Title

dianoigo blog

Wednesday 2 August 2017

Review of "Paul's Triumph" by Christoph Heilig

Christoph Heilig, Paul's Triumph: Reassessing 2 Corinthians 2:14 in its literary and historical context (Biblical Tools and Studies 27; Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 335 pp.

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to win a copy of this book from the author through a draw undertaken on the Zürich New Testament Blog Facebook page. I am writing this review partly as a token of appreciation to Christoph. It cannot be construed as an expert or peer review as I am not an expert or Christoph's peer either in the specific subject matter (exegesis of 2 Cor. 2:14 and the concept of the Roman triumph), the sub-discipline (Pauline studies) or the discipline (biblical studies), though I have an undergraduate qualification relevant to the last.1 My review is more of a reader-response exercise, one that I hope will provide some meaningful insights.

1. Overall impressions and theological contextualisation

The book is a fascinating window into the complexity and richness of contemporary scholarly biblical exegesis. I suspect that many non-scholars, encountering 2 Cor. 2:14ab during public worship or personal Bible study in a modern translation (e.g., NRSV: "But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession"), instantaneously form a mental picture of Paul's meaning and move on, confident that this picture accurately represents the apostle's thought. From this perspective, it is remarkable that a 300+ page monograph could be written about the meaning of these few words—the latest contribution to an ongoing academic conversation. It is equally remarkable that a 300+ page monograph could be written on these words and arrive only at probabilities, not certainties, about their meaning. This, however, is the nature of academic biblical studies today: the excesses of modernist hubris have taught us post-moderns that attaining the factually, objectively "correct" interpretation may simply be impossible.

Does this mean the discipline of biblical studies is both esoteric and futile? Mē genoito! Fresh exegetical insights like Christoph's will undoubtedly influence future translators, commentators and preachers and thence lay readers. My point is the opposite: we lay readers should be grateful for the enormous amount of work that scholars put into reconstructing—as far as possible—the authorial intent behind a biblical passage. We should also be aware of the limitations of the exegete. To express it with a qal wachomer, if even a 300-page monograph by an expert cannot uncover the meaning of a passage with certainty, how much less can five minutes of reflection by a lay reader do so?  Recovering authorial intent definitively is often simply impossible; we may have to be content with a set of options to which approximate relative probabilities may be assigned. Christoph appropriately defines exegesis as "the Evaluation of Hypotheses of Meaning" (p. 6). His monograph is a nice illustration of some points I made previously about the complexity of biblical interpretation in a blog post entitled The problem of understanding the Bible: reflections after four years of theological study. To wax theological, it is only faith nurtured by the Spirit and the Bride (Rev. 22:17), and not exegetical acumen, that can move us from hypotheses and probabilities to knowledge of God.

2. Likes

Enough abstracting—let me get to what I liked about the book. Reading the book was a great experience, if tedious at certain points, and what I liked best was the fine methodology and the meticulous way it was executed. Rarely have I seen an exegetical methodology that was nearly so, well, methodical! As a statistician with a still-latent interest in synergies between statistics and biblical studies, I was fascinated by Christoph's invocation of Bayesian theory (founded by a clergyman, appropriately enough) as the logical foundation of his exegetical task. The fundamental idea of Bayesian statistics (and here I am going a little beyond what Christoph explicitly discusses) is that, for a particular unknown quantity (expressed formally as a mathematical parameter),
Posterior probability ∝ (is proportional to) Prior probability × Likelihood
The posterior probability is what we are after. It is expressed as a conditional probability: the probability that the parameter (in our case, the meaning of the text) takes on a certain realisation or option, given the data (in our case, the text itself, as we have it).2 So the aim is to assign probabilities to different hypothetical options of meaning. If we can assign a probability near 100% to a particular option, or at least a relative probability far greater than any other option, we can propose this option as worthy of acceptance.

The posterior probability, as we can see, is (proportional to) the product of two other quantities: the prior probability and the likelihood. The prior probability captures information about the parameter (meaning of text) external to the data (text itself). The prior information includes the set of hypothetical options itself (perhaps generated by a literature review and lexicographical study, in our case), and antecedent probabilities assigned to these options. Christoph paraphrases "prior probability" for his exegetical purposes as "background plausibility," i.e. "which of the suggested meanings of 14b we would expect from Paul both generally and more specifically from the flow of thought in the passage—irrespective of the concrete wording of 14b" (p. 8). Included in the relevant background (prior) information are "external evidence" (e.g., semantic range of the key verb thriambeuō in texts proximate to Paul) and "internal evidence" (consisting of the "Larger Pauline context," the "Transition from 13 to 14a" and the "Relationship between 14b and 14c-15a").

The likelihood is, like the posterior, formally a conditional, but the direction of conditioning is reversed: it is the likelihood of the data (the text as we have it) given the parameter (the meaning the author wished to express). Hence, instead of asking, "Given that Paul wrote X, how probable is it that he meant Y?" (the form of the posterior), here we are asking, "Given that Paul meant Y, how likely is it that he would have written X?" Christoph paraphrases "likelihood" for his exegetical purposes as "explanatory potential," which answers the question, "If the hypothesis were true, would we expect this formulation (that is: the verb, its object and the adjuncts) or is it surprising?" (p. 9).

Christoph's Bayesian exegetical methodology has two great features. First, he correctly construes the objective as an estimated probability distribution assigned to hypothetical meanings rather than "Paul's intended meaning" itself, which is properly unknowable. Second, he rightly gives due attention to all three ingredients necessary to arrive at a sound posterior probability distribution: (1) a full (as far as possible) set of hypothetical options; (2) an evaluation of the prior probability (background plausibility) of the various options; (3) an evaluation of the likelihood (explanatory potential) of the various options. This last is a particular strength of Christoph's study, because my own reading experience suggests that explanatory potential is often neglected in exegetical studies relative to background plausibility. This is a major issue because, according to Bayesian theory, explanatory potential and background plausibility are equally important! For instance, consider a text with two competing interpretative options, A and B. Scholars conduct exegesis of the text focusing exclusively on background plausibility and determine that the background plausibility of A is five times that of B. They conclude, accordingly, that the text is five times as likely to mean A as B. Along comes a new scholar who supplements the previous research with an "explanatory potential analysis" and finds that the explanatory potential of B is five times that of A. The new conclusion (posterior), following the Bayesian multiplicative law above, is that meanings A and B are equally probable! I wonder how many exegetical communes opiniones might be overturned if scholars were to consider explanatory potential as important as background plausibility.

Second only to his Bayesian methodology in my list of "likes" about Christoph's book was his lively and helpful discussion of lexical semantics. His treatment of this subject, and how it applies to his Bayesian methodology, was so useful to me that I would be tempted to cite it as a source on lexical semantics (of course only as a supplement to standard works such as Silva's Biblical Words and their Meaning and Nida and Louw's Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament). He offers some amusing comments about the English word nonplussed, which—when used at all—is often used with the exact opposite of its intended meaning.3 This called to my mind an analogous case where the meaning of an expression is held constant but its form is reversed. The English phrase "I couldn't care less" expresses that one's level of interest is minimal. However, one often hears the phrase "I could care less" used with the same intended meaning, even though it literally only that one's level of interest is not maximal. Probably the double negation ("couldn't...less") in the original phrase has tripped up some people whose level of care about aligning semantics with syntax is not maximal. Anyway, I digress.

2.1. Description of argument

Everything I have said so far pertains only to Christoph's introductory chapter, which was the most captivating part of the book to me only because I am more interested in the broad problem of biblical exegesis than the specific problem of what 2 Cor. 2:14b means. Still, the rest of the book is an impressive instantiation of the proposed methodology. Christoph devotes 91 pages to identifying the hypothetical options—what 2 Cor. 2:14b could possibly mean. This is partly because he identifies a need for a fresh lexicographical study of thriambeuō, which he undertakes with the aid of Thesaurus Linguae Graeca (Oh, how I wish to live to see the day when it enters the public domain!) Besides pointing out some shortcomings in previous lexicographical research on thriambeuō, Christoph discusses specific lexical problems such as the semantic range of the verb (particularly when transitive as in 2 Cor. 2:14b) and whether the verb necessarily stresses the direct object's movement in the procession and the object's exhibition. He finds that 
one could define the (or a) meaning of transitive θριαμβεύειν in a way that includes the following components: 
1. the context of the act: a triumphal procession
2. the act itself: causation of [somebody] or [something] to move
3. the accompanying act: a movement of the agent (behind the object)
4. the result of the act: the display of the object to those watching the procession (p. 101)
He thus proposes the definition, "to cause [somebody or something] to move (before oneself) in a triumphal procession in order to display [somebody or something] to the watching crowd" (p. 101).

Now "equipped with several options for interpreting the use of θριαμβεύειν in 2 Cor 2:14b" (p. 116), Christoph proceeds to Part 2, "Evaluating Background Plausibilities." Here, under "external evidence" he discusses issues such as what Paul and his readers might plausibly have known about Roman triumph processions, whether the source of Paul's allusion is a general Roman practice or a specific occurrence of this practice (e.g., Claudius's triumph in 44 C.E.), and whether pagan processions other than the triumph may have influenced Paul's thought. He then proceeds to "internal evidence," offering a detailed discussion of the flow of argument in the immediate context of 2 Cor. 2:14b.

