The Books Jesus Read That Never Made the Bible with Dr. Matthias Henze

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have Dr. Matthias Henze with us. Dr. Henze, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Johnny Ova: I'm excited for our conversation today. We've had a lot of good feedback on this topic, so I'm really excited to have you on.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Great, good to be here.

Johnny Ova: Most people picture the Old Testament ending and then four silent centuries passing before the New Testament opens. Just at a high level, what's actually going on in this gap?

Dr. Matthias Henze: The religion of ancient Judaism developed over time, rapidly, just as any religion does. It so happens that when you pick up a Bible, the Old Testament brings us up to, roughly speaking, the fourth century before the Common Era. Then for some reason books written later are no longer included in the Hebrew Bible, and from there we jump to the New Testament, which was written during the second half of the first century CE. So we are effectively skipping over several hundred years, depending on how exactly you date these texts. That's the Christian perspective. We could make the exact same argument about Judaism. The Hebrew Bible still ends in the fourth century, and the first rabbinic text, the Mishnah, is typically dated to the late second century of the Common Era. So there we're talking about a gap of 600 years or so.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Why does this matter? Because when we look at the New Testament, we get a pretty good idea of the Judaism of Jesus. Jesus and his followers were active participants in the Judaism of their time, and we read a little about what that Judaism entailed. For example, Jesus goes to the synagogue regularly, as Luke tells us. There are no synagogues in the Hebrew Bible. The followers of Jesus call him rabbi. There are no rabbis in the Old Testament. Jesus talks with the Pharisees about matters of the law. There are no Pharisees in the Old Testament. So there is a Judaism implied in the New Testament that is hardly ever explained. The authors hardly step back and say, this is what's going on. They assume we know a form of Judaism that simply does not exist in the Hebrew Bible. It's a bit peculiar. You read the New Testament and want to know who the Pharisees were, or the Sadducees, and you go back to the Old Testament, as I did as a very young reader of the Bible, and you find nothing. I thought it was just me. Only later did it occur to me that during those gap years Judaism evolved. New groups came into existence. The synagogue and the rabbi came into existence. By the time of the New Testament, Judaism looked dramatically different from the religion of ancient Israel we find in the Old Testament.

Johnny Ova: So this nickname, the silent years, is that just a hollow nickname? Is it as shallow as: the Old Testament ends here, the New Testament starts there, so I guess God didn't want anything in between and was silent?

Dr. Matthias Henze: I don't think it's shallow. It's actually worse than that. I wrote a little book about this called Mind the Gap, the gap being the gap between the Old and the New Testament. I have a very dear friend who teaches in Toronto, Judith Newman, and at the end of every meeting, as we're parting ways, she always says, Matthias, always remember there was no gap. There are no dark years. There's no in-between. What we're discussing is the decision of some people to single out certain books and label them the Old Testament, and other books and label them the New Testament. Then you create two bodies of literature that happen to be 400 years apart. But in the history of ancient Judaism, of course, there was no gap. There was no darkness. Judaism developed further.

Dr. Matthias Henze: I sometimes ask my students, were there any Jews around during that period? There's always a silence in the room. And I say, actually, yes, there were. Then I ask, what do you think they did? Silence in the room. And I say, they wrote texts, tons of texts that you don't know, but we actually do have. It was an incredible time of literary production, of creativity, of trying out new ideas, of various influences we should probably talk about, Greek influence and so on. Judaism didn't develop by accident. It was an incredibly vital period. So there's nothing dark and no gap here. Judaism continued to exist. We just made a decision to efface, to blend out, these years.

Johnny Ova: Great point. Now, when we talk about the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha and the Dead Sea Scrolls, what are we actually talking about? How do these three categories differ from one another?

Dr. Matthias Henze: Good question. Apocryphal in Greek means hidden or somewhat mysterious, but the term originally had a very specific meaning. The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek several times beginning in the third century BCE, and the oldest of these is the version we call the Old Greek or the Septuagint. The Septuagint includes all the books of the Hebrew Bible, but also extra books such as Ben Sira, Tobit, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. These books are called the Apocrypha: books included in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible. We can list them. You go to a bookstore and get an English Bible, and it'll say Holy Scripture, Old Testament, New Testament, with the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha are the books in the Greek Bible but not in the Hebrew.

