Both the argument from etymology and the argument from a word’s supposedly “basic” meaning are exegetically fallacious forms of reasoning. Biblical scholars have been warning against these “word-study” fallacies for years,[1] but most Bible readers, whether anti-Trinitarian or Trinitarian, have not gotten the memo, so the former keep using the arguments and the latter keep being flummoxed by them. As has often been pointed out, the English word nice derives etymologically from the Latin word nescio, which meant “ignorant,” but this tells us nothing about the meaning of the word nice! The Hebrew word el apparently has “might” as its etymological root, but this cannot be taken to mean that God is an impersonal force of “might” into which human beings can tap. The relevance of this second example to the debate over the meaning of pneuma ought to be obvious.

Words have their meanings in the contexts of their uses, and these meanings can vary from one place to another. To get a sense for how a word is typically (not always) used, one must survey all of the occurrences of that word, at least in a large enough body of literature and with enough occurrences to warrant viewing the selection as representative.

The word pneuma occurs 379 times in the Greek New Testament. Of these, approximately 258 occurrences are used in reference to the Holy Spirit. (Exact numbers are debatable because in a handful of texts there can be reasonable differences in how the text is understood, but the broad picture remains the same.) In one text God the Father is described as pneuma (“God is pneuma,” John 4:24) and in one text the risen Christ is (“became a life-giving pneuma,” 1 Cor. 15:45). Obviously, God the Father and Jesus Christ are both persons, not impersonal forces or abstract attributes.  About 61 occurrences refer to demons or angels or other unspecified supernatural beings, including 22 references specifically to “unclean spirits” alone.[2] Most readers of the Bible understand that in the biblical worldview these demons, unclean spirits, and angels were viewed as personal beings, not impersonal forces. About 40 texts use the word in an anthropological context, i.e., referring to the inner person or invisible aspect of human beings (“my spirit,” “spirit and body,” etc.). These include two likely references to the spirits of departed human beings awaiting the final resurrection (Heb. 12:9, 23). The remaining 18 or so texts use the word “spirit” in reference to the attitude or disposition of individuals or groups of people.

The foregoing survey of New Testament usage of pneuma reveals just how shallow the anti-Trinitarian argument is. In actual usage the notions of breath or wind have receded to the background of the word pneuma; in fact, the word can never be translated “breath” or “wind” except where the word is used in symbolic imagery in reference to demons or deity (John 3:8a; 2 Thess. 2:8; Rev. 13:15). Nor does pneuma ever have the meaning of an impersonal force or energy or of the abstract attribute of power. Instead we find that pneuma is used in reference to the following:

• God
• Christ
• the Holy Spirit
• demonic and unclean spirits
• angels and other generic spirits
• departed human spirits
• the inner aspect or person of human beings

In actual New Testament usage, then, it frequently, and arguably most often, refers to persons, not to impersonal forces or abstractions. Of course, anti-Trinitarians can still try to mount arguments from specific uses in context that the Holy Spirit is not a person. However, the word-study arguments that appeal to the etymology or basic meaning of pneuma fail. They are bad arguments and honest anti-Trinitarians should simply abandon them.

NOTES

[1] See, for example, J. P. Louw, Semantics of New Testament Greek, SBL Semeia Studies (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; Chico, CA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1982), 23-38; Moises Silva, Biblical Words and Their Meanings: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), 35-51; D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 26-32; Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, rev. and expanded ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 84-89. Such references could be multiplied. For a recent discussion aimed at a popular readership see Richard L. Schultz, Out of Context: How to Avoid Interpreting the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012), 63-65.

[2] On angels and demons as personal beings, see Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman Jr., Sense and Nonsense about Angels and Demons (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 38-41.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you….”

Anti-Trinitarians commonly argue that in this statement “the Holy Spirit” is parallel to, and therefore synonymous with, “the power of the Most High.” They conclude that this verse teaches that the Holy Spirit is the power of God, meaning, they claim, either that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force of power that in some way emanates from God or is an abstraction for the divine attribute of God’s power.

There are at least two problems with this argument. The first is that even if the text did call the Holy Spirit “the power of the Most High,” this would not mean that the Holy Spirit is merely God’s power (his attribute of power or a force or energy emanating from his being). We know this would be a faulty conclusion because the Father and the Son are each also called the Power of God:

“But from now on the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (Luke 22:69 ESV; cf. Matt. 26:64).
“…but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24 ESV).

In Luke 22:69, “the power of God” is a circumlocution for God himself, specifically God the Father (obviously, since Jesus, the Son of Man, will be seated at his right hand). In 1 Corinthians 1:24 “the power of God” is a descriptive way of saying that in Christ God has exerted his power to save us. Neither verse, obviously, is denying the personhood of the Father or the Son.

Twice in his epistles, the apostle Paul also calls the Christian message “the power of God”:

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16 ESV).
“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18 ESV).