Next comes Part 3, where Christoph evaluates the explanatory potential of competing interpretative options. This entails again coming up with other hypothetical options, this time other ways Paul might have expressed a meaning equivalent to a hypothetical meaning of the text of 2 Cor. 2:14b. Considering first the verb itself, Christoph is able to virtually rule out that Paul used thriambeuein as a "dead metaphor" that no longer evoked the original context of a Roman triumph (p. 206). Other issues he considers are whether transitive thriambeuein is a likely way for Paul to have expressed the idea of exposure to social shame (p. 208), the idea of Paul "as a victorious general who celebrates together with God" (p. 211), the idea of Paul as an incense bearer within the victorious party (p. 212), the idea of Paul as a defeated foe over whom God is celebrating victory (pp. 216-17) and the idea of Paul as a captive "led by God in his triumphal procession" (p. 217). He concludes that the latter meaning is the most probable for 2 Cor. 2:14b in view of its background plausibility and explanatory potential.

Christoph next turns to the explanatory potential of various interpretations of the direct object (hēmas, "us") and the adjuncts (pantote, "always" and en tō Christō, "in Christ"). He finds that "us" "refers specifically to the team that works towards the realisation of Paul's commission" (p. 223), that "always" emphasises that "God is triumphing continuously" (p. 225), and that "in Christ" locates the procession itself, "strengthening the message of the divine agency behind the activity of Paul and his co-workers at the level of the subject matter" (p. 237). Christoph offers a valuable insight on the contribution of "always" to the explanatory potential of certain interpretations: it "automatically implies that what comes after the procession (imprisonment, execution, Roman citizenship, etc.) is not in view" (p. 225).

Commencing his concluding section, Christoph summarises his findings thus far by pointing out that several exegetical options that had performed well in terms of background plausibility "broke down completely" with respect to explanatory potential (which reinforces the methodological importance of the latter). The only options that perform well under both criteria are "Hafemann's suggestion that 14b expresses Paul's apostolic suffering in terms of the triumphal procession" and "Breytenbach's (and Schröter's) interpretation of the triumph as referring to Paul's ministry since his conversion" without necessarily evoking the "captive" aspect (p. 241). He then argues that Paul's metaphor more likely pertains to spatial movement (i.e. the itinerant nature of his ministry) than suffering: Paul wants to offer "the correct understanding of what might not look like a spirit-driven ministry" (p. 243). Christoph then teases out the finer aspects of the metaphor, such as which negative (captivity, shame, death) and positive (under God's control, bringing glory to God) connotations of the triumph imagery are intended. He is particularly interested in whether Paul "wants to transform the perception of his readers [about his mission or]... simply to reaffirm it" (p. 254); he leans toward the former.

In his final chapter, Christoph considers the implications of his interpretation of 2 Cor. 2:14 for Paul's engagement with Roman imperial ideology. His key finding here is that "Paul's use of the triumph imagery demonstrates that he was actively observing and engaging with his Roman environment" (p. 276). While this part of my review has been more descriptive than evaluative, I have made it a subsection within "Likes" simply because the content is so thoroughly researched, well argued and well written.

3. Dislikes

It should be evident that I enjoyed this book thoroughly. The couple of dislikes I am about to mention are of trifling importance compared with the likes mentioned above. My biggest complaint would be that the book ends too abruptly. The section called "Conclusion," and the chapter within it called "Summary of Exegesis," actually still introduce and discuss new ideas throughout, and do not recapitulate the argument and findings to the extent that one would expect. Thus, if one were to return to the book after some time, wanting to quickly summarise the argument and points within a literature survey for instance, one would find it an arduous task—if one had not made careful notes on the first reading, one would probably have to reread the entire book. Furthermore, what is arguably the climax of the book's exegesis is expressed in a somewhat puzzling way:
Thus, the complex move to encourage the Corinthians to identify themselves with the watching crowd only to find themselves challenged in their simplistic perception of Paul's ministry is not as far-fetched as one might think at first. (p. 259, emphasis original)
By stating only that this reading of Paul's intent is less far-fetched than one might think, Christoph leaves open the implication that it is still somewhat far-fetched. Yet by italicizing the sentence and ending a pivotal chapter with it, he signals that he considers it very important. While one appreciates Christoph's care not to overstate his case, it seems he may have undersold the idea. Perhaps this sentence should have been followed with a more positive, though still not dogmatic, expression of the merits of this interpretation.

Finally, there are a few linguistic and stylistic errors, though not enough to be a significant problem. I did not note down all that I noticed (which I think were fewer than ten), but "vine" on p. 16 should be "wine" (the oversight may, ironically, be related to semantic interplay between languages—the very topic Christoph is discussing at this point). There are also some instances where a period (full stop) is used within quotation marks and the sentence continues outside the quotation marks (e.g., p. 18).4 I have not seen this before, and am not sure it is grammatically correct—I think the period should have been omitted.

Now let me arrive at a closing remark: Christoph's monograph is undoubtedly at the vanguard of biblical scholarship. It is a suitable subject for the verb thriambeuō, though it would be more diplomatic to read it intransitively in this case.

Footnotes

  • 1 I do have some publications in biblical studies journals, with hopefully more on the way. See Thomas J. Farrar and Guy J. Williams, "Diabolical Data: A critical inventory of New Testament Satanology," JSNT 39 (2016): 40-71; Thomas J. Farrar and Guy J. Williams, "Talk of the Devil: Unpacking the language of New Testament Satanology," JSNT 39 (2016): 72-96; Thomas J. Farrar, "New Testament Satanology and leading suprahuman opponents in Second Temple Jewish literature: A religion-historical analysis," JTS (forthcoming). I aspire to do an interdisciplinary doctorate in statistics and biblical studies, which is one reason why Christoph's application of Bayesian probability theory to biblical exegesis is of great interest to me.
  • 2 In the case of biblical exegesis, of course, the data itself may be uncertain, and since the "internal" aspect of textual criticism has interdependence with the prior and the posterior, the logic becomes much more complicated. Fortunately, the text seems secure in 2 Cor. 2:14.
  • 3 Actually, this comes later in the book on p. 196, but it is in keeping with his earlier discussion of lexical semantics.
  • 4 'The statement "The cat is black." uses the same concept of 'blackness' as the sentence "The car is black."'

Tuesday 25 July 2017

The Apostolicity of the Post-Apostolic Church (Part 1 of 3): Apostolic origins, teaching and succession, and non-traditional perspectives


Virtually any Christian would agree that "apostolic" is an attribute the Church ought to have. Indeed, "apostolic" is among the four characteristics of the Church specified in the Nicene Creed (the others being "one," "holy" and "catholic"). But what does it mean for the Church to be "apostolic" in the post-apostolic period—indeed, some nineteen centuries after the original apostles died? Contemporary Christian answers to this question vary but fall into three broad categories.

Most Protestant movements view today's Church as "apostolic" only to the extent that it remains faithful to the apostles' doctrines and practices as preserved in the New Testament. This might be termed indirect apostolicity. However, during the past two centuries some Christians have taught that the office of "apostle" has been prophetically restored. Consequently, some churches today—particularly the various "Apostolic Church" sub-denominations and some Pentecostal churches—call their leaders "apostles." This might be termed direct apostolicity.

These are both relatively new answers to the question of what it means for the post-apostolic Church to be apostolic. There is a third answer that was uncontested for well over a millennium of Church history (say, from the third through fifteenth centuries) and is still maintained today by Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican Christians. This answer portrays the apostolicity of the Church in three aspects: apostolic origins, apostolic teaching and apostolic succession. Before explaining further, let us note the extent to which it agrees with the two newer answers described above. The traditional answer agrees that faithfulness to apostolic teaching as preserved in the New Testament is essential to the Church's continued apostolicity. It agrees with one group of Protestants that the office of "apostle" was unique and confined to the early church. However, it agrees with the other group of Protestants that the post-apostolic Church retains a direct kind of apostolicity.


Again, the traditional, Catholic-Orthodox-Anglican view understands the Church's apostolicity under three aspects: apostolic origins, apostolic teaching and apostolic succession. Herein I will focus on the Roman Catholic expression of apostolicity. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church,
The Church is apostolic because she is founded on the apostles, in three ways: 
  • she was and remains built on "the foundation of the Apostles," The witnesses chosen and sent on mission by Christ himself; 
  • with the help of the Spirit dwelling in her, the Church keeps and hands on the teaching, The "good deposit," the salutary words she has heard from the apostles; 
  • she continues to be taught, sanctified, and guided by the apostles until Christ's return, through their successors in pastoral office: the college of bishops, "assisted by priests, in union with the successor of Peter, the Church's supreme pastor" (CCC 857)

The first bullet point highlights the importance of the ancient apostles—something all Christians acknowledge—and stresses their uniqueness. While the sense of the Greek word apostolos is something like "envoy," it gradually became a technical term in Christian circles, denoting those individuals that the risen Jesus personally, verbally commissioned to build and lead the Church. "The Twelve" were of course the most famous group of apostles (Mark 3:14; Rev. 21:14; etc.), but there were others. Also described as apostles within the New Testament are Paul (Rom. 1:1; Gal. 1:1; Acts 14:14; etc.), Barnabas (Acts 14:14; 15:2), James the Lord's brother (Gal. 1:19) and possibly Andronicus and Junia(s) (Rom. 16:7)—this last case being most controversial because it may refer to a female, Junia, as an apostle (though both the name and whether these two are being called apostles are ambiguous). There were, at a minimum, sixteen people who held the office of "apostle" (the Twelve, Matthias as Judas's replacement, James, Barnabas and Paul), but perhaps many more than that.1

Paul seems to imply in 1 Cor. 15:8-9 that being a witness of Jesus's resurrection was a prerequisite for being an apostle (cf. Acts 1:22-26). Moreover, Paul's words "Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me" suggest that the timing of his apostolic commissioning (after Jesus's ascension) was exceptional and that he was the last apostle to be commissioned. There is no indication in the New Testament that more apostles were expected in the future, nor is there any indication that the patristic, medieval or Reformation-era Church ever anticipated a latter-day restoration of the apostolic office. Thus the claim that the apostolic office was recreated unexpectedly ex nihilo in the nineteenth or twentieth century is biblically and historically suspect.


