Richard Briggs Review - Part 4

Conclusion

This sense in which scriptural categories are projected forward from their original appearances to help shape the discussion of later scripture is picked up in the Christian New Testament too: creation is taken up in new creation, exodus in new exodus, covenant in new covenant, and all of these were announced long ago in Jewish scripture (Isaiah 65, Jeremiah 31 ...). In this sense, the Christian New Testament simply progresses the hope of newness into a Christological shape, articulated around the person and work of Jesus Christ. Here is a model profoundly based in continuity. But as Chris Seitz has pointed out, there is a difference between von Rad’s notion of tradition-history sustaining the canonical development of the Old Testament scriptures and the separate claim being made that this is what the New Testament simply continues: the difference lies in the various points of rupture introduced into the trajectories of creation, exodus, covenant, and other categories. As Seitz and others have suggested, the links between the testaments are best understood ‘typologically’ or ‘figurally’. It is always well to remember the reaction of Jesus’ disciples in coming across the empty tomb: bewilderment, despair, a genuine sense of not understanding how the story they thought they were following could come to this. Thus somehow the ‘fulfilment’ of all scripture which Jesus announced as taking place in himself (Luke 24: 25-27) cannot simply have been read off the events, or indeed the texts which would go on to witness to the events. Here, then, is discontinuity: ways in which the New Testament suggests that God has now done something ‘new’, although importantly, as the von Rad quote makes clear, it is not ‘newness’ itself which is the significant theological category. The opening verses of Hebrews put the point most forcefully with respect to the category of revelation: ‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son’ (Hebrews 1:1-2), and of course the rest of Hebrews treads no less lightly through a series of other category comparisons.

The key to holding all this together, it seems to me, is to recognise that the continuity is primarily discernible retrospectively, since there are many ways in principle that a narrative (or indeed a salvation-history) could be carried forward, and only one way in fact in which the New Testament does end up carrying it forward. Arguably theoretical notions of what counts as continuity count for little in the face of the onward particularistic march of history. Continuity then has to be construed in and around (or ‘figured’ into) the events and texts which continue to unfold. In short, the New Testament, in itself, is neither continuous with nor discontinuous with the Old, but degrees of continuity are discerned by people who come to see that the God of the story has not changed. These points of continuity are themselves handled differently by different New Testament authors: so (to over-simplify for a moment) Matthew tells us the story of Moses but tells it about Jesus, while John tells us the story of Genesis, but it is about Jesus, and Luke tells us the story of all the Law and the Prophets, but it is about ... Jesus.

Increasingly it seems to me that the New Testament perhaps introduces very few new theological categories at all. Christology, or at least most articulations of it, might be an exception. But Christian ethics wrestles with its own versions of law and grace just as Israel always wrestled with Torah. The Holy Spirit is poured out at Pentecost (and surely plays a key role in facilitating the retrospective discernment of continuity), but was long since known in Israel and anticipated in prophecies quoted on the day of Pentecost. Atonement theology draws its categories from Leviticus and elsewhere in the Old Testament. None of it makes its intended sense without understanding it in continuity with the Old Testament.

To sum up: the New Testament could not have been anticipated as the telos of the Old, but in retrospect, continuity can be discerned between the two witnesses, and arguably the New Testament cannot be rightly understood without the Old. The familiar question, then, of whether in some sense it replaces the Old is badly put, or, we might say, replacement is the wrong metaphor for grasping the relationship between the two. But the Old is of course changed in some sense by its (new) relationship with the New.

The question which strikes me most forcefully, then, after reading MMJT concerns the extent to which MJT already has to hand the conceptuality it needs for its task in the scriptures of the New Testament. Undeniably these have been appropriated and interpreted in frameworks uncongenial (and sometimes downright hostile) to Jewish thought, and I found myself wondering whether part of the problem perceived here is to do with the particular Christian theological frameworks in play in the discussion rather than with the notion of Christian theological frameworks per se. I am not saying that the New Testament is the answer to the questions surveyed in MMJT, rather that it would be a profoundly constructive dialogue partner since it is, in its own time and place, deeply engaged with the project of working out the very questions which occupy MJT. If that dialogue could take place with people working with scriptural categories in a hermeneutically subtle and constructive way, then it seems to me that one might have a very powerful engine both for reading the New Testament and for Messianic Jewish theology.

I am reminded of the extraordinary story in Acts 18 where Apollos, a Jew of Alexandria, comes to Ephesus and unleashes all his rhetorical glory on the gathered crowds. He was, says Luke, ‘an eloquent man, well-versed in the scriptures ... and he taught accurately (akribōs) the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John’. (Acts 18:24-25) These scriptures are the Tanakh, and his baptism is not a Christian one. Intriguingly, ‘when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the Way of God to him more accurately (akribesteron).’ (v.26) Too often the discussion of Jewish and Christian theological categories supposes that for one to be right the other must be wrong, but perhaps one might suggest that one could be ‘accurate’ and the other ‘more accurate’. Unless, of course, God changed his mind sometime between the two testaments, and there is material discontinuity, but to this many New Testament readers will want to say, with Paul, ‘by no means!’

So I find myself wanting to read further than MMJT takes me, and agreeing with its concluding apologia that it is in fact a prolegomenon to a future development of a MJT. I want to know what a messianic Jewish pneumatology looks like in the light of Joel 3 and Pentecost. I want to understand the categories of messianic Jewish ‘ecclesiology’. I want to see how far messianic Jewish hermeneutics can learn to be indebted both to the rabbis and to all the other ways of reading texts which have flourished over God’s many centuries. And most of all I want to see the New Testament read in a way which taps into its life-blood and brings it alive to those of us who have come late (though gratefully) to the story. Which suggests that Richard Harvey has been more than successful in presenting his map-making exercise to an outsider like me, drawing me in to want to see further and better. Thank you – and may your map help lead us all into exceedingly fertile territory indeed.