Neither of these texts, obviously, means that the gospel or message of the cross is a divine person. The expression “the power of God” has different connotations or nuances depending on context. Notice that Paul can say that “the word of the cross” is “the power of God” and then just a few verses later say that Christ is “the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18, 24). There is no discrepancy here and no problem of understanding, as long as we don’t try to construe “the power of God” in a flat-footed manner.

Thus, even if Luke 1:35 meant that the Holy Spirit is the power of the Most High, this affirmation would not prove or mean or imply that the Holy Spirit is less than a person. That just isn’t how this language works.

Second, the argument that the use of parallelism proves an identity between the Holy Spirit and the power of the Most High is exegetically fallacious. Parallel terms in such Hebraic parallelism may be synonymous but they also may not be. Biblical speakers and authors did not use parallelism as a coded way of conveying the meaning of terms; they used similar or related terms in parallelism because they expected their hearers and readers would already know what the terms meant. The two lines in synonymous parallelism each state similar thoughts (not necessarily identical thoughts) but in different words; the words in the two lines do not always form direct one-to-one correspondences in meaning. Consider the following examples:

“The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars,
Yes, the Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon” (Ps. 29:5 ESV).

David does not mean that the voice of the Lord is the Lord; he does not mean that the Lord is a voice!

“I will establish your seed forever
And build up your throne to all generations” (Ps. 89:4 ESV).

The above verse does not mean that David’s seed is his throne.

“I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring,
And my blessing on your descendants” (Isa. 44:3b ESV).

God does not here “define” his Spirit as his blessing. Having God’s Spirit on them is certainly a blessing, but the text does not mean that blessing and Spirit are synonymous terms. Likewise, Luke 1:35 does not define Holy Spirit to mean the power of the Most High.

No matter how obvious it may seem to anti-Trinitarians, and no matter how often they say it, Luke 1:35 does not define the Holy Spirit in impersonal terms. It is not referring to the Holy Spirit as another term for God’s attribute of power or omnipotence, nor is it referring to the Holy Spirit as God’s impersonal force or energy. The text simply does not say these things. The appeal to the parallelism of Gabriel’s statement to prove that the Holy Spirit is nothing more than God’s power is simply a bad argument.

Besides being an obvious argument from silence, this argument overlooks contrary evidence. The Holy Spirit is mentioned in one of the New Testament epistle salutations:

“Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood: May grace and peace be multiplied to you” (1 Peter 1:1-2 ESV).

Here the Father, the Spirit, and Jesus Christ are all mentioned together in the salutation.

There is no end of arguments appealing to the “missing” Holy Spirit. Why isn’t he mentioned in John 1:1? The better question is, Why should he be? John 1:1-18 is an introduction to a Gospel account of the teaching, death, and resurrection of the Son, Jesus Christ. Such objections are worthless as evidence against the personhood of the Holy Spirit.

Some anti-Trinitarians read a lot into the fact that there are passages that mention the Father and the Son together but not the Spirit (e.g., John 1:1; 1 Cor. 8:6; 2 John 3). But the omission of the Spirit in such texts proves nothing. There are also passages that mention the Father and the Spirit but not the Son (e.g., Luke 11:13; 1 Thess. 4:8) and others that mention the Son and the Spirit but not the Father (e.g., Matt. 12:31-32; Acts 9:31; Gal. 3:13-14; 1 Peter 1:11-13). No theological deductions may be drawn from the “omissions” in such texts.

In a recent article on the Trinity, I made the following observations of relevance to this argument from silence:

Viewed historically, confessions of Jesus’ followers probably began as simple Christological statements such as “Jesus is Lord” (cf. Rom. 12:9; 1 Cor. 12:3; Phil. 2:11). As the gospel was taken to Gentiles who often did not know much or anything about the God of Israel, the message would typically have a dyadic structure of faith in God and in his Son Jesus (e.g., Acts 17:30-31; 1 Thess. 1:9-10), reflecting Jesus’ own references to the Father and the Son (Matt. 11:27; John 5:17-26; etc.). The more elaborate triadic or Trinitarian statements are often associated with baptism and the church’s corporate worship and ministry (e.g., Matt. 28:19; 1 Cor. 12:4-6; Eph. 4:4-6). The point is that there are historical and contextual reasons why some passages refer to all three divine persons and others do not. (“Triadic New Testament Passages and the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Journal for Trinitarian Studies and Apologetics 1, 1 [Jan. 2013].)

The arguments from silence discussed in this and previous posts probably don’t exhaust the anti-Trinitarian arsenal of such arguments, but they illustrate the problems with such arguments. Don’t fall for them.

Here again, the anti-Trinitarian has manufactured an argument that seems to fit the biblical data on this narrow matter of usage, but that assumes that the Bible should present the Holy Spirit in a certain way in order to warrant readers understanding that the Holy Spirit is a person. But we have no reason to place such a demand on Scripture—which is to say, we have no reason to place such a demand on God in the way he reveals truth to us. The argument fallaciously reasons from the “silence” of the text about any conversations involving the Holy Spirit to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit is not a person.

