65 - Inerrancy and Acts 7, Summary of Acts [B]

Inerrancy and Acts 7, Summary of Acts. Acts 6:11-7:60

If we read Stephen's defence—actually it was not a defence, it was a prosecutorial indictment of the Sanhedrin—it would take, if we read it slowly with effect and grammatically as it would have been given, then it would take about six to seven minutes to go through it. So it took Stephen ten minutes at most to make this statement, and when we look at something of this nature it is good for us to go through the entirety as it was originally given at one sitting and to understand it in its entirety and its whole as to what Stephen was accomplishing and what it was that he was saying.

He is giving his defence in chapter seven before the same high priest who challenged Jesus. So this is almost a re-enactment of the trial of Jesus, and there are a lot of parallels that are brought out for that very reason because it is about two or three years after the crucifixion and it is as if God is giving the Jewish leadership a second chance. If we think about the structure of Acts and what we have seen there is a sermon by Peter on the day of Pentecost which challenged the nation to repent, a term that goes back to Deuteronomy chapter thirty to turn back to God. Again in Peter's message in Acts chapter three after he had healed the lame man outside the temple challenged the nation to repent, and again they failed to do that. Then he and John were arrested by the Sanhedrin and threatened. Later they are arrested again and are beaten. Now as a result of what Stephen says a persecution will arise. So we see the intensification of opposition and hostility toward the Christians, those who have accepted Jesus as Messiah during this time.

In Peter's first message he challenges them to repent, in his second message he challenges them to repent, and this is a major theme in the subsequent message of the apostles we are told about in chapter five, and now this is going to crystallize the negative volition of the Sanhedrin, their hostility to Christ.

This is the longest sermon in Acts and the only sermon in Acts that does not have the gospel in it, because its point is an indictment of condemnation to the Sanhedrin for their rejection of not just the Messiah but for their constant rejection of God. Stephen points out that they have not had respect for the Torah, they have not had respect for the temple because over the years of Jewish history they have even brought idols from the other nations in and set them up in the temple, they have been disrespectful of Moses for they have not obeyed him. And ultimately all of this reveals that they have been blasphemous of God and they have violated God's commandments to worship Him and Him alone again and again and again down through their history. Stephen brings this to a conclusion and this just creates an intense fore storm of reaction against him.

Now we want to go back and look at some details within Stephen's message that are important for us to pay a little more attention to.

The definition of inspiration is based on the Greek theopneustos [qeopneustoj], a compound noun coined by Paul. It doesn't mean inspire. We use the English word "inspire" to communicate someone who has had a remarkable insight into something, or they are able to reach heights of genius in art or music or something of that nature. But what the English word "inspiration" translates is a word that means that God breathed out the Scriptures. The ultimate source is in God Himself. He breathes it out from His person and He breathes it into the mind or soul of the individual writer of Scripture. Then that individual writer of Scripture exhales that, as it were, into the Scripture—using a breathing metaphor to describe this process of the writing of Scripture and God's Word in and through the writer of Scripture, to guarantee that what the writer of Scripture put down on papyrus was exactly what God intended and would be without error in any area that is addressed—whether it was speaking of Geography, history, observation is creation—and whatever the writer penned would be without error. That only applies to the original manuscripts, which we don't have anymore. 

What is typical of evangelicals today is that they know very little about their Bible, very little about what they believe or why they believe it, and in many cases they don't know anything about its origin or transmission. They almost have just this superstitious view of the text. And there are always those who are over in the King-James-only crowd who think that actually the King James version in the English was inspired by God, and that "If the King James was good enough for the apostle Paul it is good enough for us." We laugh and chuckle at that but there are people who actually believe that and there are some who are scholars who ought to know better but have tried to develop a scholarly defence of that, and they are out there teaching that.

