Hebrew Voices #240 – The Chair of Moses: Part 1

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Rev. Dr. Philip Thomas “Pip” Mohr: This project of doing that, you pick your favorite theology, and you cut away the things that you don’t like to get to the true Jesus, who looks just like you. That’s been going on for, well, a lot longer than the modern period, but definitely in the modern period. And so, these scholars who are doing that kind of thing with Matthew 23 are right in line with, “I’ve picked the Jesus I prefer. Let me get rid of the things I don’t like.”

Nehemia: Look, I mean, there’s something about this Jesus fellow, I’ll just say it like that, where Mao Tse-Tung, who doesn’t come from a Christian culture, is making the early church and Jesus out to be like proto communists, right? And I don’t have an answer, I’m just thinking out loud. There’s something here where people from around the world are trying to engage with this historical figure and recast him in their own kind of, you know, mold. That’s really interesting.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Reverend Dr. Philip Thomas Mohr, who goes by the name Pip. He is an assistant professor of biblical and theological studies at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina. He’s also a Minister of the Word at the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. And… shalom, and welcome to the program, Pip. Thank you for joining us.

Pip: Thank you. Good to be here.

Nehemia: I don’t know if the audience sees this, but I noticed on your Zoom it says your name is Philip Thomas Mohr, and in parentheses, it has Nehemiah with vowels. And I thought to myself, “Oh, he put my name in there to remind himself who he’s talking to.” But, no, you actually used that name. So, tell the audience about that.

Pip: Yeah, yeah. So, one of my roles I’ve been doing for a number of years, teaching Hebrew, the third level of Hebrew, for Westminster Theological Seminary online. So, students online would see me in Zoom, and I forgot to change it. But we have Hebrew names in the course because we, you know, talk to each other, and as I call on students… And so, they would call me Nehemiah…

Nehemia: Okay. Oh, and you pronounced that even with the correct Tiberian… well, let’s say the correct emphasis.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: NehemiAH, instead of the Eastern European, NeHEMiah.

Pip: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, it’s funny, I once interviewed a gentleman who told me his name was NeheMIah, and I said, “Wow, it’s very unusual for, you know, someone from your background.” He said, “Well, I went through a very difficult time in life, and my community gave me that name. My original name is…” I don’t remember, it was like Bill or something, right?

Pip: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And I said, “The same thing happened to me. A man came at me with a scalpel when I was eight days old, and I was given the name Nehemia. Right? I went through a difficult thing.”

Pip: A traumatic experience.

Nehemia: Yeah, exactly. There you go. Because for those who don’t know, Jews are given their name at eight days old. So, the reason I wanted to interview you is, I get this, like, newsletter announcement from the Society of Biblical Literature, and they had an announcement about a new dissertation that had come out from one of their members, and it was you. I mean, there’s a bunch of them. I read through them and I’m usually not interested. And here I’m like, “I need to talk to this guy!”

So, your dissertation for your PhD was called “The ‘Chair of Moses’ Saying (Matthew 23:2–3): Historical Concerns, Providential Applications, and Present Understanding; a Dissertation”. And it’s actually from the Catholic University of America, so, until five minutes ago, I thought you were Catholic. Then I found out you are part of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, which I’ve never heard of until five minutes ago.

So, Pip, tell us about the Chair of Moses. You probably don’t know this, but I have a profound and deep interest in that, both as an academic, but also from kind of a personal perspective, because I’ve approached the Chair of Moses from the Jewish perspective, which I don’t think you discussed that in your dissertation. I don’t remember. You had some interesting things in your dissertation which I wouldn’t have expected. Meaning, one of the things I do as a human being is… I have two hats; I have the academic hat, and I have the believer hat, and I try to keep them separate. And you’ve done a really interesting kind of blending that I’ve never seen before, and to find out that you’re not Catholic makes it even more impressive.

So, talk to us about the Chair of Moses. Assume the audience never heard of that, doesn’t know what that is. What’s the Chair of Moses, and why is that worthy of a dissertation?

Pip: Sure, yeah. Well, the question “what is the Chair of Moses” is a live question. You’ll get many different answers to that question, but where we encounter that phrase is in Matthew chapter 23 verse 2. Jesus is speaking to his disciples and the crowds, and he says to everyone, you know, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on the Chair of Moses,” and it goes on to say, you know, “Therefore you should do what they tell you to do,” qualifies it, but, you know, don’t do according to their works because they say, or they preach, but they don’t do, or they don’t practice what they preach. And so, that launches into some contrast between these scribes and Pharisees and the true disciples of Jesus, and then the woes to the scribes and the Pharisees, whom he calls hypocrites. So, it’s a…

Nehemia: And by woes, you mean there’s a series of sort of rebukes that Jesus is giving throughout Matthew 23, right?

Pip: That’s right, that’s right.

Nehemia: Right.

Pip: And so, we get probably some of the harshest language you’ll see in the New Testament towards any group or person we see in the rest of chapter 23. So, it’s a very difficult chapter to read, and I think maybe that’s why not a lot of people read it, or, you know, they read it once and move on. They don’t hear a lot of sermons or other kinds of treatments of it. But…

Nehemia: That’s interesting that you say “difficult”, because I… So, here’s something where, even after all these years, I’m somewhat innocent of the Christian context. Meaning, you say it’s difficult; I’m actually surprised to hear that. Meaning, who is it difficult to, and why? I’m not aware of that.

Pip: Yeah. Well, speaking of the chapter as a whole, before we get to the Chair of Moses saying, you can read, recently there’s a Catholic writer named Anthony Saldarini, and he’s talking about this chapter and he’s reflecting on Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in, say, the 20th century, right? Huge topic. And he’s saying, “Because this passage is so harsh towards scribes and Pharisees, and then also, at the end, towards the city of Jerusalem, it seems like this passage would play right into anti-Jewish rhetoric and polemics.” And so, his recommendation as a Catholic scholar is, don’t even read it. Don’t even…

Nehemia: Really? Don’t read it? Or don’t preach it from the pulpit?

Pip: Kind of both.

Nehemia: Wow!

Pip: I mean, to the preacher; don’t preach it. And to the layperson, he seems to be saying, pass over it.

Nehemia: Wow!

Pip: Just, you know, know that it’s there. The scholar needs to deal with it, but the church…

Nehemia: Wow! That is really interesting. And then, I would think somebody like Candace Owens or Dan Bilzerian, who, frankly, I don’t really know what their theology is, so maybe it’s not fair for me to mention them, but I’ve seen them in anti-Semitic rants citing Christian justification for their anti-Semitic rants. I would think they love this chapter. So, I mean, maybe it’s difficult for some people, and others are like, “This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life to justify what I already believe,” right? Meaning, I don’t know.