Dr. Matthias Henze: The second term is a little more complicated. Pseudepigrapha. It's a mouthful. Epigraphy means writing, and pseudo as in pseudonym: writing under the name of a different author. It was a common literary practice in the ancient world, by no means only in Judaism. You have the same in the Greco-Roman world. You write a book under the name of an authority who is not you, mostly a biblical authority. You write a book under the name of Moses or Abraham or Enoch or Baruch or Ezra. In the late 20th and early 21st century there was a vigorous debate among scholars about why ancient authors would do this. Previously it was held that this was an art of deception, of forgery, a way of hiding behind the text. I think that is completely wrong. I think texts were written and attributed to people to signal the growth of a literary tradition associated with a certain name. If you came across a text attributed to Baruch, you knew that in the Bible he was the scribe of Jeremiah, and you knew what kinds of theological issues and language would be in that book. Pseudepigrapha is a vague term. There is no fixed corpus. With the Apocrypha I can give you a list. Pseudepigraphic writings are all over the place, and we're talking about many, many more books.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Very quickly, the third category, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we can talk about this later. The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish manuscripts discovered in the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s at a place called Qumran and the surrounding areas on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. These are ancient Jewish fragments dating from the third, second and first centuries BCE to the first century CE. They are marvelous because they include the oldest biblical manuscripts we have, and they also give us a beautiful window into the Jewish literature that circulated at the time. Included are some of the Apocrypha, some of the Pseudepigrapha, some biblical books, and lots of writings from the Qumran community itself. So it's very different from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.

Dr. Matthias Henze: When we talk about 1 Enoch, we're talking about a book also known as the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch. It is an ancient apocalypse. It's actually not one coherent book but a long text made up of little booklets, and what they have in common is that they are all attributed to Enoch, who shows up very briefly in Genesis 5 and doesn't really play much of a role in the Hebrew Bible itself. This Enochic literature was written over a period of time, the oldest text perhaps in the third century BCE, the youngest perhaps in the first century CE. It grew over time, and all of it is attributed to Enoch. Very few people know this book today, but we have good reason to believe it enjoyed quite a bit of popularity when it was composed. Eleven copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. They certainly considered it an authoritative book, and we can discuss what exactly that means. It was really quite influential at the time, but then it fell by the wayside.

Johnny Ova: So pseudo as in, we don't believe Enoch himself wrote this, but somebody later wrote it and attributed it to him.

Dr. Matthias Henze: That is exactly right. Enoch is mentioned very briefly in Genesis 5, before the flood, and very few people would claim he wrote any books. Writing came into existence much later. And we can date the different booklets that found their way into 1 Enoch with some degree of confidence, I believe. It's certainly much later.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. So why did these books not make it into the Bible most Christians read today? Who drew the line, and when? Because this is messy.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Yes, it's very, very messy. Before I answer, I want to make very clear that I'm not here to criticize the canon. I'm the last one. I don't want to take away your Bible. I'm not here to say these were idiots who were all theologically narrow-minded. I'm not saying that at all.

Johnny Ova: No, listen, our audience is good with this.

Dr. Matthias Henze: All I'm saying is that now that we have these texts, we can read much more broadly. The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70, and that posed a big problem for both Christians and Jews. It posed a problem for Christians because the Messiah had been crucified 40 years before, the Messiah who was anticipated to overthrow the Roman Empire, and the exact opposite happened. That called for some explaining, and the explaining came in the form of the Gospels. But you're asking about the Jewish side. With the temple gone, Judaism needed to reinvent itself. We now know there were different groups proposing different models for how to base Judaism on the Hebrew Bible, of course, and at the same time guarantee its continued existence. The group that was eventually victorious was the rabbinic movement. Why? Because the rabbis were above all pragmatists. They had fairly little appetite for the apocalypse, for questions of cosmology and the like. They wanted to regulate Jewish life on a daily basis. How do you keep the commandments? What do you do on the holidays? How do you observe the Sabbath? Those are not issues that preoccupy the author of 1 Enoch or many other texts from the Second Temple period, the apocalyptic texts, as we call them.

