Tag Archives: paul rhodes eddy

August 25, 2014

Is Marriage a Covenant? Part III

Paul Rhodes Eddy is Professor of Biblical & Theological Studies at Bethel University and Teaching Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN.

For those who follow the blog regularly, you know that Paul is currently working on a book entitled Kingdom Sex: Toward a Covenant-Centered Theology of Human Sexuality. The book will be a further development of an extended working paper that is currently available online.

This is the third part of material from his book that he has made available on conjugal (male-female) marriage being a sacred covenant in the sight of God, as revealed throughout Christian history and the entire biblical corpus.

In the first post Is Marriage a Covenant? Part I Paul established that church history is quite favorable to the concept of marriage as a covenant.

In an effort to redefine marriage as set forth by Moses, Jesus, and the apostle Paul (Gen 2:18-24; Matt 19:1-11; Eph 5:25-31), some have questioned whether we can legitimately ground the notion of marriage as a covenant in the Scriptures. Is there a case against marriage as covenant?

In Is Marriage a Covenant? Part II, Paul addressed three common arguments that have led some to this conclusion, in order to present us with a defense for marriage as a covenant to be affirmed and celebrated in the church.

For those who have read the first two installments, you know that I originally did not intend to post a third. However, due to the relentless efforts of some critics to cast a synthetic fog of ambiguity around “biblical” marriage, largely because of the obvious messiness of relationships found in the OT (i.e. polygamy), Paul agreed that a third and final post was necessary.

NOTE: The following is rather thorough for those who have serious questions and concerns regarding “biblical” marriage, particularly why polygamy is seemingly allowed in the OT. If you want to know what’s really going on with marriage in the Bible, and if there is any clear way of knowing God’s intentions for it, I believe that Paul Eddy can help us sort it out.

Is Marriage a Covenant, Part III

In two previous posts, we considered evidence suggesting that the scriptures offer a normative vision of marriage as a covenantal relationship.

In this final post, we will consider two further challenges to this claim:

(1) the presence of polygamy within some of the biblical texts, and (2) the question of whether ancient Israelite/Jewish women were considered to be merely the “property” of their husbands, and thus could not have been authentic covenant partners with their husbands.

Is polygamy in the biblical world incompatible with an understanding of marriage as a covenant relationship?

It might seem that the practice of polygamy – or polygyny to be specific (i.e., polyandry had no place in the Jewish tradition) – within the biblical tradition is evidence against seeing marriage as a covenant within the biblical texts.1

Deuteronomy 21:15-17, for example, provides guidelines for a man who has children by two wives. However, polygynous practice does not undermine our basic claim, as the following considerations suggest.

The first point is this: Although there clearly are problems with polygamy (as we will see below), polygamous marriage in and of itself does not undermine the concept of marriage as a covenant relationship. Rather, polygamy simply represents the condition where one person enters into multiple marriage covenants simultaneously.

Now, some may suppose that the idea of having multiple simultaneous marriage covenants is an oxymoron, and they may point to Genesis 2:24 as biblical evidence of this. Specifically, a modern reader of Gen 2:24 might conclude that the phrase “the two shall become one flesh” is meant to be a defense of monogamy (i.e., “one flesh” = one couple).

For example, E. G. Parrinder argues that taking more than one wife…

“would be sheer adultery. The ‘one flesh’ makes this quite clear. It is not permissible to have two marriage contracts at once, ‘two flesh’ . . . .”

‘They are no more two, but one flesh’, excludes a third party.2

While Parrinder’s concern is understandable, his argument is flawed. The “one flesh” concept expressed in Gen 2:24 is not a reference to monogamy or to sexual union per se. Rather, as we’ve noted previously, it is best understood as referring to a covenant bond of familial community and loyalty, i.e., kinship-by-covenant.3

This being the case, it is possible for someone to have more than one kinship (“one flesh”) marriage relationship at a time, i.e., to enter into more than one marriage covenant simultaneously. As Robert Holst observes regarding the Gen 2:24 notion of one-flesh:

“there is no reason why one man and several wives would not be one flesh [i.e., blood relatives]. To be one flesh means that the man and the woman [or women] who were before marriage unrelated are now a new family unit. This phrase indicates the absolute indissolubility of marriage—not that it is of necessity monogamous.4”

The key point here is this: There is no inherent incompatibility between the practice of polygamy and an understanding of marriage as a covenant.

Now, that being said, it is also the case that the Bible, especially the NT, provides a basis for a critique of polygamy. Simply put: While polygamy is technically compatible with marriage as a covenant relationship, the biblical texts suggest that it is neither God’s original design, nor his ideal, for the marriage covenant.

Several observations substantiate this claim.

(1) While Genesis 1-2 does not explicitly prohibit polygamy, it can be properly read as underpinning monogamous marriage as the primordial ideal fashioned by God. As David Instone-Brewer has pointed out, the Genesis creations texts, along with such texts as the animals entering Noah’s ark two by two (Gen 7:9), came to form “a well-known proof for monogamy.”5 For example, the Qumran community made use of the Genesis creation story (particularly Gen 1) to condemn polygamy (see CD 4:20-5:6; 11QTemple 57:5b-19).6

(2) The OT evidence does not support the claim of wide-spread polygyny within ancient Israel.7 Of the roughly 3,000 men mentioned in the OT, only 33 of them explicitly are said to be involved in polygyny. When marriage is mentioned, the vast majority of men in the OT are said to have a “wife” (in the singular). In actual practice, it seems that monogamy was the common practice in ancient Israel, with polygyny most often appearing to be “the privilege of royalty or a necessity for a childless marriage.”8

(3) Within OT legislation, polygyny is never commanded or explicitly condoned, unlike, for example, the Code of Hammurabi (§§144-148). Deut 21:15-17 does make provision for the rights of the first-born in a polygamous marriage. But even here, the focus is on protection of the children; it is in no way a defense of the institution of polygyny itself.9

(4) Interestingly, there is a critical stream regarding polygyny that runs through the OT. To begin, the two primary cultural reasons for polygyny – i.e., the infertility of a first wife and diplomatic polygyn for the purpose of forging political alliances – are both undercut by the OT. Regarding infertility, the OT instructs Israelites that fertility flows from faithfulness to covenant relationship with Yahweh – both by narrative example (Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah) and by explicit teaching (Exo 23:26; Deut 7:14; 28:4).

Similarly, politically motivated polygyny should be out of the question, since the OT warns Israel against political alliances in general (e.g., Deut 17:16; Isa 7; 30:1-7; 31:1-3) and diplomatic polygyny specifically, both by narrative example (I Kings 11:1-10; 16:31-33) and explicit command (Deut 17:17).10

More broadly, when polygyny is mentioned in the OT, there is often an implicit critique of the practice within the narrative, whether for inciting internal disputes within families (e.g., Gen 16:1-8; Gen 30:1; I Sam 1:6) or other reasons (I Sam 11:1-4).11

Critiques of polygyny can be seen in the following instances: (a) The first canonical mention of bigamy (Genesis 4) is that of Lamech who is portrayed as a rebellious man. (b) A number of interpreters have concluded that polygyny seems to be involved in the sin perpetrated by the “sons of God” against the “daughters of men” in Genesis 6:1-4, and (when read in context) this sin is tied to the flooding of the earth. (c) Abraham’s experience of concubinage with Hagar (Gen 16) is shown to be against God’s will and an expression of Abraham taking matters into his own hands rather than trusting God’s promise. This unwise choice of Abraham seems to be tied to God’s choosing circumcision as the sign of the Abrahamic covenant in the following chapter (Gen 17). (d) Throughout the prophets, monogamy is used as a symbol of the covenant union between God and Israel, while, whether explicitly or by inference, polygyny and/or multiple lovers can be seen as a symbol of polytheism and/or idolatry (e.g., Jeremiah 2:2; Ezekiel 16:8-34; Hosea 2:18-20).12

(5) Related to the last point, for both the Jewish and Christian traditions, Yahweh’s unique covenant relationship with Israel (and eventually the church), often expressed throughout scripture in terms of a marriage, becomes in certain key respects an image that norms the ideal human marriage.

While, at times, the Old Testament mentions the idea of Yahweh forming relationships with other nations, “Israel’s singularity as YHWH’s chosen and covenanted people is never seriously threatened; ‘polygyny’ on a theological plane was a far more remote possibility than it was on the mundane level.”13 A number of texts explicitly state that Israel is Yahweh’s singularly unique people from among the nations (e.g., Exo 19:5; Deut 4:19-20; Amos 3:2). This feature of the Yahweh-Israel relationship can be seen as an inspiring analog to – and divine example of – monogamous human marriage.

(6) It has been argued by several OT scholars that the best translation of the original Hebrew in Leviticus 18:18 is something alone these lines: “And you shall not take a second wife as a rival to your first wife, uncovering her nakedness while your first wife is alive.” The argument given is that while the term “sister” is used here in the Hebrew, the phrase itself is best understood as a Hebrew idiom for “to take one in addition to another.”