According to the second bullet point above, the Church remains apostolic by handing on the apostles' teaching. The Catechism elsewhere elaborates on the two forms that this teaching took:
In keeping with the Lord's command, the Gospel was handed on in two ways: 
  • orally "by the apostles who handed on, by the spoken word of their preaching, by the example they gave, by the institutions they established, what they themselves had received - whether from the lips of Christ, from his way of life and his works, or whether they had learned it at the prompting of the Holy Spirit"; 
  • in writing "by those apostles and other men associated with the apostles who, under the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit, committed the message of salvation to writing" (CCC 76)
Thus, from a Catholic/Orthodox perspective, apostolic teaching consists not only of the New Testament (in which most of the apostles are not represented as authors) but also of oral apostolic teachings known as "apostolic tradition." This idea may sound strange to Protestant ears, but again it was uncontested in the Church for over a millennium. An example of a practice followed unquestioningly by most Protestants that rests more on apostolic tradition than the New Testament is that of meeting on Sunday for worship and not keeping Saturday as the Sabbath. As Protestant biblical scholar Craig Keener, a leading authority on Acts (and not a Seventh-Day Adventist) states,
Those who regard second- and third-century traditions as normative will observe Sunday, but this need not be normative for churches that start only from Scripture.2
Now, unquestionably the apostles transmitted teachings orally that they considered to have as much authority as their writings (2 Thess. 2:15; 1 Cor. 11:2, 34; 2 John 12; 3 John 13-14). The problem is, how do we know nineteen centuries later what these oral teachings were? We have all probably played the game "Telephone" ("Chinese Whispers" in the U.K.) where a message is whispered from ear to ear around a circle or down a queue of people. The point of the game is to show how radically the initial message changes through this iterative transmission process.3 Authentic "apostolic tradition" could, therefore, not be preserved so as to retain its authority unless the Holy Spirit were somehow involved in the oral transmission process. Enter the doctrine of apostolic succession.


The Catechism explains the relationship between apostolic teaching and apostolic succession thus:
[The apostolic preaching was]...continued in apostolic succession[:] "In order that the full and living Gospel might always be preserved in the Church the apostles left bishops as their successors. They gave them their own position of teaching authority." Indeed, "the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved in a continuous line of succession until the end of time. This living transmission, accomplished in the Holy Spirit, is called Tradition, since it is distinct from Sacred Scripture, though closely connected to it. Through Tradition, "the Church, in her doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes." (CCC 76-78)
And again:
"The criterion that assures unity amid the diversity of liturgical traditions is fidelity to apostolic Tradition, i.e., the communion in the faith and the sacraments received from the apostles, a communion that is both signified and guaranteed by apostolic succession." (CCC 1209)
Without this Spirit-guided apostolic succession there would be no basis for trusting that any teachings of the apostles had been preserved orally. Therefore the Catholic/Orthodox claim that the Church has reliably transmitted "apostolic tradition" stands or falls with the doctrine of apostolic succession.


We have seen that the doctrine of apostolic tradition rests on the doctrine of apostolic succession. The latter is a tangible, historical claim: namely, that the bishops of the Church today are in an unbroken line of succession going back to the apostles, who set this process in motion. However, it would be a serious mistake to view the doctrine of apostolic succession as merely a matter of history or ecclesiastical politics. It is a theological idea: apostolic succession is a process believed to have been initiated and perpetuated by the Holy Spirit in order to safeguard the Church and her gospel. It is one of the means by which Christ fulfilled his promises to found the Church on a rock so that the gates of Hades might not prevail against her, supply the Church with the Holy Spirit perpetually, nourish the Church, be with the Church until the close of the age (Matt. 16:18; 28:20; John 14:16-17; Eph. 5:29).

Apostolic succession is a big part of the Catholic/Orthodox answer to the question, "What became of the Church after the apostles died?" Post-Reformation Christian movements tend to offer different—and very pessimistic—answers to this question: the Church was devastated by a great falling away and became largely corrupt, whether rapidly or gradually. Hence the need for reform or, in more radical sectarian circles, restoration of the long-lost apostolic faith. Such movements point to numerous New Testament passages about doctrinal corruption and heresy that would afflict the post-apostolic Church (2 Thess. 2:3-12; 1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 4:3-4; 1 John 4:1-3). According to post-Reformation thinkers, the power grab resulting from "apostolic succession" claims caused or accelerated this corruption. By contrast, from a Catholic/Orthodox perspective apostolic succession is a divinely ordained protection against heresy. (We will see later that St. Irenaeus made exactly this point in the second century.)

What provision did God make for the survival of the early Church? According to 19th-century Christadelphian apologist Robert Roberts, the provisions God made were the apostles and their writings, the New Testament. "Apostolic tradition," he insists, could not have worked.
If the early churches, consisting of men and women fresh from the abominations and immoralities of heathenism, and without the authoritative standard of the completed Scripture which now exists, had been left to the mere power of apostolic tradition intellectually received, they could not have held together. The winds of doctrine, blowing about through the activity of 'men of corrupt minds,' would have broken them from their moorings, and they would have been tossed to and fro in the billows of uncertain and conflicting report and opinion, and finally stranded in hopeless shipwreck. This catastrophe was prevented by the gifts of the spirit. Properly qualified men, as to moral and intellectual parts, were made the repositories of these gifts, and empowered to 'speak and exhort, and rebuke with all authority.' They 'ruled' the communities over which they were placed, feeding the flock of God over which the Holy Spirit had made them overseers... In this way the early churches were built up and edified. The work of the apostles was conserved, improved, and carried to a consummation. The faith was completed and consolidated by the voice of inspiration, speaking through the spiritually-appointed leaders of the churches. By this means the results of gospel-preaching in the first century, when there were no railways, telegraphs, or other means of a rapid circulation of ideas, instead of evaporating to nothing, as, otherwise, they would have done, were secured and made permanent, both as regards that generation and succeeding centuries.4
Now, Roberts's picture of the early church is fraught with inconsistencies. During the first century, most "converts" to Christianity were Jews and Gentile God-fearers. It was in the second and third centuries that converts consisted largely "of men and women fresh from the abominations and immoralities of heathenism". Thus, according to Roberts's own model, the Holy Spirit and apostolic authority vanished precisely when they were needed most. Furthermore, the second-century Church was still "without the authoritative standard of the completed Scripture which now exists". The apostles did not bequeath to the Church a completed New Testament canon; it took generations for the boundaries of the canon to take shape and centuries to be finaliseda task left to post-apostolic ecclesiastical authorities. What provision did God make for the interim period when there were no longer apostles and there was not yet the "authoritative standard of the completed Scripture"? Roberts does not answer this question, but his logic requires that God must have made some provision and not merely abandoned the post-apostolic Church. Is it not at least plausible that, just as God used Spirit-led apostles to preserve and transmit the teachings of Jesus after His ascension, so God used other Spirit-led men to preserve and transmit the teachings of the apostles—the apostolic tradition—after the apostles died?

Thus, far from demonstrating that ecclesiastical authority and the Holy Spirit were no longer needed after the apostles, Roberts's own arguments suggest the opposite. His rejection of "the mere power of apostolic tradition intellectually received" is moot if the apostolic tradition was transmitted by the Holy Spirit rather than merely the human intellect as Robert assumes. This assumption in turn rests on the assumption that the apostles had no divinely appointed successors, which rests on an argument from silence, namely that God "never, so far as we have any evidence, appointed 'successors' [to the apostles]."5

If, then, we can produce evidence for apostolic succession, Roberts's model of God's plan for the early Church—already severely weakened by the chronological gap between the apostles and the availability of a complete New Testament—will come crashing down. In the second half of this article, we will look at evidence for apostolic succession in Christian writings from the late first through late second centuries.

Footnotes

  • 1 Paul in 1 Cor. 15:6 refers to more than five hundred people who met the condition of having witnessed the risen Lord, though this does not necessarily mean they were all apostles. Didache 11.3-6, written probably toward the end of the first century, refers to apostles quite generically, as though they were fairly numerous, although by this time probably nearly all of the aforementioned sixteen had died. One must bear in mind, however, that ecclesiological terminology was not standardized in the first century, so it is not certain that the author of the Didache understood the term "apostle" as technically as Paul, for example, seems to have done.
  • 2 There is some limited anecdotal evidence in the New Testament that the first day of the week held special significance—see Keener's comments on Acts 20:7 and 1 Cor. 16:2—but nothing like a decree that the Sabbath has been set aside or supplanted by the first day of the week.
  • 3 In my own experience, the message has sometimes been preserved almost perfectly, rather amusingly undermining the point the facilitator was trying to make! Nevertheless, the principle is valid that errors gradually accumulate through iterative oral transmission of a message.
  • 4 Robert Roberts, Christendom Astray, p. 148.
  • 5 Robert Roberts, Christendom Astray, p. 147, emphasis added.

Saturday 15 July 2017

What "Yetzer in the Wilderness"? A response to Jonathan Burke on the Devil in the Synoptic Gospels

Burke’s series The Yetzer in the Wilderness

Christadelphian apologist Jonathan Burke and I have had several written exchanges over the years, especially on the subject of (the) Satan. Much of it has focused on the wilderness temptation narrative from the Gospels (Matt. 4:1-11; Mark 1:13; Luke 4:1-13).1 One of Burke’s main contributions to this exchange has been an eight-part series entitled The Yetzer in the Wilderness: Jesus and the Evil Inclination. Burke subsequently pointed out that I had responded "to just one of [his] arguments." This was true,2 and there is a reason for it. I had long intended to do a detailed study of the Second Temple Jewish background of New Testament Satanology, and it made sense to reserve comment on Burke's arguments in this area until my study was complete. After much ado I submitted this study to the Journal of Theological Studies, which has accepted it for publication. Copyright rules prevent me from reproducing material from the manuscript here, so I will respond directly to Burke’s arguments here while referring the reader to my forthcoming publication for more detailed and fully referenced argumentation on some of the relevant Second Temple texts.

