Romans 10.6-7, Jonah, and Moses.

[Secret Alias]

FWIW I think Origen offers some insight as to what the Marcionites saw in the passage:

Consider, however, whether all men have in some way part in Him in His character as Logos. On this point the Apostle teaches us that He is to be sought not outside the seeker, and that those find Him in themselves who set their heart on doing so; Say not in your heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? That is to bring Christ down; or, Who shall descend into the abyss? That is to bring Christ up from the dead. But what says the Scripture? The Word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, as if Christ Himself were the same thing as the Word said to be sought after. [Comm John 1.36]

I think this is the meaning that Paul intended.

[Ben C. Smith]

I can't help wondering if the targum here is providing an anti-Christian gloss. I.E. There is no need for a prophet like unto Moses to bring us a new version of the Torah and no need for a prophet like Jonah to descend into the abyss for our sake.

I have wondered that, as well, both about this particular passage and about others from Jewish literature of either late or unknown date.

For example, Roger David Aus somewhere points out that at some point the Jews were connecting Psalm 22 with the book of Esther: the prayer of the Psalm became her prayer before confronting Ahasuerus. He argues that they did this early, and that Christians instead applied it to Jesus' death. But I think I disagree with that order of things. It looks like its application to Jesus' death arises naturally and spontaneously out of the subject matter itself, whereas its application to Esther's feelings before entering the throne room seems less fitting; it makes more sense to me that Christians were applying this Psalm to Jesus first, and that Jews were saying, "Nuh uh, it applies to Esther," and were willing to put up with a lesser degree of thematic correspondence in order to rob Christians of their prophecy. The Jewish exegetes are, at any rate, in this case working directly against Christian interests.

But in my brief foray into Mark and Esther, for example, I sided with the Jewish legend surrounding Esther being earlier than the story of the death of John. In this case, adding details from the latter to the former does not hinder Christian intentions in any way; nor does it respond to Christian claims; what it does instead is to recognize the links between the respective stories of Esther and John the baptist and then strengthen them. This seems suspicious to me as a likely action to be taken by a Jewish tradent, unless that Jewish tradent was really a Christian. If there existed a tendency for Jewish tradents to steal details from Christian stories in order to enhance their own in such a way as to actually strengthen the Christian story itself, I would like to learn about it, since my current impression is that Christians (in general) had no problem considering themselves as the rightful heirs of Judaism, leading them to appropriate whatever they felt like from any form of Judaism deemed ancient enough, while Jews (in general) considered Christianity to be of no merit, if not flatly heretical. A modern analogy might be how Mormon exegetes have no difficulty borrowing interpretations of the Protestant Bible from Protestant exegetes, while most Protestants would recoil from borrowing Mormon interpretations of Mormon writings, except to ridicule them (as the Jews spoofed the gospel story in their own countergospels, like the Toledot Yeshu).

In all of this I readily admit that the other direction of influence is possible, by the way; we are playing, I think, with rather tenuous probabilities.

In this current case, the reading of the Targumim, if it postdates Paul, seems to be relying upon Christian exegesis in a remarkably Christian way, first noticing both that Paul has changed "across the sea" to "in the abyss" and that Paul has now connected the abyss to Christ's state of death, then recalling some other Christian text, like Matthew 12.40, which compares Christ's state of death to Jonah, and finally introducing Jonah, quite smoothly, into the Targum of Deuteronomy 30.12-14, a move which serves to connect Paul and Matthew as mutually interpreting each other. The church fathers did this sort of thing, of course, but did the Targumists and other Jewish exegetes? That is a serious question. Is that something we know about them, that they joined Christian texts constructively in much the same way that Christian interpreters did?

And for what, in this case? To produce a text which is no less susceptible to Christian claims than the Deuteronomic original was? The text was already about the law before Paul made it about his gospel; in the Targumic version it is still about the law, and offers Paul no more obstacles than the original did. It seems more Christian than the Masoretic text is, what with that reference to Jonah in such a convenient spot and all.