Dr. Matthias Henze: The rabbis did not fully suppress these questions. In rabbinic prayer, in the siddur, to this very day there are lots of elements about the resurrection of the dead and what we call eschatological expectations. These ideas continued to exist. But the rabbis were not keen on preserving writings from the late Second Temple period that were preoccupied with end-of-time questions. The rabbis didn't really like people running around with a big sign saying the world is coming to an end tomorrow. Their concern was to create a form of Judaism that could not easily be destroyed again in the absence of a temple, something that would last and help people with their day-to-day lives. I think that's a major reason why, by and large, we don't have Jewish manuscripts of writings from the Second Temple period, certainly not of the apocalyptic texts. The early Christian movement was a different story. They were very eager to embrace these texts. So the actual manuscripts we have of 1 Enoch, for example, are all Christian manuscripts.

Johnny Ova: It's one of the most highly debated topics, and to me it's fascinating, because most people don't even know the Bible was put together. The image, again at a very high level, is God in heaven writing it and sending a paper airplane down right into your hands, and here we go. I find that digging into this a bit more, at least from my perspective, strengthens my faith, because it gives good concrete evidence of what is and what's not. It also goes against some commonly held ideas in Christianity, but the search for truth to me is pretty exciting.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Can I jump in, because you're making such an important point. I lecture quite a bit in synagogues and churches, and often I bring with me these weird ancient Jewish texts nobody has ever read. What I find overwhelmingly is that people are very receptive. They do not feel threatened. They're intrigued and quite open-minded. Again, I say, look, I'm not taking away your Bible at all, but let's read these texts side by side. I do this all the time: a biblical text alongside, let's say, a text from the Dead Sea Scrolls. There will be a scrolls exhibit here in Houston beginning in November and running through September of next year. I'll be giving lots of tours and talks, and I will read the Gospels in the context of Second Temple Judaism. Not to relativize the Gospels. I'm not saying Jesus was just one of many Second Temple figures. It's a way to better understand the Gospels. I can point to many details in the Gospels that you and I would happily gloss over if all we read was the Gospel itself. But once we read it side by side with the Dead Sea Scrolls and other texts from the period, we realize these authors were responding to very specific issues being discussed at the time. So, and I'm really glad you're saying this, Johnny, not only does it not diminish the brilliance of the New Testament, the theological significance really, but it amplifies it.

Johnny Ova: Exciting. I couldn't agree more. Back to this extra literature: how much of it would Jesus and his first followers have actually known or read? Was it fringe material, or common knowledge in their world?

Dr. Matthias Henze: The answer is we don't know. I get this question a lot. I could say with professorial authority, oh yes, he read it every evening. Or I could say no, these were just apocalyptic crazies in the desert and nobody read their stuff. The truth is we don't know. Often when my colleagues answer the question, I feel they have this urge to make what we study a little more important by saying everybody read it. We really don't know much about how widely they spread. The Dead Sea Scrolls are helpful in that all of a sudden we have a community that collected texts in circulation at the time, well beyond what was written at Qumran itself. Scrolls were brought there. Texts we would consider fringe today, you mentioned 1 Enoch, and I would add the Book of Jubilees from the second century BCE, and there's a long list of books, were found at Qumran. The community sometimes refers to these texts with little formulas like "as it is written." That seems to suggest these books were not just on their shelves but had some authority for this community. So Qumran leads me to assume these books enjoyed a certain circulation, but how widespread they really were is very difficult to say.

