This is follow-up
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This means one text quotes another text. When both texts are biblical, this is often called cross-referencing. When we get into today's theme, we;ll see intertexting between The Ten Commandments (OT) and The Sermon on the Mount (NT)
One of Chris Harrison's projects is called "Visualizing the Bible":
"Christoph Römhild sent me his interesting biblical cross-references data set. This lead to the first of three visualizations. Intrigued by the complexity of the Bible, I derived a new data set by parsing the King James Bible and extracting people and places. One of the resulting visualizations is a biblical social network. The other visualization shows how people and places are distributed throughout the text." Chris Harrison-
But why should I tell you when I can show you?:
"The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect." .More info about this chart, and charts of the Bible as a social network here.
NOTE: Sometimes the text "intertexted" to is from another text or genre.
-INTERCALATION/SANDWICHING
-DOUBLE PASTE
-HEMISTICHE
INTERCALATION is a "sandwiching" technique. where a story/theme is told/repeated at the beginning and ened of a section, suggesting that if a different story appears in between, it too is related thematically. We looked at this outline of Mark 11:
CURSING OF FIG FREE
CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE
CURSING OF THE FIG TREE
This theme becomes even more clear when we note that Jesus statement was a quote from Isaiah 56:68, and the context there (of course) is against prejudice in the temple.
double paste: Often, two Scriptures/texts are combined into a new one. Ex. : Jesus says “My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.” The first clause (before the comma) is from Isaiah 56:6-8, and the second is from Jeremiah 7:11
hemistiche/ellipsis: when the last section of a well-known phrase is omitted foremphasis: Matthew says "My house shall be a house of prayer......," intentionally
leaving out
the "...for all nations" clause.
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class discussion on Matthew 21 (
Three Acted Parables about Nationalism)
especially focusing on the temple tantrum..Note, the chapter started with "Palm Sunday":
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we watched the "Lamb of God" video and discussed how it was actually a nationalistic misunderstanding. If Jesus showed up personally in your church Sunday, would you wave the American flag at him, and ask him to run for president? 
Post your answer in the comments section below...at bottom of this posta)Van Der Laan:
Jesus on his way to Jerusalem
On the Sunday before Passover, Jesus came out of the wilderness on the eastern side of the Mount of Olives (just as the prophecy said the Messiah would come).
People spread cloaks and branches on the road before him. Then the disciples ?began, joyfully, to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen? (Luke 19:37). The crowd began shouting, ?Hosanna,? a slogan of the ultra-nationalistic Zealots, which meant, ?Please save us! Give us freedom! We?re sick of these Romans!?
The Palm Branches
The people also waved palm branches, a symbol that had once been placed on Jewish coins when the Jewish nation was free. Thus the palm branches were not a symbol of peace and love, as Christians usually assume; they were a symbol of Jewish nationalism, an expression of the people?s desire for political freedom __LINK to full article
b)FPU prof Tim Geddert:
Palm Sunday is a day of pomp and pageantry. Many church sanctuaries are decorated with palm fronds. I’ve even been in a church that literally sent a donkey down the aisle with a Jesus-figure on it. We cheer with the crowds—shout our hosannas—praising God exuberantly as Jesus the king enters the royal city.
But if Matthew, the gospel writer, attended one of our Palm Sunday services, I fear he would respond in dismay, “Don’t you get it?” We call Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem “The Triumphal Entry,” and just like the Jerusalem crowds, we fail to notice that Jesus is holding back tears.
Jesus did not intend for this to be a victory march into Jerusalem, a political rally to muster popular support or a publicity stunt for some worthy project. Jesus was staging a protest—a protest against the empire-building ways of the world.
LINK: full article :Parade Or Protest March
c)From Table Dallas:
Eugene Cho wrote a blog post back in 2009 about the irony of Palm Sunday:-Link
The image of Palm Sunday is one of the greatest ironies. Jesus Christ – the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, the Morning Star, the Savior of all Humanity, and we can list descriptives after descriptives – rides into a procession of “Hosanna, Hosanna…Hosanna in the Highest” - on a donkey – aka - an ass.He goes on to say it’s like his friend Shane Claiborne once said, “that a modern equivalent of such an incredulous image is of the most powerful person in our modern world, the United States President, riding into a procession…on a unicycle.”
