Paul's interpretation of Yehoshua ben Yoseph through the Scriptures of Israel as "retrodiction"

Abstract

In his lecture on Paul’s Interpretation of Yehoshua ben Yoseph through the Scriptures of Israel as “retrodiction”, Gert Steyn addressed a sensitive and hotly debated contemporary issue – particularly amongst South African Christians – namely the assumed prediction of the Jesusevents in the Old Testament. This contribution connects with several areas in biblical scholarship, such as the canonicity of the Bible (particularly the relation between the Old and New Testaments), biblical hermeneutics and Bible translation. Steyn has, in this manner, chosen a relevant topic – not only for scholarly research in the biblical disciplines, but also for the church’s doctrine on Christology. From a methodological point of view, Steyn’s utilization of a narrative approach in the first part of his lecture, and an exegetical approach in the second part, turns out to be not only a strategically effective structure of communication, but also lends itself effectively to an introduction and analysis of the research problem. Moving from the macro-context of the New Testament to the micro-context of Pauline hermeneutics, he briefly introduced his audience to both the width and the depth of his research the last 26 years on the use of the Old Testament in its Greek form (the Septuagint) by the New Testament writers. But the contribution of Steyn’s inaugural lecture goes beyond the relevance of the topic, his communicative strategy and his methodological approach. He convincingly argued, on the one hand, and as he has shown with his two examples, on the other hand, that the Old Testament did not predict the Jesus-event. Although there were expectations about different messianic figures during the course of pre-Christian times, and although the New Testament connects with these messianic expectations when interpreting the Jesus-events, the early Christian writers also identified and made their own selection of passages which they could relate particularly to the passion, the crucifiction, empty tomb and post mortem appearances of Jesus of Nazareth. This became particularly clear from the examples that Steyn discussed in his exposition. Paul, as the earliest documented Christian writer, uses passages from his Scriptures that had no connection to the Jesus-event, but Paul interprets these passages in the light of the crucifiction and the conquering of death by Jesus. The direction in this hermeneutical stream does not flow from the Old Testament to the New Testament when dealing with the particular events surrounding Yehoshua ben Yoseph, Jesus of Nazareth, but it flows rather from the New Testament back to the Old Testament. By illustrating this, Steyn positioned himself to be on a par with mainstream biblical scholarship on this issue. The relation between the Old and New Testament should thus not be reduced to the perception that the Christian canon is a single a-historical book, but the diversity, chronology and ancient historical context of the different Old Testament books ought to be acknowledged when dealing with the Old Testament literature from a New Testament perspective. Finally, by coining “retrodiction” as a new term in biblical hermeneutics, Gert J Steyn takes especially the New Testament scholarly community one step further towards responsible interaction with the Old Testament. It is hoped that this term will establish itself well in biblical scholarship and that future generations of biblical scholars will continue to connect the term with Steyn’s research.