Scripture-ish

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God said it, I believe, that settles it.

But what does it settle?

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Accepting Christian Scripture as true does not determine its meaning. Interpretation is always necessary, and the more important the theological claim, the more important it is to interpret the claim in a sensible or true way.

By the way, this song is just too good not to watch, since I mentioned its title.

For instance, Christians affirm that Jesus is the Son of God, but what does this mean? And, crucially, should we understand this affirmation “literally”? Is it traditional Christian theology to claim that Jesus is literally the Son of God, or is that a departure from Christian theology? What does it mean to say that Jesus is literally the Son of God?

Or what about the claim that the church is the body of Christ? Does that make sense literally or only in some other way?

Such questions invite reflection on the meaning of words, the meaning of meaning, and the possibilities of communication. That’s where I start, before turning to some examples of theological assertions and querying whether they should be interpreted literally.

By the way, I first presented this essay in a meeting of fellow Christians, all members of the Churches of Christ, and I gave myself the task of investigating whether the claim “Jesus is literally the Son of God” makes sense—or what sense it is supposed to make. That setting intrudes itself in some of my sentences below.

Words and Meaning

I do believe words have meaning, and communication is possible. I have some hope that this brief essay can communicate a meaning, and that readers will be able to discern something close to the concepts that exist in the head of the author of this text—if they want to. Postmodern literary theories have taught us that texts can communicate in multiple ways and readers are involved in the business of constructing meaning with texts, but at least some times—and, I think, almost all the time—the meaning readers aim at constructing with the text is the meaning that the author intended. Authors feel justified at times in complaining that readers have misconstrued their intentions, that is, that the texts have been misinterpreted. Such complaining happens frequently when authors respond to reviews of their books: “That’s not what I meant!”

Or, let me quote Pope Pius XII, who wrote in a famous encyclical in 1943, “There is no one indeed but knows that the supreme rule of interpretation is to discover and define what the writer intended to express” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 34). The good bishop then immediately undergirds his assertion by quoting Athanasius (Against the Arians 1.54). He could have quoted a number of other early Christian writers, including Augustine: “The aim of its [= divine scripture’s] readers is simply to find out the thoughts and wishes of those by whom it was written down and, through them, the will of God, which we believe these men followed as they spoke” (On Christian Doctrine 2.5.6).

Let me say it again: I do believe that texts can communicate meanings, though I also recognize some of the difficulties in making such a claim. And because texts can communicate meanings, I also believe that it is possible to translate a text from one language to another. An English translation of the Bible, for instance, can communicate the same meaning as what is communicated by the biblical texts in their original languages.

No, that is saying too much for translation. Let me put it this way: an English Bible can communicate an approximation of the meaning communicated by the texts in their original language—an approximation, not the same meaning, just an approximation. Greek words do not correspond perfectly with English words, just as English words do not correspond perfectly with English words. Agape means something very similar to “love,” but not exactly the same thing, just as the English word “adore” means something very similar to “love” but not exactly the same thing. Of course, the word “love” itself has various shades of meaning, depending on whether we’re talking about loving our spouse or loving God or loving ice cream. And then there’s development in language: the phrase “making love” in a movie from the 1940s was intended to communicate something different from the way the same phrase was employed in movies from the 1970s.

Such variables in language have led some people to declare translation to be impossible—an overstatement, to be sure, but one that captures a significant truth. We can, with more precision, say that translation is challenging and always imprecise. And so we commonly give the Bible-study advice that you need to check your Scriptural passage in more than one translation so that you can discern different nuances of the meaning of the original language text.

All of the foregoing is prolegomena. Now for the main item.

Son of God

Is Jesus the Son of God? Yes, of course. I am a Christian talking to Christians, and the assertion that Jesus is the Son of God is a basic Christian affirmation. According to the traditional English wording of the most well-known verse of the Bible, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. Ask the Pope or the President, Barton Stone or Alexander Campbell, and they’ll all tell you that Jesus is the Son of God. Now, if you ask what they mean by that, or in what way Jesus is the Son of God, or what implications people should derive from that status, the similarities among them will quickly evaporate. Arius believed that Jesus was the Son of God. So did Marcion. And Irenaeus and Athanasius believed it. I assume the demons believe it, just as the Epistle of James says that the demons believe other basic elements of Christian theology.

Churches of Christ have traditionally followed a course of strategic ambiguity regarding the exact signification of Jesus’ divine sonship. Let me be more specific: churches of Christ have often not followed the path of mainstream Christianity in regard to some aspects of the doctrine of God.

Many Christians throughout the past couple millennia have thought it very important to specify with some precision the way in which Jesus is the Son of God, to define in some detail the relationship between Jesus and the Father, to bring more exactitude to this discussion than the bare phrase “Son of God” could do. If the declaration of Jesus’ divine sonship unites followers of Athanasius with followers of Arius and followers of Marcion, then it is not a very useful declaration, it has often been thought. We need to define God as the creator of heaven and earth—thus excluding the beliefs of Marcion—and we need to draw out the implications of divine sonship as entailing that Jesus is (for example) “light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not made”—and this next bit is crucial, so I will cite the Greek of the Nicene Creed—homoousios with the Father, not homoiousios but homoousios, of the same substance—not similar, same. Many Christian groups have historically been so concerned to declare Jesus to be very God that they have recited some version of the creed every single week.

