Errors of Prophets: When Prophets are Wrong
Prophets are not omniscient. I find it troubling how much weight religions invest in this notion that prophets are somehow infallible. There’s an interesting example in the Gospels of the New Testament involving John the Baptist, who Jesus said was “the greatest among the prophets.” This exalted status as a prophet makes this example all the more interesting.
In Matthew16:14 Peter tells Jesus that some of the people are saying that Jesus is Elijah. A few days later the disciples ask Jesus “Why then do the scribes say that Elijah must come [before the end]?” The scribes were asking this because there was a prophecy in Malachi 4:5 that said God would send Elijah before the end of the world. Jesus answers:
The text of Matthew clearly indicates that Jesus was implying that John the Baptist was the fulfillment of the Malachi prophecy. According to Jesus in this text John the Baptist was Elijah.
Now, let’s take a look at the Gospel of John where John the Baptist is answering questions about who he is:
Obviously there is a conflict here. Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew that John the Baptist is Elijah, while John the Baptist himself declares in the Gospel of John emphatically that he is not Elijah. Who is right? John the Baptist, the “greatest prophet”? Or is Jesus right? For a fundamentalist Christian this text poses a problem where the “greatest prophet” makes a statement that is in direct conflict to an interpretation by Jesus. To a non-fundamentalist this shows that there was a wide range of understanding about Old Testament prophecies among the Apostles. And this raises another question. John the Apostle, according to Matthew’s gospel, was at the event in Matthew 17 where Jesus proclaimed that John the Baptist was Elijah. So why would the apostle John later write in his own Gospel that John the Baptist was not Elijah?
Egyptian Origins of the Ark of the Covenant
I remember when I started studying ancient near-eastern linguistics about a decade ago. One of my primary interests at the time I started studying was the Egyptian influence on the Jewish religion, and more specifically on the text of the Torah. My rationale was that if a people and a religion claimed to have its origin in Egypt, we should expect to see Egyptian influence in the text. As I learned more about the Hebrew and Egyptian languages, I began to develop the following premise as a model: if for some reason the Greek source texts we have for the New Testament were lost, and all we had were English translations, we could use some of the technical religious language to deduce what the source language of the New Testament was. For example, if we came to the word Baptize, a Greek word, we’d know that this was a technical religious word with Greek origins, and that in Greek it simply means Dip. What happens frequently when religious texts are translated is that the technical language of the religion and its practices tend to stick in the original language. This is due to the ritualistic practices cementing the term in its original form. So at some point the word ceases to be translated and is simply transliterated.
However, I quickly found that almost all of the lexical material for classical Hebrew tends to reference eastern Semitic languages instead of western Semitic languages, such as Egyptian. And from an academic perspective this makes sense since the Torah really wasn’t solidified until after the return from the Jewish exile in Babylon under Nehemiah and Ezra. So from this perspective, we would expect to see eastern Babylonian influence on the text. But I was continually haunted by the fact that the Jewish people had a story claiming that they spent hundreds of years in Egypt and were led out by an Egyptian, Moses, who was educated and raised by Egyptian priests, who eventually wrote the Torah according to tradition. Under such circumstances, how could there not be Egyptian influence?
Naturally, I learned Egyptian after learning classical Hebrew. But as soon as I gained some proficiency in Egyptian, I began to notice that there were indeed Egyptian influences on etymology and religious themes (see my article on the origin of Yahweh as a prime example of this); and to my dismay these influences were frequently overlooked in the monumental Hebrew lexicons, such as Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon.
So with a little background on my interest in this topic, one of the easiest places we see this Egyptian influence is in one of the most revered objects in Jewish history, and possibly even Christian history: The Ark of the Covenant. And ironically, to notice the influence you really don’t even need a knowledge of the languages, even though there are some linguistic hooks that solidifies this theory.
Now, I want to make it clear that I have a bias in that I’m a skeptic and a rationalist, so whenever I see an article about the Ark, or see any reference to it in pop-culture, I generally roll my eyes and think its just another kooky exploitation of a mystical religious icon. The movie Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, has done much to solidify our modern notion of what the ark looked like and what it was used for.