Johnny Ova: We even see this in the Bible. I've noticed a lot of books are quoted in the Bible with almost an expectation, like, you know this stuff. It's common language. Don't you remember? It's said in such and such. And we don't have that book.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Yes, exactly right. I do this routinely with my students in the Hebrew Bible alone. Off the top of my head, there are about 20 or so titles of books listed, and clearly the biblical author is under the impression that we have access to these books and can just look stuff up, when in fact that's not the case. I'll throw out one thought for you to consider. It's a little more complicated than that, because once we enter the Second Temple period, authors like to throw out all kinds of titles. I have a very dear friend in Norway who just had a fabulous project on books known by their title only, and she has collected many of them. Her theory is that some of them really are titles of books that existed, but sometimes it seems to be rhetorical. So we need to be a little careful. The Book of Noah is a good example. It's mentioned all over the place. Was there a Book of Noah? Or are they just citing it to make their point? We're in troubled waters, is what I'm saying.

Johnny Ova: That is fascinating. Side note, after we're done I need you to tell me more about this event in November. You said November through next year?

Dr. Matthias Henze: It's an exhibit. You mean the exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Yes, of course.

Johnny Ova: Yes, sorry, the exhibit. Awesome. You mentioned before the Jews and their expectation of a coming Messiah. How much of that expectation came from these writings rather than from the Hebrew Bible itself?

Dr. Matthias Henze: Excellent question. Let's begin with the word Messiah. The English word comes from the Hebrew mashiah, which just means the anointed one. That's really all it means. Were there anointed ones in the Old Testament? Of course. There are people who were anointed, most importantly kings. The best-known story is Samuel anointing Saul, and then David, into office in 1 Samuel 16. Priests are anointed into office, and perhaps prophets as well, though the evidence is not so clear. So there are messiahs in the literal sense in the Hebrew Bible, but they are not considered end-time agents, agents from God who come at the end of time to bring about the world to come. What you're really asking is, when did the meaning of the word change? What's the origin of belief in an end-time figure, an eschatological agent of God who ushers in a new reality? The answer is that it's exactly during our gap years, in the late Second Temple period, that interest in such a messianic figure came into being. Some colleagues of mine would claim that the Dead Sea Scrolls community anticipated two messianic figures at the same time.

Dr. Matthias Henze: What these people did was go back to the Hebrew Bible and begin to interpret messianically certain texts that in and of themselves don't really read like descriptions of an end-time figure. Texts that come to mind are 2 Samuel 7, where King David is told he should not build a house for God but God will build a house for him, and it is his successor, Solomon, who will be the son of God: I will be like a father to him. Early interpreters soon read this as a messianic prediction. Psalm 2 is another one, Isaiah 11, the servant songs in Isaiah, Daniel 7. From very early on, Jews of the late Second Temple period began to read these as predictions of a messiah who would come at the end of time. Now jump to the first century, the time of Jesus. By then messianic expectations were in full bloom. There was a common understanding that at the end of time God would send a messiah, and that this Messiah would probably be the Son of God, a messianic title that goes back to 2 Samuel 7 and Psalm 2 and was in use in the Dead Sea Scrolls before the New Testament. So it was not so difficult or uncommon for the New Testament writers to claim that Jesus was this Messiah, even though, strictly speaking, there is no such messianic expectation in the Hebrew Bible.

Johnny Ova: On a similar vein, I just interviewed a guest where we went over this more in depth, but I'd love your perspective. In the Old Testament there's almost a silence about Satan, the devil and demonic activity. There are a couple of mentions, but very few. Same thing with angels, demons and unclean spirits in the way they're spoken about in the New Testament. As we get closer to the New Testament, it seems like everything's a demon. They're everywhere. Where did this come from?

Dr. Matthias Henze: They're all over the place. Before I answer, I want to step back. What you're doing right now, Johnny, is reading the New Testament and saying, wow, the Messiah is really important, and angels are all over the place and really important, so where is this coming from? That was my point at the beginning of our conversation. You go through the Old Testament and it's just not there, or at least it's not as pronounced. Are there angels in the Old Testament? Of course. There are angels in Genesis, but they remain underdeveloped. They don't have names. They don't have job assignments. They're really stand-ins for God. I had a student who wrote a beautiful paper on Genesis 22, the Akedah, the near sacrifice of Isaac. My student wrote that the angel there is a stand-in for God. It's a way for the author to have Abraham interact with God in a direct, physical way without attributing a form or shape to God. The angel in and of itself is not the point.