Pip: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, read in a certain context. So, one of the things I discovered in the dissertation, getting a little ahead of ourselves, is, you know, there’s a historical critical tendency to take these words that Matthew puts in Jesus’s mouth and say, “No, that’s actually Matthew’s invention or some later teacher’s invention that has been inserted back into Jesus.” As soon as you do that, then the polemic becomes some early Christian group against some early Jewish group, and that’s actually where the anti-Semitic reading, the anti-Jewish reading, thrives.

Nehemia: Wait, this is profound. You’re saying… well, I’m going to let you talk. That’s amazing.

Pip: So, on the other hand, if this is something that Jesus, a Jew, is saying to fellow Jews in a totally Jewish setting, he’s set in the Temple in this part of Matthew’s gospel… If that’s something Jesus is saying, then it’s really hard to construe it as anti-Jewish, because it’s inter-Jewish; it’s something that’s happening within a community. There’s competing views. It’s not an anti-Jewish polemic if it’s in Jesus’s mouth. It only becomes anti-Jewish if you think it’s a later invention that’s put into Jesus’s mouth. Does that make sense?

Nehemia: So, let me ask you this. And this is for most of the audience who isn’t coming from an academic background.

Pip: Sure, sure.

Nehemia: When you say “put into Jesus’s mouth…”

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Are there believing Christian scholars who say that? Or is that something you’d only hear from someone who’s an agnostic or atheist? It’s a genuine question. I actually don’t know what the answer is.

Pip: Well, there’s such a variety. So… how do I put it? I think that there are lots of believing scholars who would say something like that. I think it’s an inconsistent way to speak about what’s going on in the gospel according to Matthew.

Nehemia: Let’s back up. Are you a believing Christian? Because I’m a Jew. I’m not a Christian, right?

Pip: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Are you a believing Christian?

Pip: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: Okay. So… And I don’t know that we have time to define what that even means…

Pip: That’s right.

Nehemia: …because… okay. So, in other words, and I love to bring this example. Like, there were ancient rabbis who said the entire Book of Job is a parable, and it lo haya ve’lo nivra, it never actually happened. And you’re not supposed to think it happened. Even though I do believe it happened, right?

Pip: Sure.

Nehemia: But it’s a legitimate position within Judaism to say, “No, Job wasn’t sitting around with his three friends. It’s a parable that prophets, or whoever, spoke, or Moses wrote down,” they actually say, right? So, that’s a legitimate position, even though I don’t agree with it. You’re saying there are believing Christians… And look, I would guess, I don’t know the answer to this; I would guess that’s… I want to be careful here. I’m not going to say it, never mind.

Pip: Okay.

Nehemia: Don’t edit that out, but people will know what I’m thinking… or maybe not. So, I think that’s probably more widespread than you would think. In other words, one of the things you’ll hear from, like, Bart Ehrman, who I think is a great scholar, is that Matthew was written anonymously and Mark was written anonymously. And then I asked myself, “What would it look like if it wasn’t anonymous?” Because when he gets to certain epistles where the epistle explicitly says Paul’s writing it, he’s like, “Oh, that’s exactly what a forger would do; he’d pretend to be Paul.” So, I’m like, “I can’t win here,” right? If the author doesn’t say who he is, then… this is the Jewish way of talking and thinking; then it’s anonymous and you can’t trust it. If the author says who he is, it’s exactly what a forger would say. It’s like Kafkaesque, you know.

Pip: It’s called confirmation bias. I mean… and Bart Ehrman is a brilliant text critic, no doubt.

Nehemia: And he is, amen!

Pip: But his historiography is not good. I mean, even the historiography that he’s relying on is basically outdated. This idea that there’s a proto-Orthodox strand and, you know, there’s competing Christianities. It’s just this total melee and, you know, Walter Bauer’s idea that heresy precedes orthodoxy and it’s not until Constantine comes in that things are regulated, and orthodoxy… That whole thing… I mean, all of Bauer’s historiography is bad.

Nehemia: So, what does Bauer say? Tell us… Because you’re coming from a perspective like, you know, you live and breathe these authors, and my audience is like, “You just name dropped. I don’t know who that is.” So, tell us, what is the position of, let’s say, mainstream Christian, or New Testament scholarship? Maybe not Christian.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Or what was it in the past regarding the authorship of the Gospels?

Pip: Okay. So, this is way off of the track of the dissertation, but I’m going to do my best to pull things out. So, Walter Bauer was a brilliant German lexicographer, and he’s looking at early Christian centers like Alexandria, and Asia Minor, and Edessa, off in the East, and he’s saying, “Look, we have this evidence that there’s, like, all kinds of different views of who Jesus is and what’s going on in the Christian message.” And so, based on his reading of those places, he says, “Really what you’ve got is a plurality of Christianities, and you don’t have a…” what we might think of as apostolic Christianity, or like, a central message that derives from Jesus. Really, you’ve got a whole melee, a competition, between different schools of thought, and so on. And he thinks he’s got some proofs for this.

Interestingly, the early documents that he ignores would be the New Testament. So, he actually starts… all of his documentary evidence is 2nd century and later. What he doesn’t look at is the New Testament, which very clearly speaks as though there’s a central strand and that there are deviations from the central strand. So, like even the Pastoral Epistles of Paul, which most people would say are among the later of Paul’s writings, or some would say were not written by Paul at all, right? But still, they’re early Christian documents that are clearly speaking about what’s in and what’s out, what’s sound and what’s not sound. That, for Bauer, he doesn’t… he brackets all that out and says…

Nehemia: Really? Because I would think that would maybe support his position that there’s different ideas around there, you know, and when you have an epistle saying, you know, “Those people were part of us, but they left us,” okay, what do they say, those people who left? Right? Maybe they have a narrative as well.

Pip: Right.

Nehemia: So, I’m surprised he brackets that out.

Pip: He brackets it out because the appeal of, say, something like 1 Corinthians, which is one of the earliest datable documents, as far as we can tell, in the mid-50s AD, that… you know, that’s really clearly, you know… in 1 Corinthians, Paul is saying, “I got, from these people, what I’m passing on to you,” 1 Corinthians 15. And he talks about this gospel message. There’s a sense in which the appeal in 1 Corinthians is to a message that Paul got prior to his missionary journey to the Corinthians, which would have happened in the late 30s, or something like that.

So, actually, the New Testament documents, like 1 Corinthians, actually try to show a connection between the writings, like Paul’s writing, and the earliest, earliest strand of Christianity. And it seems to have a stable core, right? That 1 Corinthians 15:3 saying, you know, “Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures. He was buried. He rose on the third day, according to the scriptures. He appeared to Cephas and the 12…”

Nehemia: What are the Scriptures in that verse, in your understanding?

Pip: Oh, definitely the Old Testament. I mean…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: Yeah, what we would think of as the law and the prophets.

Nehemia: Some Christians interpret that as, “Well, it’s in the, you know, it’s in the Gospels.” Or do they? I’m asking.