A few moments’ reflection can generate several if not many examples of other persons in the Bible for whom we happen not to have any report of them engaged in conversation. For example, we have no report in Scripture of a two-way conversation involving Joseph of Nazareth (Mary’s husband); an angel speaks to Joseph, but the Gospels never mention Joseph responding verbally to the angel or of Joseph speaking to anyone. Is this evidence against Joseph’s personhood? Of course not. Noah is the major figure in Genesis 6-9, but the text does not report him having any conversations.

Although the argument is fallacious, it also happens to be factually mistaken. We do have at least one instance, apparently, of a two-way conversation involving the Holy Spirit. Consider the following passage:

8 And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”
9 And he said, “Go, and say to this people: ‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive. 10 Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.’”
11 Then I said, “How long, O Lord?”
And he said: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste….” (Isa. 6:8-11 ESV).

It is beyond dispute that the above passage presents a two-way conversation. The speakers in the text alternate back and forth between the Lord (vv. 8a, 9-10, 11b) and Isaiah (v. 8b, 11a). And now for the completion of the argument: the apostle Paul stated explicitly that in Isaiah 6:9-10 the Lord was the Holy Spirit speaking:

And disagreeing among themselves, they departed after Paul had made one statement: “The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet: ‘Go to this people, and say, “You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed; lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them”’” (Acts 28:25-27 ESV).

Thus, according to Paul, Isaiah 6 reports a two-way conversation between the Holy Spirit and Isaiah. Do we need this passage to prove that the Holy Spirit is a person? No. Had Paul not told us that it was the Holy Spirit speaking in Isaiah 6, we would still have plenty of other evidence in the Bible, especially in the New Testament, that the Holy Spirit is a person. There is no rule that requires the Bible to report two-way conversations for each person it mentions. Thus, with or without Isaiah 6 and Acts 28:25-27, this anti-Trinitarian objection to the personhood of the Holy Spirit is a bad argument.

Arguments from silence pertaining to the personhood of the Holy Spirit are perhaps the most common types of arguments used by anti-Trinitarians on this issue. I will address two such arguments here, saving others for later installments.

No Name

Anti-Trinitarians routinely argue that the Holy Spirit must not be a person because the Bible never attributes a personal name to him, as it does to the Son (“Jesus”). This is a clear instance of an argument from silence. To support the belief that the Holy Spirit is impersonal, the argument depends on knowing that (a) the Holy Spirit would have a personal name if he were a person, (b) biblical writers would know that personal name for the Holy Spirit if he had one, and (c) they would tell us that personal name if they knew it. Those are a lot of assumptions, for which no evidence can be provided.

It is true that the Son of God has a personal name—Jesus. But he existed as a divine person before he had that name (John 1:1-18; 8:58; 17:5; etc.). So this isn’t much of a precedent, since the Holy Spirit has not become a physical, human being and evidently never will do so.

One may grant that Holy Spirit isn’t a proper name as we would understand it. That is, Holy Spirit isn’t a proper name in the same way that Jesus, Thomas, John, Mary, and Elizabeth are proper names. However, I can think of no reason why the Holy Spirit would need to have a proper name of this sort. The argument from silence presupposes that every person must have such a proper name, but this claim needs to be proven or the argument has no foundation.

In biblical parlance, on the other hand, the term “Holy Spirit” is a name; that is, it is a recognizable designation that distinguishes him from Jesus the Son, from the Father, and from angelic and demonic spirits. Thus the Bible refers to each of the following as a “name” (Greek, onoma): “Father” (Matt. 6:9; Luke 11:2; John 17:1, 5, 11, 21, 24, 25); “Christ” (Matt. 24:5; 1 Pet. 4:14, 16); “Jew” (Rom. 2:17); “Lord” (Phil. 2:9-11; cf. Eph. 1:21); “Son” (Heb. 1:4-5); “Word of God” (Rev. 19:13); and “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Rev. 19:16).

In any case, the Bible explicitly refers to “Holy Spirit” as a name when it quotes Jesus as saying, “Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). A careful study of Matthew 28:19, I have argued, shows that “Holy Spirit” is one of three names in this text, denoting three distinct persons.

No “Face”

Some Jehovah’s Witnesses have suggested that a point against the Holy Spirit being a person is that the Bible never refers to the Holy Spirit having a “face” (prosōpon, a word that sometimes is even paraphrased with the word “person,” as in Gal. 1:22 ESV; 1 Thess. 2:17 ESV, NRSV). The word occurs just 76 times in the New Testament, a fact that calls into question whether one would have any right to expect this particular word to be used in connection with the Holy Spirit as a person.

The fallaciousness of the argument is rather easily illustrated. The New Testament never uses the word prosōpon in reference to any of the demons or unclean spirits. Yet Jehovah’s Witnesses and most other anti-Trinitarians recognize that in New Testament teaching the demons are personal beings, not impersonal forces. I also could not find any New Testament texts using prosōpon in reference to women or children; hopefully we can all agree that this bit of linguistic trivia does not call into question the personhood of women and children!

