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October 7, 2024

October 7th, Jerusalem, and Biblical Prophecy Revisited

By Clarke Morledge

Bullet holes riddle the exterior of the Zion Gate in Jerusalem, a center of conflict during the wars of 1948 and 1967 for control of the Holy City.  I visited Jerusalem in December, 1993, and the sight of these bullet holes gripped me deeply.

 

It has been one year since Hamas led a surprise attack against the modern state of Israel. The situation in Gaza has been desperate and dire, while daily life in Israel continues under constant threats from Yemeni Houthis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Iran. The fact that the original attack came 50 years plus a day after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 was no coincidence.

Hamas’ name for the October 7, 2023 attack was “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” Al-Aqsa is the name of the great mosque located on the Jerusalem Temple Mount. Israeli police had been limiting the number of worshippers who visit the iconic mosque, spreading concerns about access to the mosque.

Fears of the war spreading invite Christians to consider how all of this connects with biblical prophecy. As I write this, concerns about climate change in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s devastation of western North Carolina, with yet another storm bearing down on Florida recall Luke 21:25: “And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves.”

So, are we nearing “The End?”

Between 2014 and 2018, I spent about two-years on and off, on a deep-dive research project to look into the whole issue of “Christian Zionism,” reflecting on a common evangelical expectation that the Bible teaches that a restoration of national Israel, within its original borders as defined in the Book of Genesis, is part of God’s prophetic plan coinciding somehow with the return of Jesus. If there was anything I learned in doing this, it was that the issue of national Israel in prophecy is exceedingly complex.

Since then, my thinking has changed in the sense that the legacy of antisemitism is worse than what I thought before embarking on this study, and that this legacy sadly extends way back into the history of the Christian church. There is inherently a “supersessionist” element in Christian theology in the New Testament, particularly in the Book of Hebrews. In some sense, the message of the Christian faith supersedes the message of traditional Judaism, from whence the Christian movement came. There is no getting around the fact that Christianity has its roots in the world of the Old Testament. The debate is over what that whole notion of “superseding” actually entails, in terms of the ramifications of that type of thinking.

I thought it might be helpful to repost the “blog post compendium” all of that research, with links to other Veracity blog posts, in order to better navigate this complicated issue which crops up almost daily on our news feeds. I originally posted this in January, 2018. I hope at least someone finds this helpful, just as I have….

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U.S. Vice President, Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian, at Jerusalem’s “Wailing Wall,” January 23, 2018. While many American Christians enthusiastically supported the visit of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, to Jerusalem, many Middle Eastern Christian leaders refused to meet with him. Why the rebuff of the American leader, by fellow Christians? (photo credit: REUTERS, Ronen Zvulun)

U.S. President Donald Trump made news in December, 2017, by announcing that the United States would move their embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, to honor the Israeli claim that Jerusalem is truly the capital of that modern nation-state. For many Christians, when they read their Bibles, they think that this is a “no-brainer.” Jerusalem has been the center of Judaism since the days of the Old Testament. Why not now?

But a lot of other Christians, when they read their Bibles, beg to differ.

As British theologian Ian Paul writes, Theodore Herzl, the pioneer of modern Jewish Zionism, modestly envisioned Mount Carmel as the capital for a modern Jewish state, and not Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of modern Israel, was willing to accept the loss of Jerusalem as the price to be paid for having a homeland at all, for the Jews, in the Middle East.

The 1967, Six-Days War, whereby Israeli forces took control of all of Jerusalem, changed all of that.

The latest move by the United States, as many see it, is simply accepting what everyone knows is the reality behind modern day Israel.  Why pretend? Jerusalem is, and should be, the capital of Israel.

Well, others are quite uncomfortable with the idea, The planned implementation of U.S. foreign policy creates concerns that this move could lead (and in a few cases, has already led) to unnecessary violence..