[Edit, 24/10/2017: a preprint version of the above-mentioned Journal of Theological Studies article can be downloaded here.]

The Yetzer in the Wilderness does not commence with an introduction explaining the purpose, thesis or methodology of the study, nor does it end with a conclusion summarising the findings. The first installment, Literary genre of the wilderness temptation (to which I have responded in painstaking detail previously) jumps straight into the question of the genre of the Gospel temptation stories. The second installment, Identifying the adversary, reads somewhat like an introduction. Here Burke acknowledges that the entity referred to as “the devil” in the temptation stories is regarded by most scholars as a supernatural evil being. He states that “This conclusion is vulnerable to criticism” but does not state his own position up front. One can infer from the title of the series (and his other writings) that he identifies “the devil” with the yetzer ra, the evil inclination within each person’s heart.

Burke then offers three “lines of evidence” that, in his view, make the typical interpretation of the Satan in the Synoptic Gospels (as a transcendent being) untenable:
1. “the most common terms used in pre-Christian Second Temple literature for a supernatural evil being, are not used in the Synoptics… In contrast, the [Satanological] terms used in the Synoptic temptation accounts have almost no pre-Christian witness in Second Temple literature as a reference to a specific supernatural evil being.”
2. “Ethical dualism and psychological dualism are dominant in the Synoptics, rather than the cosmological dualism which would be expected if a supernatural evil being was present in the temptation accounts.”
3. “There are no Old Testament or Second Temple parallels to the temptation accounts; the earliest analogs appear in the Tannaitic literature of the second century.”
The third “line of evidence” is not a line of evidence at all, but an argument from alleged silence. Burke cites no scholarship in support of the alleged silence—and in fact there are several important Second Temple parallels to the temptation accounts.3

The second “line of evidence” is likewise an opinion not substantiated with any evidence. The eighth and final part of Burke’s study is entitled Dualism in the Synoptics, and it is here that one expects to find his second claim defended. Surprisingly, this section merely defines three types of dualism (cosmological, ethical and psychological) and then abruptly ends, offering no argumentation for Burke’s previously stated claim that ethical and psychological dualism are dominant in the Synoptics rather than cosmological dualism. One can add here that the claim itself is rooted in a false dilemma: it sets ethical and psychological dualism in antithesis with cosmological dualism, whereas all of these kinds of dualism are compatible. A similar false dichotomy (between anthropological and mythological aetiologies of evil) underlies and invalidates Burke’s methodology in his peer-reviewed article on Satan in the Apostolic Fathers.4

This leaves us with Burke’s religion-historical claim about terminology to address—the only one of his three claims for which he provides any supporting argumentation! The five remaining parts of The Yetzer in the Wilderness discuss four specific Satanological terms (Satan, the devil, the evil one, the tempter) followed by a summary. Before addressing Burke's arguments in detail, I need to point out some methodological problems with his study.

Methodological problems with Burke’s study

(1) Burke overemphasises terms to the neglect of concepts.

For example, Second Temple literature features figures—such as "Mastema" in Jubilees and Belial and related figures in Qumran texts—who are leading transcendent opponents with considerable conceptual similarity to the Synoptic Satan. Are these parallels irrelevant as religion-historical background to the Synoptic Satan merely because this leading transcendent opponent has a different designation?

(2) Burke neglects the wider Synoptic context of the Satanological terms he discusses.

Mark’s account of Jesus’s wilderness temptation (1:13) uses one Satanological term—satanas—that occurs five other times in this Gospel (3:23 [twice]; 3:26; 4:15; 8:33). Matthew’s account (4:1-11) uses three Satanological terms—peirazōn, satanas and diabolos—of which satanas occurs thrice more (12:26 [twice]; 16:23) and diabolos occurs twice more (13:39; 25:41). Luke’s account (4:1-13) uses only diabolos, which occurs once more in his Gospel (8:12) and twice in Acts (10:38; 13:10). If one concedes the equivalence of diabolos and satanas for Luke (which should be obvious from his redaction of Mark 4:15 in Luke 8:12), we can add Luke’s seven uses of satanas (Luke 10:18; 11:18; 13:16; 22:3; 22:31; Acts 5:3; 26:18).

Obviously, this data—the same terms, used by the same authors, within the same documents—is of crucial importance to correctly interpreting how the Synoptic writers understood the entity that tempted Jesus. Yet Burke’s study inexplicably ignores it!

The most extensive Satanological pericope in the Synoptic Gospels apart from the wilderness temptation is undoubtedly the Beelzeboul controversy and accompanying parable of the strong man (Mark 3:22-27; Matt. 12:24-29 cp. 9:34; 10:25; Luke 11:15-22). Here, Jesus implicitly identifies the Satan as the prince of demons, the strong man whom he is overcoming through his exorcisms.5 This pericope, present in all three Synoptic Gospels, presents a fundamental problem for Burke’s view that the Satan is the anthropological yetzer—a problem Burke's study makes no effort to address. Similarly, Matthew depicts the Devil as the object of eschatological punishment along with “his angels” (Matt. 25:41).6 That the Devil leads a group of angels clearly identifies him as a supernatural being rather than an anthropological abstraction, yet once again Burke’s study ignores this evidence. Luke reports Jesus’s statement, “I saw the Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” made in response to the disciples’ joyful report about their successful exorcistic ministry (Luke 10:17-19).7 The demons are implicitly identified with “the power of the enemy,” so here too the Satan is implicitly identified as a heavenly being who rules demons. Yet again, Burke neglects to explain how this passage squares with his view that the Satan is reducible to the evil yetzer within human nature.

(3) Burke relies heavily on negative arguments.

As the title of Burke’s study suggests, his central claim is that the Satan/Devil/tempter in the Synoptic wilderness temptation narrative is the yetzer ra, the evil inclination within the human heart. However, his study focuses primarily on arguing against interpreting the Satan/Devil/tempter as a supernatural opponent on the grounds of insufficient religion-historical precedent. Even if this negative argument were successful—as we shall see, it is not—we would still not have a "yetzer in the wilderness"; we would simply have a weaker case for a supernatural opponent (albeit one that could still stand based on the contextual data on the Satan/Devil within the Gospels). The positive evidence Burke offers from Second Temple Jewish literature for his yetzer interpretation is confined to two brief passages: Sir. 21:27 and 11QPlea for Deliverance 19.15 (discussed below).

These methodological shortcomings are already sufficient to invalidate Burke’s claims concerning the opponent in the Synoptic Gospels. Nevertheless, let us proceed to examine his discussion of four specific Synoptic Satanological terms.

Burke's religion-historical survey of Synoptic Satanological Terms

(1) (the) Satan

Burke states that “In Second Temple Period literature the term ‘satan’ (whether in Hebrew or Greek), is predominantly used as a common noun rather than a personal name.” I would agree that ‘satan’ does not clearly appear as a personal name in pre-Christian literature. Indeed, in my forthcoming study in JTS I argue that ho satanas is probably a title rather than a name in most New Testament occurrences, better translated “the Satan” than “Satan.” However, whether ‘satan’ is used as a personal name is distinct from whether ‘satan’—when preceded by the article—designates a particular transcendent being, the Adversary par excellence. Stokes, who also does not find evidence of ‘Satan’ as a personal name in Second Temple literature, nonetheless firmly asserts the latter point:
The Hebrew Scriptures contain several different kinds of satans. They speak of humans in the capacity of attackers or executioners as satans. They speak of heavenly satans, serving the Deity as executioners of the wicked. They also speak of a particular satan, the Satan, who serves God as attacker or executioner of the wicked and, in the case of Job, as attacker of a righteous person. While it was this individual, the Satan, who especially piqued the imaginations of earlier interpreters and who would become the best known of the satans, early Jewish literature would continue to speak of other satans as well… authors continued to use the title ‘the Satan’ to speak of a particular superhuman individual. This title seems to have been replaced by others in certain works, such as ‘the Prince of Mastema’ in Jubilees and ‘Belial’ in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It remained popular in other circles, such as those that produced the New Testament. In these writings, the title appears transliterated as ὁ Σατανᾶς or translated as ὁ διάβολος.8
Burke begins his discussion of the religion-historical background of ‘satan’ with Sirach, inexplicably neglecting to discuss the Hebrew Bible, which is obviously a crucial source for understanding this term. In the Hebrew Bible, as is well known, śāṭān appears numerous times as a common noun referring to humans. In Numbers 22:22, 32 it is used descriptively, though not as a designation, for the angel of YHWH. In 1 Chr. 21:1 the anarthrous term probably denotes an anonymous celestial adversary, though a minority of scholars regard this being as human. Most important for our purposes are the occurrences of the arthrous word haśśāṭān in Job 1-2 and Zech. 3:1-2, which are—besides Sir. 21:27—the only unambiguously arthrous and pre-Christian occurrences of ‘satan.’9

There is a scholarly consensus that the setting of Job 1-2 and Zech. 3:1-2 is YHWH’s divine council, and that haśśāṭān in both passages is therefore a celestial being. This is weighty evidence in support of interpreting ho satanas in the Synoptic Gospels as a supernatural being—the more so since the Synoptic writers likely regarded Job and Zechariah as Scripture10—so it is incomprehensible that Burke ignores it. (Numerous scholars have identified the Satan’s “demand” or “request” in Luke 22:31 as an echo of Job’s prologue.)11

Two points concerning haśśāṭān in Job 1-2 and Zech. 3:1-2 that are disputed amongst scholars12 are the figure’s moral character and whether the term denotes a specific being or an office or role that hypothetically could be filled by different beings. Most scholars regard haśśāṭān in Job and Zechariah as either morally ambiguous or evil; all agree however that haśśāṭān is subservient to YHWH. Burke makes much of the moral character issue (in 1 Enoch, since he does not discuss the Hebrew Bible), but it is not very important. The Satan remains subservient to God in the New Testament,13 and his evil character in the New Testament can be understood as an interpretive resolution of the moral ambiguity in Job and Zechariah. Whether haśśāṭān in Job and Zechariah designates a specific personal being or merely a specific portfolio in the divine council is also not very important, since later Second Temple texts (see below on Jubilees, Parables of Enoch and the LXX) and the New Testament clearly understand the Satan as a specific being.