Dr. Matthias Henze: That changes dramatically in the Second Temple period, when all of a sudden angels have names, Gabriel, Michael and so on. They have job descriptions. There's a strict hierarchy of angels. Perhaps most importantly, there are good angels and bad angels. All of this develops in the late Second Temple period, and the Dead Sea Scrolls are very helpful because they spell it out for us. They say, for example, that bad angels or demons are also strictly hierarchical, and at the top of the ladder is a figure with different names. Sometimes he's called Mastema. In Christian theology he will be called Satan. He's the head of them all, who sends evil spirits to torment human beings, to cause illness. He's the origin of evil, and so on. And the texts all agree that they cannot be defeated. They can be expelled, but they cannot really be killed.

Dr. Matthias Henze: A number of years ago I was at a talk where a New Testament colleague of mine interrupted himself in the middle and said, isn't it interesting that Jesus expels the demons, but he never kills them. He never really defeats them. Then he went on. That moment really struck me, and I wanted to look into it. Why is that, even for Jesus, who was so clearly in a different league? To keep a long story short, the answer is that this is part of the eschatological or apocalyptic worldview, which holds that demons are part of this world. They're the origin of evil, the source of why we get things wrong, but they're part of this world, and only at the end of this world, with the inbreaking of the new aeon when God creates a new heaven and a new earth, will these demons finally be defeated. For now we can keep them at bay. We can recite prayers. The Dead Sea Scrolls have very beautiful prayers that do exactly that, the Songs of the Sage, for example, which you recite to keep the demons away. But you cannot kill or ultimately defeat them quite yet.

Johnny Ova: Now I'm going to say something controversial, Dr. Henze. When I look at this topic, it seems to go from the satan character in Job, who seems to be working for God and not as God's enemy, and then as time progresses into this gap, this silence, however Christianity describes it, we know it's not silence. It almost seems like they're trying to figure out why bad things happen to the just and the unjust, and the answer becomes, well, it must be Satan. And I always ask, what if they're wrong? If you go back to the Old Testament, I don't think God is confused. I see clearly in the Hebrew scriptures the relationship between evil and God one way, and as it progresses it seems people are struggling with this idea much like we do today when we see suffering and bad things. Why, why, why? We come up with conclusions that might be good-hearted but might also be wrong, and then all these dogmas get built on top, mixed with Greek mythology, Canaanite ideas and all of it, and it took on a life of its own.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Absolutely. Not controversial at all. I love what you're saying. Let's zoom out for a second. What we're discussing is the nature of late Second Temple Judaism, and what we're seeing, and I think you're absolutely right, is that there are some fundamental questions that preoccupy us. What's the origin of evil? Why is it that when we're left to our own devices we eventually screw things up? Why are we so destructive? Where is grandma? She's not with us anymore. Where is she right now? The Psalms, and the Hebrew Bible at large, don't really answer this. These are big questions, and what we see in Second Temple times is that different groups came up with different answers. There is not one answer to the origin of evil. There's not one answer to what exactly these demons do. That's the beauty of it. That's what keeps people like me off the streets. My colleagues and I study these literatures, and we find that during this amazing period there were many attempts to wrestle with and answer these questions, which is why we have all these texts.

