Beeson Podcast, Episode 321 Karen Jobes January 3, 2017 https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2017/Exegesis-the-Septuagint-and-1-Peter Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. We're coming to you today from San Antonio, Texas where we've been involved with the Evangelical Theological Society. That's an annual meeting of scholars, New Testament theology and church history and all the theological disciplines. We meet once a year. It's a wonderful time for meeting old friends and networking with scholars. I have the pleasure today of talking to one of the speakers at this conference. A friend of ours for a long time, Dr. Karen Jobes. Karen, welcome to the Beeson Podcast. Karen Jobes: Well, thank you Dr. George. It's a pleasure and privilege to be here. Timothy George: Now, I want to tell people just a little bit about your academic work and background and then I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself and particularly tell us how you came to faith in Christ. I think people will find that a fascinating story. Karen Jobes is professor emerita of New Testament Greek and Greek exegesis at Wheaton College. She was the Gerald F. Hawthorne Professor of New Testament Greek and exegesis. For those of you who don't know that name, Dr. Hawthorne was one of the great scholars of biblical studies. Taught at Wheaton for many years. Before that, she taught at Westmont College in California and also Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, so she has made the rounds as we say in a lot of important academic evangelical institutions. She's a wonderful scholar, written a number of books. We're going to talk about some of those today, but let's begin, Karen, by asking you just to say a little bit about your own background and how you came to faith in Jesus Christ. Karen Jobes: Well, I came to faith in Christ, made an adult commitment to faith in Christ between my junior and senior years of college. I'll let you guess how many years ago that was, but we're counting decades at this point. When two friends became Christian and they gave me two things to read over the summer break. One was a copy of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth and the other was a track that contained the gospel of John which happened to be in the, then new translation of the NIV. So, over the summer I read Hal Lindsey's book and that kind of put the fear of God in me because that was a book about the return of Christ and the end of time as we know it that he believed would happen sometime in the very near future, in the 80s perhaps. Then the gospel of John reminded me that Jesus loves me. So, it was a combination of those ideas that led me to an adult commitment to faith in Christ. Now, since then, I no longer follow Hal Lindsey's way of interpreting the Bible, but I often think how it's wonderful that God can use even a crooked stick in our lives to do his perfect purposes. So, I'm thankful for that, but the gospel of John remains at the top of my favorite New Testament book lists. I'm actually about to launch, I'm writing commentary on John's gospel, so I'm looking forward to that work. Timothy George: John is my favorite gospel too. It just draws you in, doesn't it? It's powerful and colorful and it makes you fall in love with Jesus. I think it does in a wonderful way. Well, no you have an interesting background in that you didn't really begin your academic work in biblical studies. You worked in physics and computer science. We don't always think of those as good preparatory disciplines for doing the kind of work you've done. Tell us about that transition. Karen Jobes: Well, from a very early age I was just in love with physics and astrophysics in particular. I had hoped to go on and get a PhD in astrophysics and work in that field. So, when I got to college, I decided to major in physics, minor in math and then after college, life happens and bills to pay and all of that, so I got a job doing computer programming at a physics lab. Princeton University's plasma physics lab which was a great opportunity as I look back on it. Decided because I had no formal training in computer science that I would go get a master's degree in computer science from Rutger's University. So, I worked for about 12 years in the field of scientific computer programming. During that time, my church invited me to teach adult Sunday school. I started teaching books of the Bible and very, very quickly realized two things. Firstly, there was so much I did not know about the Bible, about the history and how to interpret it. I just felt like I really wanted a deeper understanding. Secondly, I realized that I was enjoying preparing and studying and teaching the Bible even more than I was enjoying my job working in scientific computing. So, after actually a couple years it took my husband and I to pray through and process what we felt the Lord was nudging us to, I quit my job and started my work on a masters in Biblical studies at Westminster Theological Seminary, thinking that I would probably just get my masters and go back in to computing and be a better Sunday school teacher and have more personal edification and knowledge of scripture, but the Lord had a different plan. I'm