Why Study The Old Testament alongside the New with Margaret Barker
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- čas přidán 28. 06. 2024
- Margaret Barker explores the importance of the Old Testament for Christians seeking to understand the New Testament: the Old is the context in which the New came into being. Moreover, how people in Jesus' time understood their scriptures is often very different to how Christians read them today.
How wonderful to hear Margaret Barker again. So erudite and yet easy to understand.
Margaret Barker found the presuppositions of biblical scholarship unsatisfactory in the 60s and spent time going back to the sources with a forensic eye.
Her work tends toward an approach not dissimilar to pre Vatican ii Catholicism and against her own Protestant background of sola scripture - because the scripture in question was not that of Jesus and the early Christian church. From the background of a hope for a restored first temple, not the one of Jesus'time, a "high" Christology emerges, one which incorporates the more awkward New Testament books - the Epistle to the Hebrews, Revelation and John's gospel read in its own terms.
Her work was and is groundbreaking, has demolished much semi modern scholarship making Jesus out to be a rebellious social worker or hovering round armed resistance movements against the establishment.
Her achievement is beyond comparison in modern bible study and it is amazing how far her linguistic approach and the anthropological approach of the late Mary Douglas has swept all before it.
The Hebrew word for virgin is actually betulah. Almah means a young woman of marriagable age.
and English word for happy is gay. You missed her point completely. Languages evolve and our understanding of specific words may be radically different even couple of decades apart. We don't have ancient wikipedia or youtube to follow all the debates, but we know that Jewish scholars, commissioned by Jewish priests to translate their holy texts into Greek chose the word "parthenos" so they most likely understood "almah" to mean "virgin". Just because later Jews started making different distinction between "almah" and "betulah" doesn't mean anything for the Jews around times of Jesus.
that was her point.