Pip: No, generally not, because 1 Corinthians is so early…

Nehemia: You’re talking about scholars. Do…

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: … lay Christians read that and say, “Oh, it’s the gospel of Mark where it says that?”

Pip: I’m not sure. I couldn’t speak for all Christians.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: I think a lot of Christians would say, “No, there’s a ready understanding that the Scriptures are not collected yet until later,” as a, you know, the New Testament…

Nehemia: Meaning, the New Testament scriptures.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, when it says Scriptures in the epistles, it’s referring to the Old Testament.

Pip: I think most people are fine saying that he’s definitely talking about the Old Testament. There might be some dispensationalist strands, or whatever, that resist that kind of take, but I think most…

Nehemia: When it says that all Scripture is good… and I apologize. I’m not quoting it correctly. All Scripture is good for X, Y, Z, is that referring to the Old Testament or the New Testament?

Pip: Yes, also Old Testament, and…

Nehemia: Really? Okay.

Pip: And that also, I mean…

Nehemia: I mean, I think that, but I’m… it’s interesting to hear it from someone from the… I forgot the name of your church…

Pip: Oh yeah, even in that context, he’s talking…

Nehemia: Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.

Pip: Yeah. He’s talking to Timothy, and he’s saying, “Your grandmother was a faithful believer, and your mother, and you.” So, he’s clearly talking about pre-New Testament… like, he’s saying, “You have received this good teaching,” and so, I think he’s definitely talking about the Old Testament. What Christians would call the Old Testament or the Hebrew narrative.

Nehemia: So, all right, let’s get back to the Chair of Moses. And the reason this was important was something you brought up that I wasn’t expecting you to talk about, which was that most scholars look at this and they say, “Well, Jesus didn’t say this. This is…” Look, this is a very kind of postmodern thing, so, it’s interesting Bauer is saying that in the 1800s.

And what do I mean by postmodern? Which frankly, I don’t understand even a little bit. So, maybe I’m using the term wrong. But my understanding of it is that everything is just narratives, and there is no truth. You have your narrative, he has his narrative, so, let’s make a narrative that allows us to seize power. Right? That’s what I understand, perhaps incorrectly, of postmodernism. That’s my narrative of postmodernism; it’s my lived experience.

So, if this isn’t a… I’ll use the scholarly term that I learned, a tendentious narrative. Meaning, like, there’s a narrative here where we’re trying to prove our position against some other group that we hate. If this is actually what Jesus spoke, what is the Chair of Moses? That’s the question.

Pip: Yeah, yes. So, just to double check; you’re asking, “Assuming that Jesus actually said it, what is it?”

Nehemia: Exactly. That’s how I… look, the way I approach this kind of question, let’s say, in this context, is, if I were a Christian, I would come at this text the way I come at the Tanakh, the Old Testament, as the word of God, and, you know, whether, you know, we could argue about whether Deuteronomy 34 was written by Joshua or Moses or Samuel. I don’t really care right now. It’s the word of God. What does it mean?

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Right? That’s the question I’m asking. Right? These other questions about authorship… God, ultimately, for me is the author. And if you don’t believe that, you have a different set of questions. Which is fair, right?

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: But if I were a Christian, how would I approach that text? That’s… Look, I did a whole series on the Book of Mormon, and people are like, “Why are you doing this? You’re not a Mormon; you’re not even a Christian.” Because I wanted to sharpen my sword in the sense of, can I apply these same sorts of principles, reading somebody else’s text, who we all know is just made up in the 1820s and 30s, right? I mean, we all know, meaning, I believe, right?

Pip: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Me and my friends agree. So, coming at it from the perspective of… and there’s two questions here, for my perspective. Jesus spoke these words in Matthew 23. What did Jesus mean? And what did the Jewish audience in the Temple understand? Which might not be the same thing.

Pip: Yes, yes.

Nehemia: And a third question; what did his disciples understand? Which might be a third thing.

Pip: Yeah. That’s great. Yeah. And so, just to clarify, that is the way that I would approach this text. In the dissertation, I take a stance to say that it actually makes the most sense if Jesus said it, and that this is something we should understand in that earliest context. So, moving forward with that… do you want me to go through this range of proposals? Or do you want me to go with…

Nehemia: Let’s start with what you think.

Pip: Okay.

Nehemia: And then we can talk about the range of proposals.

Pip: Great, great. So, I came to the conclusion that the Chair of Moses is actually referring to what you might call a legal institution within what we might call early Judaism at the time, under Roman occupation. They don’t have their own robust political system; it’s very much tied up with Roman interference. And so, you’ve got, say Pontius Pilate’s tribunal, right? That’s going to be deciding certain matters. But then you’ve got, say, the Sanhedrin, or the council in Jerusalem, deciding certain other matters. It’s clear that Pontius Pilate, and Herod, too, doesn’t want to be deciding on certain religious matters, they want to leave that to the sort of Jerusalem Council community. And it seems to me that the Chair of Moses is referring to that kind of institution.

I don’t think it’s the same thing as the Council, because it’s not clear to me that scribes and Pharisees are the makeup of the council. It seems like Sadducees and others are also part of the council. But it seems to me that he’s giving this idea that there is a court of appeal, called the Chair of Moses, or maybe chaired by the Chair of Moses, where people would bring cases that are too difficult for them to resolve within smaller communities or maybe within a synagogue procedure. They’re too difficult, so they bring them to the Chair of Moses, which is largely occupied by scribes and Pharisees at the time. And the scribes and Pharisees on the Chair of Moses will make legal decisions about whatever the case is that was too difficult in the towns. And this is drawing from Deuteronomy…

Nehemia: Deuteronomy 17, verses 8 and on, where it talks about when you have a matter too difficult, you go to a sort of, like, supreme court. I’ll just paraphrase, right? And you’re saying that was called the Seat of Moses in the 1st century, or Jesus uses that term? Maybe other people use the term. Look, the Seat of Moses appears in Jewish literature, right? But we don’t need to get into all those details. Meaning, it was a term he didn’t make up that was around, right? And I’m looking here at Jastrow’s dictionary, and he brings a bunch of examples… I’ll share the screen here, and we can maybe…

Pip: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: …edit this a little bit. But we have here cathedra, which is the word used in Jewish Hebrew sources, and it comes from the Greek word cathedra, which I’m pronouncing like an Israeli, actually, probably, where I learned it. And it’s not just a chair. Meaning, the word in Greek is this exact word. Am I right? And people, when I talk about it, think like, “Why is this important? It’s an obscure verse we’ve never read.” Because when you go to any major European city, there’s a cathedral, and it’s named after this verse, because people were claiming they had that authority. Right?