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FOR ALL THE NATIONS: BY RAY VANDER LAAN:
Through the prophet Isaiah, God spoke of the Temple as ?a house of prayer for all the nations? (Isa. 56:7). The Temple represented his presence among his people, and he wanted all believers to have access to him.Even during the Old Testament era, God spoke specifically about allowing non-Jewish people to his Temple: ?And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord ? these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer? (Isa. 56:7).
Unfortunately, the Temple authorities of Jesus? day forgot God?s desire for all people to worship freely at the Temple. Moneychangers had settled into the Gentile court, along with those who sold sacrificial animals and other religious merchandise. Their activities probably disrupted the Gentiles trying to worship there.
When Jesus entered the Temple area, he cleared the court of these moneychangers and vendors. Today, we often attribute his anger to the fact that they turned the temple area into a business enterprise. But Jesus was probably angry for another reason as well.
As he drove out the vendors, Jesus quoted the passage from Isaiah, ?Is it not written: ?My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations??? The vendors had been inconsiderate of Gentile believers. Their willingness to disrupt Gentile worship and prayers reflected a callous attitude of indifference toward the spiritual needs of Gentiles.
Through his anger and actions, Jesus reminded everyone nearby that God cared for Jew and Gentile alike. He showed his followers that God?s Temple was to be a holy place of prayer and worship for all believers. - Van Der Laan
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Excerpts from a good Andreana Reale article in which she sheds light on Palm Sunday and theTemple Tantrum:
,, Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem actually echoes a custom that would have been familiar to people living in the Greco-Roman world, when the gospels were written.
Simon Maccabeus was a Jewish general who was part of the Maccabean Revolt that occurred two centuries before Christ, which liberated the Jewish people from Greek rule. Maccabeus entered Jerusalem with praise and palm leaves—making a beeline to the Temple to have it ritually cleansed from all the idol worship that was taking place. With the Jewish people now bearing the brunt of yet another foreign ruler (this time the Romans), Jesus’ parade into Jerusalem—complete with praise and palm leaves—was a strong claim that He was the leader who would liberate the people.
Except that in this case, Jesus isn’t riding a military horse, but a humble donkey. How triumphant is Jesus’ “triumphant entry”—on a donkey He doesn’t own, surrounded by peasants from the countryside, approaching a bunch of Jews who want to kill Him?
And so He enters the Temple. In the Greco-Roman world, the classic “triumphant entry” was usually followed by some sort of ritual—making a sacrifice at the Temple, for example, as was the legendary case of Alexander the Great. Jesus’ “ritual” was to attempt to drive out those making a profit in the Temple.
The chaotic commerce taking place—entrepreneurs selling birds and animals as well as wine, oil and salt for use in Temple sacrifices—epitomized much more than general disrespect. It also symbolised a whole system that was founded on oppression and injustice.
In Matthew, Mark and John, for example, Jesus chose specifically to overturn the tables of the pigeon sellers, since these were the staple commodities that marginalised people like women and lepers used to be made ritually clean by the system. Perhaps it was this system that Jesus was referring to when He accused the people of making the Temple “a den of robbers” (Mt 21.13; Mk 11.17; Lk 19.46).
Andreana Reale
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So Jesus is intertexting and ddouble pasting two Scriptures and making a new one.
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Much of what Jesus said was intended to clue people in to the fact that the religous system of the day would be overthrown, but we miss much if it because we Americanize it, making it say what we want it to say, We turn the parables into fables or moral stories instead of living prophecies that pertain as much to us as to the audience that first heard them."
-Steve Gray, "When The KIngdom Comes," p..31
“Indeed, read in its immediate context, Jesus’ subsequent instruction to the disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain..’ can refer only to the mountain on which the temple is built!... For him, the time of the temple is no more.”
"The word about the mountain being cast into the sea.....spoken in Jerusalem, would naturallly refer to the Temple mount. The saying is not simply a miscellaneous comment on how prayer and faith can do such things as curse fig trees. It is a very specific word of judgement: the Temple mountain is, figuratively speaking, to be taken up and cast into the sea."
