed. But in the end, Isaac was spared and those covenants that were given to Abraham and Sarah were passed on through him. So the next we have Rebecca, Isaac's wife, she gave birth to Jacob, and Jacob though not Isaac's firstborn would become heir to all Isaac had, and he would be renamed Israel and his 12 sons, you know, as we've learned about this year would become the house of Israel, which continues to give those covenants of Abraham to people today. And then with Rachel, she would give birth to Joseph, Jacob’s 11th and favored son, and after Rachel's death, Joseph, you know, he was sold in Egypt as a slave, and in the end saved his family from destruction. And so these are powerful sons, you know, sons that prepared the way for Mary's firstborn son, Jesus Christ. So just like Isaac, Jesus would be sacrificed by his father, but he wouldn't be spared. Just like Jacob, Christ is vital to everything that is the house of Israel, only through him are those covenants and blessings given and just like Joseph, Christ saves his family, and he saves us from this destruction that awaits us. But Christ's sacrifice and his blessings, you know, they're on a far grander scale than that of Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, because he, you know, is the Messiah, he's our Savior and the Son of God. And that kind of brings us back to Mary.

Stuart: Yeah, say more about what you were thinking about as you were researching for this episode.

Ellis: So I read in a book about women in the Bible by the Holman Bible staff. And when I was talking about Mary, there's this quote, I really liked it said, "every veteran mom knows that parenting is a whole lifetime of learning to let go, the mother of a son knows this truth even more acutely, I can't keep him he has to live his life." For Mary, it was deeper and more excruciating than even that, I can't keep him he has to give his life. So Mary knew from the very beginning that her little boy was going to be special. I don't know if she understood exactly what that meant, or if she knew that he was going to have to die in the end. But I'd like to think at some point she knew. And at the very least, she had the idea that it might happen when all the opposition that Jesus was receiving grew worse. But even if she knew what was going to happen or not, when Gabriel appeared to her in the very beginning and told her that she would conceive, her response was, Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord be unto me according to thy word. And to me, this is Mary's equivalent of not my will, but Thine be done. She was willing to do what the Lord asked of her and she believed that this miracle of Christ's birth was possible, and that his life was possible. I love the verse right before Mary's response to Gabriel, Luke 1:37 "For with God, nothing shall be impossible." I had the scripture by my desk on my mission, it's just an amazing promise. With God, a virgin can conceive, a 90 year old woman can conceive, but more importantly with God and with our Savior, Jesus Christ, you know, we can come home, we can be forgiven, we can overcome that fall that we learned about the beginning of the year, and we can be resurrected. And because of him, you know, this isn't the end. And I don't know about you, but I want to be like Mary, I want to be able to look at the Lord and say, Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord, be it unto me according to that word. Because sometimes God gives us miracles. Sometimes we’re told no, and sometimes the blessings we longed for don't come in this life. But if anything is possible with God, I believe that we're in good hands.

Stuart: And that's a perfect place for us to end today and this season on the Old Testament. Thanks. Thank you for listening to Abide, a Maxwell Institute Podcast. Could you please rate review and subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to this podcast? And follow us on social media at @BYUMaxwell? On YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and sign up for our newsletter at MI.BYU/edu. Thank you and have a great week.