It is highly doubtful that the New Testament writers had a handbook on their desk (as a matter of fact, they probably didn’t have desks at all!) that included such instructions as, “When referring to persons, be sure to throw in the word prosōpon once or twice so your readers will know they are persons and not forces.”

The argument that the absence of the word prosōpon somehow indicates that the Holy Spirit is not a person is a particularly bad argument.

The objection may be properly answered in several ways, but here I simply wish to focus directly on the crucial premise of the objection, which is that the use of neuter pronouns signals an impersonal object or abstraction as the pronoun’s referent. The claim is simply and unequivocally false. For the sake of those with little or no knowledge of the biblical languages, I will explain the matter as simply and completely as possible. Fortunately, it’s really not complicated.

The New Testament was written in ancient Greek, not in contemporary English. Greek uses a system of three “genders” in its nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and other words that modify or refer grammatically to nouns. The three genders are labeled in the modern study of ancient Greek as masculine, feminine, and neuter. These genders are typically marked by distinctly patterns of spellings of the words, especially the endings of the words. When we transliterate these Greek words (write them out using English letters instead of Greek letters), we can see these differing spellings corresponding to the three genders. So, for instance, the pronoun autos, usually translated “he,” is masculine in form, like the Greek nouns ophthalmos (“eye”) and adelphos (“brother”). Notice that they all have the same ending, -os (when used as the subject or to describe the subject; the endings change in other grammatical positions in a sentence). Not all masculine subject nouns have this ending, but it is the most common. The pronoun autē, usually translated “she,” is feminine in form, like the Greek nouns zōē (“life”) and adelphē (“sister”). Again, one can see a common ending, though as with the masculine other endings occur with other words having a feminine gender. The pronoun auto (found in Romans 8:16), usually translated “it,” is neuter in form, like the Greek nouns onoma (“name”) and paidion (“child”). Here one can see two of the most common ending forms for neuter nouns in the subject form: -ma (pneuma, onoma, sperma, etc.) and –on (paidion, euangelion, xulon, etc.).

Now, you may already have noticed something rather important and relevant to our topic. All three grammatical genders can be used in reference to persons and to non-persons. So, for example, the nouns adelphos, adelphē, and paidion all normally and literally refer to persons (brother, sister, child), while the nouns ophthalmos, zōē, and onoma all normally and literally refer to non-persons, whether things or abstractions (eye, life, and name). This information leads to the following conclusion: grammatical gender does not indicate personhood or non-personhood; it doesn’t equate to biological gender even though it often coincides with it. A noun’s grammatical gender may coincide with the biological gender of the object to which the noun refers, but it need not do so and often does not do so. Nor does the grammatical gender of a noun indicate whether the object to which the noun refers is a person or not. It is the meaning of the noun itself especially as used in context—not its grammatical gender—that informs the reader as to whether it is referring to a person or to something impersonal.

An easy and noncontroversial example of a neuter noun that normally and literally refers to a person is the Greek noun paidion, “child.” The noun occurs 52 times in the Greek New Testament (and 168 times in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament). The fact that it is neuter has absolutely nothing to do with whether it refers to a person. One can in no way infer that a child is not a person, or even that it might not be a person, from the fact that the Greek noun paidion happens to be neuter. Jesus is called a paidion eleven times in the New Testament (Matt. 2:8, 9, 11, 13 [2x], 14, 20 [2x]; Luke 2:17, 27, 40), all in reference to the period of several years after his birth.

Likewise, pronouns that are neuter and that refer back to neuter nouns like paidion do not imply that their referent is impersonal. The pronoun normally is grammatically neuter to agree in grammatical form with the noun that is its antecedent (a fancy term for the word to which it refers). From the fact that a neuter pronoun is used in reference to a neuter noun one can conclude only that the writer was following normal grammatical protocol. It has nothing to do with the metaphysical status of the object to which the noun and pronoun refer. So, for example, Matthew uses the masculine pronoun auto (the same pronoun we saw in Romans 8:16) in reference to “the child” Jesus: “Rise, take the child [paidion] and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him” (Matt. 2:13 ESV). Here the ESV uses “him” to translate the Greek pronoun auto (as does the KJV also). Luke uses the same pronoun auto in reference to Jesus as paidion twice (Luke 2:28, 40).

Thus, in Romans 8:16, and in other such texts, the use of the neuter pronoun auto to refer to the Spirit tells the reader absolutely nothing about whether the Spirit is a person, a force, or an abstraction. That isn’t the pronoun’s job. The pronoun is simply agreeing grammatically with the grammatical gender of the noun pneuma, which happens to be grammatically neuter. As we have seen, grammatical gender also tells us nothing about the personal status of the object to which the noun refers. So the objection from neuter pronouns against the personhood of the Holy Spirit fails. It is a bad argument because it misunderstands something very basic about the Greek language—something any first-semester student of Greek should know.