Dr. Matthias Henze: That brings us back, Johnny, to your question about why the rabbis did not preserve these texts. Perhaps there was a little too much ambiguity, a little too much of a marketplace of ideas, and they needed to narrow things down. Christians do exactly the same thing. I'm sure you've had people on your podcast who talk about second-century Christianity, where some church authorities put their foot down and say, this is getting out of control, we need to define things. But during these years, which is partly why it's so exciting, there really was a liberty, a freedom to think and try out new ideas. Let's talk about the story of the Watchers, how they were drowned in the flood and how these evil spirits emerged, what they did and how far we can take that. Some groups will follow that kind of thinking and others won't. So when you say controversial, it's controversial for some and not so much for others.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Just a quick footnote. When I was a very young assistant professor, many years ago, I gave a talk in the evening class here at Rice on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the question of evil came up. I explained the Watchers story, the origin of these demons and what the people at Qumran did to shield themselves. A gentleman in the audience got up, really upset with me, shaking his head, and said, I don't know what it is you're teaching us, but it sure ain't Judaism. I was a little assistant professor, and I was mortified. Now that I'm old and senile, I would say, okay, you are part of rabbinic Judaism, and that is what Judaism is for you. What we're talking about is a form of Judaism that predates rabbinic Judaism, the timeline we discussed earlier, with a freedom to try out different ideas the rabbis admittedly didn't have much appetite for. So for you this is not Judaism. You take a later form, which some of my colleagues would call mainline Judaism, the real Judaism, and these other groups in the Second Temple period become fringe groups who got it all wrong.

Dr. Matthias Henze: I would make the exact same argument on the Christian side. We could read lots of Christian texts, and I could say, Johnny, I'm going to say something really controversial: I like the Gospel of Thomas, and everybody would react. From a faith perspective, that is how we approach it, but from a historical perspective we need to be honest and see that there were lots of ideas. And the way these groups interacted with each other was through writing. That's why we have this beautiful literature. They spelled out their ideas by writing an apocalypse or a testament or rewritten Bible, all these crazy categories, to say, this is what we think and this is not what we think. An amazing plurality of ideas.

Johnny Ova: Amazing, and really enlightening. Can you trace belief in the resurrection of the dead across this period? How did it grow from a few scattered lines into something Jesus and Paul could assume their audience believed?

Dr. Matthias Henze: The resurrection of the dead is not a Christian invention. It's not something Paul or Jesus or the evangelists came up with. That's clear when you read the Gospels. One of my favorite stories is John 11, Lazarus being raised. It is very clear that for the authors of the New Testament the resurrection is a given. They assume this is what will happen. It's not a big leap of the imagination. It's part of their religious repertoire. Going back to the Hebrew Bible, you don't see it. One of my favorite classes at Rice is a class on the Psalms. I happen to like poetry. There are so many psalms where the psalmist feels very close to death. I go down to Sheol, into the pit, which means I'll be cut off from the worshiping community in Jerusalem, and he or she pleads with God not to let that happen. But nowhere, and I emphasize this, nowhere in the 150 Psalms does the psalmist say, but eventually I will come back and rejoin the community. That's just not part of the repertoire. So once again we have the Hebrew Bible, where death is final and there's no coming back, as opposed to the New Testament, where resurrection is assumed. So what happened in between?

Dr. Matthias Henze: There are texts in the Hebrew Bible that use resurrection language, particularly in the prophets. You find a few lines in Isaiah. But I think the most beautiful case is Ezekiel 37, the Valley of the Dry Bones. There resurrection language is a metaphor for exile. For the prophet Ezekiel, exile, being away from the homeland, equals death, and the community's return to the homeland equals resurrection, coming back to life. So an idea that began as a figure of speech for exile and alienation from God little by little came to be taken literally. The first and in fact only reference to the physical resurrection of the dead in the Old Testament is in Daniel 12, which is a fairly late text. It clearly anticipates that the maskilim, the wise, will be resurrected and become like the stars in heaven. Then in our period between the Testaments there are a number of beautiful texts that spell out resurrection in detail. I'll mention two quickly.

Dr. Matthias Henze: One is 2 Maccabees 7, the martyrdom story of the mother and her sons who give up their lives. Several of them say, God has given me this hand, or this tongue, and he will give it back to me in the resurrection of the dead, so I can give up my body. Another text, a little later, is 2 Baruch, another Jewish apocalypse, written shortly after the destruction of the temple. In chapter 51 there's a long description of what will happen to the resurrected. The concern there is for the physical integrity of the body in the resurrection. The author believes the resurrection will happen in stages. First you are raised back into the body you had in this life, and then you can gradually change your form and ultimately become light, light beings like the angels. That sounds a little like Daniel 12 too.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting. I know I'm bouncing around, there are just so many questions in my mind. Jesus steps into these fierce debates about the law and how to read the Torah. How do these writings reframe the arguments he was part of?