Translated in this way, it is not simply a prohibition against marrying two biological sisters or, conversely, a mother and her daughter. Rather, it is a prohibition against marrying any two women at the same time. If this is the case, then the Law itself gives an explicit prohibition against polygyny.14

No doubt some have rejected this interpretation due to the fact that the OT assumes polygyny as a given reality, and thus this interpretation appears as unrealistic – even incongruous – idealism. However, at times OT laws do in fact push toward the ideal – i.e., the prohibition against hatred in Lev 19:17. Interpreted as a command against polygyny as an ideal to strive for, Lev 18:18 “can be categorized as a lex imperfecta, a law which prohibits something without thereby rendering it invalid.”15

(7) Beyond these OT considerations, there is Jesus’ perspective on this question. Jesus clearly alludes to God’s design of marriage as one man and one woman joined by God for life, and he explicitly grounds this conviction in the narrative of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 (Matt 19:3-9; Mark 10:2-12).16

When the Pharisees ask him why, then, God allowed for divorce in the Law, Jesus answers: “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but at the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery” (Matt 19:8).

Here we notice two things. First, Jesus considers divorce and remarriage (except for proper reasons) to be a case of “adultery” and thus a form of something like serial polygamy. This strongly suggests there is no place for polygamy of any kind in Jesus’ mind. Thus Craig Evans rightly concludes: “lying behind [Jesus’] rejection of divorce is a rejection of polygamy.”17

Second, if we are to follow Jesus’ pattern of interpretation, we can legitimately say that whatever cases of polygyny were tolerated by God in the OT, they were contrary to God’s ideal plan for human marriage, and were only tolerated due to the “hardness” of people’s hearts and the commonness of these practices in the surrounding culture.18

Following Jesus, the Pauline tradition upholds monogamy, thus rejecting polygyny in the process (I Cor 7:1-4; I Tim 3:2; Titus 1:6).19

(8) Finally, the early (proto-)orthodox church followed Jesus in affirming monogamy and rejecting polygyny.20 Once again, the creation texts of Genesis played an important normative role.

N. T. Wright summarizes the situation:

The heart of early Christianity was the belief that in Jesus of Nazareth the creator God had dealt with the rebellion and corruption of the present creation, particularly of the humans who were supposed to be in charge of it, and had opened up the new and living way into a new and living creation in which the original intention would now be fulfilled. And that is why, despite the centuries of apparently unrebuked polygamy in the Old Testament, the New Testament assumes on every page that monogamy is now mandatory for the followers of Jesus – and made possible, though as the disciples recognized still difficult (Matthew 19:10), by the victory of Jesus on the cross and the power of his Spirit.21

In biblical times, were women considered to be the “property” of their husbands, and, if so, is this incompatible with a view of marriage as a covenant relationship between husband and wife?

Some have suggested that, in biblical times, wives – like slaves, animals, and land – were merely the “property” of their husbands, and that this calls into question an understanding of marriage as an authentic covenant relationship.22

I offer two lines of response to this objection.

(1) First, let us grant for the moment the claim that wives were considered to be merely the “property” of their husbands, that husbands “owned” wives the way that they owned animals and land. Even if this is how ancient Israelites understood marriage, there is no reason to think that this is somehow necessarily incompatible with the understanding of marriage as a covenant between husband and wife. Here’s why.

The paradigmatic example of an authentic covenant relationship in the OT is the covenant between Yahweh and his people Israel. However, Yahweh is not simple viewed as Israel’s covenant partner. Yahweh is also understood to be the Creator, King and Lord over all things, including Israel. In fact, Yahweh explicitly claims that he owns the “whole earth,” and that Israel is his “possession” (Exodus 19:5).

This is clear ownership and property language. And yet, this very passage in Exodus sets the context for Yahweh to enter into covenant relationship with Israel in chapters 19-24. Clearly, ancient Israelites had no sense of incompatibility between property/ownership and covenant relationship. In fact, the covenant between Yahweh and Israel provides the very paradigm by which these ideas are integrated.

As it turns out, the same holds true for Christians who are clearly portrayed as participants within the New Covenant, on one hand, and, at the same time, are referred to as God’s “possession” (Eph 1:14; Phil 3:12) and are said to have been “bought with a price” (I Cor 6:20). In fact, the early Christians easily and naturally integrated their self-conceptions as “slaves” of Jesus with their sense of being partners with him in the New Covenant. None of this divine “ownership” language within the NT is ever seen as a threat to full participation in an authentic covenant relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

(2) My final line of response, however, will be to question the very claim that I granted for the sake of the argument above. Many have claimed that women in biblical times were simply treated as property, as “chattel,” that was transferred (by purchase) from their fathers to their husbands upon marriage. The impression that is given here is of women in biblical times as having virtually no autonomy, no inherently recognized worth, and virtually no power or influence with regard to their daily lives and social roles.

I don’t have the space here to offer an in-depth response to this common caricature about women in ancient times. But suffice to say that an increasing number of scholarly studies – from classicists to OT and NT specialists, from gender archaeologists to social theorists to third-wave feminists – are calling into question this widely generalized and problematic historical construct.

These more balanced assessments, while not denying the ways in which male dominance cast its long shadow over the ancient world, nonetheless include recognition of women’s agency and influence in important sectors of daily life.23

Gender archaeologist Carol Meyers argues that “patriarchy” is “a Western, constructed concept, not a ‘social law’ or an immutable feature of all societies,” and she goes so far as to claim that “it no longer provides a valid heuristic formulation for representing Israelite society.” Instead, she has proposed that we adopt the more complex and nuanced concept of “heterarchy.”24

More specifically, a number of scholars have shown that the notion of husbands merely “owning” wives as mere non-agental “property” in the biblical world is fraught with problems.25

John Goldingay summarizes the OT evidence by saying: “As there is no suggestion in Genesis 1-2 that men have authority over women, or husbands over wives, so there is no suggestion of the idea that wives are their husband’s property . . . . Neither is there much evidence elsewhere in the First Testament for the idea that wives are their husband’s property, while there is much evidence for the opposite.”26

Two main factors have led some to conclude that a wives-as-chattel model is at work in the OT:

(1) the practice of giving the bride’s parents mohar, which some translate in an unnuanced fashion as “bride price”; and (2) the use of the word ba’al for husband, which can be translated as “lord” or “owner.” What do we say about these two phenomena? First, as a number of scholars has pointed out, mohar, which only occurs three times in the OT (Gen 34:12; Exo 22:16; I Sam 18:25), is better translated as “marriage present,” or even “compensation gift.”27

As Roland de Vaux explains: “The mohar appears less as the price paid for the woman than as a compensation paid to the family of the fiancé and, in spite of the external resemblance, the two are morally different: the future husband acquires a right over the woman, but the woman herself is not merchandise.”28

De Vaux’s conclusion fits with the fact that it was not uncommon within the ancient Mesopotamian world for this money to be given to the bride as part of her dowry.29 With regard to use of ba’al, Christopher Wright points out that, while its use in the context of marriage “undoubtedly signaled the authority of the husband, there are good grounds for doubting that it also signified his ownership of her person.”30 This conclusion is supported by simple observations such as the fact that a husband could not sell his wife, as he could mere possessions and property which he owned.31

In conclusion, we find that neither the phenomenon of polygamy nor the status of wives poses a threat to the biblical understanding of marriage as a covenant relationship.

To the contrary, and as we noted in the prior posts, the biblical vision of marriage fits well with an understanding of marriage as a covenant. Among other factors, this is demonstrated in the fact that, unlike the case with regard to many tribal societies (e.g., early Arabia), the act of marriage in the Bible is understood to create a kinship-by-covenant bond between the wife and husband (Gen 2:23-24), thus between the wife and her husband’s family.32

Paul Rhodes Eddy

Thanks to Paul for sharing his well-researched perspective.

D.D. Flowers, 2014.

_______________

1 E.g., this is raised as a potential problem in T. Tully, “Stutzman, Sex and Secular Marriage” (Feb. 17, 2014), http://thejesusevent.com/2014/02/17/stutzman-sex-and-secular-marriage/.

2 E. G. Parrinder, The Bible and Polygamy (London: SPCK, 1958), 48.

3 Walter Brueggemann, “Of the Same Flesh and Bone (GN 2, 23a),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 32 (1970), 540; Frank Moore Cross, “Kinship and Covenant in Ancient Israel,” in From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 7-8; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Waco, TX: Word, 1987), 71.

4 Robert Holst, “Polygamy and the Bible,” International Review of Missions 56 (1967), 207. Similarly, William Loader notes that within ancient Judaism, “the few who could afford polygyny might see their relationship to each of their wives in the light of Gen 2:24.” The New Testament on Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 53.

5 David Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible: The Social and Literary Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 138-40.