They call Jerusalem, the “city of peace.” Why then, is it so controversial? What does the Bible have to say about all of this? Continue reading

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October 4, 2024

A Trip to the Museum of the Bible

By Clarke Morledge

My wife and I spent an afternoon in Washington, D.C. this summer at the Museum of the Bible. If you have not been, it is definitely worth the visit.

The Museum of the Bible, in Washington, D.C., opened November 17, 2017

Situated just a few blocks southwest from the U.S. Capitol, the Museum of the Bible can easily take a full afternoon, or even a full day (as that is my wife’s pace) to explore everything. Or you could just go to watch people.

The afternoon we were there, I saw a group of Amish families, speaking Pennsylvania Dutch with a bunch of baby strollers in tow. There were, of course, white Anglo-Saxon Americans, like myself, but plenty of African Americans, and African visitors from across the ocean…. and even a few Southeast Asians. What a mix!

The idea of having a Museum of the Bible was ambitious, and it had a rough start. The Green family, founders of the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts store chain, carried the vision of the Museum of the Bible to reality. But along the way, the Greens ended up acquiring certain artifacts to place in the museum that had questionable provenance. This has happened with other museums of various types, as sometimes inexperienced museum collectors do not always know who to trust when you try to collect artifacts for a collection. In the case of the Museum of the Bible, some objects had to be returned to their rightful owners. As it turned out, all of the supposed Dead Sea Scrolls that the Museum had acquired were discovered to be fakes.

The good news is that the Museum of the Bible has since learned its lesson, setting more careful standards for antiquities acquisitions. Also, the Museum has managed to address concerns that it might be effectively captured by particular Protestant evangelical interests.  The Museum has worked hard to include scholarship from Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish sources to round out the interpretation of the Museum’s displays. The Vatican Library in Rome has given the Museum of the Bible some things to display, and I learned a lot about the history of Jews in colonial America. The Museum of the Bible appears to have a good mix of standard museum fair, with objects and written signage for adults and older students to read and see, along with immersive activities for kids and families.

Hey, there is even a display with Elvis Presley’s Bible! Elvis was known for being the king of “rock-n-roll” music, but he also recorded Gospel music, too. The Museum of the Bible rotates items in and out of its collection for public viewing, but you can also see it online, along with a history of how the Museum acquired Elvis’ Bible.

Here are just a few of the other things I saw that caught my eye, from the display about the history of the King James Bible. Back when the King James Bible was first printed, there was a discrepancy regarding how to interpret, much less print, Ruth 3:15. The ESV translation reads it like this:

And he said, “Bring the garment you are wearing and hold it out.” So she held it, and he measured out six measures of barley and put it on her. Then she went into the city.

But the King James scholars behind the KJV translation were befuddled by some confusion between the various Hebrew manuscripts available to them in order to produce the English translation. Did “she,” meaning Ruth go back into the city, as the ESV has it above, or should it be “he,” as in Boaz, who “went back into the city?”  Different printers varied in their printings of 1611:

The “she” in the last line of the printing, on the bottom, is a little hard to make out as the English printers of the day would often print the so-called “long s” at the beginning of the word much like the letter “f”. You can see the same practice in the word “mea-sures” broken across two lines in this verse, where it looks like “mea-fures”.  See this video on “The 7 Forgotten Letters of the Alphabet” for an explanation.

 

There were also a number of Bible printings of the King James Version over the years that had some glaring errors in them.  One printing, nicknamed the “Killer” Bible, from the 1795 printing by R. Bowyer and J. Fittler of London, accidentally misspelled the word “filled” in Mark 7:27 as “killed.” This printing has Jesus saying, “Let the children first be killed.” Oooops! The Museum of the Bible has a copy of this Bible on display (zoom into the photograph to see the error at the top of the left hand page, in the right hand column):

The Killer Bible.

 

Now here is something I have always wanted to see for myself. In 1631, the printer Robert Barker of London printed a Bible with a terribly embarrassing error in one of the Ten Commandments found in Exodus 20:14, “Thou shall commit adultery.”  The printer left out the word “not.” Now, that is a big OOOOPS!  They call it the “Wicked Bible.” It is a collectors edition now, as most copies of that printing were either corrected or destroyed. But the Museum of the Bible has their own rare copy!