Churches of Christ have traditionally not followed this practice, and have indeed left the matter open as to what exactly people mean when they declare Jesus to be Son of God. In the past few decades, however, there has been among some leaders in churches of Christ an effort to elevate a traditional doctrine of the Trinity to a fellowship issue (see Mark Powell, Brad East, Keith Stanglin; and relatedly Leonard Allen).

I wonder, though, if we could ask Athanasius, or Arius, or Marcion—or whoever, the Pope or Barton Stone or Mark Powell—whether Jesus was literally the Son of God, what they would say. What does it mean for someone to be literally the son of someone else?

I have two sons, and I think we would all agree that both of them are literally my sons, though one of them has inherited genetic material from me and the other one hasn’t. One of them is my biological son and the other is my adopted son, and this latter son therefore has another father who is his biological father. Is my adopted son’s biological father the literal father of my adopted son? Hmm, maybe, but I also am his literal father, and now I’m not sure what “literal” means in this context.

The New Testament gives me the assurance that I myself am a son of God. According to the apostle Paul, all who are led by the Spirit are sons of God (Rom 8:14). Am I literally a son of God? Oh, man, I don’t know. If you’re making me answer, I guess I’d say “yes, I am literally a son of God.”

What about Jesus? Well, if I am literally a son of God, surely Jesus also is. But, again, I’m not sure what the word “literally” accomplishes in this context. At any rate, Christians who have thought about this issue of the relationship between Jesus and the Father have succeeded in offering some substance to the phrase “Son of God” as applied to Jesus.

The first thing to note is that Jesus did not become the Son of God at any time, and certainly not at the time of his birth from Mary, as if the phrase “Son of God” can apply to the Second Person of the Trinity only from two thousand years ago, but not before then. No, that is ridiculous, absurd—indeed, heretical. The Father did not become the Father at some point in history, and the Son did not become the Son. These terms—Father and Son—are clues to their eternal relationship. So, the phrase “Son of God” does not refer to his birth from Mary by the Holy Spirit. Rather, it refers to his essence, as begotten of the Father before all ages; before time, the Son was begotten of the Father, so that there was no time when the Son was not. Here, note well, we have left Arianism behind. There is, of course, no mother involved in this eternal begetting. Is it a literal begetting? I would rather not apply the term literal to it. Like much religious language, these terms—Father, Son, begetting—are clues to a reality that transcends human language, and the term “literal” is usually too mundane.

Or perhaps I should say that “literally” is not mundane enough. It is a word that is notoriously and increasingly difficult to pin down. The word is often merely an intensifier, signifying something like “really” or “to a great extent.” You can imagine someone saying, “My boss has me literally running around in circles,” or “Since the semester began I’ve been literally walking a tightrope with these classes.” The current American president has said that canceling the tariffs he unilaterally imposed on imported goods “would literally destroy the United States of America” (TMD, linking to this Truth posted Aug 29, 2025). What he meant by this assertion is anyone’s guess, but I leave open the possibility that this is another instance in which President Trump’s supporters would council us to take him “seriously but not literally”—although I myself would advise that in this instance we do neither. At any rate, we all agree that in this post the president could not have meant the term “literally” in a literal way, or else his statement is nonsense. The Oxford English Dictionary records the earliest such use of the term “literal” in 1857, when the Young Men’s Magazine included this evaluation of some sort of summer camp: “It is a literal hell.”

Given such a common signification to the word “literal,” we might wonder again what meaning is conveyed by the declaration that Jesus is literally the Son of God. Does such a declaration foreclose Arianism—or embrace it? Does it have reference to the eternal begetting of traditional Trinitarian theology, or is its purview Mary’s conception of the Christ child by the Holy Spirit?

Again, traditional Christian theology has taken great pains to define the particular ways in which Jesus is Son of God. Does the affirmation that Jesus is “literally” the Son of God cohere with or diverge from these traditional definitions? Does it affirm or deny the Nicene definition of the Trinity? Or does it not address that issue at all? If the latter, what issue does it address? Or, why make the affirmation?

The term “literally” is too ambiguous for me to provide answers to these questions. If those who affirm this declaration cannot answer these questions either, then I doubt the value of the declaration. It has become literally meaningless.

Body of Christ

Theological language becomes even more tenuous when we adopt the Bible’s descriptors for the people of God, such as “body of Christ.”

Now, the phrase “body of Christ” has a variety of significations in Scripture. If we think about the “literal” body of Christ, our minds probably picture a crucifixion victim, or we ponder the doctrine of the incarnation. But the Christian ritual of communion also involves something called “the body of Christ,” which appears to outside observers to be some sort of bread. This ritual derives some of its meaning from the Last Supper, in which Jesus held a loaf of bread and said, “This is my body” (Matt 26:26).

Is that bread literally the body of Christ? Well, who are you asking? There is a venerable Christian interpretation of the communion bread such that after it has been consecrated it does truly, really become the body of Christ (CCC 1373–81). Many Christians would balk at such a notion, churches of Christ among them (at least, in my experience), and they might say that the bread is only symbolically the body of Christ, or, perhaps, something more than a symbol but less than the full reality.