-N,T. Wright, "Jesus and the Victory of God," p.422
By intercalating the story of the cursing of the fig tree within that of Jesus' obstruction of the normal activity of the temple, Mark interprets Jesus' action in the temple not merely as its cleansing but its cursing. For him, the time of the temple is no more, for it has lost its fecundity. Indeed , read in its immediate context, Jesus' subsequent instruction to the disciples, "Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea'" can refer only to the mountain on which the temple is built!
What is Jesus' concern with the temple? Why does he regard it as extraneous to God's purpose?Hints may be found in the mixed citation of Mark 11:17, part of which derives from Isaiah 56:7, the other from 11:7. Intended as a house of prayer for all the nations, the temple has been transformed by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem into a den of brigands. That is, the temple has been perverted in favor of both socioreligious aims (the exclusion of Gentiles as potential recipients of divine reconciliation) and politico-economic purposes (legitimizing andconsolidating the power of the chief priests, whose teaching might be realized even in the plundering of even a poor widow's livelihood-cf 12:41-44).......In 12:10-11, Jesus uses temple imagery from Psalm 118 to refer to his own rejection and vindication, and in the process, documents his expectation of a new temple, inclusive of 'others' (12:9, Gentiles?) This is the community of his disciples.-John T, Carroll and Joel B. Green, "The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity," p. 32-33
FIG TREE: FOLLOW SCRIPTURES WHERE IT IS A SYMBOL OF NATIONIAL ISRAEL/jERUSALEM/GOD'S BOUNDED SET:
NT Wright on the temple:
Jesus as New Temple:
Three thought experiments.
- -Think if I offered you a drivers license, claiming i had authority to issue it
- -Think if someone destroyed all bank records and evidence of any debt you have owe
- -Think what would happen if you pointed at something, hoping your dog would look at it.
Now watch this short and important video above for explanations. IF VIDEO DOESN'T PLAY
BELOW, just click this to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1rTG9MMWN4
BELOW, just click this to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1rTG9MMWN4
N.T. Wright, "The Challenge of Jesus":
Jesus’ clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works but because his kingdom-agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off her frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. I therefore propose that the clash between Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries, especially the Pharisees, must be seen in terms of alternative political agendas generated by alternative eschatological beliefs and expectations. (58)
His attitude to the Temple was not "this institution needs reforming," nor "the wrong people are running this place," nor yet "piety can function elsewhere too." His deepest belief regarding the temple was eschatological: the time had come for God to judge the entire institution. It had come to symbolize the injustice that characterized the society on the inside and on the outside, the rejection of the vocation to be the light of the world, the city set on a hill that would draw to itself all the peoples of the world. (64)
…Jesus acted and spoke as if he was in some sense called to do and be what the Temple was and did. His offer of forgiveness, with no prior condition of Temple-worship or sacrifice, was the equivalent of someone in our world offering as a private individual to issue someone else a passport or a driver’s license. He was undercutting the official system and claiming by implication to be establishing a new one in its place. (65) NT WRIGHT
See:
Jesus and the Temple Destruction: Did Jesus say he would destroy the temple?
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More on Jesus' temple tantrum as against the racist religious system, and not all about "don't sell stuff in church.":
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By intercalating the story of the cursing of the fig tree within that of Jesus' obstruction of the normal activity of the temple, Mark interprets Jesus' action in the temple not merely as its cleansing but its cursing. For him, the time of the temple is no more, for it has lost its fecundity. Indeed , read in its immediate context, Jesus' subsequent instruction to the disciples, "Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea'" can refer only to the mountain on which the temple is built!
What is Jesus' concern with the temple? Why does he regard it as extraneous to God's purpose?
Hints may be found in the mixed citation of Mark 11:17, part of which derives from Isaiah 56:7, the other from 11:7. Intended as a house of prayer for all the nations, the temple has been transformed by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem into a den of brigands. That is, the temple has been perverted in favor of both socioreligious aims (the exclusion of Gentiles as potential recipients of divine reconciliation) and politico-economic purposes (legitimizing and
consolidating the power of the chief priests, whose teaching might be realized even in the plundering of even a poor widow's livelihood-cf 12:41-44)....