glad I didn't know all of it at the time. I would have been too intimidated to probably continue, but it was while I was at Westminster that the Lord began to develop in me a vision for teaching in a Christian college or seminary and go on for my PhD. That was affirmed by my professors and my pastor and so I ended up getting a PhD, but not in astrophysics. Timothy George: Yeah. Karen Jobes: I think studying God's special revelation in scripture and studying his general revelation in the universe satisfies a similar kind of need in our hearts I think. Timothy George: Yeah. Medieval theology talked about the two books. The book of nature, the book of revelation and that they are to be read in tandem, one with another, so there's a long history of people doing what you've done. Karen Jobes: Yeah. I've never found that science and faith are at its root, antithetical. I think that in fact thinking to learn to think scientifically and to think theologically often engage in very fruitful ways. Timothy George: Now, I think I first got to know you well when you gave some lectures at Beeson some years ago on the book of 1 Peter. You were writing a commentary at the time on 1 Peter. You gave these wonderful lectures. Very amazing, assimilating discussion of that text. Now, that's been some years ago, but I remember a lot of that was what I would call deeply exegetically textured. You were delving into the text and finding insights there that a surface reading may not easily present. Could you say a little bit about exegesis itself? A lot of your work is exegetically focused and driven. What is exegesis? If you want to, tell us what 1 Peter is about. Karen Jobes: Okay. Thank you. Well, exegesis is involving a very close reading of the biblical texts in the original languages. That involves understanding the genres, the ancient genres of how they functioned in the cultures from which they were written. It involves understanding of the language of Hebrew and Greek. The syntax and how to understand the text at a very detailed level. So, that's always been a great joy of mind. My mind tends to work more analytically than synthetically. So when I had to choose between exegesis and theology, I thought I would do a better job with exegesis. It was a real joy to write now a couple of different exegetical commentaries. In 1 Peter, there were a couple of things that surprised me. Because we all know we think we know a book of the Bible because we've read it in English many times and heard sermons and so forth. Firstly, 1 Peter is not or was not at that time preached on in the American church as much as it is in some other countries. Secondly, by taking this very slow, detailed analysis of the text, I learned a couple of things that have really stayed with me. Peter writes to us in the framework of being exiles and foreigners. In our society, as I've gotten older, it seems like more and more I feel like a stranger in my own country. So, I think that is a theme that's going to resonate with more American Christians as we go forward than it has in the past. When we think about Jesus and the heart of the gospel, throughout church history there's been debates as to what is really the true significance of the incarnation. Some people would say he was a great moral teacher, his parables. He teaches us how to live. We have a lot of common ground with other world religions because of that perhaps, but for Peter and I'm finding like for the writer of Hebrews and other books of the New Testament, Jesus's words are important and they are instructive. But for Peter, the heart of the Christian gospel is Jesus's death on the cross. He bore our sins in his body on the cross. Very emphatic repetition of that in 1 Peter chapter two. Peter quotes from the suffering servant song of Isaiah. Isaiah 53. He quotes [it from] the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The Greek translation of the Hebrew of Isaiah 53 already has built into it an amplification of the theme of atonement. That translation was produced by Jewish translators centuries before Jesus was born. So that's interesting and he picks up on that theme of atonement and he says this is really the heart of what the significance of Jesus Christ is, his redemptive death on the cross. Then in that same passage, he says, "To bear up under unjust suffering. To bear up suffering for doing good. To this you were called." When I read that, I had to step away from my writing for a month or two because it was such a startling idea to me. I had the thought I think that Jesus suffered so we don't have to and here Peter was saying exactly the opposite thing. Because Jesus suffered, he left an example for us to follow in his footsteps. So, that got me thinking about how would this play out in our own lives because fortunately, many of us in North America have lived in a society where we're not really suffering in serious persecution for our faith as some Christians are around the world. The biggest takeaway from my own life in terms of vocation of 1 Peter is that the messages it is better to suffer than to sin. That's how we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. I had previously thought that the temptation of sin was pleasure or satisfaction of some