Saturday, June 16, 2018

Ironic Ignorance


As the saying goes, “ignorance is bliss.” As seen here though, ignorance is ironic.

John 7 reveals some remarkable ignorance of the Scriptures among Jesus’ skeptics and enemies. Case in point: at John 7:41 “some were saying: ‘The Christ is not coming out of Galilee, is he?’” Here, the skeptics were ignorant of Isaiah 9:1-2 which specifically mentions Galilee in connection with a “great light.” Certainly it takes no great imagination to see that this could pass for the Messiah.[1] Then, at John 7:52 the Pharisees sneered: “You are not also out of Galilee, are you? Search and see that no prophet is to be raised up out of Galilee.” In saying this, they expressed ignorance that the prophet Jonah[2] hailed from Galilee as expressed in Jeremiah’s book 2 Kings 14:25. They also revealed ignorance of the messianic import of Isaiah 9:1-2.

In this, the NET Bible concurs in a footnote:
This claim by the leaders presents some difficulty, because Jonah had been from Gath Hepher, in Galilee (2 Kgs 14:25). Also the Babylonian Talmud later stated, “There was not a tribe in Israel from which there did not come prophets” (b. Sukkah 27b). Two explanations are possible: (1) In the heat of anger the members of the Sanhedrin overlooked the facts (this is perhaps the easiest explanation). (2) This anarthrous noun is to be understood as a reference to the prophet of Deut 18:15 (note the reading of P66 which is articular), by this time an eschatological figure in popular belief. This would produce in the text of John’s Gospel a high sense of irony indeed, since the religious authorities by their insistence that “the Prophet” could not come from Galilee displayed their true ignorance of where Jesus came from on two levels at once (Bethlehem, his birthplace, the fulfillment of Mic 5:2, but also heaven, from which he was sent by the Father). The author does not even bother to refute the false attestation of Jesus’ place of birth as Galilee (presumably Christians knew all too well where Jesus came from). [emphasis original]
This multilayered ignorance reveals just how unprepared Jesus’ contemporaries were. This is especially ironic considering that not all Jews were this unaware of their own scriptures, and this insight derives from a surprising source, the apocryphal book of Tobit. In it, Tobit is presented as being from the northern tribe of Naphtali in Galilee, the same place mentioned in the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 9:1-2. (Tobit 1:1) In this fable, the Archangel Raphael (meaning “God Heals”) became the man Azariah (“Jehovah Has Helped”) who claimed to be one of Tobit’s relatives from Hananiah (Tobit 5:12-13), therefore also from Naphtali and Galilee. As one scholar reported: “Presumably, Hananiah is a member of Tobit’s tribe of Naphtali, from Upper Galilee. Raphael has therefore taken on the guise of a Galilean Israelite with a verifiable history.”[3] In this story, Azariah is responsible for two healings, that of blindness (Tobit 11:12-14) and of demon-possession (Tobit 8:3), miracles that are associated with God’s blessing, especially the former. (Isaiah 35:5-6; 61:1-2) Thus it seems pretty clear that even though Tobit is unhistorical, that it does preserve a Jewish expectation that the Messiah would also hail from Galilee. Indeed: “Raphael, the savior of Tobit, should be understood as a theological template for Jesus’ followers when they identified him as a heavenly savior in human form.”[4] So the only ones who recognized the messianic expectations of Galilee were the Jewish composers of Tobit. Thus the characters in Tobit “acknowledged that the angel of the Lord had appeared to them” as a Galilean savior. (Tobit 12:22) To repeat, the fictional characters of Tobit were more enlightened than Jesus’ real-life opposers. Has irony ever been so great as this?

In conclusion, may we not be caught off-guard as Jesus’ ignorant or forgetful skeptics and opposers were, with their lack of meditation and study of the Scriptures.

See also my discussion of a similar case here: A case for Christ’s pre-human existence: Additional explanation http://jimspace3000.blogspot.com/2011/07/case-for-christs-pre-human-existence.html This reveals another case of the Pharisees being caught off-guard, in this instance with Christ’s exegesis of Psalm 110:1.

Footnotes:
[1] Regarding Isaiah 9:1-2 and the messianic connotation of the “great light,” The Complete Jewish Study Bible says:
[Isaiah] returns to the theme of future blessing. The Land that was to experience the Assyrian captivity would someday experience God’s blessing, mediated though the birth of a child who would rule on the throne of David. (vv. 6-7). The Targum uses the descriptions of these verses as titles for the Messiah.
Additionally, The Jewish Study Bible notes:
The ideal Davidic king. Isaiah describes the liberation from some form of adversity (perhaps the Assyrian conquests of Israelite territory… Most later readers (both Jewish and Christian) understood the passage to describe an ideal future ruler, i.e., the Messiah.
Thus the people in darkness seeing a great light are identified as living in the territory identified in verse 1, and that seeing a “great light” was indeed identified as being messianic.

[2] The Complete Jewish Study Bible in its introduction to Jonah says:
Though Yonah’s [Jonah’s] mission was to Ashur’s [Assyria’s] capital, the book is directed at Israel. … Israel is guilty not only of departing from God, but also of failing to carry out its great commission to the Gentiles.
So Jonah is recognized as a legitimate prophet and was grouped with the 12 Prophets in the Jewish Canon. Ironically, the Prophet Daniel was relegated to the Writings, showing that Jonah could have been too if he fell out of favor.

[3] Muñoa, Phillip. Raphael, Azariah and Jesus of Nazareth: Tobit’s Significance for Early Christology. Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha. (2012). 13

[4] Ibid. 15



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Credits:
Opening graphic from jw.org.

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posted by JimSpace at 11:28 PM