Inspiration is the belief that God the Holy Spirit as the agent of inspiration so supernaturally guided and supervised the human writers that without waving their individual personality so that their own human style, vocabulary, personality, personal feelings all come across in the text. So we can read in the original languages Peter's epistles, John's epistles or Paul's epistles and get a real sense of who they were. We understand their distinctions in their personality and their writing styles and their vocabulary. The Holy Spirit doesn't override any of that but nevertheless God who is so powerful that He is override or supervise their writing in such a way that what they write is exactly what He intends without violating their personality so that what they write is without error in the origin autograph [writings].

John 10:35; Matthew 5:18; 2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21; 1 Corinthians 2:14-16 are just some of the passages that support this view.

We may not have full copies of the New Testament that go back within 200 years of the original writings but we do have a number of fragments of different manuscripts that go back within that period of time, and we also have numerous quotations and citations in early church fathers going back to Clement of Rome who wrote during the apostolic period. They quoted Scripture again and again and again, and in all of these particular writings plus in various lectionaries (a scrap of paper where they wrote the Scripture reading down for that particular service) that were read in public, and they go back to this period. Even though we don't have the original we can reconstruct the original by comparing manuscripts [MSS].

Inerrancy is a word that was coined in the mid-twentieth century because what we used to be able to say and mean in the nineteenth century—Do you believe the Bible is the Word of God—later had to be said that that the Bible was the infallible Word of God. Then it went to, Do you believe the Bible is the infallible, plenary, inspired Word of God. Then it was necessary to say that the Bible was the authoritative, inerrant, infallible, inspired, plenary, verbally inspired Word of God. This had to be added just to say what people meant when people a couple of hundred years said they believed the Bible was the Word of God. There are always people who come along and try to find room so that they don't have to really believe that everything that is written down in the text is from God.

The word "inerrancy" was coined to emphasize the fact that in the original writings there are no errors, that we can recover the wordings of those early MSS and they're all free from any falsehood, fraud or deceit. So when the Bible speaks of anything that it addresses—geography, weather, agriculture, anything empirical when it speaks of anything in the creation/science—it is without error. There are a lot of challenges that are made on this basis but usually what we discover is that we don't know enough information—not of Scripture but whatever the claim is, for example, up until 1927 the claim was made that there was no ancient literature that ever mentioned the Hittites, therefore the Bible was not true. But in 1927 in Turkey they discovered the capital of the Hittite empire. Oh my, the Bible was right after all! 

Acts chapter seven has several places in it that are under attack. The reason we review inerrancy is because this is stating that in the original autographs the writers of Scripture are recording exactly what happened. That means that at the very least (let's say Stephen makes mistakes in what he said) Luke is accurately recording what Stephen said. Stephen's speech here is not of the same order as Paul writing an epistle to the Ephesians or David writing the Psalms. It is Stephen standing up before the Sanhedrin giving an oral defence of his position and indicting them on the basis of Old Testament history. So what he says could contain errors but that is not what we are claiming is inspired. What is inspired is Luke's recording of Stephen's message. So at the very least if (a big if) there are errors in Stephen's message then Luke is just faithfully recording those. Satan tells a lie, the writers of Scripture faithfully record the lie. The inerrancy of Scripture doesn't say that there are no lies in the Scripture. There are lies recorded in the Scripture but they are accurately recorded by the writers of Scripture as lies.

The first "contradiction" that is usually brought up as a problem is found in Acts 7:6 ^NASB "But God spoke to this effect, that his DESCENDANTS WOULD BE ALIENS IN A FOREIGN LAND, AND THAT THEY WOULD BE ENSLAVED AND MISTREATED FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS." This is in the first section of Stephen's defence where he is rehearsing the history of God's call of Abraham. Critics will come and go to Exodus 12:40 or Galatians 3:17, both of which state that the Israelites were in slavery in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years. Oh, so Stephen is wrong! Not necessarily. In Genesis 15:13 God said ^NASB "{God} said to Abram, 'Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years.'" Stephen is not citing a specific passage. For one thing he is summarizing a lot of material here, not giving a point by point, word by word exegetical analysis of God's covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15. And in Genesis 15 God summarizes and rounds the number to 400 years. Stephen is quoting or summarizing from Genesis chapter fifteen.