...In 12:10-11, Jesus uses temple imagery from Psalm 118 to refer to his own rejection and vindication, and in the process, documents his expectation of a new temple, inclusive of 'others' (12:9, Gentiles?) This is the community of his disciples.
-John T, Carroll and Joel B. Green, "The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity," p. 32-33
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Temple Warning Inscription:
The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was surrounded by a fence (balustrade) with a sign (soreq) that was about 5 ft. [1.5 m.] high. On this fence were mounted inscriptions in Latin and Greek forbidding Gentiles from entering the temple area proper.One complete inscription was found in Jerusalem and is now on display on the second floor of the “Archaeological Museum” in Istanbul. IF VIDEO BELOW DOESN'T PLAY. CLICK THIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60GuNRg
The Greek text has been translated: “Foreigners must not enter inside the balustrade or into the forecourt around the sanctuary. Whoever is caught will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.” Compare the accusation against Paul found in Acts 21:28 and Paul’s comments in Ephesians 2:14—“the dividing wall.”Translation from Elwell, Walter A., and Yarbrough, Robert W., eds. Readings from the First–Century World: Primary Sources for New Testament Study. Encountering Biblical Studies, general editor and New Testament editor Walter A. Elwell. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998, p. 83. Click Here
click this if video doesn't play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXQozTxQSiE
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TEMPLE TANTRUM
If video below doesn't play, click or paste this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlOxlSOr3_MA
So Jesus is intertexting and ddouble pasting two Scriptues
and making a new one.
But he leaves out the most important part "FOR ALL NATIONS"...which means he is hemistiching and making that phrase even more significant by it's absence,
b)As a follow-up to the temple tantrum of Jesus as targeting racism more than commercialism (see this, and these). if it's a new concept, and if you always though it was about "Don't sell stuff in church!" I find Bartholomew and Goheen's analysis intriguing. They read it as racism/prejudice/nationalism/"separatism" AND a "spirit of violence".
Does the former always lead to the latter?:
In the footnote to the above the authors clarify:
Hey, maybe Jesus- concern WAS commercialism after all:
is racism + violence=commercialism?
Also...this called to mind Erwin McManus in "The Barbarian Way":
So it can't be "truly" true.
But it speaks the truth in part; and is partly true.
But two questions:
But he leaves out the most important part "FOR ALL NATIONS"...which means he is hemistiching and making that phrase even more significant by it's absence,
b)As a follow-up to the temple tantrum of Jesus as targeting racism more than commercialism (see this, and these). if it's a new concept, and if you always though it was about "Don't sell stuff in church!" I find Bartholomew and Goheen's analysis intriguing. They read it as racism/prejudice/nationalism/"separatism" AND a "spirit of violence".
"...God has chosen the people of Israel to dwell among the nations so that all nations can enter teh covenant with God. But the temple Jesus now enters now functions in quite a different way, supporting a separatist cause, cutting Israelites off from their neighbors. Furthermore, the spirit encouraged within the temle is one of violence and destruction: it had become a 'den of revolutionaries' (Mark 11:17, authors' translation). Israel has turned its election into separatist privilege....a new temple, Jesus' resurrection life in the renewed people of God, can become the light for the nations that God intends." (The Drama of Scripture, p, 176)
In the footnote to the above the authors clarify:
"The Greek word here is Iestes ansd most likely refers to revolutionaries who sought to obverthrow Rome with violence, see also on Mk 14:48, 15:27, John 18;40, see NT Wright, Jesus and The Victory of God, 419-20--
Hey, maybe Jesus- concern WAS commercialism after all:
is racism + violence=commercialism?
Also...this called to mind Erwin McManus in "The Barbarian Way":
"God always revolts against religions he starts"That's a shock value statement, of course.
So it can't be "truly" true.
But it speaks the truth in part; and is partly true.
But two questions:
- Didn't the fact that the temple was not completely separatist/sectarian even in the "Old" Testament (one of the passages Jesus quotes ..to counter racism..in the tantrum is Isaiah 56:6-8) help? Was the religion/temple of God in Judaism inherently racist, even if God-ordained? Weren't the dovesellers/moneychangers the violators, not temple Judaism itself?
- If we picture God "revolting" we might ironically envision him as a but too "violent.
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