Pip: Sort of…

Nehemia: Well, okay. So, you’ll explain that because maybe I got that wrong. But here, he brings an example, caja de Cathedra de Moshe, “like the Seat of Moses”, right? So, there’s an example in… Psik Devayechi. We won’t go into all of that because we’ll focus on your information, but this is an important one. There were 70 gilt chairs in the synagogue of Alexandria, right? So, in other words, there were 70 important people in the synagogue, or something like this, at least, how I understand it, you might have a different understanding, in the synagogue of Alexandria. And these weren’t just, you know, pretty chairs that they would sit in. It’s a seat of authority.

Pip: Sure.

Nehemia: As I understand it. And you’re saying it’s actually a specific institution, which, okay. All right…

Pip: Well, yeah. So, if we back up… so…

Nehemia: In other words, does every synagogue have a Seat of Moses? Or is there one in the land?

Pip: Yeah. So, let’s back up, and just say cathedra, the Greek word, is just a chair of any kind. It could be a formal chair. It could be a chair that you are, you know, resting in. There’s no special significance to just the word cathedra. And then, of course, the Aramaic cathedra coming from the Greek, so, it’s a Greek loan word into Aramaic in that context…

Nehemia: And in Hebrew, by the way. I’m looking here at passages that are Hebrew, not… in other words, all the words around them are Hebrew.

Pip: Yes.

Nehemia: So, it’s in both the Hebrew dialect used at the time… it’s not biblical, Old Testament Hebrew, but… and then it’s in Aramaic as well. Yeah.

Pip: Yeah, yeah. So, those passages in the Talmud and other places, well, they’re probably much later than what we’re talking about in Matthew 23. So, there’s that. But then, I want to just stress that, like the Chair of Moses, the whole context for that is he’s talking about the Chair of Solomon, with a round back; says it’s like the Chair of Moses.

So, there’s this question of; what are we talking about in that passage? Comparing the chair, or the throne, of Solomon to the chair, or throne, of Moses? It seems like it’s a known thing. You know, you have to know what the Chair of Moses looks like in order to make the comparison.

Nehemia: Well, Hebrew and Aramaic have perfectly good words for chair, so when they’re using this specific word, to them, it seems like it’s more than just a regular chair. Would you agree with that?

Pip: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Once you put “of Moses” on it, you’re talking about something very special. And then, the 70 chairs in the Sanhedrin, possibly with a president’s chair, and that president’s chair might be a Chair of Moses. We have no direct connection to say that that’s what the president’s chair would definitely be called. But we do know that the word, the loan word, of cathedra, was used to talk about those seats in the Alexandrian Sanhedrin. So, that’s actually interesting. That’s the Alexandrian Sanhedrin they’re talking about, with these golden chairs.

So, there is a sense in which cathedra, especially with “of Moses” or something attached to it, becomes something more august, like a throne. And it is the case, as you were kind of saying before, that later on, people wanted to appeal to the Chair of Moses that they read about in Matthew 23 to talk about the Chair of Peter, the Chair of Christ, the chair of this and that and the other thing, and they’re looking at this idea of an authoritative chair.

But one of the things that I’m questioning in the dissertation is that the Chair of Moses is an ordinary piece of synagogue furniture, which is often… well, we can talk about the archeology in just a second, but it seems to me that it’s not. And one of the main reasons is, he’s talking to a plurality of people who are all sitting in one chair: the scribes and Pharisees. That’s a lot of people to be sitting in a lot of different chairs. Later on in the passage he talks about the chief seats in the synagogues, the proto cathedra in the synagogues. And so, there’s a sense in which there are synagogues…

Nehemia: Is that the same Greek word?

Pip: Well, it’s similar. It’s “chief seats”. It does derive from cathedra, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: Which just is the word for sitting, the verb for sitting. So, the verb for sitting becomes cathedra. Cathedra is any kind of chair. But these chief seats in the synagogues, or these pronounced benches, whatever they were, that’s mentioned later in the passage. It doesn’t seem to be the same thing as the singular Chair of Moses. And so, I guess the singularity of the term makes me think that this is talking about either one chair, which seems unlikely, or an institution that gets kind of this label or this metonymic association with…

Nehemia: Explain metonymic for my audience.

Pip: Yeah. When you use one thing as a substitute for another thing. So, kind of like when I say, you know…

Nehemia: The example I like is, I say Washington and I mean the US government.

Pip: That’s right. I was just thinking.

Nehemia: “Washington said.” Well, Washington’s been dead for 200 years. “I mean, the US government.”

Pip: That’s exactly right. So, that would be a metonym, where you use something that’s associated in place of the larger institution or some detail about the institution.

Nehemia: So, let’s go back to what… we had three questions.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I want to get to other questions too; what it meant later. But so, what did Jesus mean? What did his Jewish audience understand? I mean, there we’re speculating… all three we’re speculating or based on educated information. And what did the 12 disciples, what would they have understood? And what did they understand later? Maybe it’s a fourth question. All right.

Pip: Yeah. I’m hoping that all the people involved in this scene in the Temple court are understanding the same thing, that the Chair of Moses is an institution for some sort of court of appeal, and what Jesus is recommending to the crowds and his disciples is, “Don’t violate the rulings of the Court of Appeal.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: Whatever they say…

Nehemia: Wait. So, that’s really important. So, in other words, he’s saying, and you’re saying… well, I mean, obviously from the context, the scribes and Pharisees dominate this… you’re calling it court of appeal, Deuteronomy 17 institution. And he’s saying, “You should obey it even when they don’t follow the rules themselves.”

Pip: Yeah. Maybe I’ll put it this way; you should obey their rulings as judges, regardless of the morality of their individual character.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: Regardless of whether you think the scribes and the Pharisees are correct on halakha or some other, you know, aspect of life… as people who have this authority, you, my disciples and crowds, whoever would follow Jesus, are supposed to accept their rulings. And so, this text, in that reading, becomes a martyrdom text, a lot like…

Nehemia: How so?

Pip: A lot like, you know, if somebody’s going to strike you on the cheek, turn to them the other also. Don’t retaliate. Don’t resist the governing authorities. Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. All of these kinds of things are sort of in line with this idea that Jesus has been training his disciples to suffer like him, and not to oppose the governing authorities. And so, the Chair of Moses, I think, is actually more of a judicial institution rather than religious opinion authority, right? Because Jesus is fine disagreeing with the scribes and Pharisees, and he even…

Nehemia: So, I’m not understanding, then, what it is. In other words, the example I think of is Matthew 15, where the disciples don’t wash their hands. That’s in Mark 7, if I’m not mistaken. And he seems to contrast there the law of God and the traditions of the sages or men, from a Jewish perspective at least. How do you reconcile Matthew 15 and Matthew 23?

Pip: That’s right. So, earlier in the gospel, Matthew 15, also Matthew 16, when Jesus contrasts his teaching with that of the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and especially the Pharisees on hand washing, we see that it’s very clear that Jesus is fine saying they’re wrong about the way they read the Scripture, or the way they apply these traditions, or the way they require other people to do these things that are only for the priests, or things like that.

