Understanding the context is a tool that we are blessed with today. We can still understand the Bible, who God is, who Jesus is, and why that matters perfectly well without it.
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Carey Griffel we are blessed to understand ANE context but the Christians in 150-350 weren’t? Seems counterintuitive to me. They were a lot closer to it then we are and the apostles and their disciples and their disciples did not need translations and hermeneutical training that is as deep as we need simply because they were closer in time. I know Qumran has been very helpful for us but seems like the help it provides is putting us closer to the understanding the 150-350 church had but not giving us a deeper/more informed understanding than they had.
I’m open to any argument that says we can now understand ANE culture/worldview better than the early church theologians/the students of the apostles (and their students etc) it’s just going to need to be compelling as I’m sure you can imagine.
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I'd say at least some of it was lost BEFORE the time of Jesus, actually. And various periods of time lost previous context. That's just going to be a fact. Once you're not in Egypt, you're going to have memories of Egypt, and if you have contact with Egypt that will strengthen that, but you will no longer be soaked in the Egyptian context. Move along to Canaan; you're going to be deep in the context of the Canaanites. Move along to Babylon, you're going to be deep in that context. Move back into the land and get under Greek occupation. More movement. Roman occupation. More movement.
With each of these moves, you're going to remember some things of the previous context. You're not going to remember them all. Study second temple literature and see how they're working through thoughts in a new way. There are reasons that Genesis and Jubilees look so different. Even by the time of the writing of Jubilees, the ANE context was vanishing. And some of what we call ANE context in the Bible is actually a combination of real connections with ANE literature--*plus* extrapolations in the form of things like 1 Enoch.
So biblical theology is a bit of a difficult venture because we are doing multiple things at once. We are looking at *original* context...the context that existed at the original composition, but we can't stay in that entirely, because we also must view the Bible in its canonical form. Which is disconnected from at least some of the original writing. The Old Testament's compilation reflects the time of the exile, which does have that ANE context....just barely, because Babylon (which was only the current iteration) was soon to be washed away in the sands of time itself.
By the time of the NT, the people were so changed by Greek culture that they really had lost the ANE perspectives. Again, a lot of Greek culture was very similar. Plato talks about the division of the nations. The Greek gods are derived, to some degree, from more ancient ones. But the Jews were only partially Hellenized. And along comes the church and the church becomes quite quickly its own culture. Not Jewish. Not Greek. Influenced deeply by both, but the church fathers weren't scholastics. They were boots-on-the-ground bishops who had current church issues to deal with.
An example of how quickly this can affect things: The early church fathers weren't looking carefully at geography, probably had no idea of much of the geography of Israel. *Certainly* didn't know anything about Mt. Hermon and its ANE meaning. They had NO IDEA where Jesus was when he gave his "on this rock" speech and that it could have had a meaning that was connected to the geographical/historical context. So you don't see any church father anywhere giving an interpretation of that as we hear from Dr. Heiser. They all said the rock was Peter because that makes the most sense on a good ol' "plain reading" of the text.
So yeah, once you get conquered by new overlords, once you're out of a particular area geographically, once you have brand new worries such as combating heresies, well...a lot of this incidental information that everyone knew before and no one really thought much about concerning its importance is simply gone from the minds of the new people who are dealing with their own problems.
The reason we can know more is because we have a wealth of knowledge that the early church had no access to.
They had no intimate knowledge of the texts or culture of Babylon or ancient Egypt. Many early church fathers couldn't even read Hebrew. By the time of Jesus, the Greek Septuagint was widely accepted (so this would be like us having a good English translation but no Greek or Hebrew manuscripts to really get a better grasp of the original meaning; translations can only get you so far). Even those who could read Hebrew, it must be the case that the meaning of some of the more ancient Hebrew terms OR borrowed terms from other languages was misunderstood.
The findings of the texts at Masada, Qumran, Ugarit, Mari, etc, have helped in massive ways to understand individual words as well as whole contexts of passages and stories.
The early church fathers didn't have that. Not even the apostles had that. They didn't need it, because they understood the story and history they were in without needing to know all the nitpicky details. Seems like they were perfectly comfortable making up reasons for the things they didn't understand; it didn't impact their view of inspiration or history.
This is all good information to have still, so don't get me wrong. But none of what we've learned has changed our knowledge of the character of God or how he's worked in salvation history.
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Carey Griffelthanks for the response. It’s helpful as I try to make sense of everything.
My first thought is if we actually have more information about ANE culture and worldview than the Apostles and guys like Iraneus, Hippolytus etc then understanding ANE culture is not important. But my memory of Dr. Heiser’s teaching is that the NT writers did have a solid understanding of ANE culture and worldview… and they passed it on to their disciples who passed it on to their disciples and so on and so forth. So studying and understanding it today helps us understand where the NT writers (and their disciples) were coming from better.
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It depends on what your goals are as far as what's "important."
It's important because as students of the Bible, we should know as much as we can. We should understand the perspectives of the authors as much as we're able to. We should be faithful readers of the text. We should be humble enough to let go our prior ideas to embrace ideas that we come to understand are more faithful to the original meaning/intent. Dr. Heiser didn't do a whole lot of work with the early church fathers and what they believed, because he was deep into the Old Testament context of things and sure absolutely the NT authors were bringing that stuff out all the time, but not in a vacuum--the NT authors were taking *from 1 Enoch* (a second temple text, not an ANE text) rather than the apkallu narrative of Mesopotamia. It just happens that both 1 Enoch and the apkallu story mesh really well so that we can see how you go from the understanding of the author of Genesis to the understanding of the author of Enoch to the NT authors. The ANE context is not the same as the second temple context, but that can get confusing fast. There are these overlaps, though, as we can see, that helped the interpretation stay "open," so to speak.
But we can very much take some of this too far, and Dr. Heiser was adamant that this doesn't make or break the gospel, that we shouldn't put ourselves on a pedestal of learning or break fellowship with people over matters of secondary issues. So it's not important in order to be a Christian, live out our lives in discipleship, etc. In other words, the church can function without much of this specific knowledge because they understand the story of salvation.