We arrive at the date of the Exodus is by looking at the date of the dedication of the temple—about 376 BC. It says in the text that is was 370 years before that they came out of Egypt. So there is a precise number there based on the 1 Kings passage relating to the dedication of the temple. Now we place the date of the Exodus at 1446 BC. If we add four hundred years to that then that puts us at 1886 BC. Generally, Abraham's dates are somewhere around 2050-2100 BC. So this 400-year period doesn't take us all the way back to Abraham, it is really focusing on the period of time wherein the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, not the period of time that they were in Egypt. So all this is talking about is that this 400-year period, which we know was more precisely 430 years, it is not an error in the text, it is an accurate recording of what Stephen said, and Stephen is accurately reciting what is in Genesis 15.

The next error people go to is in Acts 7:14 ^NASB "Then Joseph sent {word} and invited Jacob his father and all his relatives to come to him, seventy-five persons {in all.}" In Genesis 46:27 we read ^NASB "and the sons of Joseph, who were born to him in Egypt were two; all the persons of the house of Jacob, who came to Egypt, {were} seventy." We have a contradiction! First of all, it is not a contradiction. It could be just a summary or perhaps Stephen is quoting from a popular understanding of the number. But it doesn't have to be that way, we have a little more evidence to back this up—the seventy-five people. The Massoretic Text of Exodus 1:5 states that there were seventy. But when we do a little bit more analysis we realise that the LXX (Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament) in Genesis 46:27 and in Exodus 1:5 says that there were seventy-five, not seventy. We often find in certain places that the Septuagint [LXX] has a different number than the Massoretic Text. This may be that the scribe who wrote this added up the numbers a little differently. Because if we add the sin and grandson of Mannaseh and the two sons and grandson of Ephraim who were there but were not included in the number that reaches seventy, then we reach seventy-five. So the LXX used a different way of accounting—whoever did that accounting.

This gets into some really interesting things about the transmission of the text. The Massoretic Text came into existence and was formalised in the canon around 900 AD. The Massoretes were a school or clan of scribes who had taken the responsibility of preserving and transmitting text over the period of several centuries and making sure that the text was accurate. In the process of doing that they added certain markings and indicative vowels because originally Hebrew has no vowels. They just looked at consonants. Hebrew doesn't have as much vocabulary as English does so it does get a little dicey in places because without certain vowels that tell us the differences between, say, a piel which is an intensive stem, and the hiphil which is a causative stem, we might not pick it out—other than the fact that the hiphil has a HE at the beginning which gives a clue. But getting into some of the more difficult forms within the paradigm there is a lot of similarity.

The Massoretes put vowel markings into the text. Early on in the development of Hebrew, some time around the first century, they started with an early form of vowel points where they used a few consonants to indicate a vowel. These consonants were doing double duty. They took two or three different vowels and made them do double duty as vowels and they called it a Latin name meaning "mother of letters." What is interesting about that is that when we look at the text of the Dead Sea scrolls for the Torah, the first five books of Moses, there are more vowels that have been inserted into that text than what is in the Massoretic Text. What does that tell us? The more recent a document it is the more vowel points it has, so that means that the original of the Pentateuch for the Massoretic Text is older than the Pentateuch that they found at the Dead Sea. These things are really important when we start dealing with trusting the text: that it hasn't changed through the hundreds and thousands of years of transmission. There are some discrepancies sometimes in some of these really ancient sources like the Dead Sea scrolls and the Septuagint and the Messoretic Text. That is why there are some of these differences. The LXX will have one thing and sometimes other older MSS that we have that are translations are not necessarily influenced by the LXX, maybe they are influenced by something else; but maybe they reflect a more accurate tradition at that point than the Msssoretic Text. That is part of Old Testament criticism.

So what is happening here is that Stephen who is a Hellenistic Jew is quoting from the Bible that he was most familiar with, which was the LXX, not the Hebrew text. The LXX doesn't have some wild number there, it is just including five people that weren't included in the account given in the Massoretic Text.

