Larry Harrt

Abstract
This paper is a reflection on the New Testament use of messianic prophecy. Frequently, the New Testament appears to interpret and apply prophetic passages in a way that seems more than a little strange to readers immersed in modern critical thinking. It is posited here that when the hermeneutical methods employed in the New Testament are seen with an appreciation for their discipline and rigor of practice, we may not only come to understand them better, but also begin to recover that sense of the prophetic consciousness which saturated the ancient world of Israel. It is further concluded that in a reflection on messianic prophecy it is possible to discern Paul Ricoeur’s vision of a hermeneutic which possesses both intellectual integrity and spiritual depth. This, Ricoeur thought, involved three stages of faith development: pre-critical, critical, and post-critical leading ultimately to what he described as a second naïveté. It is hoped that this paper might make some contribution to a biblical interpretation and theology that is, to use another of Ricoeur’s favorite terms, ‘restorative.’

Key Words
prophecy, prophetic, messianic, fulfillment, Old Testament, New Testament, interpretation, consciousness, salvation-history, hermeneutic, second naïveté

Turtles All the Way Down
In his novel Turtles All the Way Down, John Green’s main character is an older teenage girl, Aza Holmes, who is trying to live a normal teenage life while suffering the sometimes-debilitating effects of an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. At one point Aza’s best friend Daisey, trying to understand says, ‘I wish I understood it. . . . You just, like, hate yourself. You hate being yourself?’ Aza, who is obsessed with the thought that she is not real, replies that when she looks into herself that it’s more like there is no self to hate. ‘It’s like,’ she says, ‘when I look into myself there is no actual me.’ She feels like a Russian nesting doll which can be opened to reveal a hollow place inside where there is another doll and another and another until you get to one that cannot be opened and is solid through and through. But Aza can never get to her ‘smallest,’ most real and solid self. This reminds Daisey of a ‘wisdom’ story she has heard from her mother. It is a story that can act here in this little essay as a kind of parable––although it may not make complete sense as such until we have progressed a ways. It goes like this:

A scientist is giving a lecture to a huge audience on the history of the earth. He explains how the earth formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust. He tells how at first the earth was very hot but over an unimaginable expanse of time cooled and oceans formed. He tells how single-celled life emerged in the oceans, how over billions of years life became more prolific and complex until 250,000 or more years ago humans evolved and started using more sophisticated tools until eventually they could build spaceships and cell phones and everything.

As he approaches the end of his lecture the scientist asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand. ‘This is all very interesting,’ she says when acknowledged, ‘but the truth is the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’
Amused, the scientist asks, ‘Well, if that is so what is the giant turtle standing on?’
And the woman replies, ‘It’s standing on the shell of another giant turtle.’
At this point the scientist, who is beginning to become a little annoyed, says, ‘And then what is that turtle standing on?’ And the old woman patiently replies, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’

The conclusion toward which I will be moving in pondering the quandary involved in how the New Testament writers use Old Testament messianic prophecy is, that it’s turtles all the way down.

Prophecy as Heilsgeschichte
Johannes Christian Konrad von Hofmann, the 19th century Biblical historian and theologian at Erlangen, is recognized as the person most responsible for the rise of the salvation-history (heilsgeschichte) school of thought as a formal approach to biblical interpretation. As a principle of interpretation, salvation-history simply asserts that God has made a progressive revelation of the divine nature and will in Scripture. Heilsgeschichte posits among other principles: (1) God’s salvific work begins as God acts in time, and is seen through actual happenings and in human events. (2) God’s salvific act which began in time is brought to completion within the historic processes of human activity. (3) The saving work of God has past, present, and future implications.

I am not at all sure why academia so often finds it necessary to state the obvious in rather elaborate fashion, but whether we adopt the formal history of religion schema as an important way of understanding the use of Old Testament prophecy by New Testament writers, or simply as a bit of helpful common sense, the historical context of messianic prophecy is of enormous significance. As noted in the basic outline above the implications are not only past, but also possess, for those seeking a faith that has intellectual integrity, ramifications that are present and future as well. What I am suggesting, is that understanding the use of messianic prophecy in the New Testament requires that we examine such usage holistically, and from the perspective of salvation-history.

The Prophetic Quandary
The difficulty encountered as we read of the uses which the New Testament makes of Old Testament messianic prophecy is this ––– There frequently appears to be a discrepancy between what is clearly the intended meaning of an Old Testament author and the interpretation given by a New Testament author. Having grown up with the frequent assurance that numerous and precise messianic prophecies have found clear fulfillment in the life and work of Jesus, young evangelical students have often had their faith severely shaken by the discovery that numerous Old Testament predictions seem to have found fulfillment in events closer to the time and setting in which they were originally made. In fact, some prophecies, in their original setting, do not look like predictions at all. Furthermore, upon a closer reading the interpretation of a New Testament writer may seem inconsistent with what the writer of an Old Testament text intended.