Hal Taussig, a founding member of the Jesus Seminar, is the editor of A New New Testament, which combines the 27 books of the real New Testament with ten other ancient texts that historically have had no place in any Christian version of the Bible. These other texts include the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Truth, the Odes of Solomon (divided into four books), Thunder Perfect Mind, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, a Letter of Peter to Philip, and the Secret Revelation of John (also known as the Apocryphon of John). Among the texts not included were the Protevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Barnabas (which will upset some Muslims) and Third Nephi (no doubt to the disappointment of some Latter-day Saints).

Taussig wants us to know that he didn’t decide on his own which books should be added to his New New Testament. No, he called a church council to decide the matter. His “council” included, among others, the following individuals:

• Geoffrey Black, the president of the United Church of Christ, the first major denomination to give official endorsement to same-sex marriage
• Lisa Bridge (a former yoga teacher)
• John Dominic Crossan (who teaches that Jesus’ body was not even buried, let alone raised from the dead)
• Karen L. King (who recently brought us the thoroughly discredited “Jesus wife papyrus”)
• Nancy Fuchs Kreimer and Arthur Waskow (two liberal Jewish rabbis)
• Stephen D. Moore, a leading biblical scholar in the area of “queer studies”
• Bruce Reyes-Chow (a blogger on the Huffington Post)
• Mark Singleton (a yoga scholar)

Not exactly Nicaea.

Taussig’s rationale for A New New Testament includes the claim that Christians have always disagreed on what books belong in the Bible. While there is some disagreement over the canon of the Old Testament (with Protestants rejecting the books of the Apocrypha and Catholics accepting them), there has been almost no debate about the New Testament canon for most of church history. Ironically, where there were some minor differences in church history over the New Testament canon, Taussig’s council seems to have simply ignored those issues. So, for example, one will not find 3 Corinthians (once part of the Armenian Bible) in A New New Testament. Today, Catholics, Orthodox, mainstream Protestants, and even most new religious sects purporting to be Christian accept the same 27 books of the New Testament.

Let us be clear about the purpose of this “new” collection. It is not about gathering together the best sources of information about Jesus Christ. None of the books added from outside the traditional canon were clearly written in the first century (admittedly some scholars date Thomas to the first century), whereas all or nearly all of the actual New Testament writings may be dated with certainty to the first century. Nor is the purpose of the collection to collect books representative of “the full range of voices that formed the early chorus of Christians,” as the book’s website claims, since the Jewish-Christian texts and the quite popular Protevangelium of James were ignored. Most of the noncanonical texts selected came from the Nag Hammadi library, an ancient collection of Coptic texts apparently favored by “Gnostic” believers in Egypt.

The real purpose of A New New Testament is to destroy the very idea of the New Testament. That is, the purpose is to promote the notion that there is no identifiable group of authoritative scriptures that reveals the truth about Jesus Christ—about who he is, what he did, what he taught, and what he expects from us. By presenting Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, and James alongside Thomas, Mary, and other apocryphal Christian texts, Taussig and his council seek to undermine the scriptural basis for orthodox Christianity. Taussig says as much on the publisher’s website promoting the book: “What will non-Christians learn from A New New Testament? Non-Christians will learn that some of the narrow-minded doctrines of orthodox Christianity and the old-fashioned ideas of the traditional New Testament are not the only way that the early Christ movements expressed themselves.”

That’s all one really needs to know about A New New Testament. Its purpose is transparently ideological, an attempt to redefine the New Testament and in so doing to define it out of existence. In place of an authoritative collection of Scriptures, Taussig and his council would substitute “early Christian literature” of their choosing. How long will it be until a new, new, New Testament is published in which the books most guilty of contributing to those “narrow-minded doctrines of orthodox Christianity” are simply omitted?

Antonin Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Ronald Reagan in 1986, making him currently the longest-serving of the nine Justices. Theologically, Scalia is a devout Roman Catholic who prefers the ultra-traditionalist Tridentine Latin Mass to the mainstream post-Vatican II liturgy. Politically, he is conservative in his judicial philosophy and in his viewpoints on specific contentious issues in American law; for example, he considers Roe v. Wade unconstitutional. Opinions about Scalia are generally polarized, with American liberals often scathing in their criticisms of his views.

Scalia’s most recent book, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, is well worth reading simply within its own intended context of defending Scalia’s approach to interpreting legal texts, called textualism or originalism. He and his co-author Bryan Gardner, law professor at Southern Methodist University, explain textualism as follows: “We look for meaning in the governing text, ascribe to that text the meaning that it has borne from its inception, and reject judicial speculation about both the drafters’ extratextually derived purposes and the desirability of the fair reading’s anticipated consequences” (xxvii). The book is also worth reading for those who are interested in the interpretation of other texts, including the texts of the Bible. Of course, most of the biblical texts are not legal texts, though some of the Bible’s most controversial material is in the Mosaic Law. But Reading Law sets forth 57 “principles” or “canons” of interpretation, the first 37 of which the authors say apply to all texts. Those who are already familiar with biblical hermeneutics will recognize several of these principles as functioning also in the study of biblical interpretation. A few examples:

#6. “Ordinary-Meaning Canon. Words are to be understood in their ordinary, everyday meanings—unless the context indicates that they bear a technical sense.”
#17. “Grammar Canon. Words are to be given the meaning that proper grammar and usage would assign them.”
#24. “Whole-text Canon. The text must be construed as a whole.”
#27. “Harmonious-Reading Canon. The provisions of a text should be interpreted in a way that renders them compatible, not contradictory.”

