Prophecy and Inerrancy

I apologize for the lack of posting of late. I have plenty to write about, but school's been taking up a lot of my time. They're making me write essays, if you can believe it.

I'm taking a Religious Studies course on Jesus, and I've been doing a little research on the infant narratives in Matthew and Luke. Here's what my textbook (Howard Clark Kee: Jesus in History) has to say about Matthew's version of events:

Each of these "historical" moves was ultimately dictated... by the divine plan laid down in Scripture. The return from Egypt is said to be the fulfillment of Hosea 11:1. The grief of the mothers whose children were slain by Herod is seen as predicted in Jeremiah 31:15. The move to Nazareth is said to accord with "what was spoken by the prophets": "He shall be called a Nazarene" (Matt. 2:23). There is no text corresponding to this declaration, but it is likely a reference to Isaiah 11:1, as noted below.

Matthew has no interest in the actual historical events in biblical times out of which the prophets spoke these words, nor does he make any attempt to show a direct correlation between the historical events in biblical times and the situation in the time of Jesus. Hosea was describing the Exodus from Egypt, when God delivered his people ("my son") and led them into the land of Palestine. Jeremiah's words probably refer to the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E., some 100 years before his own time. Jeremiah's prophecies come from the last quarter of the seventh century B.C.E., shortly before Judah, the southern kingdom, likewise fell.

The word Nazarene does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, but is probably traced to Isaiah 11:1, where the shoot (nester) from the stump of Jesse is mentioned as God's agent in establishing his just rule on earth. The metaphor in Isaiah is that of a tree cut down, which signifies the end of the Davidic dynasty. The prophet foresees the appearance, from the seemingly lifeless stump, of a shoot that will both signal and effect the reestablishment of the Kingdom. Conceivably, Mathew could have found in this prophetic word a prediction pointing to the kingly role that was assigned by Christians to Jesus. Instead, Matthew used the Isaiah 11 passage to prove that it was ordained in Scripture that Jesus' residence should be in Nazareth. (The Hebrew letters would be n-ts-r; the language was written in consonants, and the reader supplied the vowels; hence, Na-TSa-Rene.)

The writer of Matthew did not ask what Isaiah intended by his words; he was interested in finding what they might mean to him and his readers. Since the Bible was held to be divinely inspired, its sacred letters were subject to multiple interpretations, limited only by the talent and ingenuity of the interpreter. The discovery of obscure meanings in Scripture was regarded as a tribute to its divine origin, not a falsification of the intention of the biblical writer. The question of the Old Testament writers' intentions was for Matthew as well as for Jewish interpreters of his age an irrelevant one, because they believed that the God who had spoken through the prophets in the past was still in control of human affairs and was shaping them in accord with his own purpose, which the skillful interpreter of scripture could discern in the present and correlate with the writings from the ancient past. What was significant was continuity of divine purpose, not precision of historical knowledge.

(Links and paragraphs added.)

I noticed years ago that Matthew's Old Testament "prophecies" often don't say what he claims they do. (The famous "virgin" birth prophecy is another good example.) At first I though Matthew is simply lying. From a modern western perspective, Matthew's creative exegesis looks like an effort to dupe ill-informed readers into the conviction that Jesus fulfilled Messianic credentials laid down centuries before.

But of course, Matthew was neither modern nor western, and he wrote according to the the literary and scholarly conventions of his own time and culture. As strange as it seems to us, his complete disregard for the intended meaning of the texts he quotes would have been quite legitimate in the eyes of his Jewish contemporaries.

Part of the problem is that Matthew's understanding of words like "prophecy" and "fulfill" are somewhat different from our own. His account of Jesus' birth and early years is designed to recall that of the nation of Israel (a dreamer named Joseph, the journey to Egypt and back again, escape from a fearful king who kills baby boys) and establish Jesus as both the Messianic King and a sort of new Moses. Matthew quotes from the scriptures in order to underline these similarities, and would have understood them more as prefigurations of Jesus than as predictions.

This is why I think the doctrine of inerrancy (at least in its popular form) misses the point: it assumes that the Bible conforms to modern logic and literary conventions that were completely unfamiliar to its authors and intended readers. If we want to assess (or assert) the truth of an ancient document, we must consider the way it was intended to be true, not the way we would like it to be true.

Of course, this isn't easy to determine. Like anything thousands of years old, we don't have a precise understanding of ancient Hebrew culture, logic, or literary genres. It's unclear exactly what sort of apparent errors or untruths (from a modern perspective) might have been acceptable to the various intended readers of the scriptures. Chronological adjustments? Misleading prophecies? Historical inaccuracies? Embellishments and extrapolations? Theological discrepancies? (I may deal with some of these points in subsequent posts.) Whatever conclusions we may reach, it's clear that a good dose of humility is required.

But whether or not the Bible is true in the ways that the authors intended it to be, or (still more difficult to discern) in the ways that God intended it to be, this much is clear: it was not written with our modern assumptions and expectations in mind.