The next discrepancy is in Acts 7:16 ^NASB "{From there} they were removed to Shechem and laid in the tomb which Abraham had purchased for a sum of money from the sons of Hamor in Shechem." This is another more interesting one. As Stephen is just summarizing the whole movement of the family of Jacob in v. 14 that summarizes about four chapters in Genesis. He is summarizing, just hitting the high points, not trying to cover every little detail. In v. 16 who was carried back to Shechem? In verse 15 we read "And Jacob went down to Egypt and {there} he and our fathers died." Who are "our fathers"? Joseph and others. We are not told about others in Genesis, we are told that they took Jacob died they took him back and buried him in the cave of Machpelah which Abraham Had bought from the Hittites to bury Sarah, then he was buried there and Isaac, and this is the cave of the patriarchs. But when it says they were carried back to Shechem the fathers would include Joseph, and Joseph was taken back at the time of the Exodus and he was buried in Shechem.

This is interesting because as we look at verse 16 it says, "…they were removed to Shechem and laid in the tomb which Abraham had purchased for a sum of money from the sons of Hamor in Shechem." But Abraham didn't buy anything in Shechem. He bought the cave of Machpelah, he didn't buy anything up in Shechem. Jacob bought land in Shechem from Hamor the father of Shechem. Shechem was a city that had a lot of significance in the history of Israel. Abraham had built an altar there, Jacob had built an altar there, it was a place where God had reiterated His promise to Abraham to give him the land. But Shechem is also the capital of Samaria, and Samaria is the home of those half-breeds…. Gentiles had been resettled there by the Assyrians in the period after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel and they were really enemies, hostile to the Jews. There was a status of animosity. It wasn't just that they didn't like each other or that there was extreme prejudice, they hated each other. If we look at where Luke is going in Acts chapter eight the gospel is getting ready to go to Samaria. But what is going on here is that he is putting Abraham for his grandson Jacob.

Is this unusual or is this an error? It is not an error, this is typical of Hebrew literature. In Hebrews chapter seven Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek. No, he didn't. Levi lived two hundred years after Melchizedek. He was a great grandson of Abraham, but he was not alive when the events of Genesis chapter fourteen took place. Abraham is and Abraham is the one who paid tithes, but the writer of Hebrews says Levi paid tithes, as it were, showing in this connection that Abraham was seen as inferior to Melchizedek, and if Abraham the great grandfather was inferior to Melchizedek so was Levi. This is the kind of thing where the head of the clan (Abraham) would be put in the place of his descendants. So this is not atypical of Hebrew writing, and the reason they would do something like that would be to make a point of connection. What Stephen is doing here is connecting that; he is not misspeaking but he is saying that because this is a descendant of Abraham and he is tracing this back to show the interconnectedness of the people. 

There is another interesting situation that comes up a little later on. It is not a textual problem. It is Acts 7:37 and this is a quotation of a messianic prophecy. The next person that Stephen focuses on is Moses, and Moses' life is rehearsed here and he goes to a prophecy from Moses. ^NASB "This is the Moses who said to the sons of Israel, 'GOD WILL RAISE UP FOR YOU A PROPHET LIKE ME FROM YOUR BRETHREN.' Remember in the course of his argument and his indictment Stephen has shown that Joseph showed up to his brothers the first time and they didn't recognize him, and there was no blessing from him. The second time they recognized him. It was the same thing with Moses. Moses was not recognized as the deliverer of the people the first time they saw him, it took the second appearance before they discovered him. Jesus showed up the first time and they don't recognize Him as the deliverer, and the implication is that He is going to have to come back a second time before they recognize Him as the deliverer. He is starting to build his case here that Moses had this prophecy about a prophet, and that is fulfilled in Jesus.

It may be a surprise that many, many evangelicals today—in fact it has almost become the new avant garde position among evangelicals—try to make the claim that there were no real messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. It was just a surprise that Jesus showed up. This is not the traditional Protestant view. Most Protestants have understood that there were specific direct prophecies in the Old Testament related to the Messiah, and this is one of them. In Deuteronomy 18:15 Moses said, ^NASB "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him… [18] I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth [intimacy], and he shall speak to them all that I command him."