Burke states as though factual that in Sir. 21:27, “the Greek term [ho satanas] is used of the evil inclination,” citing two scholars who take this position. This is far from factual, however. Burke fails to observe that numerous scholars regard ho satanas as denoting the proverbial (human) adversary here.14 I offer detailed exegesis of this text in my forthcoming JTS study, arguing that the original Hebrew (which does not survive at this point) probably used śāṭān for a generic human adversary, but that the Greek translator has taken it to refer to the Satan, a particular celestial being. I further argue that the translator does not oppose belief in the celestial Satan per se, but opposes cursing the Satan. This is all to some extent conjectural, given the very limited context we have for interpreting Sirach’s ho satanas, but I believe my interpretation is less conjectural than the ho satanas = evil yetzer interpretation. After all, Sirach uses the term yetzer in 15:14 (cf. Heb. MS A; Greek translation has diaboulion), and could have used it here had the author wished to make such an identification.

Burke states,
In 1 Enoch the term appears only four times (41:9; 53:3; 54:6) [sic],15 and is not used as a proper name; instead Shemihazah and Azâzêl are the names of the supernatural evil opponent. Additionally, the satan in 1 Enoch is an obedient servant of God, not an evil adversary.
Burke neglects to distinguish between the different parts of the Enochic corpus. This is significant since Shemihazah only appears in the Book of the Watchers (chapters 1-36), while the term satan occurs only in the Book of Parables (chapters 37-71), which was composed centuries later (usually dated to around the time of Herod the Great).16 Furthermore, Burke erroneously states that “All references to satan are found in the Aramaic texts at Qumran”. In fact, none of the references to satan are found in the Aramaic texts at Qumran. The Book of Parables survives only in Ethiopic; no fragments of it have been discovered at Qumran.

Azazel (Asael in the original Aramaic of the Book of the Watchers) is common to both the Book of the Watchers and the Book of Parables. In the Book of the Watchers he is one of the Watchers’ leaders, while in the Book of Parables he is the main supernatural opponent. The plural satans in 1 En. 40.7 and 65.6 are undoubtedly supernatural beings.17 The singular ‘[the] Satan’ seems to be a specific supernatural being in 1 En. 53.3 and 54.6, a point Burke apparently concedes since he contests only whether “the satan” is obedient or evil. In fact, “the Satan” may actually be a title of Azazel in 1 En. 54.6,18 in which case he is unambiguously evil. It is also worth noting here the striking parallel between 1 En. 54.5-6 and Matt. 25:41 (concerning fiery eschatological punishment prepared for the wicked angels), which has led some scholars to assert Matthew’s literary dependence on this text.19 In 1 En. 53.3 [the] Satan seems to be cast in the role of punisher of wicked humans, which also has New Testament parallels (e.g., 1 Cor. 5:5; 10:10; Heb. 2:14; 11:28).20

Coming to Jubilees, Burke deals with this important text in just one sentence:
In Jubilees 10:11 the term ‘satan’ as a proper name was interpolated into the text by later scribes; textual evidence indicates the original word was Mastema, and all other instances of the term in Jubilees (23:29; 40:9; 46:2; 50:5), use it as a common noun.
I agree with Burke that the last four occurrences of the word ‘satan’ in Jubilees are common nouns. They may refer to human or supernatural opponents or both. Concerning Jub. 10.11, Burke states as though factual that the original word was Mastema. I think it likely that the original text at Jub. 10.11 referred to “the Satan,”21 but the point is not important enough to pursue here. Certainly the primary designation for the supernatural opponent in Jubilees is Mastema, which is more correctly understood as a title, “the prince of hostility” (Heb. שר המשטמה, a term preserved in the Book of Asaph the Physician as well as in 4QPseudo-Jubilees, which depend on Jubilees.) This figure is important to interpreting the Synoptic Satan for two reasons. First, his designation as “prince” and his role as ruler of demons correspond to Beelzeboul in the Synoptic Gospels, who is identified by Jesus with the Satan. Second, the words “mastema” and “satan” derive from cognate Hebrew roots,22 so “Mastema’s” designation is probably dependent on the biblical haśśāṭān. More certain is the dependence of “Mastema’s” functions in Jubilees on the role of haśśāṭān in Job, which has been noticed by many scholars especially in Jubilees’ rewriting of the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac from Gen. 22.23 Thus in Jubilees we have a supernatural opponent with important connections to both “the Satan” in the Hebrew Bible and “the Satan” in the Synoptic Gospels—surely an important link between the two, but one that Burke’s study overlooks.
Significantly, the authors of both Jubilees and the Parables of Enoch appear to have understood haśśāṭān in the Hebrew Bible as a specific transcendent being. Therefore, regardless of whether the authors of Job and Zechariah themselves understood haśśāṭān as a specific individual, such an understanding of haśśāṭān is attested in pre-Christian Second Temple Judaism.

Burke rules three other texts—the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Testament of Job and the Greek Apocalypse of Moses—out of court, although they all use the term ho satanas for a supernatural opponent, because of uncertainties about their date and provenance. This is a sensible, conservative methodological step, and one I also take in my JTS study: I do not rely on these texts to reconstruct the pre-Christian background of the term ‘satan’ due to the risk of anachronism. However, Burke should be wary of making an opposite error. If he wished to argue from silence that “the Satan” positively did not denote a supernatural opponent in pre-Christian Judaism, the mere possibility that some of these works are pre-Christian or preserve pre-Christian Satanological traditions would pose a significant risk.

Concerning the Qumran literature, Burke probably correctly states that the word ‘satan’ “is used rarely, and only as a common noun.” However, he goes on to claim concerning the Plea for Deliverance, “Tigchelaar has argued that here [‘satan’] is used of the evil inclination.” In Burke’s later summary this changes to a factual statement: “in 11Q5 xix 13-16 (the ‘Prayer for Deliverance’), [the word ‘satan’] refers to the evil inclination.” In fact, not only does Burke have little scholarly backing for this interpretation; he appears not even to have the support of Tigchelaar, the only scholar he cites in support!24

A final notable omission from Burke’s religion-historical survey of the Synoptic term satanas is the Pauline corpus. The generally accepted Pauline epistles, which almost certainly pre-date the Synoptic Gospels and come from the same movement within Second Temple Judaism, use the term (ho) satanas seven times (Rom. 16:20; 1 Cor. 5:5; 7:5; 2 Cor. 2:11; 11:14; 12:7; 1 Thess. 2:18). If one is willing to accept disputed epistles as Pauline there are up to three additional occurrences (2 Thess. 2:9; 1 Tim. 1:20; 5:15). While exegesis of these passages cannot detain us here, several of them (e.g., 2 Cor. 11:14, 12:7, 1 Thess. 2:18 and 2 Thess. 2:9) appear to clearly depict the Satan as an external, quasi-angelic opponent and seem irreconcilable with an identification of the Satan with the anthropological yetzer.

(2) The Devil

Coming to the Greek term ho diabolos, Burke discusses the Septuagint and a few later texts. I agree with him that the relevant data is fairly meagre, but he has overlooked some important points.

In both Job and Zechariah, the LXX translators have rendered haśśāṭān with ho diabolos. As Wieger points out, ho diabolos (“the slanderer”) has a pejorative connotation that haśśāṭān lacks,25 indicating that the translator understood haśśāṭān to be evil. Furthermore, since “the slanderer” is an unlikely title for a portfolio in the divine council, it appears the translator (like the authors of Jubilees and Parables of Enoch) understood haśśāṭān as the designation of a particular being rather than as an office or role. Nevertheless, in the LXX ho diabolos is not yet a technical term reserved for the Satan, as it arguably is by the time of the NT. This is evident from the use of this term for Haman in Esth. 7:4, 8:1 LXX.26
 
Burke erroneously attributes the term ho diabolos to several other Second Temple texts where diabolos is actually anarthrous (1 Chr. 21:1 LXX; Ps. 108:6 LXX; 1 Macc. 1:36; Wis. 2:24). Of these, Wis. 2:24 has been identified as referring to the Devil, though as Burke observes this interpretation is increasingly challenged by scholars.27 I do not consider any of the proposed interpretations conclusive, but would not rely on Wis. 2:24 to reconstruct pre-Christian Jewish ideas about the Devil.

Burke mentions a reference to the Devil in Philo’s Questions and answers on Genesis (which survives only in an Armenian version), but relies on Yonge’s dated translation; Marcus’s more recent work omits this sentence,28 which looks like a late interpolation since Philo nowhere else refers to the Devil.