Dr. Matthias Henze: It's all good. When I was a teenager reading the New Testament, I always thought Jesus was the only one who debated these questions, the only one who took on the Pharisees. Then you read beyond the New Testament and go, my, there's a very broad culture of dispute going on. That's what people did at the time. They debated the law. It completely changed the way I read the New Testament, and also the way I teach it. I bring debates, for example about Shabbat, the Sabbath, what you can and cannot do, and I read them with my students hand in hand with debates about the Sabbath in early rabbinic writings. We have some of it in the scrolls as well. The criticism of the Pharisees, Jesus lashing out at the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew, has a very close analogy. In the scrolls they also didn't like the Pharisees very much. All of a sudden there's a context, and we realize that Jesus debating the law with the Pharisees and the Sadducees means he is part of an ongoing debate about how to interpret the law.

Dr. Matthias Henze: Matthew 5, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, makes very clear that, at least from Matthew's perspective, Jesus did not break, let alone abolish, the law. The debate is about what exactly the law means for the people of the time. What sets Jesus apart, and I'm generalizing very broadly and I apologize for that, from other participants in this culture of dispute is that he is more radical. He wants to get at the root of what the law is, and he's less concerned about the specifics. I said earlier the rabbis are pragmatists. They're all about the specifics. Jesus wants to get at the heart of it all, and that's why he ends up with the double commandment to love God and love your neighbor.

Johnny Ova: If you put one of these books in front of a modern Bible reader, what would genuinely surprise them?

Dr. Matthias Henze: I do this all the time, by the way. As I said, I give lots of talks in churches and synagogues. The typical response I get is, I've never read this book before, but I know it. I understand the debate. The language takes a little getting used to, and I help my audiences with it, but there's this weird feeling of, I know this kind of literature, I know this language, I know the scriptural references. I've just never read this before. That's intriguing. It's as if there are more New Testament books, an extension of the literature we know so well.

Johnny Ova: Exactly. You mentioned 2 Baruch, and also 4 Ezra. They were written as Jewish responses to the destruction of the temple in 70, right? What were they wrestling with, and what does that show us about how that world processed such a catastrophe?

Dr. Matthias Henze: That's correct. Again, I'm simplifying and I apologize profusely. The authors of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch wrote in the late first century, probably in Israel. At the core, they're trying to figure out why God allowed the Romans to destroy the temple. Was it a one-off, an isolated act of divine punishment? Or is it part of a larger plan God has for Israel that we need to figure out? When you read these books carefully, you see that both protagonists, Ezra in one book and Baruch in the other, both scribes in the Hebrew Bible, which speaks to the significance of scribes in the late Second Temple period, are frustrated, and they turn to God. Both texts are structured as dialogues. Their frustration at the beginning is about the destruction of the temple. Why, God, did you let this happen? But as the book unfolds, the nature of their frustration changes. They become more and more frustrated that God has revealed so little about the divine intention for Israel. Where are we going?

Dr. Matthias Henze: So they ask over and over, okay, we're beginning to understand that Jerusalem in a way had to be destroyed, and you did this, and we no longer oppose it, but tell us more. Where are we going with this? That's where the apocalyptic mindset comes in. The answer they give is that the destruction of the temple is a first step in a larger plan, an eschatological schedule, that will lead to the coming of the Messiah. Both texts have messianic episodes, the resurrection of the dead, and ultimately a world to come, about which they say surprisingly little, even though it's so central to them. They're very concerned about the end time, the meantime that remains between now, a generation or two after the destruction, and the imminent inbreaking of God, which is just around the corner. There's much more to say, but that's it in a nutshell.