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
Now the theme of the Ark of the Covenant is: two winged heavenly beings called Cherubim, a box, and two poles that were used to carry the box. Now more specifically, even though the image above of the Ark doesn’t show anything between the angels or Cherubim, the text of Exodus says that God appeared between the Cherubim and the technical name for the space between the wings was called the Kippur, which is frequently translated as “mercy seat” or “place of propitiation”, but in Hebrew it’s simply Kippur. So the theme, to reiterate is:
- Two angels or Cherubim
- God between the wings of the Cherubim in a place called Kippur
- The Cherubim and God on top of a box
- Poles mounted to the side of the box by which priests carried the Ark
Now, let’s take a look at some images from ancient Egyptian art that predates Moses and the exodus from Egypt. The image below shows two winged heavenly beings with wings outstretched on both sides of a god, on top of a box, with poles on the side, being carried by Egyptian priests:
Boat Procession with Winged Beings
This theme is found on Egyptian wall reliefs as well as smaller art objects such as the following where Amun, an Egyptian god, is fixed between two winged heavenly beings on top of a boat. This was to symbolize a real event in which the priests would parade a larger boat, mounted on poles, with Amun seated between two winged beings:
Icon of Boat with Winged Creatures
The examples of this theme are frequent and there isn’t much use in posting more examples here. Instead, I’d like to move onto a more specific form of this theme in which a Khepera beetle, or scarab, is shown seated between two winged beings, or sometimes with the two beings holding wings up to the side of the Khepera beetle:
Khepera
The Khepera beetle, or scarab, is one of the most ubiquitous symbols found throughout the ancient middle east. The word for scarab in ancient Egyptian was pronounced something like “khepera” and had a number of meanings such as: revolve, renew, regenerate, resurrect. The theme of the Khepera beetle between divine beings, sometimes winged, is extremely frequent in Egypt as illustrated by this relief in an 18th dynasty tomb:
Khepera on Boat
Why is this important to The Ark of the Covenant? The reason is because the space between the angels in Hebrew, as we noted above was Kippur. In Hebrew, which doesn’t have vowels written out, only has the consonants: KPR. I find it highly coincidental that the Hebrew Torah describes the space between the two Cherubim as KPR and that there is a frequent theme in Egyptian art in which a KPR, or Khepera, has two divine beings usually with outstretched wings. In fact, the very word Cherubim is probably derived from the Egyptian word Cheriu, or Heriu, which meant “those from above” or “heavenly beings”.
As a result, we should suspect that the real Ark of the Covenant would have looked more Egyptian in nature, most likely with a Khepera beetle, or scarab, between the two Cherubim. This makes additional sense in that the High Priest only accessed the Ark of the Covenant one time per year, and that time was at the “revolution” of the year, or the beginning of the new year. Recall, the Egyptian word Khepera means “revolution” or “renewal”. So, at the beginning of the new year, the High Priest would go in and ceremonially perform a ritual act to signify the end of the old and the beginning, or renewal, of a new year.
Below are some additional images showing the theme in Egyptian art, some original, some artistic replications:
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There are numerous other examples proving that the Ark of the Covenant’s design was a borrowed theme. Again, as I’ve said in other posts, this evidence of Egyptian themes in the religious icons of the Hebrew faith adds credibility that the Hebrew religion does in fact have some roots in Egypt.
The Word Logos is Light
I frequently hear Christians misuse the following famous passage from the Gospel of John:
Christians frequently use The Word in this passage to mean the Bible, and then extend this to Jesus, saying that both were “In the beginning”.
First, everyone from a Judeo-Christian background will agree that this verse is referencing the famous introduction to the book of Genesis:
But where does the Word fall into the Genesis reference? We get additional clues of what the Word is referencing if we continue reading John 1:
It should be clear what the reoccurring theme in these few verses is: light. So how does this reference the Genesis account? The first words spoken by God in the Genesis story are “Let there be light!” or Yehyeh Or in Hebrew.
So the Word referenced in John 1:1 is the word Light, not the Bible. With this in mind, other passages become clear, like why Jesus says “I am the light of the world”. Clearly Jesus did in fact believe he came from this primeval light source. However, throughout John he references this light and tells his followers that they have equal access to this light.
In addition, the ancient Hebrews associated the divine name YHWH with the Hebrew verb “to be”. This is most likely what the author of John believed as well. Remember, the phrase “let there be light” in Hebrew is only two words: “Yehyeh”=”let there be” and “Or”=”light”. Then it’s very likely John was trying to imply the following: “and the Word (light) was with God (YHWH=Yehyeh)”.