Burke again conservatively rules a number of texts out of evidence due to uncertain/late date and/or provenance (Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Ascension of Isaiah,29 Greek version of Jubilees, History of the Rechabites, Greek Apocalypse of Moses, Testament of Solomon, etc.) or text-critical problems (Joseph and Aseneth 12.9). I have no objections here. I think Burke’s discussion of the Ascension of Moses is highly problematic, but while I deal with this text in some detail in my JTS study, the literary-historical problems with study of this text are too complicated to treat here. Anyway, regardless of the source of Jude’s allusion to a quarrel between Michael the archangel and the Devil (Jude 9), the allusion shows that the source existed in the first century and influenced the early church. The idea of a being who quarrels with an archangel must therefore be considered as part of the pre-Christian Jewish background on the term ho diabolos. This is significant since a quarrel between an archangel and an evil angel is a far more plausible scenario in a Second Temple Jewish setting than a quarrel between an archangel and the evil inclination.

(3) The Tempter

Burke states—correctly, as far as I can tell—that the term “the tempter” (Greek: ho peirazōn) has no pre-Christian Jewish witness. This is not very important, since peirasmos (testing or temptation) is unquestionably one of the Satan’s functions in Job 1-2. What the Satan proposes to God and then executes (Job 1:9-11; 2:4-5) is clearly a test of Job’s loyalty to God, even if the word peirasmos does not occur in the LXX text. The role of the anonymous satan in 1 Chr. 21:1—inciting a righteous man to commit a sinful act—can likewise clearly be described as temptation, as can some of the exploits of “Mastema” in Jubilees (cf. 17.15-18.12), Belial in the Damascus Document (cf. CD 4.12-19) and “the satans” in 1 En. 65.6. Here again, Burke focuses myopically on a term rather than the concept it denotes.

One can add that Matthew is not the first writer to use “the tempter” as a Satanological designation—Paul does so in 1 Thess. 3:5. Thus, what was said above about ho satanas in the Pauline corpus is also relevant here.

(4) The Evil One

I am not entirely sure of Burke’s rationale for discussing this Satanological term: he otherwise limits himself to terms that appear in the Synoptic wilderness temptation accounts and ignores other Synoptic Satanological terms that appear only outside the wilderness temptation accounts.30 Nevertheless, let us consider what he says about this term:
The term ‘the evil one’ (ton ponērou), has no Second Temple pre-Christian witness as a reference to a supernatural evil being.
To begin with, “ton ponērou” mangles the Greek, combining an accusative article with a genitive adjective. But what can we say of Burke’s assertion that “the evil one” is not attested as a Second Temple Jewish designation for a supernatural being? I will not object too strenuously to Burke’s dismissal of the instances in Jubilees—the term “evil one” is generic here and it is ambiguous whether it refers to human or supernatural opposition or both. Due to problems of date, provenance and text, I am happy with his dismissal of the instances in 2 Enoch, the Story of Ahikar, Pseudo-Ezekiel, History of the Rechabites, 2 Baruch and Odes of Solomon. I would, in similar fashion, dismiss his late Talmudic evidence.31 I will not quibble either with Burke’s dismissal of 1 En. 69.15, which possibly refers to “the evil one” but is text-critically problematic and can be interpreted in other ways.32

Burke misses some important evidence, however. Most significant is the apparent reference to Belial in 4QBerakhot as הרשע, “the evil one” (4Q286 7 ii 5; the fragmentary text truncates before the ayin, but no other construction seems possible).33 What is odd about this omission by Burke is that he cites Black, one of the scholars who pointed out this reference to “the evil one,” but erroneously cites him as supporting the claim that this Satanological designation has no pre-Christian witness.34

The name Melkiresa (literally “ruler of evil,”) which occurs in two Qumran texts (4QCurses and 4QVisions of Amram), is a close analogue of “the evil one”—both at least are Satanological designations with “evil” as the operative word. Finally, Philo refers to unholy angels as hoi ponēroi (“the evil ones”) in On the Giants 17.35

Burke states that the lack of Second Temple Jewish precedent for “the evil one” has prompted “many scholars to argue that ton ponērou [sic] should not even be read as ‘the evil one’ in Matthew.” He does not cite any of these “many scholars.” However, while a Satanological referent is uncertain in Matt. 5:37, 6:13 and 13:38 due to the ambiguous gender of the genitive tou ponērou,36 the nominative ho ponēros in Matt. 13:19 is unambiguously masculine and unquestionably refers to Satan, being a redaction of ho satanas in Mark 4:15.

The attestation of “evil one” for supernatural opponents in Second Temple Jewish literature is very sparse, but not absent as Burke claims. Moreover, even apart from religion-historical precedent, “the evil one” is a rather obvious way to refer to the ultimate opponent and leader of forces of evil. Burke's skepticism that “the evil one” was used as a Satanological designation by Matthew is unwarranted given that this designation occurs in numerous other early Christian texts.37

Conclusion

As noted earlier, the structure of Burke’s study does not seem to have a true conclusion. However, the following comes closest to a concluding statement:
The combined weight of this lexical evidence casts serious doubt on the suggestion that the original audience of the Synoptic temptation accounts would have understood the satanological terminology as a reference to a specific supernatural evil being well known within Second Temple Period Judaism and the early Judeo-Christian milieu.
In line with our methodological criticism earlier, we can again note the negative nature of this statement. Despite Burke’s study being entitled The Yetzer in the Wilderness, he does not even draw a positive conclusion about the Synoptic Satan being identifiable as the yetzer to the original audience. He restricts himself to “cast[ing] serious doubt” on whether the original audience would have understood the Satanological terminology as referring to a supernatural evil being.

Has Burke succeeded in even this more modest objective of casting serious doubt on the standard identification of the Synoptic Gospels’ wilderness tempter? In my judgment, not at all. First, he focuses exclusively on terminology whereas he should also consider concepts. Second, he incomprehensibly ignores the broader Synoptic Gospel context of the Satanological terminology used in the temptation stories. Third, his religion-historical survey of the terms “Satan,” “Devil,” “tempter” and “evil one” understates their footprint as Satanological terminology in Second Temple Jewish literature. Concerning “the Satan,” Burke ignores the important witness of the Hebrew Bible, takes as factual a disputed interpretation of ho satanas in Sir. 21:27 and an unattested interpretation of śāṭān in the Plea for Deliverance, downplays the significance of the Parables of Enoch, fails to recognise Jubilees’ “Mastema” as an intermediate development between “the Satan” of the Hebrew Bible and that of the New Testament, and neglects the evidence of the Pauline corpus. Concerning “the Devil,” Burke misses important clues in the LXX translation of Job and Zechariah, too easily dismisses the evidence of the “Ascension of Moses” and fails to properly address the evidence of Jude 9’s source (evidence that bears weight irrespective of the problem of identifying this source). Concerning “the tempter,” Burke focuses exclusively on the term and fails to notice that the function of temptation or testing is repeatedly attributed to superhuman opponents in Second Temple literature. Concerning “the evil one,” Burke misses the crucial evidence of 4QBerakhot.

On the whole, Burke’s study can be described as a methodologically flawed and exegetically tendentious effort to find a religion-historical foothold for Christadelphians’ idiosyncratic reading of the Gospel temptation narrative, and more broadly their unique doctrine of the biblical Devil. If these are the best exegetical arguments that can be mounted, one wonders that there are not more Christadelphians calling for an internal review of the matter. The traditional Christian doctrine of the Devil as a transcendent opponent has been vindicated by biblical scholarship of the past century—not that it was ever in doubt among those for whom the teachings of the Church, faithfully transmitted through the ages, are authoritative.