kind. After studying 1 Peter, I come to think that actually, the power of sin over us is that we want to avoid suffering. So, when maybe we'll tell a lie because we don't want to suffer the consequences of the truth or maybe a student will cheat on exam because they don't want to suffer failure. So, it's that avoidance of suffering. So those two aspects, the atonement at the heart of the gospel and the Christian's call to suffer rather than to sin would be the two biggest takeaways I found in 1 Peter. Timothy George: Now, you mentioned the Greek Old Testament text that 1 Peter picks up and of course other places in the New Testament also quote this document we call the Septuagint. You've studied the Septuagint as one of your major emphasis in scholarship. Tell us a little bit about what it is, how it came to be written, how it functions in the New Testament. Karen Jobes: Well, the Septuagint is a very fascinating document and a part of our Christian heritage even as Protestant Christians. The Septuagint is an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. It began to be produced we think about two and a half, three centuries before the birth of Christ in Alexandria, Egypt. The first part of the project was to produce a translation of the Pentateuch. [It] was probably the first major translation from one language in to another that ever happened in the world. Then as other books of the Old Testament were translated in to Greek, by extension they came to be called the Septuagint as well. Now, the word Septuagint is derived from the Latin word for the numeral 70, septuaginta. The reason for that is the tradition is that the Pentateuch was originally translated by 70 or maybe 72 translators. We have this both numbers in the traditional stories of how the translation was produced. Timothy George: This was done in Alexandria by tradition? Karen Jobes: Alexandria, Egypt. Timothy George: Where there was a strong Jewish community. Karen Jobes: Very large Jewish population living in diaspora outside of the Holy Land. So, that makes a lot of sense because Jews living in the Greek speaking culture after a generation or two could not fluently read the Hebrew text and the Septuagint came to be the Old Testament used by Diaspora Judaism. It's really important for us as Christians, I think primarily in one way because the New Testament writers, they're writing in Greek, their books and letters and they want to quote scripture. They would naturally quote, the Greek Old Testament, the Greek translation that was available to them at that time. So, we find in New Testament exegesis how important it is to look at and to understand the translation of the Hebrew into Greek as part of the exegetical process in the New Testament. There are other ... It gives us a glimpse in to how Jewish translators understood the Hebrew text because all translation has a bit of interpretation in it. It gives us a glimpse of the Hebrew text that was used for the basis of translation and how that compares to the Hebrew text we have today. So, there are many, many fascinating aspects to Septuagint studies. Timothy George: I have a hard question for you. Is the Septuagint inspired? Is it it the divine word of God? Especially when it's quoted in the New Testament, which we certainly believe is the divine word of God. Answer that question if you can. Karen Jobes: Well, I think Protestant doctrine of scripture does not permit any translation to be considered as inspired. Certainly providentially guided by the Spirit and God can use even bad translations for his purposes, but that throughout church history has been debated. Augustan for instance, St. Augustan believed that both the Hebrew text and the Greek translation known as the Septuagint and only that Greek translation were in fact both inspired by God. He and Jerome got in to quite a bit of an argument about that. Jerome did not buy in to the inspiration of the Septuagint. He translated his Vulgate from the Hebrew text, but of course, even today, the Eastern Orthodox Christianity does rely heavily on the Septuagint as their common text. So, as Protestants, we don't accept the inspiration of the Septuagint, but even so, I think we can respect it and appreciate it in ways greater than most of us having being brought up in the Protestant church. Timothy George: You've written a book about the Septuagint, Discovering the Septuagint A Guided Reader. Would you recommend that book to Bible students generally? Karen Jobes: If they can read Greek, yes. Actually, I have two books published on Septuagint. One was written with Dr. Moisés Silva Invitation to the Septuagint and a large part of that book is for people who don't read Greek or Hebrew and who want a more general introduction to the Septuagint, as well as a large part of it there for people who do appreciate the Greek and Hebrew languages, but the book that you've just referenced is my most recent book that came out last spring and it's intended to help students particularly who've had a couple of semesters of New Testament Greek take that next step in to reading the Septuagint which is a larger corpus of material and has a vastly greater vocabulary than one you learn in New Testament Greek. So, it's a selection of Greek