Then again, even people who believe in Transubstantiation don’t necessarily talk about the bread and wine being now literally the body and blood of Jesus. The Catechism of the Catholic Church instead says that “Christ himself, living and glorious, is present in a true, real, and substantial manner” (1413). In the Eucharist, the events of Christ’s Passion “become in a certain way present and real” (1363). “[I]n this sacrament the true Body of Christ is made substantially present for us” (2120). The Catechism quotes Thomas Aquinas as explaining that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist “cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by faith” (1381). I assume then that Thomas would not want to use the word “literally” in his assertion that the bread is the body of Christ.

According to the Catholic theologian Matthew Levering: “Such hyperrealism is rejected by the Catholic Church. Instead, Christ is present truly and substantially, but in a sacramental mode that ensures that this is not and cannot be cannibalism” (p. 55). And the Eastern Orthodox theologian Radu Bordeianu similarly says: “when one receives Communion, it tastes like bread and wine, but it is in fact the Body and Blood of Christ, even though it is not tangibly different from unconsecrated bread and wine” (p. 82).

And then the New Testament uses the phrase “body of Christ” in reference to the church (esp. Rom 12; 1 Cor 12). Christians have thus talked about the people of God being the hands and feet of Jesus. But I think it is true to say that no one would want to affirm that Christians are literally the hands and feet of Jesus (whatever “literally” means), or that the church is literally the body of Christ.

Literal Metaphors

It seems like we would say that the description of the church as the body of Christ is a metaphor, and was so intended by the apostle Paul. Maybe that means that the literal sense of the claim that the church is the body of Christ is a metaphorical sense, that if we are to take it literally we should not interpret it in a literal fashion.

Is it the same for the claim that Jesus is the Son of God?

Let’s see what C. S. Lewis says about language and theology. The following passage appears about halfway through his famous essay “Is Theology Poetry?” (1944, pdf).

Theology certainly shares with poetry the use of metaphorical or symbolical language. The first Person of the Trinity is not the Father of the Second in a physical sense. The Second Person did not come “down” to earth in the same sense as a parachutist, nor reascend into the sky like a balloon, nor did He literally sit at the right hand of the Father. Why, then, does Christianity talk as if all these things did happen? The agnostic thinks that it does so because those who founded it were quite naively ignorant and believed all these statements literally, and we later Christians have gone on using the same language through timidity and conservatism.

Lewis goes on to discuss the point, and—as you surely know—it would be better for you to read him than me. At any rate, I’ll summarize. Lewis has two answers to the question posed in the quoted passage: (1) the earliest Christians probably never gave it a thought (this imagery that should not be taken literally), never asked the question, but as soon as they asked the question in the second century, they knew the answer was that the language did not describe reality in a literal sense. (2) We cannot cease to use metaphor and symbol, because that’s how our language works. As Lewis goes on to say: “all language about things other than physical objects is necessarily metaphorical.”

More recently, the Anglican and philosopher Keith Ward has written helpfully on metaphor in the Bible, and he devotes a section of his book to the metaphor of divine Sonship (pp. 75–83), which he concludes with this statement: “we need always to bear in mind that saying that Jesus is the Word or the Son of God, though it is true, is a metaphorical statement with many levels of meaning. To put it in a more traditional way, it is a ‘mystery’, a truth of faith that cannot be put in a straightforwardly literal and readily comprehensible way.”

Conclusion

Like I said: God said it, I believe, and that settles it. But perhaps it is still worth contemplating what we mean by the language we employ.

Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Buy the book at 21st Century Christian.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Buy the book at 21st Century Christian.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Should you read the Minor Prophets as if these twelve different prophetic voices together constitute a single book?

I have a definite answer to this question: hmm, maybe.

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This is a thing that scholars like to talk about—or, at least, they used to. Maybe it’s not so in fashion now to engage in scholarly arguments over the unity of the Book of the Twelve. (That’s the name scholars often use for the Minor Prophets when engaging in these discussions: the Book of the Twelve, which is an ancient name for this collection.) It became a common thing to talk about in the 1990s, but maybe the trend has waned a little by now, or the positions have become more settled.

Here I’m going to talk about some of the evidence for the idea that the Book of the Twelve is, in fact, a single book, and what it might mean to read the Minor Prophets in this way, what difference it would make. It’s this last idea that leaves me a little cold, where I struggle to find a meaningful payoff. But some people seem to think it’s important or helpful to read the Twelve as essentially one, a unified collection or composition.

Part of a Trend in Scholarship

The pursuit of understanding the Minor Prophets as a unified collection could be seen as an instance of the recent-ish impulse to perceive larger structures in the Hebrew Bible.

For most of the time that modern biblical scholarship has been practiced, since around the year 1800, most observers would say that scholars have endeavored to break things apart, to examine the sources of the books, to say, for instance, that the book of Isaiah was not all written by Isaiah but by different people. The book of Isaiah is not unified according to authorship. Same for the Pentateuch: not by Moses but by different authors. Same for even the books of the Minor Prophets: Hosea didn’t write all of Hosea, nor Amos his book, nor Micah his book, nor Zechariah his book, nor probably any of the prophets. All these books grew over the course of the centuries, supplemented by editors (or redactors), often seeking to make the ancient message meaningful to a contemporary audience.