Scalia and Gardner do not present these canons as inviolable, absolute rules. In fact, their third canon explicitly rejects such an understanding of interpretive principles:

#3. “Principle of Interrelating Canons. No canon of interpretation is absolute. Each may be overcome by the strength of differing principles that point in other directions.”

Uncounted hermeneutical blunders in the interpretation of the Bible might be avoided if this one principle were understood and applied. The assumption that a particular grammatical construct must be either irrelevant or absolute violates this canon.

Scalia and Gardner conclude their book with “Thirteen Falsities Exposed,” generally in rebuttal to common arguments against textualism. So for instance they criticize “the false notion that the spirit of a statute should prevail over its letter.” The issue this point raises is one that readers of the Bible also frequently find it necessary to address.

Scalia’s book, like Scalia’s viewpoints and arguments generally, is already controversial. Richard Posner, a legal scholar who has long been one of Scalia’s most vocal critics, published a lengthy review in the New Republic entitled “The Incoherence of Scalia.” Ed Whelan, a former law clerk for Scalia, wrote a multi-part response to Posner (originally on National Review Online). Stanley Fish is a notable scholar who recommends the book while taking issue with its advocacy of textualism. The debate will continue. Those of us who are interested in biblical interpretation can learn a lot from following the debate.

“Jehovah’s Witnesses have had wrong expectations about when the end would come. Like Jesus’ first-century disciples, we have sometimes looked forward to the fulfillment of prophecy ahead of God’s timetable. (Luke 19:11; Acts 1:6; 2 Thessalonians 2:1, 2).”

The implicit inference for the reader to draw is that if Jesus’ original disciples could make such mistakes, then no blame can be attached to Jehovah’s Witnesses for doing so as well. However, the article glosses over some basic facts concerning the proof texts it cites. Let’s look at each of the three texts.

“As they heard these things, he proceeded to tell a parable, because he was near to Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately” (Luke 19:11; all quotations from the ESV).

Here Jesus’ “first-century disciples” are still ignorant of the basic elements of the Christian faith as those are going to be made clear to them following Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus and the disciples are on their way to Jerusalem for the Passover, where one of the disciples will betray Jesus, another will deny him, and the others will abandon him. They really have no idea at this point what God’s plan is, even though Jesus has been revealing it to them piecemeal through his parables and miracles. To cite this verse as precedent for the failed predictions of people who claim to be the only true Christians twenty centuries after Jesus’ death and resurrection is simply absurd.

“So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’” (Acts 1:6).

At this point Jesus has died and risen from the dead, but the Holy Spirit still has not come on the disciples with power to be his witnesses (1:8). They have begun to understand some things but they still are in no position to be teachers. The veil of ignorance is only just beginning to lift. So once again, to cite this text as precedent for the Jehovah’s Witnesses history of failed predictions is a clear misuse of the text.

One should also note that in neither text are the disciples represented as actively teaching their “wrong expectations” to others. They are not evangelizing people with the message that the kingdom was going to be restored to Israel at a particular time. Not only have Jehovah’s Witnesses actively taught their false expectations to others, they have required all members to uphold those false expectations as long as the Society’s publications teach them or risk being disfellowshipped. Only after the Watchtower Society has publicly set aside the false expectations its leaders’ teaching had engendered are members allowed to reject those expectations. Of course, nothing like that was going on with the disciples of Jesus.

“Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come” (2 Thess. 2:1-2).

Frankly, this citation is even more shocking in its abuse of Scripture than the previous two. In this text the “first-century disciples” who are adhering to “wrong expectations” are false teachers who claim to be speaking or writing on behalf of the apostles! “Let no one deceive you in any way,” Paul adds (2 Thess. 2:3), still referring to these false teachers. So if Jehovah’s Witnesses want to cite this text as applicable to them, one can only agree in the sense that the text labels them as those who are deceiving people with their false claims.

The Watchtower article then tries to justify their false teachings as evidence of their zeal to obey Jesus’ instruction to bear witness to the coming judgment on all humanity:

“Consider this example: A lookout in a fire tower might see what he thinks is a wisp of smoke on the horizon and sound what proves to be a false alarm. Later, though, his alertness could save lives. Likewise, we have had some wrong expectations about the end. But we are more concerned with obeying Jesus and saving lives than with avoiding criticism. Jesus’ command to ‘give a thorough witness’ compels us to warn others about the end.—Acts 10:42.”