6 For discussion, see Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 60.

7 The world-wide statistics on polygamy are interesting. According to the Ethnographic Atlas, of the 1,231 societies from around the world noted, 186 were monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny; 588 had more frequent polygyny; and a mere 4 practiced polyandry. See J. Patrick Gray, ed., “Ethnographic Atlas Codebook,” World Cultures 10/1 (1998), 86-136. As Gordon Hugenberger (Marriage as a Covenant: Biblical Law and Ethics as Developed from Malachi [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998] 106, n. 95) notes, the attempt of some scholars to extrapolate from either contemporary Palestinian settings or alternative ANE contexts to estimated polygyny rates within ancient Israel is not without its problems.

8 Elaine June Adler, “The Background for the Metaphor of Covenant as Marriage in the Hebrew Bible” (PhD dissertation., University of California at Berkeley, 1990), 57-58 (referencing Plautz, “Monogamie und Polygamie”). See Loader, New Testament on Sexuality, 80. This aligns with Hugenberger’s (Marriage as a Covenant, 108) observation that, within ancient Mesopotamia, polygyny was largely practiced “in the exceptional circumstance that one’s wife [proved] to be infertile” or struck with illness. As evidence of this pattern, a number of Nuzi marriage contracts forbid bigyny unless the wife is found to be infertile. See J. Mervin Breneman, “Nuzi Marriage Tablets” (PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1971), contracts 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 101.

9 See John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, vol. 3: Israel’s Life (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 379, 380.

10 As 11QTemple 57:17-19 reveals, the Qumran community apparently took their interpretation of Deut 17:17 to the point of requiring monogamous marriage for the king.

11 Goldingay (Old Testament Theology, III, 380) notes that the OT’s “descriptions of polygamous relationships can be read as deliberately drawing attention to the trouble they involve.” See also Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant, 111, n. 104; Craig Evans, “Genesis in the New Testament,” in The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, ed. Craig A. Evans, Joel H. Lohr, and David l. Petersen (Boston: Brill, 2012), 474. Following this pattern, the post-biblical book of Sirach (26:5-6; 28:15; 37:11) notes that rivalry between wives can create serious problems for husbands who avail themselves of polygyny.

12 It should be noted that it is problematic to use the fact that the OT presents Yahweh as ending up in what amounts to a polygynous marriage to the “sisters” Israel and Judah (Jer 3:6-11; Ezek 16:44-63; 23:1-49) as divine justification for polygyny, since this state of affairs is not one that Yahweh set out to achieve, but rather was thrust upon him as the unfortunate consequence of national sin that led to the tragic division of God’s people. Incidentally, there is no reason to think that the Levirate law of the OT necessarily requires, let alone promotes, polygamy. On this point, see Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant, 114-5; Ron du Preez, “Does Levirate Law Promote Polygamy?,” in To Understand the Scriptures: Essays in Honor of William H. Shea, ed. David Merling (Berrien Springs, MI: Siegfried H. Horn Archaeological Museum of Andrews University, 1997), 273-89.

13 Adler, “Background for the Metaphor of Covenant as Marriage in the Hebrew Bible,” 60.

14 Scholars who argue for this translation include: Angelo Tosato, “The Law of Leviticus 18:18: A Rexamination,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46 (1984), 199-214; Walter Kaiser, Toward Old Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), 189; Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant, 115-8; Richard M. Davidson, Flame of Yahweh: Sexuality in the Old Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), 193-98; Ronald A. G. Du Preez, Polygamy in the Bible (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1993), 74-9; René Gehring, The Biblical “One Flesh” Theology of Marriage as Constituted in Genesis 2:24 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 70-1. This is not merely a theoretical translation debate among contemporary academics. As Lawrence Schiffman notes, the Karaites used Lev 18:18 as an argument against polygamy. See “Laws Pertaining to Women in the Temple Scroll,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty Years of Research, eds. D, Dimant and U. Rappaport (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1992), 217.

15 Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant, 118.

16 For a discussion of the background to Jesus’ teaching on divorce and its implications for monogamy and polygamy, see Evans, “Genesis in the New Testament,” 470-81; David Instone Brewer, “Jesus’ Old Testament Basis for Monogamy,” in The Old Testament in the New Testament: Essays in Honour of J. L. North, ed. Steve Moyise (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 75-105.

17 Evans, “Genesis in the New Testament,” 481. Similarly, see Loader, New Testament on Sexuality, 249-50; W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to St. Matthew, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988-97), III, 18 (viz. Matt 19:9). Contra Holst, “Polygamy and the Bible,” 207-9.

18 David Daube notes Rabbinic opinion that the OT allowance for polygamy was a divine concession to human hard-heartedness. David Daube, “Concessions to Sinfulness in Jewish Law,” Journal of Jewish Studies 10 (1959), 6.

19 The Greek phrasing of I Tim 3:2 (along with Titus 1:6) and its interpretation have been a point of debate for some time. The phrase reads literally as a “one-man woman.” As William Mounce (Pastoral Epistles [Nashville: Nelson, 2000], 171) observes, the anti-polygamy interpretation “is the most natural understanding of . . . one-woman.” However, regardless of whether polygamy was the sole focus of this passage or not, as George Knight (The Pastoral Epistles: A Commentary on the Greek Text [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992], 158) points out, “polygamy . . . is certainly ruled out by the sense of the phrase.” Similarly, see C. H. Dodd, “New Testament Translation Problems II,” Biblical Theology 28 (1977), 115; Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, 171; Towner, Letters to Timothy and Titus, 251.

20 E.g., Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 134; Tertullian, To His Wife, 2; Basil of Caesarea, Letter 188 (To Amphilochius, concerning the Canons), 4; Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, 1, 10. Frequently, the Genesis 2 creation text is appealed to for support.

21 See Wright’s insightful essay, “Case Study: Monogamy,” in his Scripture and the Authority of God, 174-200 (here pp. 191-2, emphasis in text).

22 E.g., Abel Isaksson, Marriage and Ministry in the New Temple (Lund: Gleerup, 1965), 27-34; Tully, “Stutzman, Sex and Secular Marriage.”

23 For a succinct summary of some of this recent research, see Carol L. Meyers, “Was Ancient Israel a Patriarchal Society?,” Journal of Biblical Literature 133 (2014), 8-27. See also Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, III, 354-7; Richard P. Saller, Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. ch. 5; idem, “Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household,” Classical Philology 94 (1999), 182-97; Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Sarah Milledge Nelson, Gender in Archaeology: Analyzing Power and Prestige, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: Sage, 2004 [1997]), esp. ch. 10 (see section on “Agency”); Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood,” “Feminist Gender Research in Classical Archaeology,” in Women in Antiquity: Theoretical Approaches to Gender and Archaeology, ed. S. M. Nelson (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007), 265-300 (esp. 282-84); Daniel I. Block, “Marriage and Family in Ancient Israel,” in Marriage and Family in the Biblical World, ed. Ken M. Campbell (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 41-3; David A. deSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 180-4.

24 Meyers, “Ancient Israel a Patriarchal Society?,” 26, 27.

25 See Grace I. Emmerson, “Women in Ancient Israel,” in The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological, and Political Perspectives, ed. R. E. Clements (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 371-94 (see esp. 382-3); Christopher J. H. Wright, God’s People in God’s Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 183-221; Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, III, 355-6.

26 Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, III, 355.

27 Emmerson, “Women in Ancient Israel,” 382; Wright, God’s People in God’s Land, 194.

28 Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), 27.

29 John Van Seters, “Jacob’s Marriages and Ancient Near East Customs: A Reexamination,” Harvard Theological Review 62 (1969), 392.

30 Wright, God’s People in God’s Land, 196.

31 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics, trans. J. W. Doberstein (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), III, 106.

32 Cross, “Kinship and Covenant,” 7-8. On the non-kinship transfer for marriages in early Arabia, see W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (Boston: Beacon, 1903), 76-7, 86-7, 122). In this sense, the biblical pattern is similar to that of Athens and early Rome, where wives gained full rights within the husband’s kinship group. See Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 81.

Leave a comment | tags: biblical marriage, carol meyers, christopher wright, conjugal marriage, is marriage a covenant?, n.t. wright, one flesh union, ot marriage, paul rhodes eddy, polygamy, polygny, polygynous | posted in Bible, Christianity, Church, Culture, Ethics

June 19, 2014

Is Marriage a Covenant? Part II

By David D. Flowers

Paul Rhodes Eddy is Professor of Biblical & Theological Studies at Bethel University and Teaching Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN.

Paul is currently working on a book entitled Kingdom Sex: Toward a Covenant-Centered Theology of Human Sexuality. The book will be a further development of an extended working paper that is currently available online.

This is the second part of material from his book that he has made available on conjugal marriage being a sacred covenant in the sight of God, as revealed throughout Christian history and the entire biblical corpus.

In the first post Is Marriage a Covenant? Part I Paul established that church history is quite favorable to the concept of marriage as a covenant.

So what about the Bible? In an effort to redefine marriage as set forth by Moses, Jesus, and the apostle Paul (Gen 2:18-24; Matt 19:1-11; Eph 5:25-31), some have questioned whether we can legitimately ground the notion of marriage as a covenant in the Scriptures. Is there a case against marriage as covenant?