So, he’s fine saying they’re wrong on these issues, and so, that means that when we get to Matthew 23 and he tells his disciples, “Obey them. Obey whatever they tell you to say,” he’s not talking about something like hand-washing. He’s talking about something like a judicial ruling of a court where somebody says, you know, “This disciple is guilty of proclaiming a false messiah.” And, you know, the synagogue kicks it up to the…

Nehemia: So, that’s what you meant by the martyrdom. In other words, when they give you 39 lashes, accept that, because they have authority. Is that what you’re saying?

Pip: That’s right. Exactly right. Which is consistent with everything else he says. So, it’s one of those ways of seeing Matthew 23 as harmonized and consistent with the remainder of the gospel. This is a big issue with this passage, that Matthew 23:2, the Chair of Moses saying is, as one scholar puts it, it’s the hardest text to assimilate with the rest of the gospel. Because everywhere else Jesus…

Nehemia: Who says that? Do you remember?

Pip: Oh, gosh, it’s in the beginning…

Nehemia: I won’t put you on the spot.

Pip: I’ll look it up in just a second.

Nehemia: And by the way, am I right that your dissertation is available for free online?

Pip: Um, it…

Nehemia: I downloaded it. Or maybe you sent it. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I down… Maybe you sent it to me, I don’t remember.

Pip: Yeah, through Proquest it is available, and I could also email it to anybody who is interested.

Nehemia: Okay. And it’s actually, hopefully coming out as a book soon, so, people can get the book.

Pip: Yeah. Maybe in a year or so. Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. Wonderful. Look forward to it. Put it on your Amazon wish list, when it’s…

Pip: All right. Mark Allan Powell, I just looked it up, is the…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: I’ll quote him. “No other text in Matthew’s gospel has resisted assimilation into proposed interpretive frameworks for the book as a whole as stubbornly as Matthew 23:2-7.” So, these verses…

Nehemia: Wow! So, I’ll put that in my terms, in sort of Jewish terms. In Judaism, we’ll talk about how there’s an apparent contradiction, and we want to resolve the contradiction. The example I gave yesterday to somebody is, it says, “No man can see God and live,” and then it says in the same book in Exodus, “and they saw the God of Israel.” Okay, what’s going on here? All right, no problem. It was a vision, or we have a hundred different explanations. But it’s important to see what the apparent contradiction is, and the apparent contradiction is, Matthew 23 contradicts the rest of the gospel. So, by “assimilate” they mean, in Jewish terms, how do we resolve the contradiction? Because God doesn’t contradict Himself, right? So, there must be some explanation.

Okay. If I’m Bart Ehrman, right, or somebody like him, and I don’t believe Jesus said these things, what would be my explanation for… I don’t need to assimilate it. I can say this is one group but there’s another group, and they don’t have to agree. Would that be the explanation? What would be their explanation?

Pip: No. Yeah. They would just say they’re from different traditions. One of them is maybe more like the historical Jesus, where he’s arguing with the Pharisees about hand washing, and the other one is from some anti-Jewish Matthew, you know, two generations later arguing against Rabbinic Judaism source…

Nehemia: And I’m laughing because, why isn’t it the other way around? Or it could be, right? Depending on who the scholar is, right? It’s pretty arbitrary.

Pip: Yeah. Part of it is that a lot of Christian scholars, or scholars of Christianity, are very self-conscious about modern history.

Nehemia: Okay. And so, they want to distance Jesus from anti-Semitism or any criticism of Judaism, so the things he said that we think are consistent with our modern 21st century worldview, Jesus said those. And the things we’re embarrassed about, Jesus didn’t say those. Got it! Is that a fair assessment of some scholars? Are we being fair?

Pip: Yeah, I think so. So, some scholars are fine. They would much rather say that Jesus is not guilty of anti-Jewish thinking. Matthew, sure, he’s guilty of anti-Jewish thinking.

Nehemia: Got it.

Pip: That’s why we want to cut away all the dross and get rid of the Matthew and get to the historical Jesus.

Nehemia: Tell us what dross is. I know from Isaiah, but tell the audience…

Pip: Yeah, cut off all the stuff that has accreted and…

Nehemia: You’re using another big word.

Pip: Onto the…

Nehemia: Plain words.

Pip: Yeah. All the stuff that has stuck onto what Jesus really said and taught by later, you know, thinkers and Christians… we want to cut all that stuff away and just get to the real, true historical Jesus. This project of doing that, you pick your favorite theology, and you cut away the things that you don’t like to get to the true Jesus who looks just like you. That’s been going on for, well, a lot longer than the modern period, but definitely in the modern period. And so, these scholars who are doing that kind of thing with Matthew 23 are right in line with, “I’ve picked the Jesus I prefer. Let me get rid of the things I don’t like.”

Nehemia: Look, I mean, there’s something about this Jesus fellow, I’ll just say it like that, where Mao Tse-Tung, who doesn’t come from a Christian culture, is making the early church and Jesus out to be like proto communists. Right? And I don’t have an answer, I’m just thinking out loud. There’s something here where people from around the world are trying to engage with this historical figure and recast him in their own kind of, you know, mold. That’s really interesting.

Pip: It is. It is. Yeah. I mean, from a Christian perspective, I’d say it’s because the story of his life, death, resurrection, ascension, that narrative that we see in the Gospels and Acts, that is the story that gets repeated everywhere. It’s the story of power. I mean, you see it also…

Nehemia: What do you mean by that? Assume I don’t know. What do you mean by that?

Pip: I mean, even in the earlier Scriptures, what Christians would call the Old Testament, that curve of humiliation to exaltation, of death to resurrection, of suffering to glory, that is the story that’s worked all the way throughout Scriptures. I believe that, in the providence of God, that’s where every human heart goes. We all long for that story, that through suffering we’re going to find redemption. And not just replacement, but in Job, double replacement; something better on the other end of that story. So, you could trace any narrative in the Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures all the way up through the New Testament, they’ve all got this same arc to them. I think the story of Jesus is, Christianly speaking, the preeminent, the highest and best revelation of that arc. And so, I think everyone acknowledges that power, just deep in the human heart, apart from…

Nehemia: That’s so interesting.

Pip: …from Christianity. Everyone wants that kind of redemption, even the communist who’s a total materialist…

Nehemia: Right.

Pip: …wants the end to be better than the beginning, and definitely better than the horrible place we find ourselves in now.

Nehemia: Wow. So, there’s a quote attributed to Nahmanides, Rabbi Moses Ben Nachman, in the 13th century, I don’t know if he really said it, which is, “Hope is born in the very depths of despair.” And that encapsulates the last 2,000 or 1,800 years of the Jewish experience. But you’re saying that’s like a universal human, like…

Pip: I’d say you see that in Genesis 3, right, when you get the curse being pronounced upon the serpent, who has deceived the first woman, and there’s this fall into the temptation to violate God’s law. And the curse on the serpent in Genesis 3:15 is: “A seed or an offspring of the woman is going to come and stamp on your head. You’re going to bruise his heel, but he’s going to bruise your head. Like, you’re going to hurt him, but he’s going to destroy you.” And there’s a sense in which, right in the middle of a judgment passage for transgression is the hope of vindication and exaltation. I’d say it’s all the way through the Hebrew and Aramaic narrative.

