To preach deliverance to the captives (Isaiah 58)

Isaiah chapter 58 is apparently the first chapter of this book where the SAB finds something that it likes, and I certainly agree that the messages of this chapter is very positive. This chapter talks a lot about fasting, which is the practice of denying oneself of food for a time. Many religions practice fasting as a religious discipline, believing that it draws one closer to God for various reasons, and Judaism has a few assigned fasts. Here in Isaiah, God is suggesting that simply denying oneself of food, is not enough, but that one should deprive oneself while seeking justice. God says to "let the oppressed go free,...deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him." So, people who don't have freedom, food, housing, and clothing should be given those things by those who do. I definitely believe that this should be the focus of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and those who don't are missing the real heart of God. I think it's a great shame that the people in America who claim that we are a Christian nation are more concerned with persecution of LGBTQIA people and immigrants than actually helping their fellow Americans who are in need when we have millions of people who are homeless and/or facing food insecurity. There's my soapbox for today, but it leaves an issue unaddressed here.

Does God approve of slavery? Although I talked a lot about Hebrew slavery back in Exodus, and Roman slavery in Luke chapter 17, there may be issues concerning slavery that I have not addressed. In particular, any instances of slavery before the giving of the Law of Moses most likely didn't follow those rules, and as the SAB notes, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all had slaves, with Abraham and Jacob in particular having slave girls that were forced to bear children for their masters. The Bible doesn't give any commentary on the moral value of this, but in not doing so seems to give tacit approval. Jesus does tell a handful of parables that involve slavery, but I don't think you can assume that means he approves; Jesus's parables are often very strange stories where the moral message is far from clear. The verse from Leviticus 25 is one I actually did address, but let me repeat it to be clear: in the year of Jubilee, all slaves are given their freedom, without exception. The passage from Mark ten is not saying that people who are Christians won't exercise authority over each other, but rather that those who are humble and serve will be considered to be the greatest. So what does the Bible teach in the end about slavery? I think there's no easy answer to this question. The concept of slavery in the Bible differs from culture to culture and situation to situation, and it's not an absolute evil because of this. "Slavery" is very morally relative, and while the Bible certainly endorsed certain forms of it, none of them were quite like the chattel slavery of the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. In my opinion, it was right for the U.S. to end slavery, but even there, there are nuances. The Emancipation Proclamation effectively freed zero slaves at the time of its issuance. The end of the Civil War ended some slavery legally, but it wasn't in full effect until Juneteenth. The 13th Amendment actually did not end slavery in the United States (read the fine print!), and it is still practiced to the present day, because capitalism thrives on cheap labor. I strongly believe that we should amend the 13th Amendment to actually, completely end slavery in our country, and work to see that it is ended worldwide. Do I believe God would approve of this position? I do, because I believe that modern slavery is so much worse than what was practiced in Biblical times. I guess that's a different, but related soapbox.

The LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek (Luke 4)

Here's where I'm really going to feel like I'm repeating myself, as this scene in Luke 4 doesn't change much between the Gospels.

Jesus goes off into the wilderness and fasts for forty days. Note that it doesn't say that he drank nothing, only that he ate nothing. As it happens, I have known people who have gone on a forty day fast from solid food, but really, that's beside the point, as Jesus is meant to be understood as being rather exceptional. If a guy can walk on water and bring people back from the dead, going for forty days with maybe only water should be a cinch.

When the devil takes Jesus up on a mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world, I never took it as being a literal thing, but more a sort of a vision. Even if the world were flat, you can only see so far, so I don't think this passage is suggesting such a thing.

Who is the Lord of all the earth? As is implied by this passage, the devil is, but then why all the verses saying that God is? Rather than a contradiction, this is a sort of complicated feudal matter; God is Lord in the end, but for some reason that's never fully explored in the Bible, when Adam ate from the tree in the garden of Eden, a certain amount of control over the earth was given to Satan. Anyway, if I remember from the first time I addressed Jesus' misquote, yes the word "only" doesn't appear in the verse Jesus is quoting, but it's strongly implied. So yeah, technically a misquote, but Jesus hasn't changed the meaning of the verse.