Footnotes

  • 1 Following a critique of Christadelphian interpretations of the temptation narrative that I wrote in December 2013 and a couple of blog articles on the subject thereafter (The temptations of Jesus and Roman law and Who tempted Jesus in the wilderness? Ten points to ponder), Burke wrote an eight-part online series under the heading The Yetzer in the Wilderness: Jesus and the Evil Inclination as well as a seven-part series under the heading Satan & demons: Thomas Farrar’s commentary. Most of the parts of the latter series do not advance any exegetical or theological arguments that merit a response. I have provided a detailed response to his comments on “the angels that sinned” (2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6). Responding to one line of Burke's argument in The Yetzer in the Wilderness, I then wrote a four-part blog series entitled Form, Genre, and Historicity of the Wilderness Temptations of Jesus in the Gospels: A Response to Jonathan Burke (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). Burke responded further with an article entitled Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, to which I in turn responded with A further reply to Jonathan Burke on the devil in the Gospel temptation stories.
  • 2 I would note, however, that I have numerous studies on Satan and demons going back to 2014 that have interacted critically with Burke's nearly 200-page tome Satan and Demons: A Reply to Anthony Buzzard (a comprehensive apologia for the Christadelphian position on this subject), to which to my knowledge neither Burke nor any other Christadelphian has responded to date. I would highlight, in particular, The Enemy is the Devil: The parables of Jesus and Christadelphian satanology and ‘When an unclean spirit goes out of a person’: An Assessment of the Accommodation Theory of Demon Possession and Exorcism in the Synoptic Gospels.
  • 3 Some of these are mentioned in part two of my series on Form, Genre, and Historicity of the Wilderness Temptations of Jesus in the Gospels.
  • 4 Jonathan Burke, "Satan and Demons in the Apostolic Fathers: A Minority Report," Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 81 (2016), 127-68. For an excellent critique of such false dichotomies, see James P. Davies, "Evil’s Aetiology and False Dichotomies in Jewish Apocalyptic and Paul," in Chris Keith and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (eds.), Evil in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity (WUNT 2/417; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 169-89.
  • 5 For further discussion of Beelzeboul and the strong man, see Thomas J. Farrar and Guy J. Williams, "Diabolical Data: A critical inventory of New Testament Satanology," JSNT 39 (2016), 46-47, 51.
  • 6 For a refutation of Christadelphian attempts to construe these angels as human "messengers," see my article When is an angelos not an angel?.
  • 7 For a survey of possible interpretations of the saying in Luke 10:18, see Simon J. Gathercole, "Jesus' Eschatological Vision of the Fall of Satan: Luke 10,18 Reconsidered," ZNW 94 (2003), 143-63.
  • 8 Ryan E. Stokes, "What is a Demon, What is an Evil Spirit, and What is a Satan?", in Jan Dochhorn, Susanne Rudnig-Zelt, and Benjamin Wold (eds.), Das Böse, der Teufel und Dämonen—Evil, the Devil, and Demons (WUNT 2/412; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 269-70.
  • 9 Since the Ethiopic language has no definite article, we cannot be sure whether the term ‘satan’ was arthrous or anarthrous in the Semitic originals of the Parables of Enoch and Jubilees, since the term survives only in Ethiopic versions.
  • 10 While the Synoptic Gospels do not explicitly cite Job, and a discussion of the formation of the biblical canon is beyond our scope, Matthew quotes Zechariah as prophecy in Matt. 21:5 (cf. 23:35; 27:9).
  • 11 See references in forthcoming JTS study.
  • 12 See further discussion and references in forthcoming JTS study.
  • 13 See especially Sydney H. T. Page, "Satan: God's Servant," JETS 50 (2007), 449-65.
  • 14 E.g., John G. Snaith, Ecclesiasticus (CBC; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 110; Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira (AB 39; New York: Doubleday, 1987), 311-12; Christian Kurzewitz, Weisheit und Tod: Die Ätiologie des Todes in der Sapientia Salomonis (TANZ 50; Tübingen: Francke, 2010), 166 n. 483.
  • 15 The four occurrences of the term are actually in 1 En. 40.7; 53.3; 54.6; 65.6.
  • 16 See James H. Charlesworth, "The Date and Provenance of the Parables of Enoch," in Darrell L. Bock and James H. Charlesworth (eds.), Parables of Enoch: A Paradigm Shift (Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 11; London: T&T Clark, 2013), 56.
  • 17 In 40.7 the satans are a class of accusers driven away by the angel Phanuel; in the latter the satans, set in parallelism with “the angels,” seem to be Watchers.
  • 18 So George W. E. Nickelsburg, "Chapters 37-71: The Book of Parables," in George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch Chapters 37-82 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress), 45.
  • 19 Leslie W. Walck, The Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch and in Matthew (Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 9; London: T&T Clark, 2011).
  • 20 On these texts see Farrar and Williams, "Diabolical Data," 54-56.
  • 21 I discuss this text in greater detail in my JTS study and interact with Hanneken’s observations on the Book of Asaph the Physician, to which Burke refers.
  • 22 Devorah Dimant, History, Ideology and Bible Interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls (FAT 90; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 147.
  • 23 E.g., Miryam T. Brand, Evil Within and Without: The Source of Sin and Its Nature as Portrayed in Second Temple Literature (JAJSup 9; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 183-84. See further references in forthcoming JTS publication.
  • 24 Tigchelaar does not say that the word “satan” is used of the evil inclination. What he says is that “the juxtaposition of satan and ‘evil inclination’ in the Plea for Deliverance reminds one of the identification of Satan and evil inclination in some Talmudic texts (b.BB 16a)” (E. Tigchelaar, "The Evil Inclination in the Dead Sea Scrolls, with a Re-edition of 4Q468i (4QSectarian Text?)," in Alberdina Houtman, Albert de Jong, and Magda Misset-van de Weg (eds.), Empsychoi Logoi—Religious Innovations in Antiquity [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 353). Other comments suggest that he regards ‘satan’ as an external entity in the Plea for Deliverance. Commenting on the Aramaic Levi Document, he writes, “The formulation in Levi’s Prayer, אל תשלט בי כל שטן, ‘Let not any satan rule over me’, as well as the formulations in other texts, indicate that שטן is a category of evil spirit, and not a proper noun. It is not entirely certain how the ‘evil inclination’ in the Plea for Deliverance is to be understood, whether as an outward or as an inward force, but in any case it seems to have gained a substance of its own, independent of a human’s heart” (Tigchelaar, "Evil Inclination," 350-51). Burke cites Tigchelaar second-hand via Brand but fails to state Brand’s own interpretation: “The petitioner asks to be saved from all evil that may afflict his person, physical and mental, external ‘satan’ and internal ‘inclination’” (Brand, Evil Within and Without, 210). Similarly, Lange: “11QPsa XIX:15 uses the term שטן without a determinative and mentions it in parallel with another type of demons, the spirit of impurity (רוח טמאה). The parallelism between ‘a satan’ and ‘a spirit of impurity’ shows that satan refers to a type or class of demons in the Plea for Deliverance and not to the leader of the antidivine world” (Armin Lange, "Satanic Verses: The Adversary in the Qumran Manuscripts and Elsewhere," RevQ 24 [2009], 40). Note also Stuckenbruck’s view, cited by Burke, that the Plea for Deliverance may have in view “a more specific malevolent being… that is, one called ‘Satan’” (Loren T. Stuckenbruck, "The Demonic World of the Dead Sea Scrolls," in in Ida Fröhlich and Erkki Koskenniemi (eds.), Evil and the Devil [LNTS 481; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013], 63). Wold, far from seeing the Plea for Deliverance as internalizing ‘satan,’ views it as externalizing the yetzer ra: “I am convinced that the yetzer ra in these lines is not an inward part of a person, or at least not exclusively, but parallel to ‘satan’ and ‘unclean spirit’ and therefore also an outward force” (Benjamin Wold, "Demonizing Sin? The Evil Inclination in 4QInstruction," in Evil in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, 38).
  • 25 Madeleine Wieger, "«Celui qu’on appelle διάβολος» (Apocalypse 12,9): L’histoire du nom grec de l’Adversaire," in Michael Tilly, Matthias Morgenstern, and Volker Henning Drecoll (eds.), L’adversaire de Dieu—der Widersacher Gottes (WUNT 364; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 208.
  • 26 I should point out, however, that the definite article need not be understood in a par excellence sense here; it is to be understood respectively cataphorically and anaphorically.
  • 27 In addition to scholars cited by Burke identifying this diabolos as Cain, Zurawski, in a detailed study, identifies this diabolos as a generic human adversary (Jason M. Zurawski, "Separating the Devil from the Diabolos: A Fresh Reading of Wisdom of Solomon 2.24," JSP 21 [2012], 366-399).
  • 28 Ralph Marcus, Philo, Supplement I: Questions on Genesis (LCL 380; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953/1961), 21-2.
  • 29 Burke states that “the term appears in one of the late Greek fragments”. This is misleading, since the Greek Legend is not a “fragment” of the Ascension of Isaiah but an expanded reworking thereof. In any case, communis opinio now regards Ascension of Isaiah as a Christian composition.
  • 30 Cf. Beelzeboul (Mark 3:22; Matt. 10:25; 12:24; Luke 11:15, 18, 19), the prince of demons (Mark 3:22; Matt. 9:34; 12:24; Luke 11:15), the enemy (Luke 10:19), the power of darkness (Luke 22:53), and parabolic representations of the Satan, namely the strong man (Mark 3:27; Matt. 12:29; Luke 11:21-22), the birds (Mark 4:4 cp. 4:15; Matt. 13:4 cp. 13:19; Luke 8:5 cp. 8:12) and the enemy (Matt. 13:25, 28 cp. 13:39).
  • 31 Burke states, “Care must always be taken not to assume Talmudic content is representative of first century Jewish beliefs, given the composite nature of the Talmuds and the lateness of their final form, but if the term ‘the evil one’ was a normative term for a supernatural evil satan or ‘the devil’ in the first century, it is extraordinary that this does not appear anywhere in the Talmudic literature.” I agree with the first part, but there is a simple explanation for why Satan is never called “the evil one” in the Talmud—the rabbis did not believe Satan to be morally evil.
  • 32 See Nickelsburg, "Book of Parables," 304-307.
  • 33 Matthew Black, ‘The Doxology to the Pater Noster with a Note on Matthew 6.13b,’ in Philip R. Davies and Richard T. White (eds.), A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History (JSOTSup 100; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1990), 334; James R. Davila, Liturgical Works (Eerdmans Commentaries on the Dead Sea Scrolls 6; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 59-61.
  • 34 Since 4QBerakhot date palaeographically from the mid-first century C.E. (Davila, Liturgical Works, 42), one cannot confidently call them “pre-Christian.” However, they almost certainly pre-date Matthew, since the Qumran community was destroyed by the Romans c. 68 C.E., and Matthew is generally dated post-70 C.E.—usually in the 80s.
  • 35 “And so, too, you also will not go wrong if you reckon as angels, not only those who are worthy of the name, who are as ambassadors backwards and forwards between men and God and are rendered sacred and inviolate by reason of that glorious and blameless ministry, but also those who are unholy and unworthy of the title. I have as witness to my argument the words of the Psalmist, where in one of the psalms we read ‘He sent out upon them the anger of His wrath, wrath and anger and affliction, a mission by evil angels’ (Ps. lxxvii. 49). These are the evil ones who, cloaking themselves under the name of angels, know not the daughters of right reason, the sciences and virtues, but court the pleasures which are born of men, pleasures mortal as their parents—pleasures endowed not with the true beauty, which the mind alone can discern, but with the false comeliness, by which the senses are deceived.” (F. H. Colson, trans. Philo. 10 vols. [London: Heinemann, 1929], 2:453-55).
  • 36 See Farrar and Williams ("Diabolical Data," 44-46) for arguments that these texts nonetheless do refer to the Satan.
  • 37 The expression is unambiguously masculine in 1 John 2:13-14, 5:18, Barn. 2.10 and Mart. Pol. 17.1. The gender is ambiguous in Did. 8.2, 2 Thess. 3:3, Eph. 6:16, 1 John 3:12, 5:19 and Barn. 21.3, but I would argue that these instances too all refer to the Satan. Burke ("Satan and Demons in the Apostolic Fathers", 157) concedes a Satanological referent in Barnabas, though not in Didache or Martyrdom of Polycarp.