In Is Marriage a Covenant? Part II, Paul Eddy will address three common arguments that have led to this conclusion, in order to present us with a defense for marriage as a covenant to be affirmed and celebrated in the church.

Is Marriage a Covenant? Part II

1) “There is no clear statement in the Bible that marriage is a covenant. For example, the Hebrew term for covenant (berith) is not found in Gen 2:18-25, the paradigmatic explanation of God’s design of marriage. Nor does Jesus or Paul ever call marriage a covenant.”

Here we must beware what some modern linguists refer to as the “word-thing fallacy,” which mistakenly assumes that if the word for something isn’t present, then neither is the concept.1

Frequently the concept and essence of a thing is present apart from the explicit terminology. (A classic biblical example is the fact that the term “Trinity” does not appear in the New Testament, while the seedling essence of this concept, which led to its later flowering within the church’s dogma, certainly is.) This is precisely the case with marriage and covenant in Genesis 2:18-25.2

To begin, we must remember that what a covenant, by definition, does is create, by promise and oath, a kinship-like bond (“kinship-in-law,” so to speak) where before none existed. As Walter Brueggemann demonstrated decades ago, understood in its ancient cultural context, the phrase “This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” in Gen 2:23 functions as a covenant formula that creates kinship.3

The renown OT scholar Frank Moore Cross explains: “In Israel, contrary to many primitive band or tribal societies, the legal compact of marriage introduced the bride into the kinship group or family. This is the proper understanding of Genesis 2:24 . . . . [W]hat is asserted is that the covenant of marriage establishes kinship bonds of the first rank between spouses.”4

2) “The texts often cited as evidence that marriage is called a covenant – e.g., Malachi 2:14; Proverbs 2:17; Ezekiel 16:8 – are better interpreted in other ways. For example, such texts are better understood as using the ancient marriage relationship merely as a metaphor for the covenant that God has with Israel.”5

Traditionally, at least three OT passages have been recognized as equating marriage with covenant:

(1) Mal 2:14 – “the Lord was a witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant”; (2) Prov 2:17 – “[the adulteress] who forsakes the partner of her youth and forgets her sacred covenant”; (3) Ezek 16:8 – “I passed by you again and looked on you; you were at the age for love. I spread the edge of my cloak over you, and covered your nakedness: I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine.”

Some scholars have argued that other things are going on in these passages. Given our limited space, we can’t enter into anything like an extended exploration of the details of these arguments. Suffice to say that just such an extended study has been done.

In his book, Marriage as a Covenant, Gordon Hugenberger explored virtually every possible argument that has been made against the common interpretation of these passages (with a focus on Mal 2:14).

Hugenberger’s conclusions have shown them to be questionable at best, and often less than that. The force of his arguments can be seen by the effect his book has had on this field of study.

For example, Michael Lawler, who is otherwise very willing to express skepticism with regard to related issues, nonetheless concludes that Hugenberger has successfully demonstrated that Mal 2:14 “portrays marriage as a solemn covenant.”6

And what of the claim that the OT prophets use the marriage covenant as merely a metaphor for the covenant that God shared with Israel?

First, this argument begins unraveling if it turns out that ancient Israelites did consider marriage to be a covenantal relationship (and evidence to this effect is discussed below).

Additionally, this thesis hinges on the developmental argument that ancient Israelite marriage was originally non-covenantal, that it was used by the prophets merely as a metaphor for the actual covenant between Yahweh and Israel, and that this metaphorical usage was later retrojected in a reified form back onto marriage, thus eventually turning it into a covenant much later.

However, this thesis begs the question of where the original covenantal roots lie by assuming that the initial impetus derived from the Sinai covenant between Yahweh and Israel (itself presumably drawn from the political realm of ancient suzerainty-vassal treaty-covenants). A number of scholars have made precisely the opposite developmental case.

For example, Elaine Adler argues that “the use of [a covenant] formula to express the legal relationship between YHWH and Israel finds its origins in family law, and thus the recitation of this expression would have evoked the quasi-familial, or even matrimonial nature of the covenant.”7 This observation aligns with Mark S. Smith’s contention that family, not political treaty, is the basic ground of ANE covenantal thought.8

Following along similar lines, Seock-Tae Sohn’s research has led him to conclude that “the origin and background of the [YHWH-Israel] covenant were the marriage practices of the people of Israel.”9 This claim raises the issue of evidence regarding the covenantal nature of ancient Israelite marriage, and so to this contested question we now turn.

3)“A covenant, by definition, requires an oath, but there is no evidence that ancient Israelite betrothals or marriages included an oath. In fact, there is no mention in the Bible of ceremonies or oaths necessary for a marriage covenant.”10

With a wide consensus of scholars today, we can agree that at the heart of the ancient notion of covenant is an oath.11 Thus, Hugenberger’s definition provides a useful guide: “A covenant, in its normal sense, is an elected, as opposed to natural [i.e., biological], relationship of obligation under oath.”12

This means we can expect to find a wide range of ancient human associations falling under the umbrella of “covenant” (berith) relationship within the OT, and we do – from political treaties (Gen 21:22-34; 26:26-31), to personal/familial relationships (Gen 31:43-55), to intimate friendships (I Sam 18:1-4; 20:8-17), to marriage (Mal 2:14).

But is there evidence of a marriage oath in the ancient Near Eastern (ANE) world? Skeptics argue in the negative based on observations such as extant ancient marriage documents do not contain an oath, and the Bible itself never explicitly mentions an oath spoken by a couple at their wedding. In fact, they claim, marriage ceremonial elements in general are missing from the Bible.

But are such observations – and/or the implications drawn from them – on track? Many scholars think not. It has been pointed out that the extant ancient marriage documents, much like our current marriage certificates, have a narrowly defined purpose: namely to function as durable written proof of the marriage for the purpose of dealing with legal and economic issues.13

The purpose of a marriage certificate is not to record the verbatim marriage vows of the couple. Rather, living witnesses (both divine and human) to the actual ceremony and the verbal pronouncements made there serve that function.14 Thus, it is quite likely that ANE marriages, including the ancient Israelites, did include the recitation of traditional verbal formulas (verba solemnia).15

What about the paucity of explicit references to ceremonial details of marriage covenant in the biblical texts? As members of any given culture know, there is little need to explicitly mention the details of what is assumed to be commonly shared assumptions and knowledge among cultural insiders. This is even more so the case for an ancient orally-dominant cultures where the phenomena of traditional referentiality and highly context-dependent communication patterns enable a remarkably economical use of language.16

For example, as Menahem Haran notes: “The phrase KRT Bĕrît (‘cut a covenant’), or similar wording, already entails in itself the details of ceremonial activity [i.e., the cutting of an animal and walking between the pieces as a non-verbal, self-maledictory oath] without any further need to highlight them explicitly.”17

The fact is that we have very little detailed information about marriage ceremonies well into the Christian tradition itself.18 All of that being said, a number of scholars have pointed out that the OT does refer, however elliptically and off-handedly, to some aspects of ancient marriage ceremonies (e.g., feasts, etc.).19

Finally, there is the problem of contemporary scholars who are unfamiliar with the range of possible oaths and oath-signs (i.e., non-verbal acts that function as an oath), and thus miss seeing their presence in the Bible. A classic case of this involves our topic at hand: the presence of an oath in the biblical understanding of marriage.

As Hugenberger has effectively demonstrated, there is good evidence to suggest that the act of sexual union was understood to function as an oath-sign between the marriage partners.20

But an oath requires the presence/involvement of the divine. Is there any evidence of involvement of the gods/God in ANE – and later Greco-Roman – marriages? It appears that the answer is ‘Yes.’ Extant documents concerning Mesopotamian marriages include temple rituals involving the gods.21 By Romans times, we find multiple gods involved in marriages in various ways.22

Within the Jewish tradition, the fact that the primordial marriage in Genesis 2 was seen as a creative act of Yahweh provides an even stronger basis for seeing divine involvement in the marriage covenant.

With the teachings of Jesus, based upon Genesis 2, God’s involvement in marriage is strongly emphasized: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matt 19:6-7).

There is no mere “secular business arrangement” here.23 This is the language of covenant relationship.

Paul Rhodes Eddy

Thanks for reading! Feel free to address Paul in your comments. He would be happy to respond to any thoughts or questions you might have.

D.D. Flowers, 2014.