Can God be tempted? I answered this at length once before; let me try to give a short answer this time: You certainly can try to tempt God, but that doesn't mean it would be effective. Is it OK to test (or tempt) God? Generally no, but clearly there have been exceptions. Not only is it not a hard-and-fast rule, but the page on the SAB is missing an important verse, Malachi 3:10, in which God commands Israel to test him! (Perhaps the SAB will add the verse once this goes up? I think it's a big one for this issue.)

The SAB has a few issues with the comparison of Luke 4:18-19 to Isaiah 61:1-2. First of all, the SAB claims that the verse in Isaiah refers to Isaiah, and not to a future prophet. While yes, the verse does refer to Isaiah, that does not mean that it's impossible that it might have another layer of meaning. It actually comes up a lot in the New Testament that a verse that people thought referred to a past event is reinterpreted to have a secondary fulfillment; that's what's going on here. Secondly, the SAB points out that this appears to be yet another case of Jesus misquoting Scripture, and asks idly if Jesus made the mistake or if Luke added it in later. I don't know how to answer that question, but I do have some insight into what's going on here. In Jesus' time, Greek was a very commonly-spoken language, and a lot of people read their Old Testament from a Greek version known as the Septuagint. As is happens, the Septuagint does mention "typhlois anablepsin" or "recovering sight to the blind" in this verse. Jesus could have been reading from the Septuagint, or Luke could have gotten his verses from the same, but we don't really have any way of knowing for sure. Admittedly, this does still leave the verse open for questioning in a number of different ways. Is the Septuagint a bad translation? Was it wrong for whoever quoted from the Septuagint to do so? If Jesus actually read correctly from the Hebrew text, and Luke substituted the Septuagint, what does that imply? These are all potentially big issues that I admittedly don't have answers for; although its not a contradiction, it is an inconsistency, which some people may consider just as bad. Please feel free to share your thoughts one way or the other in the comments.

How long was Elijah's drought? The SAB claims a contradiction here, but I seem to be failing to see it. The Old Testament doesn't seem to be at all specific as to the length of the drought. I'd be curious as to where James and Jesus got three and a half years.

In verse 38, there is mention of "Simon's wife" which implies, as the SAB says, that the "first Pope" was married. I don't know what Catholics believe about this, or even if it would be an issue, as I'm pretty sure that celibacy among clergy was not a thing practiced in the early church. The SAB also implies that Simon Peter abandoned his wife to follow Jesus, but I don't know that one could say that with certainty. Sure, it's possible, but just because verse 5:11 says "they forsook all" doesn't mean that it should be taken quite so literally; at the very least one might assume that they didn't leave behind their clothes, and if they took something at all, who knows what they may have taken overall?

In the rest of the chapter, there's a lot of healing and casting out "devils", and while the SAB marks all of this as absurd and/or scientifically wrong, we're talking about miracles once again. Just because Jesus cleared a fever by rebuking it doesn't mean that the Bible is saying that's standard medical practice. As for the casting out of devils, the SAB brings up a question that I don't have a good answer for.

Then shall they fast in those days (Matthew 4)

The first issue that the SAB has with Matthew 4 is an interesting one, as it brings up bigger theological issues. If James 1:13 says that God cannot be tempted, then how is it that Jesus, supposedly being God, can be tempted? Is this a contradiction? Once again, I think this can be chalked up to the ambiguity of language, but it raises other questions for me. The ambiguity is this: Let me use the example of one of my kids. Suppose you were to try to get my older daughter to do something and you were to bribe her with a chocolate bar. Believe it or not,  she actually doesn't like chocolate, so in a sense, while you could bribe her with chocolate, in another sense, you can't...because it wouldn't be successful. I think that's the point of what James is saying. (This goes for the issue on verse seven as well.)

The bigger theological issue this raises, at least for me, is the question of why the devil would even bother. As I've heard many people point out--in regards to this passage, no less--the devil seems to be well-versed in scripture, so one might wonder why he bothers to oppose God since he must know how futile such action must be. I don't have an answer for that, it's just something I've always wondered.

Anyway, the SAB seems to be asking how it can be possible for Jesus to have fasted for 40 days and nights. There are a few things to say about this. One thing is that there are no details given about the fast; I would assume that Jesus didn't go without water for forty days, but rather only went without food. As it happens, there was this thing a few years back (it may still be as popular now, I don't know) where a lot of people I knew were doing 40-day fasts. They didn't go completely without consuming anything, but I know they went without solid food for 40 days; it doesn't take superhuman endurance for that sort of thing. Which brings me to a more important point: Jesus was superhuman. I don't think it's so hard to imagine that someone who had the ability to walk on water and raise people from the dead could manage to go a long time without food.

