Why do we want people living two, three, four, five, six hundred years
after the New Testament to be our context for the New Testament?
Why?
How did the Church Fathers explain the Deuteronomy 32 worldview entities,
like rulers and dominions in the New Testament
and as anti-supernatural entities?
Some of them knew about it because they had exposure to Second Temple literature,
like Jubilees I would say. Others were completely ignorant of it.
They had no idea.
Now if you want an interesting book that has a chapter or two in it on this question,
Gerald McDermott, his book, God's Rivals, goes into the question of
how the Church Fathers processed the gods of other nations.
There's a chapter or two in that book about the early church discussion
over what to do with these patron deities that the nations had.
Yeah, we did do, Andrew comments, a podcast with him.
We did it over that book as well.
I don't know what number of the podcast is, but that's one of the few
resources I've ever seen that gets into the material because typically
the Church Fathers are spending no time in Second Temple Jewish literature.
There are some exceptions, but typically, you know, they're
again, Church Fathers in the 200s, the 300s, the 400s AD.
There are a few centuries after the Second Temple period,
after the New Testament period itself, and they believe that the Church
has replaced Israel so that the motivation for them to get into Jewish material
to understand their New Testament is exceedingly low.
Okay, that's just not the way they're parsing things.
They're not much help when it comes to contextualizing the New Testament.
They're all post-New Testament.
Yeah, one resistance that I have seen with respect of the use of
Second Temple period material is that, "oh, but the Church Fathers never talk about this."
Well, so what?
Yeah, that's because they're not reading Hebrew. They don't know Hebrew.
They certainly don't know Aramaic.
The Western Fathers know Latin, but a lot of those guys didn't even know Greek.
I mean, Augustine confessed to hating Greek. He had a decent knowledge of Greek,
but it wasn't something he was comfortable with,
which is part of the reason why he's messed up in Romans 5-12,
which is in large part the answer as to why so much of the Christian church
went one direction in Romans 5-12 and lots of other Christians didn't.
Christians in the East have no doctrine of original guilt from Romans 5-12.
That's only in the West.
It's because the East, the people who do their work in Greek, not Latin,
not the Vulgate like Augustine did, are doing their theology from the original language,
and Augustine in many cases was not,
and the Church Fathers again in other cases were not.
You know, it just depends. It depends on what era you're in, but once you,
once the Latin West becomes dominant, Latin becomes the language of church discourse,
and Latin is not the primary language for either Testament,
so they're working from translation out of the gate,
and they can't go back to the Old Testament because none of them know Hebrew.
Origen did. I'm trying to think who beside Origen might have known,
Tertullian might have known some Hebrew,
but it is extraordinarily scarce, Jerome did, to find a Church Father
that could actually work in Hebrew.
They're entirely divorced from the context,
and you know, they're hesitant even to work in Greek. It's just the way it is.
So, why we would want the Church Fathers
to contextualize the New Testament is beyond me.
Why do we want people living two, three, four, five, six hundred years
after the New Testament to be our context for the New Testament? Why?
There's no reason other than "I like church tradition." That's the answer.
People are stuck with church tradition. They are not used to going to the primary sources.
In Second Temple literature that's what you have:
You have primary sources for the context of the New Testament.