Nehemia: Wow. Guys, I feel like this is, I’m saying to the audience, this is, in a sense, maybe more important than the specific question of the Chair of Moses. Because we’ve now identified… I feel like this is very Jordan Peterson-esque, right? He’ll read the New Testament, and he’ll read, you know, the story of Peter Pan, and he’ll ask, “What are the universal human stories?” And what Jordan Peterson will say, and I don’t speak for him, of course, but my understanding of him is, like… The reason these stories are so compelling to us is there’s something deep in the human, I’ll call it soul, that resonates with these stories. And that’s why you have, you know, something… I was talking with my wife this morning about… one of the oldest stories in human history is Beauty and the Beast. It’s the epic of Gilgamesh, in a form, right? That there’s the woman who tames the wild man, right? And these are sort of, you know, it’s the story of Abigail, or Abigail and David, right? Meaning, that’s the epic of Gilgamesh and Beauty and the beast, right? And he’s like, “I need you,” right? David says to Abigail, right?

So, there’s something profound about that whether you believe in it or not. And I do believe in the Old Testament as my Scripture, but you can still learn something. People are like, “Nehemia, why are you so interested in the New Testament?” Because there’s profound truths in the New Testament. That there’s a reason two billion people believe in it and have been compelled by it and moved by it. And so, maybe we should learn something from that is my approach, okay.

So, let’s go back to Jesus. What Jesus, the audience, and the disciples, all three of them understood is that there’s a Chair of Moses. And Jesus is saying, “Obey their rulings,” their practical rulings, “but not necessarily their religious rulings.” Is that what you’re saying?”

Pip: Yeah, obey their judicial rulings. So, if there’s a court case, in a synagogue or, you know, court case… I’m saying, like, if there’s accusations that, and the synagogue, the local synagogue or community doesn’t feel like they can do it, they pass it on to the Chair of Moses which has these authoritative teachers who are all, you know, assembled, and they will come out with a ruling. And the ruling could be… I mean, in Deuteronomy, it could be anything from, like, a restitution ruling to capital punishment, you know. Who knows what the issues would have been?

And Jesus is saying, “Don’t go against the ruling.” And that has nothing to do with, or, I should say, that is not a contradiction with Jesus saying, “You can disagree with the Pharisees on their hand-washing tradition, or you can…” Taking the scribes, I mean, Jesus takes the scribes to task over and over again. His main question to them is, “Have you never read?” And of course they’ve read. But what he’s saying is, “Your interpretive framework is all wrong,” and he’s trying to train his disciples to have a different interpretive framework from some of these scribes that he’s talking to. And so, there’s a sense in which he’s allowing his disciples to argue. That’s not the issue. What he’s not allowing his disciples to do is what we might call, now, civil disobedience, or something like that.

Nehemia: Interesting. So, I’ll tell you how I encountered the Seat of Moses in my experience, my lived experience, as they say. So, I was living in Israel something like 25 years ago, and I met these Messianic Jews who were living as, effectively, ultra-Orthodox Jews. And I said, “Wow, that’s interesting. Why do you have the, you know, the sidelocks and the black hat, but you say you believe and you call him Yeshua? Like, I literally don’t understand.”

They said, “Well, he commanded us to obey those who sit in the Seat of Moses, and those people are still among us. They’re the rabbis.” And what would your response be to… and maybe you don’t need to respond, right? But what would your response be if someone in your congregation came and said, “We know you’re the scholar. You’ve studied this.” What would you explain to this Messianic Jew? Would you just say, “That’s fine, you do that. You actually should do that because you’re Jewish.” What would your explanation be? So, that’s a question. Well, let’s answer that question.

Pip: Okay.

Nehemia: If you’re comfortable. If not, it’s fine.

Pip: Yeah. Well, I’d say probably right idea, wrong text. I mean, we have warrant elsewhere in the New Testament for people who are Jewish continuing to live as people who are Jewish, right? So, Paul will say, “Go ahead. You can keep kosher.” I mean, that’s kind of an anachronistic way to talk about it. But “You can keep the dietary laws. You can keep the traditions. That’s neither here nor there with respect to Jesus, just don’t require Gentiles to do it.” This is kind of Paul’s message; don’t impose it on people who are going to come to Jesus in faith, who don’t have that as their heritage.

And so, there’s a sense in which, in the earliest church, we see Paul especially saying, “Jews can continue to be distinctively Jewish as long as they acknowledge the inclusion of these other people who are not at all distinctive in that same way, and who are not going to be circumcised and not going to be doing these other things. They’re going to be included in the covenant by the same means, but without the outward sign.” So, this is that Romans passage about the one who’s a Jew is a Jew inwardly, right? And he’s arguing about circumcision and things like that.

So, there’s warrant for saying somebody who identifies traditionally with the practices of Judaism and who worships Jesus, or Yeshua, in faith, to continue in that track. And there’s no way… you know, Paul prohibits pretty clearly the binding of the conscience. Meaning, you can’t require people to do what God’s not requiring them to do. And if somebody seems to have a more stringent conscience about what they’re required to do, you have to go along with them. You don’t violate conscience. And so, when a Gentile comes into the, say, a Messianic Jewish community, when somebody like me comes in, it is my duty toward loving my brothers and sisters not to serve pork. Like, it is actually my duty not to pressure them to violate their conscience. And it’s their duty not to exclude me from the community just because I don’t have the markers and the signs.

So, I would say that community has warrant from other passages that are just fine. I would say that here, I don’t see a clear connection… unless we abstract it from the mouth of Jesus, I don’t see a clear connection between the later rabbis and the Chair of Moses. And I think that the rabbis…

Nehemia: Okay…

Pip: …hesitate, the rabbis hesitate to claim anything like that kind of authority. In fact, the Rabbinic writings, some of them may be, you know, stemming from the same time. Some of them are much later. They very self-consciously and clearly would put themselves in a different category from Moses, right? And so, to say, “I sit on the Seat of Moses” in the sense of possessing Moses-like authority, I don’t know of any rabbis who do that. Apart from maybe, well, Jesus is probably the only well-known one that we know of who’s going to say, “I actually can tell you what’s going on,” as the prophet like Moses.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, I don’t want to go down this rabbit trail because I do want to get to, if you have time, to talk about how this was applied throughout history. And you have a really fascinating explanation of… I want to say this; anybody who’s engaging with academic study of religion should hear what you have to say in your dissertation. I was very impressed by what I read about, and I forget what you call it, something like providential something or another. What was the term you used?