But if that’s the way the books were written, is the task of interpretation simply to undo all the supplementation, to seek out the original compositions and situate those compositions within the time of the original author? What about the actual books that we have, the book of Isaiah, or the book of Zechariah, or the Pentateuch? Were the editors who supplemented earlier writings (laws and stories and oracles and such) imbeciles, as scholars seem to have usually assumed, or were they theologians or prophets or artists with intentions about how they went about their work? Did these redactors have something to say that is worthy of scholarly pursuit and reflection?

These are some of the questions that animated the work of, for instance, Brevard Childs and James Sanders and others in the 1960s and 1970s, who pioneered what Sanders called “canonical criticism” and what Childs called “the canonical approach.” Maybe these approaches or criticisms are two different things, but they are similar and a lot of people conflate them. A couple of classic texts by these scholars are Torah and Canon (1972) by Sanders, and An Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979) by Childs.

The work of Childs and Sanders and others spurred people to examine the larger structures in the Hebrew Bible. Granted that Isaiah was originally written by different prophets, how did the book of Isaiah come together into its present form? These days the study of the unity of Isaiah along these lines is well-established. See, for instance, the 30-year-old book by H. G. M. Williamson, The Book Called Isaiah (1994).

Another good example of this trend—an especially helpful example for comparison with the Minor Prophets—is scholarship on the book of Psalms. In his Introduction from 1979, Childs didn’t really talk about the “book” of Psalms, the overall composition, the editing principles, but one of Childs’ students, named Gerald Wilson, argued in his dissertation that there was something like a plot in the Psalter, an overall structure—even if loose—in the book of Psalms, editing principles that could still be discerned.

A few years later (1993), James Nogalski published his dissertation arguing for the redactional unity of the Book of the Twelve, and this concept has been a part of the scholarly conversation ever since.

Ancient Evidence for a Single Book

The ancients—Jews and Christians—did often talk about the Minor Prophets as a single book. Here is a list of the basic evidence.

* Sirach 49:10

* Josephus, Against Apion 1.37–42

* 4 Ezra 14:44–48

* Early Christian canon lists

* The Talmud, Bava Bathra 13b and 14b

* Masoretic manuscripts

* Dead Sea Scrolls

* Septuagint

I’ll discuss these bits of data further in a moment, and you can read other similar discussions, such as the essay by Anna Sieges in The Oxford Handbook of the Minor Prophets (2021). All this evidence indicates that the Twelve Prophets belonged together, and that when counting up the books of the Jewish Scriptures, the Twelve Prophets counted as one book, just like Isaiah counted as one book, and Proverbs counted as one book. Only the Talmud explains why the Twelve count as one, and its explanation—relating to the short length of each of the Minor Prophets—cannot be taken seriously as an explanation of how or why the Twelve came together. The reason why we can’t take it seriously in that way will become clear as we continue our discussion.

Masoretic manuscripts

I’ve discussed some examples of these manuscripts in another post. That post concludes this way: “The Masoretic manuscripts treat the Twelve as a biblical book, and the individual prophets in the Twelve as not a full-fledged biblical book even if more than a mere chapter.”

Dead Sea Scrolls

I discussed the Minor Prophets in the DSS here. The evidence is complex, more complex than scholars have often realized. It is not clear that the DSS show that the Minor Prophets were always on the same scroll. Probably not. Probably sometimes a single Minor Prophet was on a scroll by itself. There is strong evidence that one of the scrolls features a collection of Minor Prophets in a sequence that diverges from the sequence of the Masoretic Text and the LXX, which both feature Malachi at the end of the collection. The commentaries on the Minor Prophets, the pesharim, do not clearly interpret the individual prophets as a part of a collection. But, one of the DSS probably did originally contain all twelve Minor Prophets, in the traditional sequence, and another scroll not from Qumran probably did, as well. So the DSS provide evidence that the Minor Prophets were sometimes perceived to be a unit, or at least copied on a single scroll in a standard sequence, but not always. Maybe not even most of the time.

Septuagint

I discussed the Minor Prophets in Septuagint manuscripts here. These Greek manuscripts feature a standard sequence for the Minor Prophets, slightly divergent from the sequence of the Masoretic Text, and the individual prophets are closer to being represented as their own books, but still within a collection of Twelve, since each of the Twelve Prophets is numbered.

Sirach

The book of Sirach is one of the deuterocanonical/apocryphal books, in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not in the Jewish Bible or the Protestant Bible. Sirach is the Greek name for the book; in Hebrew it is called Ben Sira and its Latin name is Ecclesiasticus. It was written in Hebrew in the early second century BC, around the year 180 BC. Near the end of the same century (perhaps about 115 BC), it was translated into Greek. We have the book of Ben Sira or Sirach complete in Greek, but we do not have a complete copy in Hebrew. A few scraps in Hebrew from around the time of Jesus have been discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls and associated finds, and before that (end of the nineteenth century) more substantial Hebrew copies of Ben Sira came to light in the Cairo Geniza in Egypt.

Ben Sira is a long book, filled with proverbs. Near the end it mentions the Twelve Prophets, though not the individual prophets. It says:

May the bones of the Twelve Prophetssend forth new life from where they lie,for they comforted the people of Jacoband delivered them with confident hope. (Sirach 49:10 NRSV)

This verse is preserved in one of the Cairo Geniza copies of Ben Sira (copy B, accessible here).

