If you don't read this material,
if you're stuck in one little tradition and sub-tradition of Christianity,
you'll never even think about the questions you could be asking.
It'll never occur to you that this verse over here could be thought of this way.
It'll never pop into your head.
How do we then parse out what fits in our doctrine and what doesn't?
I'll give a pretty extreme example.
I can't remember exactly where it is.
Somewhere in Maccabees, there's this talk of praying for the dead.
There's a war and a bunch of people get killed, and the commander says,
hey, let's go and pray for the dead so that they're not damned to hell, basically,
or whatever the correct term would be there.
I've always understood in my Christian upbringing that you can't pray for the dead.
Once they're dead, they're dead. That's the end of that.
It seems as if at some point
it was part of the Christian body's understanding that you could do that.
When did that change happen and how do we determine
which is valid doctrine and which is heresy?
There's also something else that needs to go into the mix.
Actually, I would say two things.
There is a passage in Peter that people still argue about today
about whether after you're dead, you get a second chance.
You may get a chance to still embrace the gospel at that point.
Again, there are still arguments about this sort of thing.
That's not the same thread as the other one, the prayer for the dead,
but it's a related thought.
That becomes part of the discussion. So, it's not just a Maccabean idea,
at least in terms of the second chance or something like that.
The other thing is we have to be really careful to assume from any book,
Maccabees, Enoch, whatever it is in the Second Temple literature,
that everybody in the Second Temple period looked at it the same way.
We have somebody, at least one person wrote that book and wrote that verse.
How representative that is of not only the wider Jewish community, singular noun,
but communities.
Again, there is no such thing as one monolithic Judaism in the Second Temple period.
It's just like Christianity today.
There's no such thing as one monolithic Christianity.
We've got infinite varieties of it.
The big ones are Eastern Orthodox, Catholicism, and Protestantism.
Protestantism breaks into how many... goodness, dozens, hundreds.
So there's no one mind and one voice in Judaism.
So what we know for sure is, okay, we know at least one person thought this.
And it's probably fair to say that, you know, other Jews thought this.
But to put a percentage on it, like is this even representative
of Second Temple Judaism?
We have no way of knowing that.
Now, a good sort of telltale sign would be if this item gets discussed in a lot of other books.
That increases the chances dramatically that this would have been a doctrinal idea.
But if it's only in one book, in one verse,
that's probably not something we can really say was doctrine in Second Temple Judaism.
To somebody it was.
But as far as a widespread influence, you know, I would doubt that significantly.
And there are other things like this that only pop up once or twice.
So how do we know what's going on with that?
So I think that needs to be part of the mix in approaching a question like this.
Now, my own assessment with all this material is that I think all of it is useful.
As you quoted me earlier, a book doesn't have to be canonical to be useful.
All of this stuff tells us how somebody in the serious
Second Temple Jewish tradition was thinking about the text.
Now, this might, in the case of this verse, are they linking back to something in the text
or are they sort of being innovative?
What I want to know is what's the context for making this statement?
And do they hook into anything else, preferably in their own sacred scriptures
like the Hebrew Bible?
And the way you would tell that is, you'd have to look at the Greek,
the Greek text of that, you know, are there any touch points with some other passage?
Could they conceivably be thinking of this passage in the Hebrew Bible?
Of course, in the Septuagint, when they're writing this in Maccabees?
I don't know, to me it's like if you can't attach it to the Hebrew Bible,
then this thought that they're thinking is not something that has
a direct relationship to the stuff that nobody would argue is sacred.
And therefore, that's the pool from which we get our doctrine.
It could just be a tradition of some rabbi, some teacher that was known.
And this guy's passing it on in the Maccabees book.
That's nice, that's interesting.
Maybe it's part of a bigger topic, okay?
But at the end of the day, if all we have is some sort of rabbinic tradition
that doesn't really attach itself well to the stuff that everyone accepts as sacred,
I'm not looking at it as doctrine, period.
It's not good fodder upon which to build doctrine.
So, again, that's just how I look at it. I'm always looking for breadcrumb trails.
I'm looking for how people interpret the Scriptures,
the canonical stuff that everybody accepts.
How are they thinking about it?
What insights do they have here?
And I'll tell you why it's useful, because if you don't read this material,
if you're stuck in one little tradition and sub-tradition of Christianity,
you'll never even think about the questions you could be asking.
It'll never occur to you.
It'll never occur to you that this verse over here could be thought of this way.
It'll never pop into your head.
So that's really useful to help us think about the biblical text.
And so anything that really helps us think about the biblical text
to me is worthwhile doing.
But I have these parameters in my head, and I just described,
how I think about some of that when it comes to this material.
I want to see the breadcrumb trail.
Show me your work.
You know, our math teachers used to insist on this.
Show me how you got the answer.
Did you just get lucky?
If you show me your work, I'll know.
So that's what I want to see: I want to see the writers, you know,
give me the breadcrumb trail so I can follow their thoughts.