A History of the Bible by John Barton

Author:John Barton
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

But rabbinic Judaism, the style of Judaism that is the precursor of what we now think of as Orthodox Judaism, tended to lose interest in messianic prophecy except in certain periods of tension or heightened expectation. It saw the Messiah as promised, certainly, but not as a subject of great interest for practical purposes.

Thus the whole model of a disaster and rescue mission, as I have called it, was not completely a Christian invention or discovery. It occurred within Judaism. But by making it the universal way of reading Old Testament Scripture, Christians ensured that Christianity would develop along quite different lines from Judaism. Christians soon came to see Judaism as having thoroughly misread its own Scriptures and even, according to some writers, as having falsified those Scriptures, removing allusions to the Messiah and to Jesus Christ as the saviour of lost humanity. We recall again how the second-century CE teacher Justin Martyr insisted that the Jews had changed the text of Psalm 96, which had originally read ‘the Lord reigns from the tree’, a reference to the cross. He also claimed that they had deleted from Jeremiah a reference to what is called the harrowing of hell, Christ’s visit to Hades after his death but before his resurrection to preach to the pre-Christian righteous. According to Justin the text had read, ‘The Lord God of Israel remembered his dead who slept in the earth of a grave, and he descended to them to preach to them his salvation.’7 There is no truth in either accusation, as there is no evidence that either of these passages was ever in the Hebrew Bible. But they confirmed the Christian feeling that Christians understood the Old Testament better than the Jews, and could even correct its text.

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