Thursday, October 19, 2023

Steven Nemes on Old Testament YHWH texts being Applied to Jesus

  

On various occasions in the New Testament, passages from the Old Testament that refer to God himself are applied to Jesus. This is another argument made by Bowman and Komoszewski. David Capes also makes much of these texts. For example, Mark references Isa 40:3, the Hebrew text of which reads as follows: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’” What Mark writes is: “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight’” (1:3). The “LORD” of Isaiah is YHWH, the divine name; the “Lord” of Mark is ο κυριος, which apparently refers to Jesus. So also, Peter on the day of Pentecost cites from Joel 2:32, which says: “Then everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved” (cited in Acts 2:21). Once more, Joel’s “LORD” is YHWH, the divine name; the “Lord” of Peter is ο κυριος, which can plausible be taken in context to refer to Jesus. This passage from Joel 2:32 is also cited by Paul at Rom 10:13. In this way, passages that originally referred to YHWH are taken as applying to Jesus. One might therefore argue that this shows that the New Testament authors thought Jesus to be himself God or YHWH.

 

This is yet a further iteration of the “basic” argument for Jesus’ divinity. What was once said of YHWH is now said of Jesus; therefore Jesus is YHWH. Like the other iterations, this argument too is invalid. It is invalid because it assumes what was said of YHWH is now being said of Jesus in the same sense. Put another way, it assumes that the New Testament authors always made use of Old Testament texts in a literal way, as thought they believed that a contextually sensitive reading of the older passage justified their citation of it in some particular case. As G. K. Beale notes, (Beale, Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament) scholars are not at all agreed on this issue. There are a number of cases in which it seems clear that the New Testament authors say that something from the Old Testament is “fulfilled” in what happened Christ, and yet this Old Testament passage has no native or inherent connection to what happens to Jesus at all.

 

The classic example is Matthew’s citation of Hos 11:1 to describe the return of Jesus’s family from Egypt to Palestine: “Out of Egypt I called my Son” (Matt 2:15). The referent of “my Son” for Hosea is clearly the faithless nation of Israel: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my Son. The more I called them, the more they went from me” (Hos 11:1-2). But for Matthew the referent is Jesus. Obviously Jesus cannot be identified straightaway with the nation of Israel, since Israel is a nation of people and Jesus is just one person. Jesus is a proper part of the nation of Israel as an individual Israelite, and a proper part of a thing cannot be straightaway identified with that whole thing. If there is any kind of “identity” between Jesus and Israel, it is perhaps one of representation, but not one of numerical or ontological identity as Bowman and Komoszewski’s argument requires. Thus also, Jesus may well represent YHWH, yet this does not entail any doctrine of incarnation. Another example is Matthew’s citation of Isa 7:14 to explain the conception of Jesus’s birth: “Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel” (Matt 1:23). Isaiah’s prophecy refers to someone who will still be young when Syria-Israel will be desolate (Isa 7:16). But Jesus was not even born at this time. Even if Jesus preexisted his human birth, he would still be “young” at that time. It would be extravagant to suppose that Matthew thought Jesus himself was, in any literal or ontological sense, that child from hundreds of years earlier about whom Isaiah was literally speaking (perhaps Hezekiah; cf. 2 Kgs 18:1). Finally, Matthew notes that Jesus spoke in parables in order to “fulfill” what had been written by the prophet: “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden since the foundation” (Matt 13:34-35). But it would once again be extravagant to believe that Matthew means to identify Jesus with Asaph, whose psalm the evangelist cites (Ps 78:2). From the fact that Jesus is said to have “fulfilled” the scriptures by doing something that Asaph said he would do, it does not follow that Jesus is being ontologically identified with Asaph.

 

These examples show that the New Testament authors may cite a text that originally referred to YHWH and apply it to Jesus, just as they do with Israel and Asaph and others, yet it does not follow that they thought that Jesus was YHWH any more than that they thought that he was the reincarnation of faithless Israel, or some earlier Israelite king, or Asaph. Indeed, if one were to insist that Jesus is identified with YHWH because texts about YHWH are applied to him, then it would follow that faithless Israel, Hezekiah, and Asaph are also YHWH. Identify is a transitive relation. If Jesus is identified with YHWH and he is also identified with these persons, then these persons are all YHWH as well. This peculiar textual situation must therefore be understood differently. (Steven Nemes, Trinity and Incarnation: A Post-Catholic Theology [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2023], 149-51)