____________________
1 This fallacy was originally applied to biblical studies by James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 206-62. See also Anthony C. Thiselton, “Semantics and Biblical Interpretation,” in New Testament Interpretation: Essays on Principles and Methods, ed. I. H. Marshall (Grad Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 75-104; Stanley E. Porter, “The Concept of Covenant in Paul,” in The Concept of Covenant in the Second Temple Period, eds. S. E. Porter and J. C. R. de Roo (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 269-85.
2 Despite the reservations of some, that Genesis 2:18-25 is, in fact, about marriage is demonstrated (apart from other internal considerations) by ANE parallels. E.g., see Bernard F. Batto, “The Institution of Marriage in Genesis 2 and in Atrahasis,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 62 (2000), 621-31.
3 Walter Brueggemann, “Of the Same Flesh and Bone (GN 2, 23a),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 32 (1970), 532-42. Similarly, André LaCocque points out that the phrase functions as “a formula of kinship.” André LaCocque The Trial of Innocence: Adam, Eve, and the Yahwist (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2006), 121.
4 Frank Moore Cross, “Kinship and Covenant in Ancient Israel,” in From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 7-8. See also the extensive argument for marriage in Genesis 2 as a covenant in Gordon P. Hugenberger, Marriage as Covenant: Biblical Law and Ethics as Developed from Malachi (Boston: Brill, 1994; reprint ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998).
5 F. C. Fensham, “The Marriage Metaphor in Hosea for the Covenant Relationship between the Lord and his People (Hos 1:2-9),” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 12 (1984), 71-79; Milgrom, Cult and Conscience, 134-6; Tully, “Stutzman, Sex, and Secular Marriage.”
6 Lawler, “Marriage as Covenant in the Catholic Tradition,” 75.
7 Elaine June Adler, “The Background for the Metaphor of Covenant as Marriage in the Hebrew Bible” (PhD Diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1990), 120. Adler argues forcefully that marriage was seen as a covenant in ancient Israel (pp. 296-308). Intriguingly, Jacob Milgrom – a strong advocate for the opposite perspective – was on her dissertation committee and officially signed off on her thesis!
8 Mark S. Smith, “‘Your People Shall Be My People’: Family and Covenant in Ruth 1:16-17,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 69 (2007), 242-58. See also Cross, “Kinship and Covenant in Ancient Israel.” This observation also forces a reconsideration of how we view OT “love” language. In the early 1960s, William Moran (“The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 25 [1963], 77-87) made the case that Deuteronony’s “love” language should be seen a rooted in political suzerainty-vassal treaties, and a scholarly consensus followed. But in light of the shift toward family-oriented understandings of covenant, viewing things with a monochromatic political lens requires reassessment. See e.g., Susan Ackerman, “The Personal is Political: Covenant and Affectionate Love (’ĀHĒB, ’AHĂBÂ) in the Hebrew Bible,” Vetus Testamentum 52 (2002), 437-58.
9 Seock-Tae Sohn, “‘I Will Be Your God and You Will Be My People’: The Origin and Background of the Covenant Formula,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, eds. R. Chazan, W. W. Hallo, and L. H. Schiffman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 355-72 (here p. 368).
10 Milgrom, Cult and Conscience, 134; Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20, 278; Tully, “Stutzman, Sex, and Secular Marriage.”
11 E.g., Cross, “Kinship and Covenant in Ancient Israel,” 8; D. J. McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1981), 141; Scott Hahn, Kinship by Covenant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 28; Gene Tucker, “Covenant Forms and Contract Forms,” Vetus Testamentum 15 (1965), 487-503; Daniel C. Lane, “The Meaning and Use of Berith in the Old Testament” (PhD diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2000), 314.
12 Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant, 9.
13 For a feel of the overwhelmingly legal-economic concerns dealt with in ancient marriage contracts, see the examples of Aramaic papyri from Elephantine in James B. Prichard, ed., The Ancient Near East, vol. I: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 170-72.
14 Eva von Dassow, “Introducing the Witnesses in Neo-Babylonian Documents,” in Chazan, et al., eds, Ki Baruch Hu, 3-21.
15 E.g., Samuel Greengus, “The Old Babylonian Marriage Contract,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 89 (1969), 505-32; idem, “Old Babylonian Marriage Ceremonies and Rite,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 20 (1966), 55-72; Haymin Tadmor, “Treaty and Oath in the Ancient Near East: A Historian’s Approach,” in Humanizing America’s Iconic Book: Society of Biblical Literature Centennial Addresses 1980, eds. G. M. Tucker and D. A. Knight (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 139; Menahem Haran, “The Bĕrît ‘Covenant’: Its Nature and Ceremonial Background,” in Tehillah le-Moshe: Biblical and Judaic Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg, eds. M. Cogan, B. L. Eichler, and J. H. Tigay (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 203-19; Adler, “Background for the Metaphor of Covenant as Marriage,” 111-24; Norbert Lofink and Erich Zenger, The God of Israel and the Nations, trans. E. R. Kalin (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2000), 86. Mordechai Friedman has made a case for identifying an ancient Israelite bridal verbal response in Hosea 2:17. See Friedman, “Israel’s Response in Hosea 2:17b: ‘You are My Husband,’” Journal of Biblical Literature 99 (1980), 199-204.
16 John Miles Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 6-13; idem, How to Read an Oral Poem (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 59-65, 130-33; E. J. Bakker, “Activation and Preservation: The Interdependence of Text and Performance in an Oral Tradition,” Oral Tradition 8 (1993) 5-20; D. Tannen, “Relative Focus on Involvement in Oral and Written Discourse,” in Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing, eds. D. R. Olson, N. Torrance, and A. Hildyard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 124-47.
17 Haran, “Bĕrît ‘Covenant’,” 208.
18 See Kenneth Stevenson, Nuptial Blessing: A Study of Christian Marriage Rites (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
19 E.g., Loren Wade, “Marriage and Covenant: Reflections on the Theology of Marriage,” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 13/2 (2002), 80-81.
20 Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant, 185-279. Also Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 5-6, 52-54.
21 E.g., see Greengus, “Old Babylonian Marriage Ceremonies and Rituals,” 58, 61.
22 Karen K. Hersch, “Gods of the Roman Wedding,” in The Roman Wedding: Ritual and Meaning in Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 4.
23 Tully, “Stutzman, Sex, and Secular Marriage.”

4 Comments | tags: arguments against marriage as covenant, conjugal marriage, ephesians 5:25-31, genesis 2:18-25, is marriage a covenant?, jesus on marriage, kingdom sex, marriage certificate, marriage oath, matthew 19:1-11, moses on marriage, one flesh, orally-dominant cultures, paul on marriage, paul rhodes eddy, sacred covenant, sexual union, word-thing fallacy | posted in Bible, Christianity, Church

June 18, 2014

Is Marriage a Covenant? Part I

By David D. Flowers

Paul Rhodes Eddy is Professor of Biblical & Theological Studies at Bethel University (St. Paul). He holds a B.A. in Biblical & Theological Studies (Bethel University), a M.A. in Theological Studies (Bethel Theological Seminary), and a PhD in Theology (Marquette University).

Paul also serves as Teaching Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN. He resides in White Bear Township, MN with his wife, Kelly, and their two sons.

His primary research interests include methodological issues in historical Jesus studies, John Hick and religious pluralism, and Christology and the Atonement. He has coedited several successful multi-view volumes and is the author or editor of a number of other books, including The Jesus Legend.

Among other projects, Paul is currently working on a book entitled Kingdom Sex: Toward a Covenant-Centered Theology of Human Sexuality. The book will be a further development of an extended working paper that is currently available online at Central Plains Mennonite Conference.

After reading Paul’s current manuscript, I asked if he would be willing to share with you some of his biblical and historical research on marriage as a sacred covenant between one man and one woman for life, as set forth in Genesis 2:18-24; Matthew 19:1-11; and Ephesians 5:25-31.

I’m thankful that Paul was willing to take time out of his busy schedule to present us with some of the material from his upcoming book, Kingdom Sex. I believe his insights are already helping to bring some much-needed clarity to God’s divine intentions for conjugal marriage.

Notice that I’ve divided Paul’s article into two parts.

The first part proves that marriage has been understood as a one-flesh covenant throughout all of church history. The second part will address common arguments that the Bible isn’t clear on marriage being a covenant relationship. On the contrary, Paul argues that marriage is portrayed as a sacred covenant throughout the entire biblical corpus.

Your feedback is welcome. Feel free to address Paul in your comments. He would be happy to respond to any thoughts or questions you might have.

Is Marriage a Covenant? Part I

Is marriage a covenant? For many people today, especially evangelical Christians in the U.S., the answer to this question will seem absurdly obvious. Of course marriage is (or at least is suppose to be) a covenant.

If it’s not – then what in the world is?

But things aren’t quite that simple. More than a few voices have questioned whether marriage – at least in certain historical contexts, including biblical times – is, in fact, properly to be construed as a covenant.1

These voices force the question upon us today: Should we understand the divine intention for marriage as covenantal? Are there good biblical and church historical grounds for seeing covenant relationship as the norm by which Kingdom people should shape their theology and practice of marriage?

I propose that the answer to these questions is an unequivocal ‘Yes.’ Let’s look at the some of the challenges to the claim that marriage is best understood as a covenant relationship and see how they stand up to analysis.

Some suggest that the idea of marriage as a covenant is a late-comer within church history. In fact, some claim that this idea was unknown within the Christian tradition until John Calvin originated it in the 16th century.2

This claim is simply historically incorrect.