Perhaps one of the best-known examples is Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7:14 -16 as prophetic evidence that Jesus is the Messiah (Matt.1:21-23). In Isaiah, the Kingdom of Judah is about to be invaded by the combined forces of Israel and Syria. The Prophet tells King Ahaz of Judah there is nothing to fear and to remain calm, focused and firm. Ahaz will know this prediction that all will be well is a true prophecy by this sign Isaiah the Prophet gives him. In the time it takes for a virgin (a young unmarried woman) to marry, conceive, bear a child, and for that child to begin eating ‘cheese curds and honey,’ Ephraim (Israel) and Syria will themselves be devastated. This prophecy of Isaiah was not only fulfilled some seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, but seems to make no messianic reference at all. The closest connection is that in both passages the child is named ‘Immanuel’ (Isa. 7:14) or ‘Jesus’ (Matt. 1:21) which means ‘for God is with or saves his people.’ Indeed, this may be the singularity for Matthew.

Any number of other passages might serve as examples. When Matthew references the return of the Holy Family from their exile in Egypt as a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1, which says ‘And out of Egypt I called my son,’ it is more likely to appear to the postmodern mind as a ‘squeezing’ of the text rather than as prophetic fulfillment. G. K. Beale provides a chart of examples of alleged misinterpretations in the New Testament writers’ use of the Old Testament.
1.) Ad hominem argumentation. The role of angels in revealing the law in Gal. 3:19; the exodus ‘veil’ theme in 2 Cor. 3:13-18; and the ‘seed’ of Gen. 12:7 (KJV) and 22:17-18 in Gal. 3:16
2:) Noncontextual midrashic treatments. The understanding of baptism and the ‘following rock’ in 1 Cor. 10:1-4; Deut. 30:12-14 in Rom. 10:6-8; Gen. 12:7 (KJV) and 22:17-18 in Gal. 3:16; Ps. 68:18 in Eph. 4:8; Hosea 11:1 in Matt. 2:15.
3.) Allegorical interpretations. Deut. 25:4 in 1 Cor.9:9; the use of the OT in Gal. 4:24; and Gen. 14 in Heb. 7 .
4.) Atomistic interpretations, uncontrolled by any kind of interpretative rules. Isa. 40:6-8; 1 Peter 1:24-25.

Beale goes on to note, ‘Thus many would conclude that an inductive study reveals an oft-occurring disconnection of meaning between NT writers’ interpretations of the OT and the original meaning of that OT text.’

Interpretive Methodologies of the Rabbis
In wrestling with this problem, the question is sometime raised as to whether we should follow the same interpretive methods of the Old Testament as those used by Matthew, John, Paul and other writers of the New Testament. The reality is that our way of thinking is so different that it would be impossible to ever fully replicate their manner of exegesis. However, this does not mean that some understanding of how they went about the hermeneutical task may not be helpful. With this in mind it should be noted that their exegetical work was characterized by four basic methods:

Literal: Particularly in regard to the interpretation of Old Testament law, Judaism frequently followed a rather literal hermeneutical methodology. Longenecker notes that even while Philo believed circumcision should be understood allegorically he also thought it should be practiced literally. Stranger still, is that it was seriously argued by some Rabbis, on the basis of a literal reading of Deuteronomy 6:7, that in the morning the schema should be recited standing up but in the evening while lying down. The intent of the early Rabbis, even when using literal methodology, was to make plain the essential meaning of the biblical text. Consequently, it is helpful to keep in mind that to this end they were comfortable in applying a variety of interpretative methodologies––both literal and nonliteral.
Allegorical: Allegorical interpretation looks for a deeper symbolic meaning to the text. It assumes that a more sophisticated interpretation is to be found beneath the obvious meaning. Galatians 4:21-31 is probably the most obvious use of allegory in the New Testament. There Paul uses the figure of Hagar from the Genesis story to symbolize Mount Sinai and the earthly city, and therefore enslavement to the Law of Moses, while Sarah represents the heavenly city of the New Jerusalem and the people of promise.
Typological: Typological interpretation is more of a way of viewing history than it is an exegetical method. An earlier event, person, or institution is seen as somehow foreshadowing a later event, person or institution – the antitype. Typology assumes that God is at work in history, that there are reoccurring patterns that reveal the nature of God, and both predict and fulfill later reoccurrences of the pattern in deeper and larger ways. From the typological perspective history itself is seen as prophetic of God’s ultimate purpose. If we think of Carl Jung’s concept of archetypes, the notion of typology may seem a little more comprehensible in a contemporary context. The Greek arche means ‘first’ and type ‘imprint,’ ‘impress,’ or ‘pattern.’ For Jung an archetype is therefore a basic, primordial, preexisting pattern. Jung believed there were patterns of circumstances, symbols, and thought that reoccur consistently enough to be considered as universal concepts or events. These archetypes represent unseen psychological (psychic) energy at work––the person of traditional faith would say it is the manifestation of spiritual forces. Until the Enlightenment it was thought that human beings had the capacity to receive meaning from the realm of the spiritual and form it into inner images that can then become the object of reflection and reason. The well-known Jungian analyst Robert Johnson makes this significant observation:

The disaster that has overtaken the modern world is the complete splitting of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious. All forms of interaction with the unconscious that nourished our ancestors––dreams, vision, ritual, religion experience––are largely lost to us, dismissed by the modern mind as primitive or superstitious.

The point is simply that we should not too quickly dismiss typology as a reading into historical events of something that is not there; and, even more importantly, recognize how biblical typology points us to the reality of the prophetic messianic consciousness and its trajectory.
Pesher: Here a text is interpreted within the framework of an event. which is a mystery. The attempt to discover the solution to the mystery of the event, or of a person, in Scripture is ‘pesher.’ For example, in the New Testament, the solution to the strange and puzzling events on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:17) is found in Joel 2:28-29.
Midrash: The text rather than the event is the starting point for midrash, which means to seek. Midrash seeks to provide practical instruction in living God’s Word, and shows the relevance of Scripture to daily life. Seven rules, which follow here, helped to make early rabbinical interpretation reasonably straightforward.
Qal wahomer says that what applies in a less important case also applies in a more important case, and what applies in a more important case applies in a less important case.
Gezerah shawa says that where the same words are applied in two separate cases the same considerations apply.
Binyan ab mikathub ‘ehad involves constructing a family of texts from one passage. It states that where texts ae similar, a principle found in one applies to the others as well.
Binyan ab mishene kethubim has to do with constructing a family of texts from two passages, so that a similar principle derived from two texts can be applied to the others.
Kaalal uferat is the principle that a general rule many be applied to a particular situation.
Kayotse bo bemaqom ‘aher establishes that a text may be interpreted by comparison with another text.
Debar halamed m ‘inyano is an explanation established from the context.

Klyne Snodgrass notes that these midrashic techniques are observable in the New Testament. ‘

When Jesus argued that if God cared for the birds, surely he cared much more for humans (Matt. 6:26), he was arguing in good rabbinic fashion from the less important to the more important. Similarly, when Jesus justified his disciples eating grain on the Sabbath by pointing to the eating off the showbread by David and his men, he was arguing on the basis of an equivalent regulation. . . ‘ It may very well be that when Matthew quoted Isaiah 7:14 in reference to the birth and naming of Jesus he too was interpreting the text on the basis of the lesser to the greater principle. That is, Matthew’s interpretation was not nearly as arbitrary as it first sounds two thousand years later. In short, Matthew is reasoning: ‘If this was true then, how much more it is true now.

Testimonial: At times we find the New Testament writers using what appear to be collections of Old Testament texts for evidentiary purposes. Indeed, they sometimes not only use the same combination of Old Testament texts, but even agree in wording that is different from the Septuagint. For instance, the agreement might be noted between 1 Peter 2:6-10, which uses Isaiah 28:16; Psalm 118:22; Isaiah 8:14; parts of several other texts and a fusion of Isaiah 28:16 and 8:14; and, Romans 9:25, 33 which uses Hosea 2:23, other texts from Isaiah and a combining of Isaiah 28:16 and 8:14 in the same non-Septuagint form as 1 Peter 2. This most likely does not represent one writer copying from another as has sometimes been concluded, but more likely is an example of collections of Old Testament passages being used apologetically as testimony. It now appears that authors in the Apostolic Age felt a greater freedom to use various translations, or to offer their own, than what was once thought. Whatever one may make of their use of the texts they quote what remains clear is they possessed a common sense of messianic prophecy and its fulfillment.

What Manner of Person
The great Jewish Biblical scholar and mystic, Abraham Joshua Heschel, in what is certainly one of the best books ever written on the prophets, insisted that it is of crucial importance to ask the question, ‘What manner of person was the prophet?’ Both the question and the answer Heschel provided contain enormous implications for anyone exploring the correspondence between Old Testament prophecy and claims of their fulfillment in the New Testament.