Old Testament texts from nine books of the Old Testament presented with vocabulary definitions, a syntactical glosses, and explanations and a little bit of historical background that would help the reader who wants to get in to reading the Septuagint actually have an aid and resource that would guide them. Timothy George: Yes. So, the two books, the more basic one is called Invitation to the Septuagint. That would be if you're not a particular reader of Greek or Hebrew. That would be a good introduction for you. Then, for those who can deal with the Greek a little bit, Discovering the Septuagint. So, wonderful. Now, I want to ask you about what you're doing now, what you plan to do. You told me I think before we began the podcast that you're starting to work on the gospel of John. I was glad to hear that. That's my favorite gospel, John. What's interesting to you about John? Karen Jobes: Well, I do have a commentary out on John's letters. It seems that going from there to John's gospel was the next logical step. I think partly because John's gospel was so instrumental in bringing me to faith in Christ as an adult. That's always had a very, very special place in my heart. I'm fascinated by the structure of John's gospel. The seven I Am statements and the seven signs and how to really understand them as signs, we need to get in to the Old Testament background of those. So, that always excites me because I love both the old and new testaments. A very, very high Christology of John. The way he presents Jesus as God, and yet he has to solve this really difficult problem of being a Jewish man and how do you present Jesus as God and uphold the doctrine of monotheism? So, that's the theme that I want to really explore more deeply in John's gospel is how does this Trinitarian God even though that word is not used in John's gospel or in the New Testament, how does John present that concept to his readers while still affirming and upholding the doctrine that there is only one God? So, I'm looking forward to what I'll learn there. Timothy George: It's wonderful. I'll look forward to your commentary. I'm going to ask you one more question because you mentioned I think you did when you were talking about how you came to faith in Christ that it was the NIV. At that time, newly translated New International Version. Of course, since then the NIV has been revised and you've been a part of the committee on Bible translation for New International Version. Just give us a little update on the NIV. What's happened to it since you first read it in terms of the revision and how it's doing today as a Bible translation. Karen Jobes: Well, I consider my work on the NIV translation one of God's great providences in my life. The privilege of having come to Christ through reading the NIV translation of John decades ago and then finding myself on the translation committee many years later has always been a very meaningful thing to me. I'm grateful to God. The CBT, the Committee on Bible Translation is a committee of 15 biblical scholars, both old and new testaments. Since I came on to the committee in 1996, we're not doing a new translation of course. We are revising and updating the existing NIV and our revision came out in 2011. There are two reasons where we need to do updating. One is we do learn new things about the culture in which the New Testament and Old Testaments were written, the different ancient cultures and different archeological finds and lexical studies. So, there is scholarship in other words that we have now that we didn't have as accessible. The Dead Sea Scrolls, one example. So, we always want to make sure that we present the best understanding of God's word, of what it meant in the time it was written. Then, English language changes so quickly and even more so now that English is kind of the language of the internet and the world wide web. So, we want to make sure that the words we used to translate that original meaning of God's word in to our culture today are not misleading in any way or undignified or unworthy of God's word. So, that's the work of the committee. We meet now once a year for about a week. We collect proposals from pastors, lay people who send us ideas. We generate proposals ourselves from writing our commentaries and other monographs and articles. The committee gets these proposals in advance and studies them and then when we get together, we discuss them and vote whether or not we want to incorporate them in what will be the next release of the NIV. We're not sure exactly when that will happen, but these revisions take many years. It's not something you can sit down in one session and do very well. So, maybe 10 years cycle at least to go through and to do a revision. Timothy George: Great. My guest today on the Beeson podcast has been professor Karen Jobes who taught for many years at Wheaton College and before that at Westmont College. A wonderful, biblical scholar. Septuagint scholar, writing now a gospel of John commentary. Dr. Jobes, thank you for this wonderful conversation. Karen Jobes: Thank you, Dr. George. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast. https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2017/Exegesis-the-Septuagint-and-1-Peter