It is certainly true that in Calvin’s mature thought, his theology of marriage is anchored in the concept of covenant (prior to which he had based it upon Luther’s ‘two kingdoms’ notion), and that he is the first Christian theologian to flesh out marriage as covenant in anything like a thorough fashion. However, he is hardly the first in church history to equate marriage and covenant.

For example, the fourth-century Arnobius writes of “conjugal covenants” (Latin = coniugalia foedera; see his Adversus Gentes, 4.20). Interestingly, in the ninth century, Pope Nicholas I uses the term covenant (foedus) of both marriages and betrothals (Responda ad Consulta Bulgarorum, III). And both the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries allude to marriage as a covenant.

In fact, Augustine himself unambiguously refers to marriage as a “covenant” (foedus) and a “bond of covenant” (viniculum foederis).3 It is important to remember the context here. The Roman concept of marriage (with its conviction of the necessity of not merely initial but continuous consent) allowed for relatively easy divorce.4

Taking their cue from Jesus and the NT authors, the early Christians on the other hand viewed marriage as a solemn and permanent relational bond. They sought to find language (Greek, Latin, etc.) that captured this counter-cultural reality. Latin terms such as pactio, pactum, confoederatio, societas – and yes, foedus (covenant) – were among those chosen to describe the marriage bond.

So why then did the church refrain from developing a robust theology of marriage as covenant until Calvin? The reason seems fairly clear.

While the Bible does provide solid evidence that marriage was designed by God to function as a covenant relationship (on which see below), the New Testament does not explicitly link the Greek terms for covenant (diatheke, syntheke) with marriage, but rather uses other images and terms to express this relationship.

One predominant instance is Paul’s description of marriage as a “mysterion” (mystery) in Ephesians 5:32. A key moment came when Tertullian translated the Greek term mysterion into the Latin term sacramentum. Jerome followed Tertullian’s move in his Latin Vulgate translation of the New Testament, and the rest is history.

From the fifth century onward, increasingly marriage was known primarily as a “sacrament” (sacramentum) in the Latin-speaking Western church, a tradition which continues to this day within Roman Catholicism.

In other words, it was originally due to the historical contingencies of textual translation that “sacrament” became the favored term in marital theology for much of the church’s history. Once Calvin made the decision to frame his “Protestant” theology of marriage in terms of covenant, the counter-Reformational Catholic Church had virtually no choice but to reject it.

Now, on both sides, it was not simply about a theology of marriage – it was about ecclesiastical boundary-marking and theological polemics. It took several hundred years, a growing spirit of ecumenism, and the Second Vatican Council for the Catholic Church to officially (re-)embrace the language of covenant within the theology of marriage in the 1960s (e.g., Gaudium et Spes, 48).

Suffice to say that the idea of marriage as a covenant was not missing in the early church, and that today both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are quite comfortable with this ancient equation.

But we must return to Tertullian for a moment – the original fount of “sacrament” language. Once again, Tertullian was simply translating the NT’s Greek mysterion with Latin’s sacramentum. An important question arises: What was involved in the idea of sacramentum in Tertullian’s world?

Within the Roman context, the concept of sacramentum had a double connotation: (1) the taking of an oath, and (2) a monetary guarantee.

What they had in common was that both attached to the notion of self-obligation, and both were quite likely to involve the divine (i.e., oaths/promises frequently appealed to the gods). And with this, we are in the same conceptual/semantic realm as covenant relationship.

Thus, we see that the sacramental – when understood in its original context – is a close cousin of the covenantal.

So if church history is quite favorable to the concept of marriage as a covenant, what about the Bible? Some have questioned whether we can legitimately ground the notion of marriage as a covenant in the Bible. Next, we will consider several of the most common arguments that have led to this conclusion.

Paul Rhodes Eddy

Stay tuned for Is Marriage a Covenant? Part II.

D.D. Flowers, 2014.

____________________
1 See e.g., Abel Isaksson, Marriage and Ministry in the New Temple, trans. Neil TomKinson (Lund: Gleerup, 1965), 27-34; Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 278; Michael G. Lawler, “Marriage as Covenant in the Catholic Tradition,” in Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective, eds. John Witte and Eliza Ellison (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 70-91; Jacob Milgrom, Cult and Conscience: The Asham and the Priestly Doctrine of Repentance (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 129-37; Tyler M. Tully, “Stutzman, Sex, and Secular Marriage” (February 17, 2014), http://thejesusevent.com/2014/02/17/stutzman-sex-and-secular-marriage/.
2 E.g., Tully, “Stutzman, Sex, and Secular Marriage.”
3 Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, 1.11; idem, On the Good of Marriage, 6, 7, 15, 17, 32; idem, On Adulterous Marriages, 1.12; 2.9-11.
4 On which, see Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Boston: Brill, 2001), 22-38.

Leave a comment | tags: biblical covenant, covenant, divorce, ephesians 5, genesis 2, is marriage a covenant?, kingdom sex, let no man separate, male-female marriage, matthew 19, one flesh union, paul rhodes eddy, sacred covenant, two become one flesh | posted in Christianity, Church, Culture, Theology

May 17, 2012

The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth

By David D. Flowers

A Brief Survey of the Historical Evidence

Christians celebrate the death of Jesus on what is known as Good Friday. It is a rather odd thing to celebrate someone’s death, especially when it was such a brutal and barbaric execution. Some skeptics today have written believers off as sick delusional people. No doubt, it is an old charge. It was even strange to Pliny the Younger who investigated the early church’s worship of the crucified Jesus—those who sang “a hymn to Christ as to a god” (Pliny, Letters 10.96-97).

But for those who are Christians, Good Friday is a time of deep theological reflection. The biblical narrative from creation to fall, from exilic despair to salvific hope, from sinner’s debt to atoning sacrifice, has reached its climax in the life and death of Christ—the true Israelite, the promised Messiah who takes away the sins of the world.

It is a beautiful death because it is the first and only death in the history of mankind that has the power to save—the Creator God becomes human flesh and displays boundless love to his broken creation. The idea of it is too good to be compared to any ancient myth of dying and rising gods, and it is so self-incrementing that any man would or could make it up only to endure the wrath of empire for proclaiming it.

However, the death of Jesus holds no power if he stays dead. That is why the apostle Paul was so adamant about it to the Corinthians who were arguing about the future of those who had died before Christ’s Second Coming (parousia). He writes:

If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins (1 Cor 15:14-17 NIV).

There has been no shortage of books, articles, and journal entries written on the resurrection of Jesus, especially in the last few decades.[1] Dale Allison has stated that the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is the “prize puzzle of New Testament research.”[2] There are excellent presentations by historical Jesus scholars that have been published in defense of the resurrection—arguments that are concerned with the reliability of the biblical text, the historical possibility of the event, and the reasonability of belief in such a miraculous occurrence.

It is the purpose of this paper to bring out some of the strongest points used in defense of the physical resurrection of the historical Jesus. This paper will persuasively argue on behalf of the following points: (1) the reliability of the NT, eyewitness testimony, and multiple attestation; (2) the empty tomb, resurrection appearances, and the growth of the early church; (3) the philosophical and scientific reasonability of miracles, ancient and modern.

EVIDENCE FOR THE RESURRECTION

Reliability of the NT, Eyewitness Testimony & Multiple Attestation

All four of the Gospels record the death and resurrection of Jesus (Matt 28; Mk 16; Lk 24; Jn 20). However, the inspiration and trustworthiness of the Bible is no longer assumed. Truthfully, the reliability of the Bible has even been heavily attacked since the Enlightenment. While a case could be built for the death and resurrection of Jesus apart from the New Testament sources, the author of this paper is not so willing to give up on the reliability of the NT and the Gospels as historical ancient biographies of Jesus.[3]

Daniel Wallace has recently written, “In Greek alone, there are more than 5,600 manuscripts today… altogether about 20,000 handwritten manuscripts of the NT in various languages.” [4] Even if someone were to destroy all of those manuscripts, the NT could be entirely reconstructed with the one million quotations by the early church fathers![5]

Some critics will respond, what about all those discrepancies? There are certainly textual variants in the many manuscripts we have, but the careful reader should not let the skeptical NT textual critic, Bart Ehrman, convert them to agnosticism just yet.[6] F.F. Bruce has written, “The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice.”[7]

In fact, the more historical and textual criticism that is being done on the NT Gospels, the more scholars are recognizing just how meticulous the ancient authors were in their creative retelling of the life of Christ. For instance, Luke, a companion of the apostle Paul, says he consulted with the “eyewitnesses” and “carefully investigated everything from the beginning” (Lk 1:2-3). Luke’s concern to give an “orderly account” of the things that happened in the first half of the century simply can’t be denied if any historian is consistent with their treatment of historical texts.

The apostle Paul passes along an early creedal statement about Jesus:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born (1 Cor 15:3-8 NIV).

James D.G. Dunn has written that scholars can be “entirely confident” that this tradition was formulated within months of Jesus’ death.[8] So, with the early dating of the Gospels being within approximately 30-40 years of the actual events, the careful oral transmission and tradition between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels, and the multiple eyewitness testimony that Jesus was seen in a resurrected form (something that it seems they had a difficult time finding the words to express), it is fair to say that something out of the ordinary happened.