Sirach is thus the earliest evidence we have that the Minor Prophets were grouped together and could be referenced collectively as the Twelve Prophets.

Josephus

The first-century AD Jewish historian writing in Greek, in one of his works, offers a quick overview of the books of the Jewish Scriptures. The work is called Against Apion, and it is an apologetic work arguing for the nobility of Judaism as a way of life, against a critic of Judaism named Apion. One of the things that should be considered a good point favoring Judaism, Josephus thinks, is that it has a limited number of books that it considers authoritative (Against Apion 1.37–42). The total number of authoritative books is 22, and Josephus divides these 22 into three categories: 5 books of law, 13 books of history written by prophets, and 4 books of hymns and precepts. Josephus does not, in this passage, specify the names of the books. But all modern scholars think that Josephus’s 22 books must have resembled very closely the modern Jewish Bible, which counts the books as 24.

These 24 books of the modern Jewish Bible are the same as the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament, with only mechanical differences in calculations. Whereas the Protestant Bible has two books of Samuel, the Jewish Bible reckons the same material as a single book. In fact, all Christian Bibles have two books of Samuel—Catholic Bibles, Orthodox Bibles, Protestant Bibles, and whatever other Christian Bibles there are. There’s no difference in content for the book(s) of Samuel, just a difference in whether to divide the material into two (Christians) or not (Jews). The same goes for the books of Kings and Chronicles: Christian Bibles have two books where Jews have the same material united in one book. The same goes for Ezra and Nehemiah, counted as a single book in the Jewish Bible. And the same goes for the Minor Prophets: the modern Jewish Bible counts all Twelve as a single book. That’s how the 39 books of the Protestant Bible are equivalent to the 24 books of the Jewish Bible.

We can’t know for sure what all books Josephus included in his count of 22 authoritative Jewish books, because he doesn’t name them, but at that late date (end of the first century AD) and with the description he provides, and the way he talks about Judaism and sacred literature elsewhere, it’s clear that his 22 books were very similar to the 24 books of the modern Jewish Bible, maybe exactly the same. A couple centuries after Josephus, we have evidence for Christians enumerating the books of the Jewish Bible as 22, and these Christians do name off the books, and the books they name are the same as the modern Jewish Bible (maybe with a difference here or there) with another counting trick: as opposed to the modern Jewish Bible, these ancient Christian lists of 22 books of the Old Testament treat Ruth as a part of the book of Judges, and Lamentations as a part of the book of Jeremiah. That’s how 24 becomes 22. Maybe Josephus assumed the same counting trick, or maybe he omitted a couple books that are in the modern Jewish Bible, perhaps Ecclesiastes or Song of Songs. At any rate, all modern scholars think that Josephus included the books of the Minor Prophets within his collection of 22 authoritative books, and if he did, he must have counted them as a single book. There’s no other way to get the numbers to work.

4 Ezra

This book is not, I think, in anyone’s Bible, but it was named for the biblical character of Ezra. This book is contemporary with Josephus, also written at the end of the first century AD, and it has a passage near the end in which the character Ezra is told by God to write out the books of the Bible—more-or-less. Here’s the passage:

So during the forty days, ninety-four books were written. And when the forty days were ended, the Most High spoke to me, saying, “Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first, and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people. For in them is the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge.” And I did so. (4 Ezra 14:44–48 NRSV)

Without explaining everything about this passage, I can say that it indicates two sets of books that together total 94 and together represent divine revelation. The first set of books, totaling 24, is for public consumption, and the second set, totaling 70, is not for public consumption but is reserved for the wise. The first set, the 24 public books, seems so reminiscent of the modern Jewish Bible that most scholars (all scholars?) make that connection. The 70 books, on the other hand, are the apocalyptic works like 4 Ezra itself. At any rate, for our inquiry, it is clear that if the Minor Prophets were included among the 24 public books, as everyone who studies the issue believes, then they must have been counted as a single book.

Canon Lists

Christians in the early centuries (beginning in the late second century) sometimes wrote up lists of the biblical books. There are a couple dozen such lists in Greek and Latin in the first few centuries of the church; John Meade and I collected most of them in our book The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity (2017). So if you want the full spectrum of evidence, go there. Here I’ll just say that almost always these canon lists refrained from naming the Minor Prophets individually but simply listed the Book of the Twelve.

I’ll give an example. One of the earliest lists of Old Testament books comes from Melito of Sardis, who wrote in Greek in about the year 170 AD. Unfortunately, his work does not survive except in quotations in other authors. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the early fourth century, wrote a book called The Church History (or Ecclesiastical History), and he quoted Melito’s list of Old Testament books (see Eusebius, Church History 4.26.12–14). The following is the last bit of the quotation that Eusebius provides. So, this is Melito as quoted by Eusebius.

Having gone, then, to the east and having gotten to the place where these things were proclaimed and accomplished, and having learned accurately the books of the Old Testament, I have arranged them and sent them to you, of which the names are: of Moses—five: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Joshua of Nun, Judges, Ruth, of Kingdoms—four, of Paralipomena—two, of the Psalms of David, of Solomon—Proverbs which is also Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, of prophets—of Isaiah, of Jeremiah, of the Twelve in one book, of Daniel, of Ezekiel, of Esdras, from which also I have made extracts, dividing into six books.

