Biblical Theology According to the Apostles

How The Earliest Christians Told The Story Of Israel

Chris Bruno, Jared Compton, Kevin McFadden

• Publisher: Apollos
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781783599561
• eBook ISBN: 9781783599578
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Although relatively few in number, the New Testament's explicit summaries of the Old Testament story of Israel give readers direct access to the way the earliest Christians told this story -- which is to say, to the way they did biblical theology. These curiously overlooked summaries are the subject of this stimulating study.Bruno, Compton and McFadden examine the passages in the Synoptic Gospels, Acts, Paul's letters and Hebrews that recount the characters, events, and institutions of Israel's story in chronological order and at substantial length. They demonstrate just how valuable a lens these summaries provide for a clearer vision of the earliest Christians' practice of biblical theology.The authors' ultimate goal is to move beyond the descriptive to the prescriptive, to show how contemporary readers can and should follow the apostles' example.

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Introduction

How did the apostles do biblical theology, and what can we learn from them? The goal of this book is to address these questions.

There has been a growing interest in the practice of biblical theology among evangelical Christians in the West, an interest seen in the very existence of this series of books. And even many laypeople are now familiar with the idea that the Bible is not only a collection of individual stories but also contains a larger story that stretches from the garden to the new creation.

From one perspective this is a new phenomenon in the church. The discipline of biblical theology was originally given a home in the academy through the work of post-Enlightenment historical critics who made a distinction between the theology of the Bible (biblical theology) and the theology of the church (dogmatic theology).1 This modern, dogged interest in the historical development of the theology of the Bible was then baptized by orthodox theologians who used the new method to analyse the history of redemptive revelation.2

From another perspective, however, recounting the theological teaching of the Bible as a story with historical development was certainly a part of pre-Enlightenment theologizing as well. Perhaps the second-century Christian bishop Irenaeus is most famous for taking this approach.3 And yet long before Irenaeus Jewish interpreters of the Bible summarized their understanding of holy writ in narrative historical form. Such summaries are found both within the OT (e.g. Neh. 9; Pss 105; 106; etc.) and outside it (e.g. Sir. 44–50). Our interest in this book, however, is not in these pre-Christian summaries, but rather in the summaries of Israel’s story composed after the coming of Jesus Christ in the apostolic witness of the NT.

Our idea: exploring the exposed iceberg

In the last century of biblical scholarship and especially in the last few decades the use of the OT in the NT has been explored at great length. For a time there was an intense interest in parallels between NT exegesis and the uses of the OT found at Qumran (pesher) or those found in the later rabbis (midrash).4 More recently there has been an interest in literary studies that consider factors behind the text such as the subtler echoes of the OT in the NT, ways that the OT story shapes the Gospels, or OT narratives that may lie underneath Paul’s arguments.5

If we use the metaphor of an iceberg, many of these studies have been deep-sea explorations attempting to shine a spotlight on things that are submersed in dark and frigid places, such as Paul’s Pharisaic training (midrash) or the philosophical echo chamber in which ancient texts find new resonations (intertextuality). We have all benefited from these studies but our project takes a more direct approach. Our goal is to explore those parts of the iceberg that are standing in plain sight under the light of the sun. Sometimes the most difficult thing to observe carefully is the thing that you see all the time, such as the famous ‘hall of faith’ in Hebrews 11. And yet Hebrews 11 is not only one of the most important examples of the use of the OT in the NT, but is also an inspired example of how to put the story of the Bible together.

The iceberg metaphor can also be usefully applied to our goal of understanding the biblical theology of the apostles by means of these passages. One difficulty in this discipline is that no one agrees about what exactly ‘biblical theology’ is. A recent volume entitled Understanding Biblical Theology finds no fewer than five different approaches represented by modern scholars (Klink and Lockett 2012). These approaches range from those who view the discipline as merely a descriptive, historical discipline, unearthing the religion of the human authors of the Bible,6 to those who argue that it should fully embrace the same categories and methods as systematic theology.7 This is why on a practical level the term ‘biblical theology’ may describe the exploration of one biblical author such as Paul (Schreiner 2001), of a larger corpus such as the OT (Dempster 2003), of the development of the OT in the NT (Beale 2011), of the central theme of the entire Bible (Hamilton 2010)8 or even of a view of God that accords with the Bible.9

Thus, an exploration of the ‘biblical theology’ of the apostles could in one sense be a study of everything the NT authors say and especially what they say about their Bible, the OT. Our goal in this project is not to explore the entire biblical theology of the apostles but to explore the exposed tip of the iceberg, their explicit summaries of Israel’s history. While there are many different approaches to the discipline of biblical theology, one characteristic of most of them is the attempt to come to terms with the post-Enlightenment focus on the Bible as a historical book. The passages in the NT that have the most bearing on this kind of study are those that narrate the history recounted in the OT from Abraham to the exile and beyond. These summaries are not everything the NT authors have to say about biblical theology, but are the clearest examples of apostolic reflection on the history or story of the Bible. Moreover, studying the exposed part of the iceberg will help us better understand what lies below the surface.