The majority of scholars agree on some basic events in the life of Jesus. E.P. Sanders has written, “There are no substantial doubts about the general course of Jesus’ life: when and where he lived, approximately when and where he died, and the sort of thing that he did during his public activity …”[9]

No real scholar in the field denies these things. Even the liberal Jesus Seminar scholar, John Dominic Crossan, admits that the crucifixion of Jesus is historical “as sure as anything historical can be.”[10] It is one of the major points of agreement between liberal and conservative Jesus scholars. For any person to deny the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, they must be ignorant of history or purposely distorting the facts. Ancient historians such as Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian, Mara Bar-Serapion, and the Jewish Talmud, mention that Jesus was crucified.[11] Mainstream scholars agree with the biblical text: Jesus really lived, he was crucified, he died, and he was buried in a borrowed tomb. (Mk 15:42-47; Matt 27:57-61; Lk 23:50-54).

Empty Tomb, Resurrection Appearances, & Growth of the Early Church

The empty tomb is recorded and admitted by Christians, enemies of Jesus, and skeptics alike—in ancient and modern times. All four canonical Gospels mention the empty tomb. Paul affirms the empty tomb with the early creed in 1 Cor 15:3-4, and so does Luke in Acts 13:29. While there are scholars today that refuse to acknowledge an empty tomb (e.g. Crossan believes that Jesus’ body was discarded with criminals and eaten by dogs), most scholars recognize the empty tomb as a historical fact.

The empty tomb makes the most historical sense. If the body was not missing, the early Christian message could have been easily stamped out with, “Resurrected? We have his body right here!” The big question is ‘why was it empty?’ The Jewish polemic against the Christian message was that the disciples had stolen the body (Matt 28:11-15; Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, 108; Tertullian’s On Spectacles, 30). Matthew writes, “And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day” (28:15).

The swoon theory was first proposed in the eighteenth century.[12] This theory claims that Jesus was not really dead after all, but merely slipped into a coma, later to be revived in the cold conditions of the dark tomb. Let there be no mistake. The Romans knew how to kill condemned criminals.[13] While there may have been an occasion where someone escaped the cross (e.g. when Romans fled the scene of battle), the historical evidence in the case of Jesus does not allow for a great escape. The medical evidence indicates a certain death (Jn 19:34).[14]

David Strauss, a nineteenth century liberal scholar, was unconvinced of the swoon theory, saying that a half-dead Jesus would not have convinced his disciples of a glorified resurrection.[15] Strauss points out that you can’t talk about the empty tomb without considering the transformation that took place with the disciples who had previously abandoned Jesus. What else can explain what they claimed they saw, and empowered them to speak the message of the risen Jesus?

According to a small few, the disciples actually had some sort of mass LSD trip, a group hallucination.[16] There are many reasons why this theory doesn’t add up. In short, the disciples claimed to have touched him, ate with him, yet he walked through walls! Also, there has never been one documented account of an entire group of people having the same hallucinations.[17] And the disciples would need to be under a continual psychotic delusion to face martyrdom with non-resistance, declaring that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

Michael Licona writes: “Historians are not chained to using a psychological explanation that is stacked against the supernatural in order to obtain purely natural conclusions in their historical work. They need to go beyond psychological conjectures and employ method carefully.”[18]

Other theories have been proposed: Jesus had a twin brother that dropped in after the crucifixion and appeared to the disciples; the women went to the wrong tomb; and the resurrection was only spiritual. But none of these theories can account for all of the historical evidence, what the disciples believed were resurrection appearances, the teaching of the apostles, and the growth of the early church in the face of intense persecution.

I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That’s what they say and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something.[19]

Whatever they saw, it was enough to change the mind of James, the brother of Jesus, and Saul of Tarsus, a zealous Pharisee and persecutor of the church. James becomes the leader of the Jerusalem church (Acts 15), and he is later martyred for his belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. What could have happened to prompt the brother of Jesus to become one of the church’s greatest leaders? An encounter with the risen Jesus is the most likely of all possible scenarios.

Saul of Tarsus had a first-hand encounter with the resurrected Christ, while on his way to persecute the church in Damascus, Syria (Acts 9). Something happened to this Saul, student of the great Jewish teacher, Gamiliel (Acts 22:3). He said his transformation from persecutor to apostle was a result of being confronted by the resurrected and glorified Christ. What could change this zealous teacher of the Law? The apostle Paul had met the risen Jesus.

N. T. Wright makes the claim that he knows nothing else that could explain the initial birth and rapid expansion of the early church, except that Jesus was really raised from the dead. Wright states that there are two things “historically secure” about the first Easter: the empty tomb and the meeting with the resurrected Jesus. Nothing in Second-Temple Judaism would have produced such a radical claim that someone (i.e. a crucified Messiah) would be raised to life in the middle of human history.[20] Wright says, “It is therefore historically highly probable that Jesus’ tomb was indeed empty on the third day after his execution, and that the disciples did indeed encounter him giving every appearance of being well and truly alive.”[21]

There is another piece of evidence that adds further weight to the story. Fitting with the principle of embarrassment, the Gospel writers report that it was women who first found the empty tomb and met the risen Jesus (Matt 281-10; Mk 16:1-11; Lk 24:1-11). This is rather peculiar since a woman’s testimony was not even considered as a reliable witness in a first century law court (Josephus, Ant 4.219).

It comes as no surprise that the disciples did not believe their report (Lk 24:11). If they were making up a story about a crucified and resurrected Messiah, especially when the whole idea was foreign to Judaism in the first place, the last thing they would do is have women as the first eyewitnesses to the empty tomb and resurrection. But no attempt is made to gloss over this embarrassing episode.

This bit of the story adds to the historical credibility of the empty tomb. The physical resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation for the empty tomb, as well as the experiences of the disciples, and the rapid growth of the early church in the face of overwhelming opposition from the same world that condemned Jesus.

Limitations of Science & Boundaries of Human Reason

There are certain biases and presuppositions that must be acknowledged on the outset of an investigation into the case for the resurrection. The seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment has conditioned much of the West to separate faith and reason. The church has often been guilty of refusing to take serious the discoveries of science. The sloppy practice of using the Scriptures to attack and defend scientific theories has furthered the idea that faith and reason are at odds with one another.

Of course, there is such a thing as bad science, something that many evolutionary biologists and skeptics of religion today refuse to acknowledge. But who will argue that it was right for the church to denounce Galileo’s heliocentrism—that the earth revolves around the sun? Like many European intellectuals who grew tired of the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, some modern skeptics and scholars abandon faith altogether, reject any spiritual dimensions to life and the cosmos, only to rely solely upon science as the only infallible guide to epistemology (what we can know and how can we know it). Is this sound?

The thinking of David Hume has left an indelible mark on Western society. Hume rejected the idea of miracles, largely based on his naturalistic perspective that the laws of nature prohibit them from happening. Hume wrote:

The Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.[22]

Would the resurrection of Jesus be a violation of natural laws? Are miracles to be entirely ruled out because Hume concluded that they are contrary to nature and the whole of human experience?

There are currently three main views of natural law: the regularity theory, the nomic necessity theory, and the causal dispositions theory. None of these theories actually allow for miracles to be understood as violations of the laws of nature. Instead, miracles are naturally impossible events that require an unknown or “supernatural” force to interrupt the natural world at a certain time and place.

Naturalism may indicate that dead people stay dead. But if there is a God who created the world, and sent his Son to reveal his divine program, then how can skeptics be so certain that this God wouldn’t raise Jesus from the dead in order to vindicate him and affirm divine revelation? It is just the sort of thing God would do to reveal himself and redeem mankind for a new world—a world that he has not left to simply wind down, grow cold, and become stardust.

William Lane Craig writes:

When a scientific anomaly occurs, it is usually assumed that some unknown natural factors are interfering, so that the law is neither violated nor revised. But suppose the law fails to describe or predict accurately because some supernatural factors are interfering? Clearly the implicit assumption of such laws is that no supernatural factors as well as no natural factors are interfering. Thus, if the law proves inaccurate in a particular case because God is acting, the law is neither violated nor revised. If God brings about some event which a law of nature fails to predict or describe, such an event cannot be characterized as a violation of a law of nature, since the law is valid only under tacit assumption that no supernatural factors come into play in addition to the natural factors.[23]

It is for the reason of “miracles” and the divinity attributed to Jesus that some “historians” find reason not to trust anything the Gospel writers say. They believe the Gospels are tainted with wishful thinking. Therefore, it is hard to determine who the “historical Jesus” really is after all. Crossan has written the following on the possibility of a resurrection miracle: “I do not think this event ever did or could happen… I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.”[24]

Historians should not be so quick to dismiss the miraculous as human inventions by lunatic disciples wanting to start their own religion on a failed Messiah.[25] Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory Boyd have written:

Most within the guild of historical-critical scholarship identify the historical-critical method with this unequivocal commitment to the presupposition of naturalism. For such scholars, talk about a naturalistic historical-critical method is redundant, and talk about about a historical-critical method that is not unequivocally committed to naturalism is a contradiction in terms.[26]

Eddy and Boyd suggest an alternative method they call an “open historical-critical method” that is not unequivocally committed to naturalism and is open to events that defy natural explanation. The method is “critical” in that it first looks for “natural” causes to bizarre events, but at the same time it is “open” to the appeals of “supernatural” occurrences, not rejecting them on an a priori basis.[27] Scholars must be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads them.