Language Application
I’m adding an appended section to this blog entry so that I can get a bit more technical for those who have some knowledge of the languages. I personally believe there is a strong possibility that there was an Aramaic original for the Gospel of John based on some indicators in the grammar. The word “with” in John 1:1 is the Greek “pros” which usually means “to” or “toward” in its simplest form. If there is an Aramaic original, the word “pros” in Greek indicates a prefixed Lamed preposition, which in Aramaic is also used to represent a direct object. As a result of this, I think there is a strong possibility that the fragment “the word was with God” and the fragment “the word was God” are two different possible translations of a single statement in the Aramaic original text. In other words, the original Aramaic text under this would have had only one sentence: “the word was [prefixed lamed]-God”. The scribe translating into Greek gave both possible translations, but by choosing the Greek preposition “pros” instead of “meta” or “syn”, he left an unintentional clue. The other option is that originally there was only one statement, but a scribe put a note in the margin of another possible translation, and when this manuscript was copied, the copiest shuffled the comment into the body of the text. This happened very frequently. In the LXX of Daniel there are sections of verses that are twice as long as the Hebrew. If you translate the additional Greek statements back into Hebrew, you begin to see that the letters in the Hebrew words had letter forms similar to the existing Hebrew letters. In other words, there were other possible translations of these texts that scribes put in marginal notes that were eventually shuffled into the main body of the texts by a later copiest. As a result, all copies of that copy branch, the branch we eventually inherited, had the comments mixed into the main body of the text making it impossible for readers to know what the original text had.
Aramaic Gospels: The Dove, Jonah, and the Baptism
The New Testament is written entirely in Greek. But many scholars for the past few centuries have speculated that the Greek gospels we inherited from the 1st century are translations of Aramaic originals that have been lost. Most of the analysis has focused on idiomatic phrases or grammatical structures in the Greek text that would be better suited to Aramaic. Some of these arguments have weight, but I’m going to suggest that the narrative of the New Testament gospels may present a more compelling argument that Aramaic source texts did in fact exist for the Gospels. In this first post on this topic we’re going to analyze the baptism of Jesus and a couple of obscure passages in the New Testament gospels where Jesus makes cryptic references to Jonah, the Hebrew prophet who was swallowed by a fish. Let’s start with Mark 1:9-13 where Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan river:
Recall that our English translations of the New Testament are based on ancient Greek texts which were written in the late 1st century, but our oldest fragments are copies that date to the 2nd-3rd century. When studying the New Testament most students have a hard enough time dealing with the Greek. But if we want to see what Jesus taught, occasionally the Greek is an obstacle and we must think in Aramaic which is the mother tongue of Jesus and his immediate followers. With that in mind, let’s do a quick analysis of the word Dove in the New Testament.
The word Dove in Greek is Peristeran, which has no special significance in Greek; it simply means Dove. However, we know Jesus’ native language was Aramaic. So if we were to hear Jesus say Dove in Aramaic or Hebrew, he’d say “Yonah” or “Jonah“.
With this in mind, take a look at the following passage from Matthew 16:
In our Greek text of Matthew the name Jonah is given by Jesus in response to a demand to receive “a sign from heaven“. First, the cryptic nature of the reply should alert us that something special is going on here. In this passage, why does the Greek have Jesus saying the only “sign from heaven” is going to be Jonah, a man? The answer is that the author of the Greek text incorrectly transliterated the Aramaic word Dove, when the author should have translated it. If we assume this passage has an Aramaic source, Jesus actually is referencing his own baptism where a dove appeared as a sign from heaven. In other words, what Jesus is saying to his questioners is:
Battistero Neoniano, Ravenna, Italy 451-75 CE
And really this translation makes much more sense because the passage is dealing with a “sign from heaven”, which would naturally refer to a creature living in the heavens such as a bird, not a man. So the Greek text which has been handed down through history has preserved the erroneous reading of Jonah instead of the Aramaic correct reading of Dove. Cryptic narratives in the Greek can sometimes only be explained if we translate the Greek back into Jesus’ mother tongue of Aramaic.
Why would a scribe decide to transliterate the word Jonah instead of translating it as dove? I think the reason is simple. As the years passed, the number of myths and stories about Jesus performing miracles and signs began to increase. The gospels were written decades after Jesus was crucified and they wanted to incorporate all of these miraculous signs into their gospels. But there was a conflict here: why would Jesus say you’re not getting any other miraculous signs except the sign of the dove at my baptism and then proceed to perform miracles which culminated in the miracle of a resurrection? In order to reconcile this conflict, they decided that the statement about the dove was really a prophecy of the greatest miracle of the resurrection, referencing Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale. The scribes smoothed out this apparent conflict in the statement of Jesus by transliteration instead of translation. This exposition can be seen in two passages, Matthew 12 and Luke 11, which parallel this “Jonah/dove” passage and attempt to expound the cryptic meaning inherent in the erroneous reading of Jonah instead of Dove. In Matthew 12 and Luke 11 the Jonah passage is expounded as a prophetic passage of Jesus spending three days in the tomb, just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale. This type of metaphorical interpretation of Old Testament stories became increasingly popular among the 2nd century Christian authors who attempted to make every Old Testament story point to Jesus (see the book of Barnabas as a good example of this type of work).