The Pesher of Paul
by Ron Corson
“The pesharim are commentaries upon prophetic texts, which apply the biblical writings to the history and life of the community. The commentators aim to demonstrate the fulfillment of biblical prophecies in their own time, especially with respect to reward and punishment, and they assert the imminent doom of their opponents in contrast to their own salvation. This “contemporizing” interpretation, or application, of the text is called “pesher,” a term related to dream interpretation.” (The Virtual Qumran)
Pesher is a method of interpretation used as a solution, usually to a contemporary situation. There are several methods of Midrash (exposition) interpretation techniques. These methods of rabbinic exegesis can range from clever and fanciful, to simple plays on the number of letters in a word, but what they most have in common is to bring the Biblical text to deal with some element of contemporary thought that the expositor is interested in talking/writing about. (See the article on Jewish Interpretation here for examples)
Once clued into this concept it is not difficult to see it is used fairly commonly in the New Testament. If you are like me you have often wondered how the Apostle Paul could say in one place that sin came from the woman and in another that sin came from the first man. Roman 5:12 “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (All texts NIV). 1 Timothy 2:14 “And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.”
The verse from Roman 5:12 has taken on a life of its own, in particular when it comes to those who hold that there was a literal recent 6 consecutive 24 hour day creation. All death must have therefore come after the sin of the one man, therefore the fossil record and dates cannot possibly be true. and there can be no other methods allowed to explain the how of creation. The problem with this is that we are taking the “Pesher” of Paul to a conclusion that is not his intent. His application of the verses is to entirely different subjects. Take a look at the context of 1 Timothy 2:12-13: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve.”
The Pesher there is certainly questionable; does the creation order really have anything to do with the ability of a woman to teach or speak or have any authority? This is a common conclusion given our modern standards of interpretation and the product of years of debate and study by Christians, philosophers and scholars.
Paul was certainly in good company. For example, Clement of Alexander, when writing about the Mosaic prohibition of eating swine and certain birds says “The sow is the emblem of voluptuous and unclean lust of food…. The eagle indicates robbery, the hawk injustice, and the raven greed.” There is a reason behind his application of a particular bird to a particular human characteristic. “Clement of Alexandria and Philo represent two adherents to the Alexandrian school, which believed that each word in the Biblical text was chosen for a precise reason.” Against their view was the “Adherents to the Antiochene methods of interpretation include the following: Eusebius of Caesarea, Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom and Basil of Caesarea” (The explanation of the Antiochene school is more varied and too complex to describe here, see the article Antiochene Methods of Interpretation)
The fact is we interpret things much differently because of the battles between the various schools of thought in the Christian church, from the Early Church Fathers on. Just as knowledge in most all areas of mankind has advanced so too we have advanced in methods of interpretation and analyzing written works. When we re-examine Paul on the subject of Romans 5, we can see that he is not saying there was no sin before the first man, but is instead working on his contemporary theme that Jesus brings reconciliation and that Adam was the pattern of the one to come.
Romans 5:14 “Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.” But it is not a pattern as we typically understand; it is a reverse image pattern. It is a contradistinction between the failure of Adam and the success of Jesus. Romans 5:15 “But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!”
The subject is not “there was no death before Adam sinned”. Instead, the subject is the reconciliation provided by Christ, contrasted to the failure of Adam (and all human beings). The powerless man was reconciled by the gift of God in that even when we were yet His enemies, God, through the incarnation of Jesus, reconciled us back to Himself. When we take the text out of this context and purpose and assign it a significance that it should not have we revert to methods of interpretation that cannot be reconciled to the age of reason.
There are Jewish expositors that could take any text and cleverly manipulate it to work for their own purposes. I dare say Adventism still has those kinds of people and those who use those techniques, but they ignore the reason and science so necessary to really create a comprehensive hermeneutic. There is an art and science to Biblical interpretation.
Ron,
I appreciate your closing line that "There is an art and science to Biblical interpretation." Historically our church has been highly scientific in looking for evidence to prove particular doctrines and viewpoints. However, this approach often runs afoul of life experiences where we discover that things work a bit differently and we are confronted with the art of interpreting the Bible. The art requires that we step outside the limited world of fact-based faith into the experiential world of knowing God on a more personal basis through the Holy Spirit. It is when people insist on sticking to the science of Biblical interpretation that their spiritual experience becomes rigid and often leads to spiritual death. It is when we experience the art of interpretation that we learn to apply scripture and faith flowers.
Ron,
Appreciate your point. There has been much use of Paul's perspective on a few threads to "prove" points against death before sin etc, so I find this very interesting.
I've pasted a line from your blog below and wonder: Do you think it is possible to replace your use of the word "text" with the word "Bible"? If not, to what degree, or with what methods, do we determine the limits? I'm not trying to bait you, it just seems so relevant to so much of the way scripture is used here by some, and "ignored" by some others of us (at least in their opinion:)
"When we take the text out of this context and purpose and assign it a significance that it should not have we revert to methods of interpretation that cannot be reconciled to the age of reason.
Somehow, Paul never gets as radical as Pesher Habbakkuk (one of the 1sr Dead Sea Scrolls published). But he is clearly doing pesher.
A very important, and somewhat disturbing pesher of Paul will be coming up in Galatians. In a few weeks we will be studying how, "there is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male and female . . ." However, soon after that Paul does a pesher on the slave woman Hagar which seems to deny the validity of Galatians 3:28. I encourage my class to read Galatians while imagining themselvs to be a 1st century gentile, female slave, then a 1st century male Jewish freeman. Imagine the gentile female slave reading 3:28, and wondering if this could possibly be true, if Paul really meant that. Then read the Hagar passage through the same eyes, Would she now come to understand that Paul didn't really mean all that?