Alright, yes, there are a lot of interesting points to consider in this paragraph from Melito, and John and I provide commentary on this extract in our book. For now, what we need to notice is that Melito says “the Twelve in one book.” That way of referring to the Minor Prophets is completely common in the early biblical canon lists.

The Talmud

The Talmud is a collection of rabbinic traditions, edited perhaps around 600 AD. One of the tractates of the Talmud is called Bava Bathra, and this tractate contains a discussion of the biblical books. You can find the text of the Talmud online at sefaria.org, and the relevant portion is Bava Bathra 14b. You’ll want to go to §8, where you’ll find a list of the books in the section of the Hebrew Bible called “Prophets,” and one of the books is called the Twelve. The discussion continues (into §9), questioning why Hosea is not copied onto its own scroll; why always with the other books of the Twelve? The answer: because it’s so small it would get lost if it were a scroll unto itself.

I said earlier that we cannot take this answer seriously as an explanation for why the Twelve were collected together. One reason: the book of Ruth is much smaller than Hosea, but it counts as its own book. Also, we’ll see later (I’m thinking about catchwords, but we’ll have to get to that idea in a later post) that there is a great deal of evidence that the compiler of the Twelve gave some thought to the compilation; he didn’t just put all the small prophetic books together on a single scroll.

The Talmud also has a discussion showing that the individual Minor Prophets were not exactly conceptualized as “chapters” of a single book, nor as full-fledged biblical books, but as something in between. On the previous page of Bava Bathra (13b §11), we find this interesting discussion.

The Gemara states: When different books are included in the same scroll, four empty lines of space should be left between each book of the Torah, and similarly between one book of the Prophets and another. But between each of the books of the Twelve Prophets only three empty lines should be left, because they are considered one book. And the scribe may finish a book at the bottom of one column and begin the next book at the top of the next column without leaving any empty space in between. (sefaria translation)

In this translation, the words in bold are the words actually represented in the Hebrew text of the Talmud, while the words not in bold are added for the sake of clarity. (The Talmud is a famously sparse text.)

The point of the passage is to establish a policy for copying a biblical scroll. When you finish the book of Isaiah and are getting ready to start copying the book of Jeremiah, you need to leave 4 blank lines between the books. But when you finish Hosea and are ready to start copying Joel, leave 3 blank lines. A scribe does not leave 3 blank lines after Genesis 1 before starting Genesis 2, nor even after Psalm 1 before starting Psalm 2. See the Aleppo Codex. Here is the transition between Psalm 1 and Psalm 2. There is one blank line.

Here is the transition between Hosea and Joel in the same manuscript.

You can see between the books exactly three lines without biblical text. These are not exactly blank lines, because there is some writing there, three Hebrew letters, which I explained in an earlier post.

The point I make here both from the Talmudic discussion and from the Aleppo Codex is that the policy was to treat the Minor Prophets as something between a full-fledged biblical book and a mere section of a book.

Conclusion

This post has surveyed only the external evidence for the treatment of the Minor Prophets as a single biblical book. There is also internal evidence—mostly, the catchwords, that I just mentioned. But I’ll have to get to that in a later post. And we’ll have to talk about what difference it makes to read the Minor Prophets as one or twelve. But for now we can say that there is strong evidence that many ancient Jews and Christians did consider the Minor Prophets to be a single book.

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The Minor Prophets were translated into Greek probably sometime in the second century BC, probably either in Egypt or Palestine, and apparently all by a single translator. (See Tov 2019: 130–31.) The same translator was perhaps also responsible for the Greek translation of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The translation is quite close to the traditional Hebrew text (the Masoretic Text; Tov 2019: 132).

The standard Greek edition of this translation was produced by Joseph Ziegler in 1943 and updated by Felix Albrecht a couple years ago. (For an English translation, see here.)

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There are six majuscule manuscripts preserving the Minor Prophets.

* the Freer Codex (W), third century AD (information; some images)

* Codex Vaticanus (B), fourth century (images)

* Codex Sinaiticus (S), fourth century (info and images)

* Codex Alexandrinus (A), fifth century (images of a facsimile)

* Codex Marchalianus (Q), sixth century (images)

* Codex Venetus (V), eighth century (Vatican section images; Venetian section)

There are some commentaries on the Septuagint Minor Prophets—a few volumes of Brill’s Septuagint Commentary Series and then a few volumes of the French series La Bible d’Alexandrie.

Sequence

The sequence of books in the Minor Prophets differs between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. The difference affects only the first six books. The sequence in the English Bible is based on the Masoretic text, so the sequence likely familiar to you is not the LXX sequence.

* Masoretic Text: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah

* LXX: Hosea, Amos Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah

The first LXX manuscript that attests this order is the first LXX manuscript that we have (except for the Naḥal Ḥever scroll [DJD edition], which presents a Greek translation of the Minor Prophets revised toward the Hebrew text, possibly including the sequence of books)—yet, it is a third century AD manuscript, so we can still wonder whether the sequence of books in the Codex W reflects the original LXX sequence or whether it was itself altered at some point before this manuscript. At any rate, most Greek manuscripts of the Minor Prophets reflect this “LXX sequence,” but not all. Several ancient commentaries reflect the Masoretic sequence: the commentaries by Theodore and Theodoret. But, then again, these are both Aniochene authors, and the Antiochene Greek manuscripts also reflect the Masoretic sequence. The LXX sequence is reflected in the commentary by Cyril of Alexandria. And the LXX order also appears in 5 Ezra 1:39–40 and an aberrant sequence in Martyrdom of Isaiah 4.22 and the Lives of the Prophets.