There are some who deny true literal messianic prophecies; there are those who claim that this really doesn't relate to the Messiah at all. The first view is the non-messianic view. Among the Jewish rabbis one said this was Jeremiah, another said that it was Joshua. It can't be Jeremiah because Jeremiah was not a prophet like Moses. Moses was a deliverer, a legislator, an executive, a mediator; Jeremiah is none of those things. Moses' ministry was the deliverance of the people; Jeremiah's ministry was to announce judgment upon the people. Joshua is not like Moses either. In Deuteronomy the final editor, who probably write those last four verses after the return from the exile, makes a very strong statement in the Hebrew (emphatic) that there never has been a prophet like Moses with whom God spoke face to face. So it can't be Joshua.

There is the collective messianic view, the idea that they are just talking about all the prophets. That doesn't work because it is a singular prophet, and it is not talking about the office of prophet but a specific prophet. Then there is the view that this is the Messiah, the specific individual messianic view. This is supported for a number of reasons in the grammar and context of the text. For example, the wider context in Deuteronomy makes it very fitting for Deuteronomy 18:15-19 to refer to the Messiah as the head of all the offices and authority spoken of in the surrounding passages. Deuteronomy 18 is talking about the leadership in Israel: the role and responsibilities of the king, the priests and other leaders. So it makes sense that this would refer to the Messiah as the ultimate authority in Israel. The most immediate context is a contrast between the prophet like Moses and those false prophets who dabbled in pagan divination. They didn't speak the word of God like Moses did.

Deuteronomy 18:20-22 ^NASB "But the [false] prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. You may say in your heart, 'How will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?' When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him."

1.  The individual messianic view is supported by the fact that the word nabi for prophet is in the singular.

2.  The prophet to come is compared to a singular individual, Moses.

3.  In the history of the Old Testament no ordinary prophet was legislative, priestly, executive, and also served as a mediator between the people and God. There has been on one like that other than Jesus of Nazareth.

4.  Other Pentateuchal messianic passages also give a broader context for this to be a messianic prophecy. Numbers 12:6-8—shows an intimacy that God had with Moses and Moses alone, in contrast to all of the other prophets. At the end of Deuteronomy the final editor says that since then there has not arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses.

In Acts 7:42, 43 there is a quotation from Amos 5:25-27. There seems to be a little bit of a difference in he Acts 7 passage.

Amos 5:25-27 ^NASB "Did you present Me with sacrifices and grain offerings in the wilderness for forty years, O house of Israel? You also carried along Sikkuth your king and Kiyyun, your images, the star of your gods which you made for yourselves. Therefore, I will make you go into exile beyond Damascus," says the LORD, whose name is the God of hosts.

Acts 7:42, 43 ^NASB "But God turned away and delivered them up to serve the host of heaven; as it is written in the book of the prophets, 'IT WAS NOT TO ME THAT YOU OFFERED VICTIMS AND SACRIFICES FORTY YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS, WAS IT, O HOUSE OF ISRAEL? YOU ALSO TOOK ALONG THE TABERNACLE OF MOLOCH AND THE STAR OF THE GOD ROMPHA, THE IMAGES WHICH YOU MADE TO WORSHIP. I ALSO WILL REMOVE YOU BEYOND BABYLON.'"

The two false gods mentioned: Moloch, the god of the Midianites; Rompha, a pagan deity. Some translators have looked at this and seen some odd things going on in the Hebrew text of Amos. Translations into the LXX sort of modernised the false gods so that they were more recognizable. So in essence it is a kind of paraphrase. Stephen is paraphrasing vv. 42, 43 from Amos 5:25-27 to show that in the ancient world the Israelites had worshipped all of these different idols. And that is his point. He is not trying to give a precise quotation; he is giving a paraphrase of Amos 5 and is focusing on the most well-known gods to emphasize the fact that the Jews in the Old Testament had constantly violated the first two commandments by getting involved with idolatry, as Jeremiah 32 and 2 Kings 23:10 also support.