If anyone ever gave mixed messages it was Paul. Very difficult to explain or develop his theology combining all his sayings.
To cb25:
"When we take the Bible out of this context and purpose and assign it a significance that it should not have we revert to methods of interpretation that cannot be reconciled to the age of reason.
No I don't think it works because Bible is too large, there is no way to assume there is a context that covers the whole Bible. Things have to be narrowed down and somewhat specific to even have context. After all what is there to take out of context in a history book that covers 4000 years of history. One part might have context to the Crimean war and another to the Great Depression, so if I say you are taking that book out of context what do I mean? We have to be more specific to really communicate.
Thank you, Ron, for this informative and provocative blog. Absolutely top notch!! And AMEN. There are many possibilities for reconciling the inescapable realities of our experience in the material world with a transcendent, personal, creator God who reveals Himself and His Truths through the stories, symbols, poetry, and exhortations of Scripture.
So the issue is that our dear friend Ron wants to support the idea that death existed before the fall . And his way of getting around that is by discrediting those texts that would prove that .
And you want people to take you serious , right ? What do we do with the Genesis account of creation ? and with everthing that the bible says that the Mesiah would do ? save people from their sins .
One has to realize there are problems with the no death before sin even within the Genesis creation story. For instance they eat. The act of gobbling up fruit or veggies will mean cellular death. Even if you assumed that the cells merely transformed into the humans body the very fact of chewing is going to physically destroy some cells. Not to mention that the sheer geometric growth rate of bacteria would cover the world in several feet of bacteria before Adam could have finished naming all his animals in the one day. Which comes out to conservatively be taking less then one second per animal to make it in one 24 hour period.
So ultimately though the blog is about Paul and not Genesis it is true that because the verse in Paul is used to pretend things are there in Genesis the two are related, nevertheless it is because the facts cannot make sense to the story that we spend the time on these issues. The Genesis story does not rule out death for other things. It's use of death even for the humans is even exagerated. as in the "day that you eat will surely die" is idiomatic for when you eat there will be a consequence, that consequence did not follow on that day or even very soon. So we need to be careful with the assumptions we insert into the Genesis story.
We forget that the stories in Genesis are "accounts" as reported by the writers. No one was there to actually report on what occurred. And even then, it was reported through their understanding at the time.
Such things as a dome covering the earth; that there could be a separation between night and morning when there was no sun nor moon until the fourth day, and a complete reversal of the order of creation recorded in Genesis 2. Trying to harmonize the two accounts will never lead to consistency. If acceptance that God is the creator is somehow insufficient, how can anyone claim to have been an eyewitness and dispute anyone else? Every reader is interpreting as he reads. Why is it insufficient to say that God created this earth and humans? How He did it has not been shared with man–as we wouldn't understand anyway.
May I recommend most highly a video by Rob Bell of the Mars Hill Church in Michigan. It is entitled "Everything is Spiritual". Bell profoundly informs and reminds, by illuminating the poetic beauty and symbolism contained in the first chapter of Genesis, of the enormity, complexity and infinitesimal smallness of our universe. He reminds us that the story with which God has gifted us mostly tells us how amazing God is and how amazing we are; and how, no matter what we think we know, the dimensions of reality hinted at by the creation poem overwhelm and transcend our time-bound notions. He also creatively binds together, within the creation narrative, the Sabbath as a memorial of creation and the Sabbath as a memorial of freedom from nature within the cycle of nature.
The video is incredibly faith affirming for those who are not afraid to look and imagine beyond the boundaries of parochial linear thought processes.
But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. Mark 10:6 Doesn't leave much wiggle room for cell subdivision to eventually "evolve" into gender reproduction over eons of time….
But hey, just like if maybe God lied in Genesis 1, then maybe Christ lied in Mark. Or maybe some intelligent mortal could re-interpret the words of Christ in some new hermen-whatever-itical way. Or we could delve into "dream interpretation" or maybe spend all day reading Chrysostom and gaining insights from a 4th century man who is credited with Christian anti-semitism. Or maybe we could all dream our way to Mount Athos and meditate on a relic there of Chrysostom, his right hand. Maybe that will give us some light into interpreting Paul. Or maybe we could celebrate one of Chrysostom's 4 feast days in the Eastern Orthodox Church, kinda like some SDA Churches on the west coast now celebrate Ash Wednsday with Catholicism….
Or we could just take the advice of E.G.W. and let scripture interpret scripture. Or as Isaiah says… For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little: Isaiah 28:10
That is very good JaNe, you have taken two verses completely out of context. That is indeed the act of a Pesher. The first:
4 They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”
5 “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. 6 “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’[a] 7 ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife,[b] 8 and the two will become one flesh.’[c] So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
10 When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. 11 He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. 12 And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.
And of course the verse in Isaiah is not at all about how to study scriptures. that is a description of the drunken gibberish they were spouting. I submitted an upcoming column on the subject.
But you have shown a good example of the technique and how just because the technique is used it should not be taken as an authorative statement. It is in fact an illustrative statement, a method of comparison and contrast. Rather like when Jesus said that unless a seed dies it cannot grow and reproduce seeds. Of course seeds that die don't reproduce at all, that is why in agriculture they adjust their planter according to the germination rate of the seeds to be planted. A Pesher is not a truth, just as an analogy or a metaphor or a parable are not truth, they are methods of illustrating an idea.