Justified True Belief

(P1) A Child Called Mighty God: Isaiah names a son born on David's throne with a title he uses of God himself one chapter later. + The charge is that Christians took a human Jewish hope and made it divine after the fact. Five texts answer that charge, not one of them carrying the case alone, and the first of the five was written seven centuries before there was a Christian alive to write anything. (1) One of the child's four names is the problem. - "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6) - Three of those four are the sort of thing a court poet might say about any promising prince. A king can be called Wonderful Counselor, or Everlasting Father, or Prince of Peace, and nobody in the room blinks. The second name is different. The Hebrew behind it is 'el gibbor. • 'El is the ordinary Hebrew word for God, or for a god. Gibbor means mighty, and it is the word Hebrew reaches for when it describes a warrior or a champion. Put the two together and you have Mighty God. (2) Isaiah uses that exact phrase of God one chapter later. - "A remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God." (Isaiah 10:21) The same two words. The same book, the same writer, and this time the one being described is the God of Israel. - Nobody has to take a Christian's word for how Isaiah uses his own vocabulary. Thirty-six verses separate the two lines, and any English Bible on a shelf will show them. - Think of a small firm where one nickname belongs to the founder and to nobody else, ever. If a memo the following week handed that nickname to somebody new, you would stop and read it twice, whatever you decided in the end that it meant. (3) The reign attached to the child does not end. - "Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore." (Isaiah 9:7) - Kings die, and when they die their reigns end. This one is given no end at either edge of the sentence, and it is set on a particular throne belonging to a particular family. (4) The date is not in dispute in any way that matters. - Isaiah 9 belongs to the eighth century BC on the traditional reckoning. Many scholars hold instead that the book was assembled out of the work of more than one prophet writing across two centuries, with the later material starting somewhere around chapter 40. On that view these early chapters usually sit in the oldest layer. A minority put this particular oracle later still, in the reign of Josiah or after the exile. - Not one of those options helps the charge. The Great Isaiah Scroll, the complete book found in the caves above the Dead Sea and copied about 125 BC, carries the verse, and 125 BC is more than a century before Jesus was born. Whoever wrote the words, they were in Jewish hands long before they were useful to anybody. Therefore, one of Israel's prophets gave a son of David a title he gives elsewhere to God.

(P2) A King Named with the Divine Name: Jeremiah's promised Branch is called by the covenant name of God. + A century after Isaiah, in a different prophet with a different vocabulary, the same strange thing happens to a promised king. (1) Jeremiah's Branch is a flesh-and-blood king. - "Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land." (Jeremiah 23:5) • Branch is a picture rather than a name: a green shoot coming up out of an old stump. Jeremiah has just finished condemning the last kings of Judah, and the shoot is what grows after them. - Raised up for David, reigning, dealing wisely, executing justice. That is a royal figure in a royal line, doing a king's work, and nothing in the verse hints at anything else. (2) The name he is given contains the name of God. - "In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: The Lord is our righteousness." (Jeremiah 23:6) - Where English Bibles print "the LORD" in small capitals, they are standing in for four Hebrew letters, usually written YHWH in English. That is God's own covenant name, the one given to Moses at the burning bush, and Jews came in time to treat it as too holy to say out loud. - Now, a king in Israel could be named for God's action easily enough. Hezekiah's name means the Lord strengthens, and nobody in Jerusalem thought Hezekiah was God. What is unusual here is not the piety of the name but which name it is. (3) Ten chapters later, Jeremiah gives almost the same name to the city. - "And this is the name by which it will be called: The Lord is our righteousness." (Jeremiah 33:16) The one being named there is Jerusalem, not a king. - That costs this strand something real, and it is better said out loud than left for a critic to find. If a city can carry the name, then carrying the name is not by itself proof that the one carrying it is divine. A reader who noticed that on his own was reading well. - What survives is narrower than it first looked. In one prophet, a coming son of David is handed a name built out of the covenant name, and the vocabulary of Israel's own worship is spent on him. Therefore, a second prophet gives the promised king a title built out of the divine name.