Monday 26 June 2017

Did Pope Francis really say that a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is dangerous?

YouTube contains a large quantity of videos purporting to be exposés about the Pope, Vatican or Roman Catholic Church. Often these take the form of clips of the Pope saying something, sometimes combined with commentary on why what he said was so shocking and diabolical.

One such video that, in several different versions, has garnered millions of views, pertains to some remarks Pope Francis made during his General Audience at St. Peter's Square on June 25, 2014. Here are the titles of the five most-viewed videos on this topic:
“POPE says Personal Relationship with Jesus VERY DANGEROUS & HARMFUL – Must Share!!” 
“POPE Francis Warns ANY ‘Personal Relationship w/ Jesus is Dangerous’: (NEWS)”  
“ANTI CHRIST! Pope Francis Says ‘Personal Relationship With Jesus Is Dangerous’” 
“Satanic Pope Francis Says Having a Personal Relationship With Jesus Is Dangerous!!!”
“Personal relationship with Jesus is dangerous outside the RCC says pope.”
Now, perhaps responding to such videos is an exercise in futility. Many of those who share them are only interested in making the Pope look as bad as possible, and not in careful, judicious reflection on the Pope's words. Nevertheless, for the sake of those willing to consider the issue with an open mind, I offer the following comments.

In order to correctly interpret speech or text it is always a good idea to place them in context. Most of the videos above include a roughly two-minute clip of Pope Francis speaking in Italian with English subtitles. This clip is an excerpt from a homily that Pope Francis gave on the topic of "belonging to the Church." The Vatican's official transcript of the homily, translated into English, indicates that the subtitles in the videos do appear to accurately represent the Pope's words.

That said, the first four headlines above show that most of the Pope's YouTube critics have blatantly misrepresented the Pope's point. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fifth video has far fewer views than the first three with their more provocative titles and use of all capitals, which has been called the Internet version of shouting.) Two of the headlines place the words "Personal Relationship with Jesus is Dangerous" in quotation marks, implying that Pope Francis said them, which he did not. Two of the headlines gratuitously apply an inflammatory label to Pope Francis ("ANTI CHRIST!"; "Satanic"); the latter also childishly superimposes red "devil horns" onto a picture of Pope Francis. More fundamentally, the titles convey the idea that Pope Francis is against having a personal relationship with Jesus, and this is simply false. Here are the key words that the Pope's critics have latched onto:
There are those who believe they can maintain a personal, direct and immediate relationship with Jesus Christ outside the communion and the mediation of the Church. These are dangerous and harmful temptations. These are, as the great Paul VI said, absurd dichotomies.
Placed in the context of Pope Francis's homily on the topic of "belonging to the Church," it is obvious that his emphasis lies on the words "outside the communion and the mediation of the Church." What is dangerous and harmful is not a personal relationship with Jesus Christ but a personal relationship with Jesus Christ outside the Church. Now, unfortunately, I was unable to track down the source and context of Pope Paul VI's statement about "absurd dichotomies." However, it seems clear that Pope Francis is warning against constructing a false dichotomy whereby one can either have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ or one can have the communion and mediation of the Church but not both. By opposing this false dichotomy, Pope Francis affirms the need for both of these things. On the need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, consider the following excerpt from a summary of a morning mediation Pope Francis delivered on January 9, 2017:
In this perspective, the Pope suggested, we should ask a “question: is the centre of my life Jesus Christ? What is my relationship with Jesus Christ?”. Francis pointed out that at the start of the celebration, in the oration of the collect prayer, “we asked for the grace to see, the grace to know what we have to do and the grace to have the strength to do it”. But “the first thing we have to do is look to Jesus Christ”. In doing so, “there are three things, let’s say three tasks, to assure ourselves that Jesus is at the centre of our life”. “First of all”, the Pope explained, “recognize Jesus, know him and recognize him. In his time, the Apostle John, at the beginning of his Gospel, says that many did not recognize him: the doctors of the law, the high priests, the scribes, the Sadducees, some Pharisees”. What’s more, “they persecuted him; they killed him”. Thus, “the first approach is to know and recognize Jesus; to seek how Jesus was: does this interest me”? It is, Francis stated, “a question that all of us must ask ourselves: does it interest me to know Jesus or perhaps am I more interested in soap operas or gossip or ambitions or knowing about other people’s lives”? Indeed, to “know Jesus, one must first “be able to recognize him”. And, the Pope added, “to know Jesus, there is prayer, the Holy Spirit, yes, but it is also good practice to “pick up the Gospel every day”. He then asked the congregation: “How many of you pick up the Gospel each day and read a passage? I would tell you to raise your hands: but I won’t do so”, he added, telling them not to worry. It is important, the Pope said, to always take a copy of the Gospel with you, such as “the pocket version, which is small, in order to be carried in a pocket, purse”, so it is “always with me”. It is said, the Pontiff continued, that “Saint Cecilia had the Gospel close to her heart: close, close!”. And in this way, keeping it always close at hand, we can “read a passage of the Gospel every day: it is the only way to know Jesus”, to know “what he did, what he said”.
So Pope Francis is clearly for a personal relationship with Jesus, not against it. What then was Pope Francis's point in saying that it is "dangerous and harmful" to think one can "maintain a personal, direct and immediate relationship with Jesus Christ outside the communion and the mediation of the Church"? I think the basic point Pope Francis is making has been made and could be made in a sermon at any church. Some other excerpts from the homily will bring out his core message:
We are not isolated and we are not Christians on an individual basis, each one on his or her own, no, our Christian identity is to belong! ... No one becomes Christian on his or her own! Is that clear? No one becomes Christian by him- or herself. Christians are not made in a laboratory. A Christian is part of a people who comes from afar. The Christian belongs to a people called the Church and this Church is what makes him or her Christian, on the day of Baptism, and then in the course of catechesis, and so on. But no one, no one becomes Christian on his or her own. If we believe, if we know how to pray, if we acknowledge the Lord and can listen to his Word, if we feel him close to us and recognize him in our brothers and sisters, it is because others, before us, lived the faith and then transmitted it to us.
The point is that no Christian is an island. One cannot live as a Christian in isolation from other Christians. We are indebted to those Christians who went before us and we are in need of those Christians who journey alongside us and they are in need of us. Hence Pope Francis warns against 
the temptation of thinking we can make it without the others, that we can get along without the Church, that we can save ourselves on our own... we cannot be good Christians if we are not together with those who seek to follow the Lord Jesus, as one single people, one single body, and this is the Church.
In any Protestant church this could form the core message of a sermon directed at those who say things like "I love Jesus but I'm not into church." Thus, I think Pope Francis's basic point is one to which every Christian should be able to say "Amen." Furthermore, in saying, "The Christian belongs to a people called the Church and this Church is what makes him or her Christian, on the day of Baptism," Pope Francis states the Catholic belief that one becomes a Christian - and part of the Church - through baptism (1 Cor. 12:13). The Catholic Church recognizes Protestant baptisms as valid, so this statement pertains to all Christians. Protestants, like Catholics, become Christians and part of the Church on the day of baptism. Without the sacrament of baptism, one is neither a Christian nor part of the Church.

Having said that, not all the aspects of "belonging to the Church" touched on in Pope Francis's homily pertain to Protestants. When Pope Francis speaks of "the Church," he means the Roman Catholic Church, because there is only one body and Catholics believe the Roman Catholic Church is that body. Pope Francis's general audience was addressed to the Catholic faithful, and in stressing the need for "the communion and the mediation of the Church" Pope Francis implicitly reiterates the Roman Catholic Church's claim to be the "one holy, catholic and apostolic" Church founded by Jesus Christ. Protestant Christians do not completely enjoy the communion and mediation of the Church because they do not receive the special gifts that the Lord makes available through the Church - most especially his Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist. Protestants are, from a Catholic point of view, Christians who are walking with Christ without the fullness of the spiritual gifts that he offers in the Church to enable us to complete that walk successfully. It could be likened (and this is my analogy, not Pope Francis's) to a firefighter entering a burning building without all of his or her equipment. It is indeed dangerous, and this is one reason why we as Catholics are passionate about working toward reconciliation and reunion with Protestants. We want them to enjoy the full benefits of "belonging to the Church."

Since Protestants reject Catholic teaching about the Church and the Eucharist, it makes sense to debate and discuss these issues. In that sense, a legitimate Protestant headline describing Pope Francis's headline might be something like, "Pope Francis says personal relationship with Jesus dangerous outside communion and mediation of Catholic Church." This captures what is controversial about Pope Francis's homily (from a Protestant perspective) without misrepresenting him. The fifth headline quoted above is the only one that does this. The other four headlines are sensationalizing red herrings designed to make Protestants loathe the Pope.

Dialogue is always needed between Catholics and Protestants, but if we are to make progress toward unity in the body of Christ we must eschew the temptation to resort to partisan propaganda - either by creating such propaganda or by sharing it uncritically in our social networks. We must instead discuss the issues that divide us in a fair, honest and loving way. We must also always keep in mind the common ground that we share, and belief in the need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is, in fact, part of that common ground.