Pip: Humbling sensitivity to providential history? Is that what you’re talking about?

Nehemia: Providential history, that was what I was looking for. Okay, and putting that within the framework of biblical studies I think is actually really interesting. So, I do want to get to that, but I would just… and maybe we save this for a different conversation.

One of the most famous stories in Rabbinical literature is the encounter of Rabbi Yehoshua in the court of Rabban Gamaliel, where Gamaliel, and it’s actually the grandson of Gamaliel in the New Testament, if I’m not mistaken, Gamaliel II, he accepts the testimony of witnesses concerning the new moon. I won’t go into all the details, but long story short, they have a debate about when Yom Kippur is supposed to fall out. And Gamaliel orders Rabbi Joshua to show up with his staff in his hand and his money purse, which shows today is not a holy day, on the day that Rabbi Joshua thinks is Yom Kippur. And the takeaway from the story is that, whether Gamaliel is right or wrong, if you disagree with him, you’re disagreeing with the Court of Moses. And it doesn’t use the word seat there, but it’s the Beit Din of Moshe or something to that effect.

Pip: Yep.

Nehemia: Because he has that function as the head of the Sanhedrin, of this council of… And this is after the destruction of the Temple. It’s in Yavneh, we believe it’s around the year 89. Take that with a grain of salt, but roughly 89. It’s before the overthrow of Rabban Gamaliel and his replacement with the other rabbi, who is mentioned in the Passover Haggadah. We don’t need to go into that.

But there is this idea that they stand in place of Moses as far as practical halacha, practical application of Jewish law. And if they tell you you’re required to wash your hands before you eat bread and make a certain blessing, and if you don’t do that, then you are in rebellion against the Beit Din of Moshe, the Court of Moses. And you could say, “Well, you know, Pharisees is one thing and rabbis are another thing, but when they make their claim to authority in Pirkei Avot and they talk about the authority and the Oral Law being transmitted… it was transmitted to the men of the Great Assembly, and from the men of the Great Assembly then to the Pharisees, which then become the rabbis, right?

In their minds… my father was an Orthodox rabbi. In his mind, sure, we don’t use the term Pharisee, because that has to do with separation from certain matters of ritual uncleanness, right? Not every rabbi was a Pharisee, right? That was like a very high level, I guess, in their mind. But it’s a direct continuation. Hillel, who was a Pharisee, is in the direct line of ordination that my father received. And sure, there was a break. We won’t talk about that, but basically, it was renewed, right, in Tzfat in the 16th century or something, right? But it’s a direct continuation of the ancient line going back to Moses. And if you disagree with Rabbi… I don’t know who the leading rabbi, not chief rabbi, is today. But in my generation, if you disagreed with Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, you were disagreeing with Moses or Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our Rabbi, 3,500 years ago, 4,000 years ago. Yeah. So… and you could say, “Well, that’s an anachronism.” Okay, but in their mind it’s a continuation, right? In a sense.

Pip: Yeah, I, yeah, I guess…

Nehemia: So, I understand where these Messianic Jews were coming from. They were saying, and this is back in the 90s, they were saying that “Look, you know, Rabbi Kamenetsky and Rabbi Feinstein, they are sitting in the Seat of Moses today. Who am I to disagree with them? I think it’s stupid that I have to wear a black hat and have these curls, but this is what our authorities have given us. And if I’m devout and obedient to Yeshua,” this is what they told me, “that I have to do this. And that’s my devotion to Yeshua.” That’s what they explained to me. And what would you say? That that’s okay? Or I mean…

Pip: I would say…

Nehemia: Maybe it’s not for you to say, I don’t know.

Pip: I think it’s not this text. I think this text is not the justification for doing that. I think…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: …the other text about conscience in Romans and other places would be better texts to support that way of life, that way of practice. Acknowledging, I mean, that, from the beginning, Christianity, what we would call Christianity now, was a diverse movement in the peoples and the tongues and the different traditions that were being brought into it. There was a sense in which there was sort of a big tent. Even in Acts 15, you get this sort of, “Well, we’re going to tell the Gentiles not to do these four things, but, you know, there’s a lot of other stuff…”

Nehemia: Explain that text, Acts 21, and I think it’s 15. How do you interpret that text?

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Assume we have no idea what it means. If you were the Gentile in Antioch and you received the letter from the council in Jerusalem, how would you implement that in your life?

Pip: Yeah. So, I think that text is very much about having harmony between, especially the Jewish practicing followers of Jesus and the new Gentile followers of Jesus, and what the council or the group in Jerusalem under James, who was called the brother of the Lord elsewhere. I mean, maybe Jesus’s half-brother; we’re not really sure exactly who this is. But he issues this letter as a result of these kind of debates in council talking with Paul and Peter about their experiences among the Gentiles. And they decide that, you know, the Gentiles can be part of the community as long as they don’t, you know, drink blood, or endorse sexual immorality, especially. I mean, what’s in target here is like Greco-Roman culture that is in clear violation with the moral law, what we think of as the moral law, the clear teachings of Torah.

Nehemia: But drink blood is a very ritual thing. Why are they not allowed to… Like blood pudding, like they have, that’s what you mean, right? Like…

Pip: Oh, well, I think it’s a ritual, but actually, in Torah it has a greater significance than that, right? So, there’s this sense in where the life is the blood, and the blood is in…

Nehemia: Leviticus 17. But also in Genesis 9, it’s a commandment to Noah, and not just to the Jews.

Pip: That’s right. So, I think because of Genesis 9, it’s actually connected to the moral law, not merely a ceremonial regulation. That there’s…

Nehemia: So, would you say, and I know it’s off track… no, it’s not off track. If you’re a Christian… well, you are a Christian. You’re a Christian pastor, and you’re teaching your church, and somebody comes to you in church and says, you know, “I really like blood pudding. I’m from Scotland.”

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Is it okay for them to eat blood pudding?

Pip: I would actually recommend against it.

Nehemia: Based on that passage?

Pip: Yeah. Based on that passage, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.

Pip: And that is probably an idiosyncrasy of me.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: So, I don’t know. I can’t claim to say beyond that, but…

Nehemia: In other words, that doesn’t represent the denomination we mentioned before, that’s just your particular view.

Pip: Right, right. Especially because it’s very Scottish in its origins.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: So, I would say that there’s…

Nehemia: Oh, the church is Scottish in its origin? The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church?

Pip: Yeah. Very much so.

Nehemia: Okay. All right. That’s an interesting tie. That’s an inclusio.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: We started with that, and we’re coming maybe to… hopefully not to an end, but if you have more time…

Pip: Sure.

Nehemia: And I want to be sensitive to your time, so I’m going to let you finish what you’re saying, and then I want to maybe shift gears a bit.

