What Else Can a Person Think

There is a certain quaint similarity among three particular biblical passages, a similarity that is not at first obvious.  One passage is from Genesis, one is from Luke, and one is from Acts.  (Okay, it might also be said that the last two passages together are from "Luke/Acts".)  The similarity is not even one of theme, but rather one of what might be called take-away.  I hope to illustrate what might be extracted of positive quality from biblical passages by even the severest of critics doing the take-away.

In Genesis 21:25-32:

And Abraham reproved Abimelech because of a well of water, which Abimelech's servants had violently taken away.  And Abimelech said, I wot not who hath done this thing: neither didst thou tell me, neither yet heard I of it, but today.  And Abraham took sheep and oxen, and gave them unto Abimelech; and both of them made a covenant.  And Abraham set seven ewe lambs of the flock by themselves.  And Abimelech said unto Abraham, What mean these seven ewe lambs which thou hast set by themselves?  And he said, For these seven ewe lambs shalt thou take of my hand, that they may be a witness unto me, that I have digged this well.  Wherefore he called that place Beer-sheba; because there they sware both of them.  Thus they made a covenant at Beer-sheba.... (KJV)

"That they may be a witness unto me"?  Surely antiquity had a radically different definition of "facts" than that which we embrace today.  If two men of influence agreed that something was so, then apparently it was so.  So the stipulated "fact" in the agreement between the two men was that Abraham (or, perhaps more accurately, his servants) had "digged this well."

(I suppose the "severest of critics" to which I referred above might also note that not even the Genesis text itself establishes or even stipulates that the well that "Abimelech's servants had violently taken away" was in fact dug by Abraham.  It seems that the concept of "rightful owner" subsumes unto itself the fact-ish concept of "digger of the well."  One might be reminded of the tendency of arguments about the legitimacy of modern political Israel's land claims to hover serenely above a clouded ancient past having something to do with Canaanites.  Apparently "rightful owner" subsumes unto itself the fact-ish concept of "original inhabitant"--a doubly unsurprising element of this instance, in which nearly all sides of the conflict attribute such an aura to Abraham.)

To modern minds--and, most crucially, to the minds of any person at any time who could grasp the concept of "fact"--there definitely seems to be something missing from the Abraham-Abimelech exchange.  Similarly, any reasonable and interested reader would note something missing from both of the exchanges in Luke/Acts:

In the Emmaus Road episode, Jesus meets two of the disciples,

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:27)

and, if that was not enough, the two return to Jerusalem to the eleven. . .

And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them . . . . And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.  Then he opened their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures, And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.... (Luke 24:36-46)

And, in the awkward non-Galilee-traveling Luke/Acts narrative, the disciples commence to wait around in Jerusalem until Pentecost.  A dozen or more competent, experienced men, well-versed in the scriptures and supported by some ten-dozen ladies and gentlemen (some not without means) had time to appoint a successor to Judas Iscariot.  And yet none of them seems even to have attempted to bequeath to posterity the obvious potential fruit of Emmaus and its aftermath: a comprehensive and authoritative list of Old Testament prophecies about Jesus.  If canonical scriptural authority be of great import (and few are the denominations that would deny this) then apparently the Old Testament's ostensible foreknowledge of Jesus is of so little import as to make the fever-dreams of a radio preacher potentially as authoritative a voice on the matter as the surmises of the church fathers.

And if that were not enough, in Acts Philip encounters "a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority"

And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esa'ias, and said, understandest thou what thou readest?....Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus. (8:30-35)

So apparently the Old Testament prophecies ostensibly about Jesus were an important conversion tool for the first Christians.  Unfortunately it was not to be for the New Testament canon to provide us a list denoting (and delimiting) those prophecies.  That can be added to the unfortunate absence of a canonical list of the canonical books--do the various collections of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books foretell Jesus?--and we are left to ourselves to decide what foretells Jesus, and what does not.  It is small wonder that the history of common-era thought is spattered with innumerable conjectures about whether ancient Buddhism or pre-Columbian religion presaged Jesus--or really anything else that can be imagined.

So what can be taken away from the episodes I mentioned?  Persons of good will can agree on constructions of reality that consider existence to be under a benign ultimate influence, and persons of good will can decide to behave with good will toward each other.  This, of course, is a notion of a take-away from those passages described above that would drive conventional Christians to distraction, and yet what else can a person think, who hopes to embody and express good will?  Those passages will not bear any greater weight of specific interpretation.