(P3) A Ruler Whose Coming Forth Is From Ancient Days: Micah names the birthplace and then says the one born there came forth long before. + This is the lightest of the five strands. It adds something to the others rather than carrying anything on its own. (1) The verse names a village and then says something odd about the man from it. - "But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days." (Micah 5:2) - The first half is a birthplace prediction, checkable and famous. The second half is about the same person, and what it does is describe his origin as reaching backwards. (2) The honest reading of "from ancient days" is contested. - The Hebrew word behind "ancient days" is olam, which covers any stretch of time whose far end nobody can see. It does duty in these Scriptures for the everlasting hills and for the everlasting God alike. - So the phrase can mean an ancient lineage. That is what a critic will say, and it is what many careful readers hold: the ruler comes out of an old family, David's, going back to the Bethlehem where David had kept sheep. - It can also carry the sense of an origin outside ordinary time, so that the one who comes out of Bethlehem had already come forth long before he was born there. - Both readings fit the Hebrew, and there is no getting round that. A family tree can be ancient without its newest member being ancient, and pretending the verse settles the question would be dishonest. (3) The value of this verse is what it adds to the other four. - By itself it proves nothing about the ruler being divine, and nothing anywhere else depends on it. - Taken with the rest, it is one more text where a human ruler is described in language larger than a human ruler needs. - One odd phrase in one prophet is a curiosity, and a fair reader should treat it as one. Five of them, in five different books written across more than five hundred years, is a pattern that wants explaining. Therefore, Micah's ruler is described in terms that stretch past an ordinary birth, on a reading many but not all hold.

(P4) A Man on the Clouds Receiving the Service of Nations: Daniel sees a figure in human form travel as God travels and receive what nations render to a god. + Daniel's vision is the strongest of the five, and it has the cleanest date: even the latest scholarly dating puts it about two centuries before the first Christian wrote a word. (1) The scene is a throne room with God already seated in it. - "As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire." (Daniel 7:9) The Ancient of Days is Daniel's name for God. - Then a second figure arrives. "I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him." (Daniel 7:13) • "Son of man" ordinarily means nothing grander than a human being, in Hebrew and in Aramaic alike. God addresses the prophet Ezekiel that way ninety times over, and it amounts to "mortal". The phrase is here to say that the figure looks like a man. • Daniel 2 through 7 is written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, Aramaic being the everyday language across the Near East in that period. (2) He arrives the way God arrives. - Cloud-riding in the Hebrew Bible is God's own mode of travel, and it is not shared out. "he makes the clouds his chariot" (Psalm 104:3). "Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt" (Isaiah 19:1). "There is none like God, O Jeshurun, who rides through the heavens to your help" (Deuteronomy 33:26). • Jeshurun is a poetic pet name for Israel, the way an old song might call a country by a name nobody uses in the newspaper. - No prophet travels that way. No king, no angel, nowhere in the Hebrew Bible. The nearest thing to an exception is the king of Babylon boasting that he will climb above the clouds and make himself like the Most High, which Isaiah reports as the sentence that damns him (Isaiah 14:14). - One like a man does travel that way, once, in Daniel 7. (3) The nations serve him with Daniel's word for religious service. - "And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away." (Daniel 7:14) - The Aramaic verb behind "serve" is pelach, and Daniel uses it for the service owed to a god. It is what Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refuse the golden statue, "they do not serve your gods or worship the golden image" (Daniel 3:12), and it is what Daniel gives God continually, in the mouth of the king who is lowering him into the lions' den: "May your God, whom you serve continually, deliver you!" (Daniel 6:16) - Aramaic in general lets the word cover ordinary service, and one verse near the end of this same chapter is genuinely disputed (D4). What can be said flatly is narrower and still worth having: every clear use in Daniel is service rendered to a god. (4) The vision names its own symbols as individuals. - Four beasts come up before this, and when Daniel asks what they are the angel answers flatly: "These four great beasts are four kings who shall arise out of the earth." (Daniel 7:17) Not four abstractions. Four rulers. - Six verses later the same vision calls the fourth beast a kingdom instead (Daniel 7:23), sliding between a ruler and the kingdom he heads without embarrassment. So verse 17 cannot prove that the figure who arrives after the beasts is one person. - What it does show is more modest. Reading a symbol here as an individual ruler is the vision's own habit rather than a category later readers brought to it, and four kings have just filled four slots. When the fifth opens and the everlasting kingdom changes hands, a fifth ruler is what you expect to find standing in it, the way a list of four named heirs leaves you looking for a fifth name. - Against that, the kingdom goes in verse 18 to "the saints of the Most High," and the leading academic reading takes the figure for an angel standing in for Israel. Both are genuine difficulties rather than quibbles (D3, D17). Therefore, Daniel's throne room contains a figure in human form who travels as God travels and receives what this book reserves for a god.