Johnny Ova: I appreciate it, Dr. Henze. I've got two more questions before we go. This has been amazing and enlightening, and I can't thank you enough for your time. I know my audience is going to love this. Can you give us a passage in the New Testament that just doesn't make sense until you read this background literature? What clicks into place once you read it?

Dr. Matthias Henze: I wouldn't go so far as to say a passage that doesn't make any sense. That would be a little offensive, I think. But I will say Luke 4, off the top of my head. Jesus goes into the synagogue and reads from the prophet Isaiah. That's Luke's way of introducing Jesus for the first time to a general audience. He has Jesus read from Isaiah, and he knocks off the most important issues of Luke's Christology, which Luke will come back to later in the Gospel. It's a brilliant way of introducing Jesus. We can read the story and it makes perfect sense. Now, it so happens that the same passages from Isaiah also show up in the Dead Sea Scrolls as messianic prophecies. So all of a sudden we see that Luke is quite brilliant in deliberately picking passages he knew would trigger something in his audience. Luke tells us Jesus reads, gives the scroll back to the attendant, sits down, and all eyes are on Jesus. Why? There's a silence: where is he going with this? Because they know these passages. We now know for certain from Qumran that these are loaded passages.

Dr. Matthias Henze: And what does Jesus say? Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. You read it and say, that's nice. I always make a joke that it's the most beloved sermon of them all because it's so short. It's one sentence. But that's not what's going on. What's going on is that Jesus says, it's me. All of your expectation, all the baggage, all the stuff you know about the Hebrew Bible, has come true in me. And then, if you keep reading, they get very angry. So once we read this innocent-looking story of Luke introducing Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth in the context of Second Temple literature, we see it's quite loaded. Luke did not pick random passages from the Hebrew Bible. He was very deliberate. He tells the story of Jesus in a way that answers messianic expectations, and he makes sure the literate reader knows what he's talking about.

Johnny Ova: Last question for me today. Why do you think the church lost touch with this entire world for so long, and what changed when Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light?

Dr. Matthias Henze: Again, it's complicated, and I apologize for simplifying. I would say two things happened. One is that the texts were simply lost and then rediscovered in the 19th century. That's another interesting topic. The 19th century was a century of discoveries, when first Europeans and then Americans traveled the Middle East in search of biblical origins and biblical manuscripts, and an enormous wealth of literature was discovered, first outside Israel and then in Israel with the Dead Sea Scrolls. This flood of new literature is now finding its way into our seminaries and universities. So the absence of the literature is one reason. The other reason, I believe, is that much in the New Testament is eschatological. Jesus, and certainly Paul, believed the end was near. You can see in early Christian writings that the appetite for this waned and eschatology was sidelined. It's a little embarrassing, because the end of the world did not come. I think the Lord's Prayer is an acutely eschatological prayer, but we pray it all the time. So it was a matter of keeping Christianity afloat and relevant, to reread and perhaps suppress the eschatological elements a little. So it's the absence of this literature and an attempt not to emphasize the eschatological, or apocalyptic, elements. That's what happened.

Dr. Matthias Henze: The scrolls changed everything. I cannot overemphasize that. I know you've had colleagues of mine like John Collins and Jim VanderKam on your podcast. These are brilliant scholars who have devoted much of their lives to bringing the scrolls into mainstream Christianity and biblical studies. Interestingly, we see that interest is going down a little again. In the 1980s and 90s and into the 21st century there was an enormous appetite for the scrolls, and it brought so much energy to my colleagues and to me. What happened is that people found that bad history begets bad theology, and that we need to be historically honest and no longer willfully overlook a good chunk of literature from this very period if we want a theology that is honest and informed. I think we can do this. I believe from the bottom of my heart that these texts enrich our Christian faith and also Jewish practice today, and do not diminish it. I feel very strongly about that.

Johnny Ova: I 100% agree with you. Dr. Matthias Henze, thank you so much for joining us today. This was an absolute pleasure, and thank you for being so generous with your time.

Dr. Matthias Henze: My pleasure. Thank you very much, I appreciate it, Johnny.