Well, after fasting, the devil shows up and tries to tempt Jesus, even suggesting scripture to support the things that he's tempting Jesus to do. As the SAB says, Jesus misquotes Deuteronomy 6:13, and this is not a translation error for the KJV. Not only is the word "only" present in the Greek, but it's there in the parallel passage of Luke 4:8. I would say in defense of this misquote that the verse that immediately follows ("Ye shall not go after other gods...") implies "only", so it's not an unreasonable stretch for Jesus to put it there.

I find it interesting the way that the SAB envisions the sorts of things that the Bible talks about, and how it's clearly different than I do. I would have never considered the physical impossibility of the scene in verse eight, but I suppose it's an issue worth considering. The thing I'd always wondered about this scene is how and why it ended up in the Gospels at all, since there's no recording of a time that Jesus sat down with his disciples and said, "Let me tell you about this wild thing that happened this one time I was fasting!" As for the issue of whether we've got some sort of flat-earth situation, I think that I'd have to say that this is figurative language in some way. I mean, even if you supposed that the devil and Jesus were standing on the moon, they'd still only see half the earth (there were kingdoms in the western hemisphere, and maybe even Australia), and I don't think there is an angle at which you could see everything. But even if the world were flat and there was a huge mountain, you'd be looking at everything from miles and miles away, so you wouldn't really see all those kingdoms, would you? I'm sure detractors will call it a cop-out, but yeah, I'm going to go with figurative speech here.

Verse nine is an interesting one, because I think a lot of people miss the implications of the offer the devil is giving, but the SAB gets it. If the devil is offering Jesus the earth, doesn't that imply that the devil owns it? You can't tempt someone by offering them something that's not yours, so the devil must own "all the kingdoms of the world". So the SAB is right to ask the questions it asks about the earth. As important as this issue is, since this post is getting long, I'm going to answer it simply. There's a sense in which both God and the devil own the earth. In the end, God owns the earth; He created it, and at the end of time, He's going to take it back. In another very real sense, the devil owns the earth, but it's sort of like a guy with a long-term lease. I actually talked about this when I covered the book of Ruth and cross-referenced Revelation 5 and referred back to this chapter.

But back to verse 10 and Jesus' quote of Deut. 6:13. The SAB asks whether the Bible tells us to serve only God or whether we are to serve others. I think the answer to this is similar to the one I just gave. Ultimately, God is the one we are made to serve, but in the course of living our lives, we serve God by serving others. Children should serve parents, spouses should serve one another, employees should serve bosses, and citizens should serve their governments in some manner. While it may seem like a contradiction on the face of it if you take the language a certain way, I think the idea is that we serve God by serving the people that God wants us to serve.

So the last issue in this chapter is that of timing. Matthew (and Mark, apparently) seem to be implying that Jesus chose his apostles (or particularly Peter and Andrew) after John got put in prison, while the Gospel of John suggests the opposite. Well, as it happens, this sort of thing happens a lot in the Gospels. The ordering of events seems to get scrambled around a lot between one telling and another. My general answer is once again, something that's going to be considered a cop-out by many, but I really don't think it is: the Gospel writers just didn't care about getting their narratives in proper temporal order. I'm using that as a blanket dismissal of contradictions of this type, but there still will be times where getting the order is important (the Sunday morning after Jesus is crucified has some issues that need sorting out) and a fair number of times, there will be things that can be said to sort things out anyway.

In this particular case, I'd say a couple things. One is that one event coming after the other in the narrative doesn't necessarily mean that they come after each other in time, and I think here verse 17 ends one story and 18 starts another. But that's about what I said in the previous paragraph. Another possibility is that John ended up in prison more than once; he was pretty unpopular among the religious and political leaders, maybe even moreso than Jesus. Here's a more important distinction: I don't think that the story of the calling of Peter in John is the same story told here. Doesn't it seem odd that Jesus would just be walking along and call these two guys almost at random, and they immediately drop everything and follow him? No, I think this is the official calling moment, while other stories like the one in John 1 are stories of how Jesus had interacted with these men previous to calling them.