It seems more likely to me that some Jew made these moves so conducive to Christian exegesis innocently, before he knew how Christians were going to use them. Moses is a natural character to introduce into a line about going up to get the law; and Jonah, being the main prophet (bar none) associated with all things maritime, is a natural character to introduce into a line about the sea; but Jonah went down into the abyss, not just across the sea, and going down makes for a better contrast with going up than going across ever did. The Targumic reading is explicable on its own terms. That reading now flowing into Paul and Matthew is an easy course to navigate.

Unless I have missed a trick or two.

[lsayre]

FWIW I think Origen offers some insight as to what the Marcionites saw in the passage:

Consider, however, whether all men have in some way part in Him in His character as Logos. On this point the Apostle teaches us that He is to be sought not outside the seeker, and that those find Him in themselves who set their heart on doing so; Say not in your heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? That is to bring Christ down; or, Who shall descend into the abyss? That is to bring Christ up from the dead. But what says the Scripture? The Word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, as if Christ Himself were the same thing as the Word said to be sought after. [Comm John 1.36]

I think this is the meaning that Paul intended.

If one carries this logic one step further, and includes Paul's proclamation: "that is the Word of faith which we are preaching" (Romans 10:8), would this lend credence to Paul's Christ/Word as an entity with no prior earthly existence, and thus being purely an object of faith?

[Secret Alias]

I think it goes back to the original understanding of the Sinai narrative. This is the difficulty with basing an understanding of the Israelite past through our principal window on antiquity - the Jewish tradition. The Jewish tradition is strange in that it has very little to do with Moses. There is very little speculation about the central figure in the tradition. Most of that interest is transferred to David or Solomon. It warps our entire understanding to a series of concerns that weren't the principal interest of Israelites in the Second Commonwealth period and thereafter.

So to this end we have to move on to the Samaritan tradition in order to gain some insight into what must have been the original Jewish understanding (the contemporary understanding obscured by both the Pharisaic and then Mishnaic/Talmudic 'readjustment' to new concerns, new paradigms). The basic understanding is that what is described as happening to Moses 'in the beginning' is with Christianity transferred to the community as a whole. This is accomplished by means of 'Jesus' who is understood by Christians to be the same figure who met Moses speaking from the burning bush and at Sinai.

This is why I think the 'Jesus angel' thing doesn't make sense. The angel in the bush can't be Joshua. I just can't see how that works yet. In the same way that Jacob wrestles with the angel and is called Israel, Moses meets the second god and becomes identified as 'the man of God/the man God.' This is the basis to my assumption that what is preserved in Greek as 'Jesus' (and among the Marcionites as 'Isu') has something to do with Ishu 'his [God's] Man.' So it is that Moses is called the man of God/God-man.

Of course if I could explain the angel in the bush as being an angel named 'Joshua' I would. But the difficulties are clearly that Joshua is originally named Hosea and his name is changed by means of letter substitution. So 'Joshua the son of Nun' can't be an angel. Yes Joshua is brought into the tent of meeting. But again you have to explain a scenario where Moses is transformed into a divine figure and that transformation is effected by his private encounter with the 'second God.' If you can do that by means of an angel named Joshua you have something to work with. I just can't see it.

But once again, Moses is clearly the human being who is transformed into a divinity by means of his private encounter with the second God and that experience is what is the driving force behind the mystery religion that was Christianity. Ur-Christianity has no central importance assigned to David (if only to make explicit that Jesus was not the son of David). Solomon is understood to be a bad figure who ensnare demons to make the temple which is also a bad thing. Because the emphasis is on Moses's experience at Sinai as a precursor for the experience that the same angel brought to all of humanity, the temple is understood as NECESSARILY destroyed and sacrifices abolished. It explains the emphasis on the ten commandments as the living testimony to the centralness of the theophany on Sinai. It just starts from the core controversy of the second commonwealth period.

If Moses was a man who became God = the-man-(of)-God that experience is transformed into a sign of what was to come rather than limited to one man. Curious that orthodox Christianity does the same thing with the crucifixion of Jesus viz. martyrdom as the pathway to divinity.