As Heschel noted the Hebrew prophets were not only prophets, but poets, preachers, patriots, statesmen, social critics, and moralists as well. He wrote, ‘The significance of Israel’s prophets lies not only in what they said, but also in what they were. . . The moments that passed in their lives are not now available and cannot become the object of scientific analysis. All we have is the consciousness of those moments as preserved in words.’ The essential task of the prophet was to declare the word of God to the here and now. The prophetic aim was exhortation and not merely prediction. ‘It was to illuminate what is involved in the present; that is, to declare ‘truth as reflected in the mind of God.’
The literalist stressing supernatural revelation denies the role of the prophet’s own self in his utterances, while an emphasis on prophecy as a psychological, or entirely inward, experience ‘disregards the prophet’s awareness of his confrontation with facts not derived from his own mind.’ When Heschel speaks of ‘facts not derived from the prophet’s own mind,’ he means much more than the raw factuality of the literalist, he means the ‘consciousness’ of the prophet. Consequently while the prophet addresses a contemporary situation he ‘is not intoxicated with the here and now,’ but speaks with a vision, or consciousness, of an end.

Aryeh Kaplan, another Jewish scholar and mystic, says in regard to the person of the prophet: Those who sought to prepare themselves for prophetic ministry were known as ‘the sons of the prophets,’ and normally spent years in intense training and rigorous discipline learning to open their consciousness to the mind of God. The difference between the Old Testament prophets and other mystics is that the prophets were more specific and clearer in their messages. ‘The true prophet,’ says Kaplan, ‘is able to channel this spiritual power, focusing it clearly enough to obtain an unambiguous message.’

Jesus’s Use of Old Testament Predictions
The writers of the four Gospels portray Jesus as acutely aware of his words, his actions, and his presence as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. He is critical of the two despondent travelers on the road to Emmaus for their inability to grasp the meaning of his life among them in light of the Old Testament. ‘Beginning with Moses and with all the prophets he explained the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures’ (Luke 24:27). Jesus’s consciousness of who he was, as N.T. Wright points out, arose out of his sense of vocation; that is, his belief that he was called to accomplish only what God can undertake and complete. His predictions primarily looked forward to the day of Yahweh that had been prophesied in the Old Testament, the decisive act of God in which the present age would be brought to an end and a new order of peace, justice, and well-being initiated. Jesus uses Psalm 110:1 twice to accept the prophetic designation of messiah; however, in doing so he reinterprets what that means. With Jesus messianism has nothing to do with earthly dominance, worldly status, or military conquest, but with humility, with sacrificial suffering and with priestly and spiritual power conferred by God rather than gained through political manipulation. What this points to once again is the existence of a profound prophetic consciousness among the people of Israel in the Second Temple era.

The Prophetic Consciousness
Ultimately what Kaplan and Heschel are talking about is a way of thinking, a way of life, a way of being––the prophetic consciousness. ‘The prophet,’ said Heschel, ‘is human, yet employs notes one octave too high for our ears.’ What I am suggesting is that in order to understand messianic prophecy we must be capable of not only engaging in literary and historical analysis, but of going beyond such analysis so as to experience, as best we can, the prophetic consciousness ourselves. We know that this spiritual consciousness, this messianic hope, this attunement to what Saint Paul called ‘the mystery of the ages which is the hope of Christ in you’ (Colossians 1:26), was acute among the heirs of the Hebrew prophets early in first century Palestine. Among the saying of the prophets that made messianic expectations burn in them we may count this short list:

• The whole world will worship the One God of Israel (Isaiah 2:11-17).
• He will be descended from King David (Isaiah 11:1) via Solomon (1Chronicles 22:8-10, 2 Chronicles 7:18).
• The spirit of the Lord will be upon him (Isaiah 11:2).
• Evil and tyranny will not be able to stand before his leadership (Isaiah 11:4).
• Knowledge of God will fill the world (Isaiah 11:0).
• He will include and attract people from all cultures and nations (Isaiah 11:10).
• Death will be swallowed up forever (Isaiah 25:8).
• There will be no more hunger or illness, and death will cease (Isaiah 25:8).
• All of the dead will rise again (Isaiah 26:19).
• The people of God will experience eternal joy and gladness (Isaiah 51:11).
• He will be a messenger of peace for the whole world (Isaiah 52:7).
• Weapons of war will be destroyed (Ezekiel 39:9).
• The people of Israel will have direct access to the Torah through their minds and Torah study will become the study of the wisdom of the heart (Jeremiah 31:33).