The illustration proves counterproductive to the Jehovah’s Witness argument, however, when one considers the fact that the organization has repeatedly sounded “false alarms” throughout its history. False predictions were made concerning the years 1914, 1918, 1925, and 1975, to name just the most egregious and clear-cut examples. Imagine the example of a lookout who repeatedly sounds what prove each time to be a false alarm. His doing so would more likely lead to people being less alert to the possibility of fires because the failure of repeated fire alarms would desensitize them to any future alarm.

Now add the idea that the lookout insists that anyone who disputes his fire alarms must be run out of town—and that only he may announce that a particular alarm was inaccurate!

During the past two centuries, there have been many such false alarms about the Second Coming or other eschatological events, from Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, the Branch Davidians, and the Children of God, to name just some of the more notable such groups. Full disclosure and fairness require me to mention, unfortunately, that various teachers on the fringes of Protestant Christianity such as Hal Lindsey, Edgar Whisenant, Lester Sumrall, and Harold Camping have also made such false predictions. Although most of these individual teachers haven’t claimed that only their faithful followers are true Christians, their false predictions render them at least unreliable teachers who should not be given any credence (or money!). The nearly constant trumpeting of some religious teacher or other claiming that a fast-approaching date is the date of the end cannot be justified as faithful believers zealously sounding the alarm to keep everyone alert to the coming Judgment Day. Such rationalization won’t work for Harold Camping and it won’t work for the Watchtower Society’s leaders.

First, let’s assign the burden of proof. The burden of proof is on those who make the assertion that Jesus was married. Since the Bible doesn’t say he was married, and most Christians historically have thought he was not married, those who come along and assert that he was married have the responsibility to provide evidence for their claim. The burden of proof is not on me to prove beyond any possible doubt or loophole of reasoning that Jesus wasn’t married, or that he didn’t sire twelve children, or that he didn’t live in England between the ages of 13 and 29. The burden of proof is on those who make such assertions.

That having been said, a reasonably strong case can be made against the claim that Jesus was married. We will look at the most significant argument that have been made in support of Jesus being married and then present the arguments against this claim.

By far the most popular argument in support of the claim that Jesus was married is that as a Jewish man, and especially as a Jewish rabbi, he almost certainly would have been married. This argument errs in two ways. First, it reasons from a generalization (most Jewish men, and most Jewish rabbis, were married) to a specific historical conclusion (Jesus must have been married). Second, the evidence for the marital status of Jewish rabbis comes entirely from Jewish literature much later than the time of Jesus, well after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the formalization of what we call rabbinic Judaism.

There are several lines of evidence that cumulatively weigh heavily in favor of the conclusion that in fact Jesus was not married.

1. There is no mention of Jesus being married in any of the four Gospels, despite the fact that they are written in the style of ancient Greco-Roman biographies (see Burridge’s book What Are the Gospels?), in which some mention of his wife would be expected. The Gospels mention Jesus’ mother, father, aunt, brothers, sisters, and other relatives, but never even so much as hint at a wife. The point is not that the Gospels’ silence about a wife, ipso facto, constitutes deductively certain proof that no wife exists; that would be a fallacious argument from silence. However, in the broader context of four sizable ancient biographies that do mention other family members, the lack of any reference to a wife creates a reasonable presumption that he was single. The Gospels, naturally enough, report what Jesus did, and generally do not make statements about what he did not do. To expect them to comment specifically on his lack of a wife if he was single would be strange indeed. Was Mark, for example, supposed to write, “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee, and he did not have a wife” (cf. Mark 1:9)? On the other hand, since it would be customary in an ancient biography to mention a wife if the subject of the biography had one, the lack of any mention of a wife for Jesus in any of the four Gospels (or any other ancient writing) is best understood as the result of the fact that he had no wife.

2. There is also no mention or evidence of Jesus being married in any of the apocryphal gospels, not even those that prominently feature Mary Magdalene (e.g., the second-century Gospel of Mary). The third-century Gospel of Philip says that Jesus used to kiss Mary (apparently on the mouth—the one manuscript of the book is torn at this point), but in context this does not refer to marital intimacy. We know this because according to Philip Christ’s kissing Mary prompted the question from his male disciples why Jesus loved her more than he loved them—an awfully strange question if he was simply kissing his wife. Since the apocryphal gospels often sought to fill in gaps in the information we have about Jesus in the canonical Gospels, it is surprising that no one mentioned Jesus being married if in fact this was the case. Again, silence is not a deductively certain proof, but the massive silence of all ancient literature about Jesus (Gospels, the rest of the NT, apocryphal literature, anti-Christian writings by Greeks and Romans, etc.) is a strong argument in favor of the presumption that he most likely was not married. The Jesus Wife Fragment, even if it turns out to be authentic (which at the moment is open to question), does not really negate this point because without some context its quotation of Jesus saying “My wife…” might mean anything, including a reference to the church.