The Wicked Bible

 

If there was one thing I was disappointed with, it was that the displays often had a lot of facsimiles instead of the real documents on display.  A perfect example is a fragment from the Oxyrhynchus collection discovered in Egypt in the late 19th century of the so-called Gospel of Mary. The Oxyrhynchus collection is from an ancient garbage dump in Egypt where many of the unearthed fragments are still being analyzed over a century later.

The Gospel of Mary.

 

The Gospel of Mary is not found in our canonical Bibles, but it was a popular text among the Gnostic Christians, particularly in the 3rd century.  In the Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene was featured has having a unique relationship with Jesus, whereby Jesus is said to have revealed things to Mary that Jesus did not reveal to the twelve male disciples/apostles. Some of what Jesus supposedly revealed secretly to Mary is strange, to say the least. A number of Gnostic Christian groups during the early church era had the rough equivalent of female presbyters in their churches (along with male presbyters), as opposed to the male-only presbyteriate in the orthodox communities. The display for the Gospel of Mary was quite informative, even though the fragment on the display was only a facsimile and not the real thing.

Was the Gospel of Mary facsimile on display simply because the Museum of the Bible does not possess the real thing? This was not clear to me. The Museum of the Bible seems like it is on good enough footing now that it might be able to acquire other artifacts for display without having to resort to so many facsimiles. Let us hope this happens!

Overall, there is a lot to explore at the Museum of the Bible. It is perfect for families and large groups to visit. In a day and age when biblical illiteracy is at an all time high, it is great that Americans and visitors to America have the Museum of the Bible available where the history and influence of the Bible on Western (and world) civilization can be surveyed.  Go visit the Museum of the Bible!!

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September 20, 2024

Reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Armageddon, Part Two: Why Is Revelation So Difficult to Understand?

By Clarke Morledge

The Book of Revelation is not only the last book in the Bible. It was also one of the last books to have gained full acceptance into the New Testament canon of Scripture. Interestingly, controversy about Revelation arose starting around the 3rd century, despite its general acceptance in the 2nd century. Hesitancy about the book was largely due to various difficulties readers had in trying to understand what the author, named John, was trying to teach.

Back when I was in high school, I managed to read the entire New Testament cover-to-cover over several days…. EXCEPT for the Book of Revelation.

Frankly, I could not make sense of it. I gave up on it, until I picked it back up again in briefly in college, and more intensely years later in seminary. Over the years since then, I have learned that I was not alone with my initial confusion about the book.

Even the great conservative stalwart Protestant of the 16th century, Martin Luther, had his own doubts about the very inspiration of the Book of Revelation, as Bart Ehrman tells us, saying that Luther “can in nothing detect that it [Revelation] was provided by the Holy Spirit” (Armageddon, Ehrman, p. 32). Nevertheless, Luther submitted to the collective mind of the early church as accepting Revelation as part of canonical Scripture, translating it into his German version of the New Testament, though he did place the book in his New Testament translation in an appendix and not the main body of the translation (Ehrman, p. 31). Despite Luther’s personal skepticism, traditional Lutherans today still accept the Book of Revelation as inspired Word of God, as do all historically orthodox Christians.

The late Protestant Bible teacher, R.C. Sproul, once said that the canon of Scripture is a fallible list of infallible books. My Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends might push back a little on this, and Sproul’s statement can sound a little odd even to Protestants. Nevertheless, all historically orthodox Christians affirm the Book of Revelation as infallible…. though difficult to interpret when it comes to some of the nuts and bolts of the text.

Revelation can be a hard book to understand. But why?

In the first part of this book review of Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End, some consideration was made as to the violent imagery we find in the book, analyzing the type of literature the book is (apocalyptic), and concluding with a look into the controversy regarding the millennium. While every biblical scholar knows that Revelation contains a great deal of symbolism, much of the controversies in interpreting the book come down to (a) how much is symbolism being used, and (2) when you do find symbolic language, what do these symbols mean?