Other contemporary NT scholars also argue for the historical probability of miracles, thus substantiating the claims of the NT. Craig Evans believes that the same criteria used for supporting the authentic words of Jesus in the Gospels, can also be applied to miracles. The historical criteria are multiple attestation, dissimilarity, and embarrassment.[28]

As already previously argued, all of these can be found in the resurrection story. Craig Keener has arguably written the greatest work on the subject of miracles. In his two-volume work, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, Keener challenges David Hume’s epistemological skepticism, and presents a monumental case for miraculous phenomena from late antiquity up to contemporary times. He begins by pointing out that all of the many ancient sources acknowledge that Jesus was a worker of miracles. Keener describes the importance of miracles in the Gospels:

Most scholars today working on the subject thus accept the claim that Jesus was a healer and exorcist. The evidence is stronger for this claim than for most other specific historical claims that we could make about Jesus or earliest Christianity. Scholars often note that miracles characterized Jesus’ historical activity no less than his teaching and prophetic activities did. So central are miracle reports to the Gospels that one could remove them only if one regarded the Gospels as preserving barely any genuine information about Jesus.[29]

Keener mentions how Walter Wink, a NT scholar and member of the Jesus Seminar, shifted his “materialistic” assumptions about reality after a divine healing of his own. Wink says, “I have no difficulty believing that Jesus actually healed people, and not just of psychosomatic diseases.” Wink writes that any scholar who would deny the truth of his story because of their worldview, do so “not on historical grounds, but on the basis of their” antisupernaturalistic assumptions.[30]

Therefore, it is important to study the historical Jesus by first discarding of the presupposition that naturalism can fully account for the way things are in the world. As Craig has written, “If we begin by presupposing naturalism, then of course what we wind up with is a purely natural Jesus. This reconstructed, naturalistic Jesus is not based on evidence, but on definition.”[31] So, based on the amount of observable evidence, there is good reason to believe in miracles today.

EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT

The very laws of nature (as we know them) are continually sustained by God’s power. He has revealed himself in the natural order and in the spiritual order. But more specifically, God’s good will for creation has been made known in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. And he has displayed his saving power by raising this Jesus from the dead. However, it is right to conclude that no amount of scientific or historical data can conclusively prove that Jesus rose from the dead. Belief in miracles, the resurrection of Jesus particularly, is not born from historical evidence alone. John Meier candidly writes:

Can miracles happen? Do miracles happen? In my view, these wide-ranging questions are legitimate in the arena of philosophy or theology. But they are illegitimate or at least unanswerable in a historical investigation that stubbornly restricts itself to empirical evidence and rational deductions or inferences from such evidence.[32]

C. E. B. Cranfield sums up his survey of the evidence in this way:

A positive proof of its truth is just not to be had by such means. Certainty with regard to it can come to us only by the work of the Holy Spirit making us free to believe. But it seems to me that the evidence available to us—and I have tried now a good many times to weigh it as carefully and honestly and objectively as I can—is such that, though I cannot prove that God raised Jesus from the dead by historical-critical methods, I can believe it without any way violating my intellectual or moral integrity. For myself, I must declare that I do indeed confidently believe it.[33]

Finally, there are at least five established facts in the case for the resurrection. These “minimal facts” are the death of Jesus by crucifixion, the empty tomb, the disciple’s resurrection claims, the conversions of James and Paul, and the rapid growth of the early church in the face of suffering and death. This is compelling evidence for the resurrection of Jesus that every skeptic must confront with historical, logical, and consistent reasons of rebuttal if they wish to challenge mainstream biblical and historical scholarship, or engage in an attack on the gospel of Jesus.

After normal causations are exhausted as an explanation for the resurrection story, the historical evidence points to the “high probability” that Jesus rose from the dead.[34]

D.D. Flowers, 2012.

NOTE: This academic paper was put into a popular three-part post “Why I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus” here at the blog. There are active links and videos in that series of posts.

[1] A few major scholars such as Dale Allison, Raymond Brown, Peter Carnley, David Catchpole, William Lane Craig, John Dominic Crossan, James D.G. Dunn, Bart Ehrman, Gary Habermas, Gerd Ludemann, Willi Marxsen, Gerald O’Collins, Richard Swinburne, A.J.M. Wedderburn and N.T. Wright have weighed in on the topic.

[2] Dale Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 200.

[3] See Richard Burridge, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). Burridge calls for an understanding of the gospels an ancient biographies.

[4] Daniel B. Wallace, Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011), 28.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Bart Ehrman is a NT textual critic, and former evangelical Christian. See his book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). Also, see Nicholas Perrin’s response to Ehrman in his book, Lost in Transmission: What Can We Know About the Words of Jesus (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007).

[7] F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1981), 14-15.

[8] James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 855.

[9] E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993), 11.

[10] John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 145.

[11] Josephus, Antiquities 18.64; Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Lucian of Samosata, The Death of Pererine 11-13; Mara Bar Serapion, BL Add. 14658; and the Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a. The Quran denies that Jesus was crucified on a Roman cross (Surah 4:157-158). This is a rather embarrassing historical blunder on behalf of the Quran. This is not some insignificant textual variant or slight discrepancy in the Islamic text. It is a historical contradiction.

[12] Early proponents were: Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, Karl Venturini, Heinrich Paulus, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The muslim, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, proposed that Jesus survived the crucifixion in journeyed to India. See his book, Jesus in India (1899).

[13] See the ancient writer, Seneca Moral Epistles 101; and Martin Hengel, Crucifixion, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 22-23.

[14] “interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.” The Journal of the American Medical Association “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ” Vol. 255 (March 21, 1986), 1463.

[15] David Strauss, A New Life of Jesus. 2 vols (Edinburgh: Williams & Norgate, 1879).

[16] Oddly enough, Strauss actually popularized this theory. In Strauss’ view, the disciples were tripping with the resurrected Christ! This view is not taken seriously by any scholar or medical expert today. See Jake O’Connell “Jesus’ resurrection and collective hallucinations.” Tyndale Bulletin 60, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 69-105.

[17] Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2004), 105-108.

[18] Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010), 567-568.

[19] Paula Fredriksen (Boston University) in an interview by Peter Jennings in Search for Jesus (American Broadcasting Corp. [ABC], July 2000).

[20] Douglas W. Kennard, Messiah Jesus: Christology in His Day and Ours (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 335. Kennard writes: “No O.T. text claims the time of third day resurrection of Messiah, but a sentiment grew among Pharisaic second Temple Judaism that began to see the Biblical text describe the general resurrection and even a Messianic resurrection on the third day.” Also see Wright’s Resurrection of the Son of God, 321-322. It can at least be said that the traumatized disciples were not thinking that Jesus was going to rise from the dead

[21] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Vol. 3: Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 686-687.

[22] David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10.2.101. Hume is saying that it is a miracle that anyone could ever be dumb enough to believe in the Christian faith!

[23] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth & Apologetics (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 262.

[24] Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 94-95.

[25] The following contemporary perspectives on miracles take the notion seriously: R. Swinburne, The Concept of Miracle (New York: Macmillan, 1970); F.J. Beckwith, David Hume’s Argument against Miracles: A Critical Analysis (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989); T.C. Williams, The Idea of the Miraculous: The Challenge to Science and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1990); J. Houston, Reported Miracles: A Critique of Hume (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); R.D. Geivett and G.R. Habermas, eds., In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997); C.S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011).

[26] Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 51-52.

[27] Ibid., 53.

[28] Craig Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 140.

[29] Craig S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 23-24.

[30] Ibid., 103.

[31] Craig, 279.

[32] John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 511. Meier is not saying that miracles are not real events in time and space, nor is he doing “covert” apologetics.

[33] C.E.B. Cranfield, “The Resurrection of Jesus.” The Historical Jesus in Recent Research. eds. James D.G. Dunn and Scot McKnight (Winona Lake: Eisebrauns, 2005), 390-391.

[34] David J. Norman, “Doubt and the resurrection of Jesus.” Theological Studies 69, no. 4 (December 1, 2008): 786-811.

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The Centrality and Supremacy of Jesus Christ

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Is Marriage a Covenant? Part III

Is Marriage a Covenant, Part III

Is polygamy in the biblical world incompatible with an understanding of marriage as a covenant relationship?

In biblical times, were women considered to be the “property” of their husbands, and, if so, is this incompatible with a view of marriage as a covenant relationship between husband and wife?