RELIGION & ACADEMIA

I Suggested Isaiah 53 Wasn’t About Jesus. Someone Threw Their Shoe At Me.

The story of my Zoom discussion on Jesus in the Hebrew Bible

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“In spite of what you may think, there is no way that you can argue he’s not there.”

Above is a quote from a Christian New Testament scholar in response to me answering a question in the negative from the Zoom audience. The question was: “from an academic perspective, is Jesus in the Old Testament?”

To me, the answer was just a quick “no”.

That is to say, most scholars are not going to look at a single verse in the Hebrew Bible and say that it is about Jesus because that is not normally how it is viewed from an academic perspective.

In this particular Zoom meeting, I knew that I would be in the minority of people because the people who were attending (and who had invited me) were coming from a conservative Christian confessional viewpoint.

The other people who they had invited to answer this question were of course prepared for me to give the kind of response which set everyone into a bit of a frenzy. Thankfully, most of the people were on mute, so I casually tried to ignore people’s frustrated faces.

This is when a scholar unmuted and deadpanned the quote that begins this article. After he said it, I invited him to make his case as we continued to have the discussion, which I was committed to keeping as civil as possible.

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The Discussion Begins

The first point in his discussion was to say that I had committed myself to academic sources that had an anti-supernatural presupposition, which is a point that I really didn’t like to hear from someone who didn’t know me personally.

I let him know as much and I also said that if you are going to say that the Holy Spirit told you that Jesus was in a particular verse, then even the most committed Christian scholars have to acknowledge that is a conversation ender.

People can say that God told them just about anything, but to participate in this type of discussion, you do have to commit to sharing things that are at least verifiable and not based on hearsay.

The next argument he made is that the church fathers believed that the Hebrew Bible was about Jesus and they knew Greek better than we did and we should listen to them because they learned directly from the apostles.

Not wanting to deal directly with an argument for apostolic succession that he had not yet articulated, I decided instead to emphasize the idea that we need to make sure that we are reading the fathers carefully.

The church fathers were not friendly to those of the Jewish faith at all and their writings are quite awful from a modern perspective. They accused Jews of having removed prophecies that related to Jesus from the Bible.

Needless to say, everything to that point was a non-starter until someone brought up the idea that if theology and Biblical studies were not so separated, then people wouldn’t say such awful things about Jesus.

The discussion was starting to heat up a little at this juncture, so I took on what he said from that point and started to dive in to see where the points of contention were. The first place I honed in on was the idea of theology.

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Not Theology Per Se

When people use the term “theology” in these discussions, they often do so widely to refer to claims that are made about God in general. Once you can ask them to define what they mean, then you can move towards discussion on the topic.

Eventually, my interlocutor claimed that theologians have identified over 300 fulfilled prophecies in the Old Testament. I interjected: ‘Which theologian, specifically?’

The first few names that I got were from internet apologists, so we went back and forth before eventually ending up on N.T. Wright, who in that particular context may as well be a canonized saint.

I pushed back on Wright because I had documented sources from him about his viewpoint on these ideas and I felt as though two things were being conflated. I think they were conflating two things: how the New Testament writers repurposed the Hebrew Bible for their own ends, versus what those texts originally meant to their authors. Wright is careful to distinguish between the two; my interlocutors were not.

This was important because it pushed the conversation from the realm of presuppositions and supernatural skepticism into a different realm of whether these claims about N.T. Wright could be substantiated.

I countered that if you look at Wright’s contribution to a conference and publication on Isaiah 53, he makes the observation that we only read the fourth Servant Song in Isaiah and not the first three, which leads to misunderstanding.

This led to my next point, which relates to the way that Christians read (or don’t read) the Hebrew Bible.

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Ignorance of the Hebrew Bible

The next point that I brought up in the discussion is that the majority of Christian readers couldn’t tell you a single thing about the historical background to most of the Hebrew Bible books that they read.

When the Hebrew Bible is read in many of those contexts, the characters begin to blur together and become personifications of some sort of attitude towards God, representing either blessing or sin, respectively.

The specifics do not matter unless it is a prophecy that relates to the New Testament, at which point every last syllable is inspired and given by God. This leads to ignorance that is derived from a belief that the Hebrew Bible is about Jesus.

In doing so, they give themselves a way of reading the text and thinking about how it applies to their life and their relationship with God. This is a fine and legitimate way of reading the text, but it is not one that will help you to become more Biblically literate.

