Notes on John Behr’s In Accordance with the Scriptures

Ch 1

From “The Bible” to Scripture

2nd temple judaism not a set canon

“writing was part of a heavenly archive never fully reflected in available texts: a perpetually evolving multigenerational work constantly adding new episodes.” Mroczek

“One of the major differences interpreters have identified as a dividing marker between Jewish and Christian theologies as they emerge in late antiquity,” she writes, is that “in Jewish theology the divine is contained in Scripture, and in Christian, God is incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.” Mroczek

However this should give pause, “even attemps to think beyond or before canon or Bible ultimately still work with them.”

Pre printing press, while Bible in codices, this is not how people mostly encountered it. “The usual collected form was (and liturgically still is) the lectionary: the Prophetologion, the Apostolikon, and the Evangelion, a fact made clear by the overwhelming number of such manuscripts compared to those of “The Bible,” or even the New Testament, and which critical scholarship is only recently beginning to take into account.”

For example St Athanasius wrote On the Incarnation before Nativity was celebrated, the Incarnation was not just regligated to the period of his birth.

St Paul is doing something new when he reflects upon Adam’s sin. It is not in 2nd Temple texts.

Scripture as a Field of Literature

“Rather than thinking about scripture as a bound book, with two testaments (or bodies) of literature and a canonical listing and order, it is better to think of scripture as a field of literature, with certain texts being more central (such as Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Psalms, etc.) and others more marginal (e.g., Bel and the Dragon), with different versions of the same texts, different collections of texts within “books” (e.g., Psalms), and many different ways of reading these texts.”

Image of a circle rather than a line as in prev section.

Yet Canon first is canon of faith/truth not a list of books.

The Apocalypse of the Cross

Romans 16.25-27 Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the apocalypse of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now made manifest and made known through the prophetic writings [κατὰ ἀποκάλυψσιν μυστηρίου χρόνοις αἰωνίοις σεσιγημένου φανερωθέντος δὲ νῦν διά τε γραφῶν προφητικῶν … γνωρισθέντος], according to the command of the eternal God, to all the nations, to bring about the obedience of faith—to the only wise God be glory for evermore. (Rom 16:25–27)

“The mystery hidden from eternity is apocalypsed—that is, unveiled—through the preaching of Jesus Christ, which is now made manifest and known through the prophetic writings.”

“1 Corinthians 15:3–5 that it is of “first importance” that what he received and passes on is that Christ died and rose “in accordance with the scriptures.” This is not a particular reference to a particular verse but rather the point that the paschal mystery is to be expounded by drawing upon the full palette of scripture.”

St Irenaus on Daniel 12.4,7 and Jer 23.20 In the last days (thru Christ) will all things be known.

So we have an image now of that circle with the cross superimposed on it. Christ interpreted thru the scriptures.

Scripture unveiled by the cross gives a shape to the whole; it is, to use Irenaeus’s well-known image, a mosaic of the king: his opponents have disregarded “the order and connection of the Scriptures,” transferring the tesserae of the mosaic to produce a picture of a fox (and a bad one at that), thereby dismembering the body of truth (Haer. 1.8–9).

As Dragoş Andrei Giulea, puts it: “The words of Scripture represent a vehicle of the divine manifestation that is given through the material mediation of the acoustically or visually perceived word.”17 We need to hear the voice of the Lord speaking through the scriptures (OT), for the gospel (singular) is the sublime message of the divine rhetor.

The New Testament as Recapituation

The Scripture are not ‘what happened next’ but an unveiling of the eternal mystery. The apostles and evangelists recapitulate the whole of Scripture.

image of smaller circle bringing into focus the whole.

1 Corinthians 15

‘Salvation history’ or the better older term ‘economy’

A movement from begining to end, from Adam to Christ, can indeed be trace, but it important to note that his plot is told from the point of view of the end, both because we are reading the scripture, now unveiled, in the light of Christ, and because if Adam is, as Paul puts it in Romans, “the type of the one to come” (5.14), then Christ does indeed come first, in just the same way that a seal precedes its imprint in the wax.

See St Nicholas Cabasilas in Life of Christ.

Man’s essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round. — Karl Barth, Christ and Adam

But Barth differs from this hermenutical approach by saing the relationship between type (Adam) and reality (Christ) as an invasion. Rather St Paul notes the difference between Adam as psychic, animated, while Christ is spiritual.

St Irenaeus in Against Heresies

Luke 17.33 and 1 Kdgms 2.6

We don’t have life ζωη apart from Christ.

A feature intrinsic to narratives is that once the end has been reached, a perspective is unveiled that was not available to the characters described—or the reader—during the course of the narrative itself (for it would ruin the plot!).

This higher or heavenly dimension of the narrative is hidden from the characters during the unfolding of the plot, to be revealed only at the end, thereby enabling us to see a double narrative—a divine plot being worked out throughout the human plot yet unknown to the humans involved.

It is vitally important, however, to note that these two narratives cannot be folded into one, at least from the human perspective, without distroying the narrative itself.

See Acts 2.23-24

And figure 6

Regardings Romans, Behr makes a distinction between death (e.g., a natural death at the end of the age) and Death (the force opposing God)

The reign of death is, thus, not the simple fact of mortality, but more, as Hebrews 2:14–15 puts it, “the fear of death” that holds humans in “lifelong bondage,” subservient not to death as mortality but “to the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.” Similarly, when Paul concludes 1 Corinthians 15 with the quotation from Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?,” he then comments that “the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law” (1 Cor 15:56). It is not death that is a sting of sin, but sin that is the “sting of death,” and it is this sin, not mortality, on which Paul focuses.

Geneologies up and down Matthew and Luke

The Time of Scripture

Scripture is always read in the present. And we figure into this by the act of reading.

We are always reading at the end of the time, at the foot of the cross.

Chapter 2: The Paschal Christ

Bibliography

Ch 1

• • Literary imagination in Jewish Antiquity; Eva Mroczek
• Meaning and understanding in the history of Ideas; Skinner
• How the Bible became a book; Schniedewind
• Who really wrote the Bible; ibid
• • Origins of the Liturgical Year; Thomas Talley
• Apprehending ‘Demonstrations’; Giula, Dragoş Andrei
• Schememann Eucharist