CSDirectory.com Weekly Bible Study Resources — December 14 - 20, 2009
Weekly Bible Study Resources
Excerpts from The Great Physician
For 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 atvintondearing.com.
SECTION I – B4 (Luke 1:26 … 47)
JESUS’ BIRTH
Luke 1:1-80
Luke 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 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.’