Jennifer Dines (2012: 367) suggests that Origen may be responsible for the popularization within Christianity of a ‘Greek’ order that arose among Egyptian Jews.

One Book?

As I mentioned, LXX scholars seem agreed that the translation of all twelve Minor Prophets was produced by a single translator, which suggests that the twelve were seen as a single collection at the time of the translation.

On the other hand, LXX manuscripts—at least the ones I’ve looked at—seem to treat the individual prophets as their own book (as pointed out by Dogniez, pdf, p. 307).

The following image shows Codex Sinaiticus, the end of Joel and the beginning of Obadiah. Note that Joel (ΙΩΗΛ), at the bottom of the left column (signaling the end of the book), has a Δ under it, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, showing that it is the fourth in a group of books (according to the Greek order). Obadiah (ΑΒΔΙΟΥ) then, at the top of the right column, is labeled with an epsilon (ε), the fifth letter.

Presumably this numbering suggests that the Twelve Prophets belong together in some way. On the other hand, the end of a book and the beginning of the next looks like the division between books, not parts of a book.

This next image shows Codex Vaticanus, the translation between Amos and Micah. Again, Micah is labeled with a gamma (Γ), the third letter of the Greek alphabet, showing that it belongs in a sequence of books, but the beginning of Micah sure does look like the start of a new book.

The end of Malachi and the start of Isaiah in Codex Vaticanus looks exactly the same, as the next image shows.

So, does the LXX present the Minor Prophets as a single book, or as a group of twelve books? I’d lean toward the idea that it’s a group of twelve books in the LXX, at least in these LXX manuscripts.

One more thing on this point: one of the ways in which scholars sometimes argue that the twelve Minor Prophets should be considered a single book is because of some catchwords linking the end of one book with the beginning of the next. (I’ll talk a little more about this phenomenon in a later post; but for now see here and here.) Modern proposals for such catchwords are usually based on the sequence in the Masoretic Text. There are probably some scholarly proposals for catchwords based on the LXX sequence, but I’m not familiar with those proposals, and—initially, at least—it would seem that the LXX sequence messes up the catchwords. So, again, I would lean toward seeing the weight of the LXX evidence as against the idea that the Minor Prophets are presented to readers as a single book.

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This essay is based on a sermon I preached several weeks ago. The video for the sermon is at the end of this post. I have continued to think about these issues, and I’m sure I’m not done thinking about them. Perhaps this way of approaching the subject of Christian forgiveness will be helpful to people.

To err is human, to forgive divine.

—Alexander Pope

There’s an episode of the TV show Blue Bloods called “Bad Company” (season 5, episode 18—find it on Disney+) that has an amazing scene, one that has stuck in my mind for years now. There’s a young woman named Sarah Grant who is angry at a man named Donald Berry. She has good reason to be angry. Donald Berry is in prison and will never get out because of what he did to Sarah’s family perhaps fifteen years earlier. I’ll let you use your imagination about the crime, or watch the episode. The scene I mentioned takes place in the prison, when Sarah visits this man, who wants to talk to her to explain that he is sorry, that he was diagnosed only in prison as a paranoid schizophrenic, that he has now found God, that he is a different person from what he was. He says that he has tried to end his life a number of times. And Sarah Grant’s response to all this is to say that if he’s really sorry for what he did, he should try suicide again and get it right this time.

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That’s the end of the scene and the storyline. We never hear from these people again.

I remember watching that scene for the first time, years ago, and thinking, “Wow! What are we supposed to get out of this? What were the producers of this show wanting to say?” And I’m not sure.

That scene reminds me of Natalie Maines.

Forgive, sounds good.Forget, I’m not sure I could.They say time heals everything,But I’m still waiting

Lloyd Vogel is a bit like Sarah Grant. He is angry at a man who treated his family poorly, and he doesn’t want to get over his anger. He has good reason to be angry, not as good as Sarah Grant has, but still pretty good. Lloyd is angry at his father, Jerry, because perhaps twenty years earlier, when Lloyd’s parents were married and Lloyd’s mom got sick, Jerry left, abandoned the family, couldn’t handle the pressure of family life, especially with a sick wife. Lloyd’s mom died when Lloyd was, I dunno, twelve years old maybe, and Lloyd spent the next twenty years pursuing his career and hating his father. I’m describing to you the backstory of the wonderful movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), the one where Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers—which, by the way, is not a kids movie. After Lloyd Vogel developed a relationship with Mr. Rogers, and learned from him about dealing with anger, he had a dream of his sick mom, and he went up to her bedside, and she said to him, “I know you’re hanging on to this anger, this hatred, for my sake. You think your anger toward your dad is honoring me.” And she says to him, “I don’t need it.”