Our criteria: New Testament summaries of Israel’s story

Movement in this direction has already begun in the recent article of Hood and Emerson, who attempt to isolate ‘summaries of Israel’s story’ (SIS) as a compositional category. This article reviews modern research in this ‘genre-transcending literary category’,10 presents criteria to identify the category SIS and then gives a provisional list of about seventy to eighty such summaries in Jewish and Christian literature found both inside and outside the Bible.

Hood and Emerson trace the beginning of their history of research to the publication of Ethelbert Stauffer’s New Testament Theology in the mid-twentieth century that contained in an appendix ‘an apparently unprecedented list’ of 121 ‘theological summaries of history’.11 Stauffer perceived in these summaries support for his own view of biblical theology, which is rooted in the sacred history:

The theology of the early church was a process of ordering. What went on was not the making of metaphysical concepts, nor yet the construction of a system, but an ordering of thought, that sought to discover the actual relationships between the different elements of the world of human experience. The answer that was found as a result of the search was like this: God ordered all reality in history . . . In this sense the theology of history is the primary and canonical form of Christian thinking . . .12

Hood and Emerson next survey several other scholars after Stauffer who have studied these summaries. They observe however that

none of these scholars address these summaries as a distinct compositional category as Stauffer did . . . Scholars usually focus on one or a handful of closely related forms [e.g. those that follow the ‘deuteronomic’ sin–exile–return view of history] rather than giving attention to summaries as a form-transcendent phenomenon.13

They also survey scholars associated with the ‘narrative turn’ in biblical scholarship (e.g. N. T. Wright) who have brought attention back to Israel’s story but do not cite Stauffer and his list of summaries.14

Joachim Jeska, influenced by Stauffer, has given ‘the fullest review and the sole attempt in the extant literature to establish a technical term for this phenomenon, Summarien der Geschichte Israels’.15 He views these summaries not merely as ‘historical reporting, but attempts to actualize Israel’s history, bringing it to bear for present or future purposes, sometimes implicitly by the creation of patterns, sometimes by explicit comment’.16 He comes up with a much shorter list than Stauffer (twenty-seven examples), partly because he does not use the shorter texts and partly because he restricts his investigation to ancient Jewish summaries that tell the story from Genesis to 2 Kings.17 Hood and Emerson observe that, although Jeska arranges his lists according to genre, he ‘follows Stauffer in accumulating examples from a variety of forms and genres’,18 treating these summaries as a compositional category that transcends genre and can be examined in their own right.

In the final section of their article Hood and Emerson suggest various criteria by which they delineate the compositional category of SIS. It should be observed that they purposely use the English word ‘story’ rather than ‘history’, not to deny the realis nature of Israel’s narrative, but to describe a narrative that moves beyond the past into the present and even the future.19 They first identify SIS as a ‘shorter version of the phenomenon known as rewritten Bible’ (RB), for example, the retelling of Genesis and Exodus in Jubilees or Josephus’s longer history of the Jewish people (Jewish Antiquities).20 The difference between this genre of literature and the compositional category of SIS is that an SIS is ‘highly condensed’ rather than being a lengthy summary and is always found ‘within a work’ rather than standing on its own.21

Next they suggest several criteria, which can be summarized with the following: an SIS recounts the ‘characters, events, and institutions’ of Israel’s history in ‘chronological order’ and at ‘substantial length’.22 By ‘substantial length’ they are attempting to eliminate briefer references to Israel’s history such as Jesus’ statement that ‘many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 8:11). By ‘chronological order’, Hood and Emerson refer to a passage that ‘moves in proper “historical” direction’, allowing for ‘minor chronological digression’ such as in Hebrews 11.23

With these criteria in place, Hood and Emerson write out their list of Jewish and Christian SIS. Since our concern is with the apostolic witness to Israel’s story, we will list only the seven summaries they find in the NT: Matthew 1:1–17; Mark 12:1–23//Matthew 21:33–46//Luke 20:9–18; Acts 7; Acts 13:16–41; Romans 9 – 11; Hebrews 11:1 – 12:2; and Revelation 12:1–12.

Our study of apostolic biblical theology follows Hood and Emerson’s criteria exactly, although our list of summaries is slightly different. We have selected the passages in the NT that recount the characters, events and institutions of Israel’s story in chronological order and at substantial length. Following these criteria we have excluded many texts that recount elements of Israel’s story but not in chronological order or at substantial length.24 One thinks of the brief recounting of certain episodes in the Gospels such as Jonah and the huge fish or Solomon and the Queen of the South (Matt. 12:39–42), Peter’s sermons in the early chapters in Acts (Acts 2:14–36; 3:12–26), or even the more substantial reflections of Paul on Abraham (Rom. 4) and Adam (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15) that do not show chronological or historical movement. In other words, while these recountings appeal to characters or events from the...

Table of contents

• Series preface
• Authors’ preface
• Abbreviations
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• Bibliography
• Search names for authors
• Search items for Scripture references
• Titles in this series:
• Notes