Pip: I don’t know if I’ve finished the thought. So, Acts 15. So, there’s this letter that goes out, making these sort of basic prohibitions that I think are actually tied more to the moral law than to the ceremonial law and toward the guarding of conscience among, and maybe we might say towards peacemaking between these two groups that are now rubbing shoulders in a way that they’ve never done before. And, you know, Peter’s narrative, earlier in Acts 10, where he goes to a Gentile house, contrary to his understanding, you know, “I’m not supposed to eat with you. I’m not supposed to be in your house. I’m risking uncleanness in this whole endeavor, and yet I’m very convinced that God has commanded me to do this, and that He’s lifted this prohibition for me to interact with you. With that prohibition being lifted…”

Nehemia: Which chapter is that in Acts, just for those who want to look it up…

Pip: Acts 10 is when the episode happens. He talks about…

Nehemia: This is the vision of the lizards and everything, right? And I apologize for paraphrasing. Is that… okay.

Pip: Yeah. Let me say it. So, he has this vision three times. A sheet falls with all kinds of unclean animals, and he hears a voice, kind of interpreted as the divine voice saying, “Peter, rise, kill and eat.” Meaning, you’re allowed to eat these unclean things that would go against the normal dietary regulations that Peter would have known from childhood. And Peter interprets it… interestingly, when he goes to visit these Gentiles, there’s an angelic messenger who brings him into contact with this household, he interprets it and he says, “I know that God has declared all peoples clean.”

It’s interesting. He interprets the vision about clean and unclean foods to be about people, which is a striking detail in the text, where he, you know, “Now that the food laws have been lifted from me, now I know that the people laws have also been lifted from me.” It’s sort of, they flow together in Peter’s thinking. And I think, given that situation, given that Peter, and of course, Paul, later on in the Book of Acts, are regularly in contact with Gentiles in this mission to spread the good news about Jesus, the church in Jerusalem is really dealing with a practical crisis, saying, “How do we get along? How do we have a building where these people would meet, or a fellowship meal where they would eat together, and these people are ritually unclean, and these people are trying to be ritually clean? How can you… how can you square that?”

So, there’s a theological argument about the cleanness of all peoples, but then there’s also this letter saying, “Be careful with each other. Don’t…” how do I put it? “Don’t bring your immoral Greco-Roman culture into the fellowship. You have to leave that outside. So, the things that would have been normal for you as a pagan worshiper of whatever god, gods, you have to leave those trappings behind, because the trappings are themselves, actually…”

Nehemia: So, is that a general principle; leave all the trappings behind? Or just those four specific things?

Pip: No, I mean the trappings that are violations of the law. So, I don’t think that Acts 15 is an exhaustive list, but in that context…

Nehemia: Oh, it’s not? Okay.

Pip: It’s the list of things that would have been associated with, say, Gentile pagan worship that are not only, you know, connected to false gods who are no gods at all, but also would be directly violating the moral law as we find in Torah. Back to that Genesis 9; the drinking of blood is connected, I mean, just the blood in general, the symbolism of blood, is connected to a law about murder and capital punishment, right? It’s clearly tied up with more than just rituals and…

Nehemia: Well, and it takes on a profound significance in Christianity. Now I’m out of my wheelhouse here, but maybe the fact… well, I don’t know the fact. Assuming that they have something like, you know, the sacrament of drinking of the blood of Jesus, and you have something in Genesis 9 for all mankind about not drinking blood, the only blood you should drink is, you know, whether literal or symbolic, we don’t need to get into that, the sacramental wine. I wonder if that has something to do with why…

Pip: I think that’s absolutely right, in the sense… So, if you, you know, in the gospel according to John, Jesus will say something so striking as, “If you want to have eternal life, you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood,” and lots of people stop following him, right? Because drinking blood is…

Nehemia: It’s one of the first commandments that was given to all mankind, not just to Israel at Sinai. Right.

Pip: That’s right. And so, when Jesus says that, it’s a revelation of the idea that there’s only one blood that’s fit to drink, and that’s his. That’s the blood of the divine lamb who comes and takes away the sins of the world. And so, that sort of explains the whole prohibition; the blood is in the life and the life in the blood. And this idea of blood-life symbolism; Jesus is saying, “That whole thing has always been about the blood that I’m going to shed on behalf of my people.” And of course…

Nehemia: And so, maybe eating blood pudding is essentially saying, I’m just thinking out loud here, I’ve chosen some other blood, Jesus. I don’t just want yours; I want some others. Maybe there’s some symbolism there. I don’t know.

Pip: Yeah. I might walk back the blood pudding. Is the blood cooked in blood pudding? I actually don’t know.

Nehemia: No, it actually is congealed blood, as I understand it. I don’t know, I’ve never made it. I was once in, like, a hotel in England, and I was asking, “What’s this? What’s this?” And the one guy says to me, “That’s blood pudding.” He says, “The Scottish eat it, and we think it’s disgusting.” I’m like [laughter], “But you have it at your English breakfast. Okay.” Yeah. And my understanding is that it’s actual congealed blood. But I could be wrong, right?

Pip: Yeah, I’m not sure how that works, but I think that…

Nehemia: Well, let’s assume it’s congealed blood, for our… For this discussion, guys, if you’re Scottish, we hope we didn’t offend you. And we’re certainly not… I’m certainly not telling people what they should do in their… I tell people, “Work it out for yourself in fear and trembling with prayer and study before the Creator of the universe, and if you have a question, ask your pastor, rabbi, or priest. Don’t ask me.” So…

Pip: [Laughter] Got you. Got you.

Nehemia: So, all right. So, do you have more time? If not, we can wrap… you do? Okay. Because I want to talk about how this applies in history, meaning, we have the Chair of Moses in the 1st century. How was it applied? Because that’s… And then how… your principle of the providential history, I think, is profound for scholars, but also for people who, whether they know it or not, are the end users of scholarship. When you open up your NRSV and one of the people working on the New Revised Standard Version was a great textual scholar named Bart Ehrman, you need to know where he’s coming from and what was baked into the translation. He was on the committee, if I’m not mistaken. Or he’s in one of those things, I don’t… maybe it was the NA27 he was on. I don’t remember.

So, could you say some final words for this episode? And then we’ll go right in without stopping. I usually ask people to pray at the end. I don’t know if you’re comfortable doing that.

Pip: Oh, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. I’m going to let you pray. Please.

Pip: Right now. Okay, let’s pray. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for this day, for the opportunity we have to think about Your word, to think about the way that You have spoken to Your people from the beginning and continue to speak to us through Your word, and by the power of Your spirit. We ask for Your help in… well, I pray that this conversation would be edifying to many, and I pray that our upcoming conversation would be helpful and would glorify You. We pray for the work that Nehemia is doing in just investigating and seeking and striving to honor You in the way that he reads what You have revealed. I pray that You would bless him in his ministry and continue to strengthen us all. We ask all this in Your name, amen.

Nehemia: Amen. What a beautiful prayer. Thank you so much.

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