Ancient Truth: General Letters
By Ed Hurst
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About this ebook
The Bible is Ancient Truth, but must be read in its own ancient context to be fully understood. Even the people among whom Jesus lived no longer understood their own Hebrew heritage because the leadership had embraced Western intellectual assumptions which were then foreign to Scripture. Where we stand today is even more foreign. The burden of responsibility is upon us to travel back into that world, to the context in which God chose to reveal Himself. This volume examines General Letters in light of those Hebrew mental assumptions.
Ed Hurst
Born 18 September 1956 in Seminole, OK. Traveled a great deal in Europe with the US Army, worked a series of odd jobs, and finally in public education. Ordained to the ministry as a Baptist, then with a non-denominational endorsement. Currently semi-retired.
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Ancient Truth - Ed Hurst
Ancient Truth: General Letters
By Ed Hurst
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 by Ed Hurst
Copyright notice: People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior – be sure your sin will find you out
(Numbers 32:23)
Permission is granted to copy, reproduce and distribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains in its original form.
Cover art: The Basilica of Ephesus, ancient ruins standing in modern Turkey. Used by permission under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2, image source. Book author’s modified image available upon request.
Other books in this series include Ancient Truth: The Gospels and Ancient Truth: Paul’s Letters by the same author. Get your free copies at Smashwords.
Table of Contents
Introduction to the Ancient Truth Series
Introduction to the General Letters
Hebrews
Hebrews 1
Hebrews 2
Hebrews 3
Hebrews 4
Hebrews 5
Hebrews 6
Hebrews 7
Hebrews 8
Hebrews 9
Hebrews 10
Hebrews 11
Hebrews 12
Hebrews 13
James
James 1
James 2
James 3
James 4
James 5
1 Peter
1 Peter 1
1 Peter 2
1 Peter 3
1 Peter 4
1 Peter 5
2 Peter
2 Peter 1
2 Peter 2
2 Peter 3
1 John
1 John 1
1 John 2
1 John 3
1 John 4
1 John 5
2 & 3 John
Jude
Introduction to the Ancient Truth Series
Mankind is fallen, in need of redemption. The one single source is the God who created us. He has revealed Himself and His will for us, the path to redemption. The pinnacle of His efforts to reveal Himself came in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ.
Most of us understand easily enough that Divine Son was born into a particular historical and cultural setting, one that is frankly foreign to us, and we to it. The distance is more than mere years of time, or language and culture, but a wealth of things that fall between Him and us. At a minimum, we could point out the Post-Modern culture, Victorian feminism, Enlightenment secularism, European feudalism, and Germanic tribal mythology – so much we can point out without much difficulty. What no one in our Western world today seems to realize is the single greatest barrier to understanding Christ is the thing which lies under all of those obscuring layers of influence: Western Civilization itself.
That is, the ancient Classical Greco-Roman world is built essentially on Aristotle and Plato. Those two are not simply alien to the people of the Bible, but their basic view of reality is frankly hostile to that of the Bible. Aristotle rejected Hebrew Scripture because he rejected the underlying worldview of the people God used to write that Scripture.
This book is not a long academic dissertation on the differences; that has been very well covered by far better qualified writers. But this should serve as notice to the reader how our Western intellectual heritage, including our basic assumptions of how a human can know, understand, and deal with reality, is not what’s in the Bible. If you bring that Western intellectual heritage to Scripture, you will not come away with a proper understanding of God’s revelation. If the rules, the essential assumptions, by which you discern and organize truth about your world remain rooted in the West, you will not fully understand the precious treasure of truth God left for us in the Bible.
We do not need yet one more commentary on the Bible from a foreign Western intellectual background; we need something that speaks to us from the background of the Hebrew people. God spoke first to them. He did not simply find the Hebrew people useful for His revelation; He made the Hebrew people precisely so He would have a fit vehicle for His revelation. Bridging the divide between them and us is no small task, but to get readers started down that path, I offer this series of commentaries that attempt to present a Hebrew understanding for the Western mind. Not as some authoritative expert, but I write as another explorer who reports what he has found so far. I encourage you to consider what I share and heed the call to make your own exploration of these things.
A note about Scripture translations: There are dozens of English translations of the Bible. None of them is perfect, if for no other reason translation itself is shooting at a moving target. More importantly, it is virtually impossible to translate across the vast cultural and intellectual gulf between that of current English-speakers and those who wrote the Bible. This author recommends the New English Translation, AKA the NET Bible – http://netbible.org/
Introduction to the General Letters
The General Letters could also be called the Jewish Christian letters. That is, they serve to correct the particular problems of First Century Jews seeking the path of Christ. While Paul addressed such things in passing, his letters primarily discussed matters pertaining to his apostleship to Gentiles. Yet, in the process of helping Jewish Christians, the various authors masterfully bridge the gap between the Old and New Covenants in ways that still speak powerfully to us today.
Hebrews
The book is commonly called The Letter to the Hebrews.
While it may have been delivered to its intended audience as a letter, its format is more of a scholarly treatise. Only the final chapter contains material typical of letters. Further, it assumed a rabbinical cast of mind. While fully committed to Christ, it was a mind thoroughly Alexandrian in training. The author appears to have been a priest or Levite, trained in the highest standard of Alexandrian Greek and quoting from the Septuagint. Thus, his audience would appear to be rather the same sort of people.
We can discern that these people were a Hellenistic Jewish community in or near Rome. Persecution has struck hard and they have stopped their regular community worship. They are contemplating a return to Judaism, in part simply to stop their suffering. The writing addresses the more educated leadership of these people, former rabbis in Judaism. The whole book is a blunt statement that the Covenant of Moses died on the Cross.
The hints within the text suggest a time just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Some of the arguments offered in this treatise would require significant change if the Temple were no longer standing. However, it is quite likely they were converted under Paul’s teaching. It’s unlikely they would have embraced Christ so easily unless their intellectual objections were answered by someone who knew those objections beforehand, knew their flaws and could offer a high level of reasoned response. This narrows the time frame to some point after 64 AD, when it appears Paul finally visited Rome at the expense of the imperial government as a prisoner. This timing coincides with a known period of imperial persecution, climaxed in the march of troops into the Herodian lands in 68 AD.
It is in this book we receive details that indicate a large body of scholarly understanding of details from the Old Testament, but not recorded there. This is the only place where so much is made of Melchizedek, for example. While Paul does offer glimpses of this material in his letters, the writer of Hebrews dumps large amounts of it. Thus, while the treatise is thoroughly Hellenist of the Alexandrian flavor, it is distinctly Old Testament Hebrew in content and reference.
Hebrews 1
Immediately our writer shows us the Hebrew standard for handling the Old Testament text. Departing from the Hellenistic methods of slavish textual analysis, but not yet as rootless as the Alexandrian adaptation, this is a peculiarly Hebrew way of quoting from the Old Testament, sometimes blending into the quote a free ranging commentary. This is more than just targum, a restatement in modern terms, but quotation with an application the original author may not have intended. Thus, even when his use seems to us unjustified by the context from which it was taken, employing too much of a poetic license, we must accept this is proper and correct because this book was regarded in its own time as God-breathed. That is, we realize the author read his Old Testament with a truly inspired understanding and his adaptations were an example of that deeper understanding which was not bound by mere words, but a fuller grasp of