How ancient Hebrew scholars may have interpreted any particular prophetic passage, or even how much they agreed as to the definitive list of messianic prophecies, is not the issue here. The point here is that among the Jewish people of first century Palestine, an intense messianic consciousness, derived from the Hebrew prophets of old, was not only manifest, but had reached that kairotic moment of which the Apostle Paul speaks in Galatians 4:4-7.

This prophetic consciousness is expressed in ancient Israel’s eschatology. R. T. France, Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford therefore writes:

From Amos to the Exile, and beyond, we find frequent explicit predictions of ‘the day of Yahweh.’ Expressions such as ‘in the day’ and ‘the days are coming’ give further evidence of a continuing expectation of the day of Yahweh, a decisive time of judgment (on the nations, and on Israel herself) and restoration. While similar phrases sometimes refer to definite acts of judgment in the near future, this cannot be said of expressions like ‘in the end of days,’ nor of the pictures of the coming golden age such as occur in Isaiah 11:1-9 or Zephaniah 3:11-20; the universal character of the work of God so described demands an eschatological future frame of reference. It may not be easy, or even desirable to separate the historical from the eschatological; the immediate and distant future are generally tantalizingly telescoped in a single perspective.

France argues that there can, therefore, be no doubt of a Jewish eschatology which saw a future decisive act of God resulting in a final end to the present order and a new beginning. Although he sees messianic expectations, in terms of references to a specific agent, as forming only a small part of this eschatological hope, it is, nevertheless, entirely reasonable to understand this eschatology as yet another angle from which to view what is here referred to as the prophetic consciousness of the people of Second Temple Israel. To anyone who thinks consciousness unreal it might be pointed out that many quantum physicists believe consciousness is the only real reality.

Conclusion
Michael Langford in his Unblind Faith: A New Approach for the Twenty-First Century, writes simply of the complex process of coming to an intelligent Christian faith:

I have argued that the reflective Christian comes to the New Testament stories in several stages; first, an awareness of the extraordinary nature of Jesus of Nazareth– relying on perfectly plausible accounts of his life and character and teaching; second, a reasonably grounded belief in a personal God who genuinely conveyed a message through the prophets; third, a decision that this Jesus is the Messiah to whom the prophetic tradition looked forward; and then, fourth, a rereading of the gospel stories in the light of these steps that have been taken. In this context, without any gullibility a reflective person may be unwilling to dismiss outright the historical reality of some actual events of an extraordinary and, perhaps unique nature, even though they remain extremely puzzled about exactly what happened.

This paper has been written with Langford’s four-stage process of becoming Christian in sight, in particular, and with some single mindedness, it has been an exploration of that stage which involves the belief that God genuinely conveyed through the prophets the message of the coming Messiah. However, it has attempted to do so in a dynamic rather than wooden fashion.

Those familiar with Paul Ricoeur’s notion of a hermeneutic that travels from a pre-critcal naïveté in its understanding, through the desert of the critical stage, and finally arrives at the springs of the post-critical, will recognize this as the journey taken here. The person of Christian faith may at first read the messianic prophecies utilized by the New Testament writers as Nostradamus like predictions; or what they imagine Nostradamus’ predictions to be like. This Ricoeur referred to as the first naiveté. However, once problems are recognized in a text, for example the intent of the original author seems different than the way an author uses it in the New Testament, or multiple texts appear to have been combined in order to produce one prophecy, or the Hebrew text does not look like a prophecy at all, then one may become lost and wander aimlessly in a wilderness of hyper criticism. They may become expert at debunking the biblical narrative, and far too sophisticated to discover that reality inherent and discernable only in a condition of complete simplicity. But, if they are able to appreciate not only the exegetical methodology employed and its rigor, but also the magnitude and actual existence of what has been referred to here as the prophetic consciousness, there is the possibility they may enter that third stage––the post critical phase in which they recognize the sorts of problems sons and daughters of the Age of Reason cannot ignore; Simultaneously, they may see in them a reality that is transcendent and beautiful, and a truth that is more than merely emblematic.
So what might be our final reply to those whose laborious analysis dismisses the possibility of Old Testament prophecy as a part of that maturing of history and spiritual consciousness which leads to that kairotic moment, to that ‘fullness of time,’ into which the Messiah is sent (Gal. 4:4)? Perhaps we should simply reiterate: ‘You don’t understand. It’s turtles, the mystery of prophetic messianic consciousness, all the way down.’

Bibliography
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