We love going to New York City. We go there for the US Open. We go there for Broadway plays. We go there for pizza (we absolutely go there for the pizza). And we go there for the people-watching (I’m not sure there is anywhere better). And we go there to ride the subway. That’s not completely true. We don’t go to NYC for the subway, but when we are in New York, we take the subway everywhere. And we love the subway. Sure, it is old and “well-used,” but it gets you there on tim, and you don’t have to pay for parking. However, if there is one thing I want from my subway, it is for that invisible conductor in the sky to warn me upon my departure to “mind the gap.” I’ll even settle for “watch out for the gap” or “don’t nap on the gap,” but I am adamant that I want a warning because, if you are not careful, those gaps can trip you up. And the New York City subway does not have a “mind the gap” warning. And in my opinion, that makes it a second-rate system. Think about it. London tells its riders to “mind the gap.” Oslo does, as well. as does Hong Kong, Beijing and Nanjing, and they do so in both Chinese and English (it’s a nice thing they do after stuffing you in their cars). And hundreds of other subways and trains have it, but New York refuses to warn us to mind the gap. Shame on them. Let’s face it: “Mind the gap” is a great warning, a proper saying and a valuable proverb. And that is especially true if you are reading the New Testament.
I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but there’s a gap between the Old and New Testaments. Now, usually, we pay no attention to this gap. We even act like it is not even there. After all, scholars have been calling this gap, “The 400 Silent Years,” for so long that we no longer even think about listening when we are around them. At least, this is how I have approached the gap. I’ve been sure this was a period of time where nothing happened or, at least, nothing important happened, or, at least, nothing important that had any bearing on how we should read or understand the New Testament. Oh sure, there was world history. The Greeks did things and the Romans did other things, but what has that to do with us? Nothing at all! Apart from a few obscure references in Daniel (like Daniel 8’s shaggy goat with a horn), Alexander the Great is never mentioned in the Bible. How about Julius Caesar? Nope, not a peep in either testament. How about the Hasmonean Dynasty? Apparently not. These “400 silent years” were nothing more than an intermission of sorts, a period of time where we could reset the stage and prepare for Act 2. After years and years of prophets and revelations and miracles and inspiration, God was silent. There were no prophets. There were no miracles. There were no messages from God. The 400-year gap was, in fact, silent—hardly worth worrying about.
Granted, it is a little frustrating when we jump from the Old Testament into the New, and we are suddenly accosted by a posse of Pharisees or a syndicate of Sadducees. And before we know what to do with that, we come face-to-face with a rabbi in a synagogue (a synagogue!). And while we are scratching our heads about those conundrums, we encounter a demon (a demon!) and an unclean spirit! And that completely throws us because none of those people, places or things are ever mentioned in the Old Testament—no, not once. And yet, they pop up in the first chapters of the Synoptic Gospels without any introduction or explanation—just like they had always been there. Now, we would think the authors would have done us a favor by telling us who these people were, where they came from, or what they stood for, but no. They just suddenly appear out of thin air without a hint of explanation. Worse, the text makes us feel like we ought to know all about them, that had we only been awake while reading Chronicles, we would have seen that the Pharisees were begat by Hasshub, but the Sadducees were begat by Ahitub; and those two brothers hated each other, hence, the animosity between the fair Pharisees and sad Sadducees in Jesus’ day. But no. There is not one mention of any of these people in the Old Testament (there are no Pharisees and no Sadducees or even rabbis). And there is no synagogue in the OT (even though it shows up in Mark 1 like it had been around since Moses). And, here’s the real kicker, there are no demons or evil spirits mentioned in the 39 books of the Old Testament (correction, evil spirits are mentioned in Samuel, but those evil spirits were sent by God to torment Saul which seems to be very different from the evil spirits in the gospels). But if none of these people or things came from the Old Testament, then where did they come from? They came from the gap, from those 400 silent years.
And that is a kick in the seat of the pants. See, I also grew up believing that to understand Jesus and his world, all one needed to do was to read the Old Testament. And so, I did. In order to get a better understanding of the New Testament, I spend years studying the Old. After all, Augustine said,
“The Old Testament is the New Testament concealed.
The New Testament is the Old Testament revealed.”
But Augustine forgot a part. He never said anything about the 400 silent years, and it seems to me like they are absolutely necessary if we want to understand all the ins and outs of the gospel accounts. So, now we have to add:
“The 400 silent years are the gospel mysteries unsealed.”
But now, I have discovered that in order to understand Jesus and his world, I need more than the Old Testament. I need to listen to the many voices who call out from the 400 silent years. I needed to understand Second Temple Judaism.
New Testament scholar Matthias Henze, in his engaging book, Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus, makes this startling claim about his life that parallels my own. He wrote:
“For the longest time, I was under the impression that this is the reason why the Christian Bible has two parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament. I simply assumed that the Old Testament was the Jewish part of the Christian Bible and the New Testament was the Christian part. The purpose of the Old Testament was to explain Judaism to Christians. Whenever we read in the New Testament of Jesus’ Judaism, we could simply turn to the Old Testament; and there, somewhere, we would find an explanation for the Jewish world of Jesus. The only problem was that I never seemed to be able to find the relevant passages in the Old Testament. What I found didn’t really explain what I was looking for. Surely, I thought, the reason was my insufficient knowledge of the Bible: I was simply looking in the wrong places. Only later, did I realize that the mistake was not mine. I was looking for passages about synagogues and rabbis and Pharisees that simply don’t exist. The Old Testament cannot explain the Jewish world of Jesus [because] the religion of the Old Testament is not the Judaism of Jesus.”
That is a rather significant statement. True, the Old Testament were the Scriptures that Jesus embraced as God’s Word. But that Scripture was written hundreds of years before Jesus, and over the course of time things changed and changed rather dramatically. It doesn’t take any real research to prove this. We leave Malachi with Persia on the throne. But in Matthew, Rome rules the world. We leave the Old Testament with prophets speaking God’s Word. But in the gospels, all sorts of people see themselves as speaking God’s Word: priests, teachers of the law, scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees. In the prophets, there was basically one response to the political situation. But in the gospels, there were all sorts of responses. There were the Zealots and the Herodians and the Essenes and the members of the Sanhedrin. In other words, everything changed. And one of the most significant changes to happen in these 400 silent years is that all sorts of new books were written (again, those 400 years were not very silent at all!), books that spoke of Jewish history, culture and wisdom, and books that spoke of spiritual and biblical truths.
Now, Henze’s point makes sense. He wrote that, “The Jewish world of Jesus was no longer the religious world of the Old Testament; it was the Judaism of first-century Israel.” Of course, it wasn’t. Over the course of time, there would have been many, many changes. So, if we want to understand Jesus’ world, then we will have to let those “silent years” speak. And if we do that, what will they say? That’s what we will be looking at in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, please don’t take a nap on the gap. You might miss something really important.