3. Understanding Jesus’ mission and the way he viewed his relationships with other human beings strengthens the presumption that Jesus was single. Jesus did not come to start a family of his own physical offspring. Rather, he understood his mission as that of bringing other people into a spiritual family in which all believers were children of God (e.g., Matt. 5:9; 6:9; 7:11; 23:9) and related to one another as brothers and sisters (see especially Matt. 23:8). Even his own blood relatives had to understand that for Jesus, God was his Father and all of his followers were his “family.” This was the point of his famous saying, when he was told that his mother and his brothers and sisters were waiting to see him: “‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’” (Mark 3:33-35). When Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, he told her, “But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17). The next statement is important: “Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples” (v. 18). She understood that Jesus’ “brothers” were his disciples—those who knew God as their “Father” through their relationship with Jesus. This is one of the most pervasive, well-attested aspects of the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels and a key to understanding the historical Jesus (see especially Joseph H. Hellerman, Jesus and the People of God: Reconfiguring Ethnic Identity). In the context of this mission, it simply would not have been appropriate for Jesus to have gotten married and had children.

4. The Book of Revelation refers to the church several times as Christ’s “wife” or “bride,” and never qualified these terms in a way one would expect if Jesus had a literal wife (Rev. 19:7; 21:2, 9; 22:17). That is, John does not say “spiritual wife” or “heavenly bride” or offer any similar qualification. This isn’t a strong proof by itself, but it adds another log to the fire.

5. The Synoptic Gospels tell us that Mary Magdalene was one of a group of women from Galilee who followed Jesus in his itinerant ministry to Jerusalem (Matt. 27:55-56; Mark 15:40-41; Luke 8:1-3; 23:49; 24:10). Jesus had healed them, and in return they were helping to support Jesus and the twelve apostles financially from their own monetary resources (Luke 8:1-3). This information does not square with the notion that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife (although I suppose polygamists might not think the group of women is a problem!).

6. According to the Gospel of John, when Mary Magdalene saw Jesus after his resurrection and recognized him, she cried out, “Rabboni!” (John 20:16; the word is actually spelled Rabbouni). Rabbouni is an Aramaic title meaning, as John himself explains, “teacher” (Greek, didaskalos); it is related to the word rabbi. In its only other occurrence in the Bible, rabbouni is a title used by a blind man when speaking to Jesus (Mark 10:51). Presumably, if they were married, Mary would not address her husband as “teacher”—especially when first seeing him risen from the dead! Granted that it is just barely possible that a woman might so address her resurrected husband, it is not at all likely.

The cumulative weight of the above six arguments warrants the conclusion that Jesus was not married. This is the best explanation, and the only probable explanation, for the evidence we have.

The best anyone can do when confronted with the evidence against the theory and the total lack of any evidence for it is to retreat to the claim that it is possible that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife. In other words, the claim is made that we have no absolute or compelling evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt that they were not married. Apparently we are expected to produce a tax return signed by Jesus of Nazareth with the filing status checked “single” in order to be justified in dismissing the claim that he was married. In the absence of any evidence that they were married, we should presume that they were not, just as we should presume that Jesus was not married to any of the other women mentioned in the Gospels. (Quick—can you prove that Jesus didn’t marry Susanna?) The alternative is to advocate a conspiracy theory in which the fact of Jesus’ marriage was somehow suppressed from all ancient literature, both pro-Christian and anti-Christian. There are conspiracy theorists who make just this claim; presumably, they would not be dissuaded from their view even if we did find a tax return with Jesus’ name on it and marked “single.”

The argument here commits the common logical fallacy known as the argument from ignorance. From the difficulty of providing knock-down, irresistible disproof for someone’s claim, it does not follow that the claim is worthy of belief. We cannot “disprove” (to the satisfaction of their proponents) any of the myriad conspiracy theories popular in our society today. If you want to believe that the U.S. military is secretly experimenting on aliens in Area 51, no amount of evidence against your belief can shake it. On the other hand, if you want to know what the best explanation is for the available facts, you are not going to hide behind the fallacious objection that a government conspiracy explains why elusive proof for the presence of extraterrestrials on earth is lacking.

In historical Jesus research, all sorts of claims get made for which there is no real evidence. Perhaps Jesus was an Essene. Perhaps Jesus spent his youth in Tibet studying reincarnation and meditation. Perhaps Jesus started a cult whose members got high on a hallucinogenic drug. I’m not making any of these up! These theories, each of which has been defended by at least one or more scholars, all deserve to be discarded as worthless speculations, even though I cannot produce any ancient literature categorically stating that Jesus was not an Essene, that he did not study Hinduism or Buddhism in Tibet, or that he was not the leader of a group of psychedelic druggies. The methodologically correct stance is to reject such speculations, both for lack of evidence and because they generally run counter in varying degrees with the information we do have about Jesus. Likewise, if you’re trying to follow the evidence wherever it leads, the reasonable conclusion is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were not married.