In this second and last part of this review, some of the other difficulties are explored, along with an analysis of what Bart Ehrman thinks the book is really about. I then hope to show why Ehrman’s solution is itself problematic.

 

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August 30, 2024

Reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Armageddon, Part One: Why is the Book of Revelation So Violent?

By Clarke Morledge

Did Jesus want a woman raped and her children killed in the Book of Revelation?

To start off this post with such a question is shocking. But it was just as shocking to me when I heard this claim made in Bart Ehrman’s 2023 best seller, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End. What follows is a PG-13 rated Veracity book review.

The Book of Revelation is one of the most difficult books of the Bible to understand. It is also one of the most fascinating books of the Bible. Over the past ten years, a number of Christian bible studies in my town across multiple churches have tried to tackle this last book of the Bible, in order to figure out its enigmatic teachings. From the blowing of trumpets, to the bowls of God’s wrath, to the mark of the beast, etc., the images we read of in Revelation have both disturbed and inspired Christians down through the ages. Revelation is of particular interest in the cultural moment of our day, when political controversies in the United States have been tearing people and families apart, cultural change sparked by social media ripples across society, and reports of civil unrest and horrific wars across the world come across daily in our news feeds.

Are we living in the end times? It sometimes feels like it. People look to the Book of Revelation to try to find the answer.

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August 17, 2024

Moses is Dead, by Travis Simone. A Review.

By Clarke Morledge

Life transitions are hard. Particularly when it comes to the death of someone special to you.

When my two parents died within nearly a year from one another, I felt like the world shifted underneath my feet. I thankfully had some good friends over the years, along with numerous cousins, and I had been married for about fifteen years. However, these relationships only encompassed certain portions of my life. My parents on the other hand were there over the entirety of my life up to that point.

Though I was closer emotionally to my mom, losing my dad after my mom turned out to be harder. My mom remained pretty sharp until her cancer incapacitated her in her last two months. Yet my dad’s advancing dementia spanned well over a year. Seeing him slip over that period eventually led to my despair the day he died, when I finally realized that the only person left who knew me during my whole life was gone. What was going to happen next?

One of the last persons to visit with my dad before he died was pastor Travis Simone, just three days before I got the phone call that my dad was dead. As I recall, a few days later Travis came by my house and brought me a Tim Keller book on suffering. I appreciated that Travis was there to help me through my life transition at a critical time.

I think about that transition time as I have read Travis’ D.Min doctoral paper, Moses is Dead: Strategies for Pastoral Transition. Just as the death of Moses eventually allowed the “baton to be passed” to Joshua, Travis had experienced his own transition, just a few years prior to my parents’ death.

Our church had suddenly lost our then lead pastor for several decades, due to an uncomfortable and unresolved controversy. Though not a physical death, the loss of the lead pastor was still a kind of death, an experience that was both shocking and unsettling. Many congregants who had made the church their Christian home for years were traumatized.

As a less senior member of the pastoral staff, Travis was suddenly asked to step forward as the interim pastor of a rather large congregation. If there was such a thing as a “megachurch” in Williamsburg, Virginia, hardly a large city, it was our church: the Williamsburg Community Chapel. Travis had to help our church navigate that difficult period, and he eventually was selected by the church membership to be the next lead pastor of this independent church, which had no denominational backing or predetermined succession plan. The church had been a part of a loose network of churches, a “consortium”, made up of other “community chapels” in the greater Hampton Roads Virginia area. But for the most part, that relationship at that particular moment was rather quite loose, so our church was pretty much on its own. It was a tough task to take on.

Life transitions are hard. Sudden church leadership transitions included.

Pastor Travis Simone, leading a book club discussion for his recent D.Min. dissertation entitled Moses Is Dead: Strategies for Pastoral Transition in the summer of 2024, at the Williamsburg Community Chapel.

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