(P5) A Priest at God's Right Hand: A psalm seats a second lord beside God and swears him into an office no king of Israel could hold. + Inside four verses, Psalm 110 hands one man two things no king of Israel could have: a seat at God's right hand, and a priesthood. (1) David's own lord is invited to sit at God's right hand. - "The Lord says to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool." (Psalm 110:1) - Two different Hebrew words stand behind those two Lords, and English Bibles mark the difference by printing the first in small capitals. The first is God's covenant name. The second is adoni, the ordinary word a servant uses of the man he works for, the word a steward would use of the master of the house. So the psalm's speaker is calling somebody his lord who is not God, and God is speaking to that person. - Jesus put that puzzle to his questioners in the temple, as a riddle rather than a claim about himself: "David himself calls him Lord. So how is he his son?" (Mark 12:37) (2) Three verses later the same figure is made a priest. - "The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." (Psalm 110:4) • Melchizedek gets three verses in Genesis and no explanation. He is king of Salem and priest of God Most High, he brings out bread and wine for Abraham and blesses him, and then he is gone (Genesis 14:18-20). A priesthood "after his order" is one that does not run through Aaron's family at all. - Israel kept king and priest strictly apart, and the separation was enforced. King Uzziah walked into the temple to burn incense, the priests told him "It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron" (2 Chronicles 26:18), and he came out a leper. - Israel's own record tells that story about one of its more successful kings and softens not a word of it. This was not a rule anybody treated as flexible. The psalm fuses the two offices in one man anyway, and swears God to it. (3) A first-century scene puts this psalm and Daniel's vision in one sentence. - Asked whether he is the Messiah, Jesus answers by joining the two: "you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven." (Mark 14:62) • Messiah is an office rather than a name. The Hebrew word means "anointed one", a man installed in his post by having oil poured over his head, and the Greek for it is Christos, which English shortens to "Christ". - The high priest tears his clothes and calls it blasphemy (Mark 14:63-64). Those men had spent their lives inside these Scriptures, and what they heard in the pairing was a claim about more than a king. Their reaction is evidence about the texts and not only about Jesus, because nobody tears his robes over a man claiming to be a successful general. - The scene comes from a Christian source and its details are disputed (D18). Nothing in this strand needs it. The psalm says what it says in Hebrew, centuries earlier, whoever quoted it and whatever happened that night. Therefore, a psalm in Israel's own hymnbook seats a second lord beside God and gives him a priesthood no king could hold.

(C1) Therefore, Israel's Scriptures already describe a coming deliverer in more-than-human terms. + Put the five together and Israel's own Scriptures, long before there was a church to read them, already hold a coming deliverer described in terms too large for a man. Not one of the five gets there alone, and not one of them has to. A cumulative case works like a rope rather than a chain. A chain fails at its weakest link, so a critic need only find the weak link and break it. A rope holds when a strand frays, because the strands do not depend on one another. A jury works the same way: a fingerprint, a receipt, a witness and a motive, none of them conclusive alone, all of them pointing one direction. (1) Five texts in five books, written across more than five hundred years. - A divine title given to a son of David (P1), which turns on Isaiah's own vocabulary. - The covenant name inside a king's title (P2), which turns on Jeremiah's. - An origin reaching back before a birth (P3), which turns on one contested Hebrew phrase. - A figure in human form travelling as God travels and receiving a god's service (P4), which turns on Daniel's Aramaic and on the way the vision handles its own imagery. - A second lord enthroned and made a priest (P5), which turns on two verses of a psalm and on a rule enforced against a king. - Break any one of them and the rest stand exactly where they were. That is what makes this a rope. (2) Two of the five are less independent than the count suggests. - A divine element inside a royal name is what carries both (P1) and (P2), so a naming convention that explains the one goes some way toward explaining the other. On a strict count the pair sits nearer a strand and a half than two. - The discount is partial rather than total, because the two names are not the same kind of name. Jeremiah's is a sentence about God, which is the ordinary Israelite pattern. Isaiah's is a two-word title, and he hands that same title to God himself one chapter later (D1). - The trial scene is one fact and not two. It shows Daniel's vision and the psalm being read together in the first century, which bears on (P4) and (P5) at once, so it is worth counting once and no more. Two people who got the story from the same phone call are closer to one witness than to two, and honest counting should say so out loud. - The other three never touch each other at any point. Isaiah's vocabulary, Micah's contested phrase and Daniel's Aramaic can each fail on its own terms without moving the others an inch. (3) The five strands are not equally strong. - Strongest is (P4). It has the cleanest date, the most detail, and its central features survive on every reading of who the figure is (D17). - Next is (P5), because the fusion of priest and king can be measured against a rule Israel actually enforced, and enforced against a king. - Weakest are (P3), which rests on a phrase that can honestly be read the ordinary way, and (P2), which has to live with a city carrying almost the same name. (4) What follows and what does not. - What follows is that the raw material for a more-than-human deliverer was sitting in Israel's Scriptures before the church existed. Anyone claiming Christians manufactured it has to account for these five texts, in Hebrew and Aramaic, in manuscripts older than Christianity. - What does not follow is that Jesus of Nazareth is that figure. That is a separate argument resting on separate evidence. - Nor does it follow that any Jewish reader was obliged to put these five together. Reading them as one figure is a judgment, and serious readers have declined to make it for two thousand years.