One of the problems that I brought up in this discussion is how they were very insistent that they believed in a historical faith when it comes to the New Testament and its claims, but they were ok with historical ignorance of the Hebrew Bible.

That didn’t sit very well with me overall. It seemed that it was way too dismissive towards the Hebrew Bible, which was my next point.

Prophets without Context

My interlocutor moved the discussion down the field when he insisted that knowledge of the faith and an understanding of the relationship between a person and Jesus would suffice for reading the Hebrew Bible.

I thought this was simply unacceptable. As I mentioned above, prophets without historical context continue to build ignorance on the Hebrew Bible. As a remedy, I suggested what I thought was a helpful starting point.

That helpful starting point was recommending that they work through a study Bible on a particular Hebrew Bible book, as that would fill in the historical gaps for them. At this point, I could tell that everyone was getting frustrated with me.

They argued that I needed to leave room for the clarity of the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit to help people understand what the true meaning of the text was, instead of trying to teach people to be better historians.

My counter point was that this was why people describe certain iterations of the Christian faith as anti-intellectual. It is fine to say that people can read the text spiritually or less literally, but it is another thing entirely to demand a literal reading that is intentionally uninformed.

At this point, I started to suggest that I would be ok with people arguing, as some theologians had, that the Hebrew Bible had two meanings, with one being contextual and the other being prophetic.

This didn’t make anyone who was attending happy.

They just wanted to see Jesus in everything that happened in the Hebrew Bible. I countered that Isaiah 53 isn’t about Jesus and that nothing in the Hebrew Bible was about Jesus.

That’s when it happened.

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The Moment the Shoe Flew

At that moment, I noticed an object flying toward the Zoom screen of someone in the meeting. I was very confused until I saw that it was in fact a shoe. I couldn’t help but burst out in laughter seeing that someone threw their shoe at me (and presumably damaged their laptop).

Of course, no one thought it was all that funny besides me. They thought that I had pushed the poor guy to the brink until he finally had no choice but to damage his own property. I was just glad the meeting wasn’t in person.

In any case, I pushed ahead in the discussion by letting everyone know that I thought that it was fine to read Jesus into the Hebrew Bible, but not in a way that they were insisting on doing. They had to do so experientially.

If they focused on experiencing the text, they could understand that Paul wrote and read Scripture in light of Christ. Paul didn’t really do literal when he quoted the Hebrew Bible, but instead he reflected on the meaning of verses according to his points about Jesus Christ.

It was fine for people to look at verses in the Hebrew Bible and feel inspired to reflect on these verses creatively and say that they remind you of Jesus in the same way that one would be inspired by music or a work of art.

One can do this without insisting that these verses are “about” Jesus or that these are what these verses mean. I insisted on this before someone looked into the Zoom camera and said “Blasphemy!”

I checked the clock and realized that the session was mercifully coming to an end. I thanked everyone for coming and gracefully tapped out of the Zoom room, content with letting everyone have their own opinion.

Conclusion

I think it is possible to advocate for Christians to recognize that verses in the Hebrew Bible, even Isaiah 53, are not about Jesus. Looking carefully at the context of verses is necessary so that they don’t make claims about how it is so obvious that Jewish people reject the truth.

I think it is important to be fair to all traditions and speak about what is most likely when it comes to these texts, instead of simply trying to make sure that their particular apologetic claims are bolstered when it comes to the text.

My hope is that you who are reading this will be able to find significance in reading the Bible in light of Jesus Christ if you wish to, but that you will also attend well to the original context of these texts.

It is hard to understand more about texts if you pull them out of their original context. It can’t hurt to know more about the context and the attendant circumstances that caused these texts to come into existence.

There is a lot that Christians could learn about what the authors of these texts have to say about God and faith if they were willing to work through them with the help of an academic study Bible, such as the SBL Study Bible, the Oxford Annotated Bible or something similar.

This will allow Christians to engage in some of the questions about God that they are missing when their current approach insists that they need to commit to the absolute truth of everything that they are arguing.

To me, the beauty of the Biblical text is specifically the questions that come up as well as a faith that can hold such queries without needing to have a crisis.

For example, the way in which authors of the Hebrew Bible respond to the geopolitical events that happened around them in light of their faith is instructive for Christians today.

Yet, they continue to read the books of the Hebrew Bible with an insistence upon a narrative in which everything will be great soon because Jesus will soon come into the world, which isn’t good news for anyone in the context of the book.

If you do decide to read these texts more creatively or in light of history, I will be encouraged by your example. Just beware of flying shoes!