(P6) The Reading Was Live Inside Judaism: Rabbinic tradition legislates against a reading of these texts that it calls "two powers in heaven." + The last strand is not a prophecy at all. It is evidence about who was reading these texts this way, and when. (1) Rabbinic literature legislates against a heresy of two powers. - Rabbinic literature is the writing of the rabbis, the Jewish teachers whose rulings and debates were gathered from about AD 200 onward into the Mishnah, the Talmud and the running commentaries called midrash. - Those texts rebuke, again and again, anyone who says there are "two powers in heaven." One of the verses they quarrel over is one of the five: the plural thrones of Daniel 7:9 (P4). - The Talmud even preserves the exchange. A rabbi explains the second throne as the Messiah's, and a colleague tells him to stop profaning God's presence and to read the two thrones as justice and mercy instead (Hagigah 14a). - Communities do not build fences around positions nobody occupies. A town does not post a sign forbidding swimming at a pond where nobody swims, and a ruling against a reading is evidence that the reading was in the room. (2) This is hostile evidence. - These are Jewish texts, preserved by Jewish scribes, written to shut a door. They were not composed to help anybody's case, and least of all this one. - That is exactly what makes them useful. Hostile evidence, meaning evidence kept by people who would dislike the use it is being put to, is the best kind there is, because nobody can accuse it of having been produced for the purpose. (3) The rabbinic material cannot show what anyone believed before Jesus. - It is later than the New Testament. What it shows is that Jews were reading these texts this way within the period when the ruling was made, and it does not show a day more. - Who the "two powers" readers were is disputed among scholars. Some were Christians, some were probably not, and the sources do not always let us tell. - Pre-Christian Jewish texts describing exalted heavenly figures do exist. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, copied before Jesus was born, casts Melchizedek as a heavenly deliverer in words normally kept for God. That evidence is real, and none of these five strands depends on it. Therefore, reading these texts as pointing past a human king is a Jewish reading before it is a Christian one.

(C2) Therefore, the materials for a more-than-human Messiah are Jewish in origin, not imported. + The charge is one of manufacture: that a human Jewish hope was taken over and inflated by Gentile converts a century or two later. The texts are in the wrong language and the wrong century for that story. (1) Every piece was fixed in Jewish hands before there was a church. - Isaiah, Jeremiah and Micah are Hebrew prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries BC on the traditional dating, and the later dates some scholars propose still put them centuries before the New Testament (P1, P2, P3). - Daniel 7 is Aramaic, and even the latest scholarly dating puts it two centuries before the earliest Christian writing (P4). - Psalm 110 is in Israel's hymnbook, in Hebrew, long before anybody in Jerusalem had heard of Nazareth (P5). - The two-powers rulings are rabbinic, not Christian, and they are aimed at readers of one of these same verses (P6). (2) What the texts earn. - They earn that the categories existed inside Judaism, in Jewish texts, in Jewish hands. - They do not earn that any Jew before Jesus had joined these five texts into one figure. The material is Jewish beyond argument. Who first gathered it up is a separate question, and the evidence for that is thinner than the evidence for the material (P6). - They do not earn that this way of reading the texts was the majority view, and it was not. The expectation running strongest was royal and national: a son of David on a throne, with the occupying army gone. - They do not earn anything at all about Jesus. Whether he fits these texts is a question about him, argued from the Gospels and from history rather than from Isaiah's vocabulary. (3) What would defeat this. - Showing that 'el gibbor at Isaiah 9:6 does not mean what it means at Isaiah 10:21 would take (P1) apart. - Showing that cloud-riding is used of an ordinary man somewhere else in the Hebrew Bible would take a leg from (P4). Nobody has produced such a passage. - Showing that the two-powers rulings are aimed only at Gentile Christians would take (P6) down to nothing. The sources are disputed enough that a reader should hold this strand loosely. - What would not defeat it is the fact that most Jewish readers have not read the texts this way. That is a separate question with its own answer. See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Was Israel Already Waiting for a Messiah? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: If the Prophecies Were Clear, Why Didn't More of Israel Accept Them?