Look, I haven’t ruined the movie for you; you ought to watch it. And if you haven’t seen it in the past six months, you ought to watch it again. It’s good. You can watch it with your kids in the room; they’ll just be bored. But you won’t be.

Now I’m about to ruin the movie for you. Not really, because you knew it had to happen: Lloyd reconciles with his father. There is forgiveness. He manages to do what Sarah Grant could not do. Earlier Lloyd was angry, bitter, and when he manages to release that anger and forgive his dad, he himself feels liberated, joyful. What’s that that they say? —that holding onto a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. Letting go of the anger is good for you.

I can understand why Sarah Grant is angry, but I can also say that it’s bad for her, that she would be better off releasing her anger and forgiving this murderer. I don’t mean that they should be best friends, or even have any sort of relationship at all. But he asked for her forgiveness, and she should offer it.

That’s the Christian way.

Forgiveness and Reconciliation

But if Sarah Grant is not going to have a relationship with the person who harmed her family, is that really forgiveness? To what extent does forgiveness involve reconciliation?

I’ve got three answers, three buckets of forgiveness, three different categories by which to measure the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation. Sometimes forgiveness entails a complete restoration of a relationship, and sometimes it doesn’t. The third bucket of forgiveness I’m not actually sure should be called forgiveness as the Bible talks about forgiveness, but we’ll get to that.

These are my buckets, not God’s buckets. I didn’t find these buckets in the Bible; I just devised them from observing life. I think it’s helpful to contemplate forgiveness in these three categories, but you could come up with a few—or even many—more buckets if you think about it enough. People are complicated, and there are all kinds of situations that don’t fit neatly into these three categories, but I think these three categories do cover a lot of the ground.

I’ll name these off and then talk about them:

* Total Reconciliation

* Partial Reconciliation

* No Reconciliation

Buckets 1 & 2: Total Reconciliation and Partial Reconciliation

The common element for both of these categories is that the offender repents and asks for forgiveness. What distinguishes the two is the nature of the offense and whether it would wise for both parties to return to business as usual.

Bucket 1, Total Reconciliation. The person repents and asks for forgiveness, and you not only forgive and welcome the person back into a relationship, but there is a complete restoration of the previous relationship.

Bucket 2, Partial Reconciliation—or you could call this one: Forgiveness without trust. The person repents and asks for forgiveness, and you forgive and welcome the person back into a relationship, but there is not a complete restoration of the previous relationship.

The examples I am thinking of here have to do with the nature of the sin that the person committed. Maybe the person had been the church treasurer and had embezzled funds and gambled away the money. Forgiving the person does not mean restoring them to their role as church treasurer. Maybe the person sexually abused kids in the church. Forgiving the person does not entail asking them to babysit your kids.

Are there biblical examples of Bucket 1? The Parable of the Prodigal Son seems to me the most obvious. This is a picture of divine forgiveness. Literally. The Father who offers forgiveness to his prodigal son represents God. It’s a good message to us, and I think it means this: whenever God forgives, there is always total reconciliation of the relationship.

Are there biblical examples of one person forgiving another person in this way? I can’t really think of any.

Bucket 1 is difficult. Let me tell you why (as I think). We are perfectly fine forgiving people completely when it comes to rather minor sins, perhaps ones of which we were not even aware. Have you had the experience where someone apologizes to you for some offense, and you’re response is something along the lines of, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Person X has said something, or done something, and at the time it didn’t even register with you, but Person X soon feels bad about saying or doing that thing, and can’t sleep that night, and finally has to confess the wrongdoing. It bothered the offender but the offendee didn’t even know. And so the offendee is perfectly happy to say, “no problem, all is forgotten,” and the offendee really means it. In this case, there is a complete restoration of the relationship, but there was never really any offense to begin with.

When there’s really an offense, when someone says something really nasty that does register with you, or does something harmful to your career, or to your family, and you are very much offended, in this case it’s hard to act like the father of the prodigal son. You will offer forgiveness, but it’s hard to forget, and the relationship is not quite what it was. Trust has been lost; you are more guarded around this person.

Second chances. We do sometimes, in some contexts, offer second chances, but usually we think of a second chance as happening when the offendee is a boss or an authority figure, and the offender has messed up on some responsibility. “Please, give me another chance, I won’t let you down this time.” We can imagine this happening at a job, or in a sport, or maybe parent to child. Sometimes spouse to spouse. And we offer a second chance, and there is a full restoration of the previous relationship—sort of. The offendee in these cases is probably still a little wary for a while, on the lookout for the messup again. It’s hard to give second chances that entail full restoration.

God does offer us full restoration, second chance upon second chance, but he also doesn’t (necessarily) protect us from the consequences of our own poor choices.

There’s a lot to think through here. For people who ask for our forgiveness, we should repudiate the advice from Mr. Collins to Mr. Bennet in regard to Lydia and Wickham:

You ought certainly to forgive them as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.

Leonard J. Vander Zee (pp. 119–20) tells a story about a baptism—that he cites from a story written by Ralph Wood and published in The Christian Century, Oct 21, 1992, pp. 925–26—involving a man imprisoned for sexually molesting his ten-year-old daughter, represented (by Vander Zee and Wood) as an isolated incident. The mother and daughter came to the prison to offer forgiveness, and this act of grace allowed the man emotionally to wonder whether God might forgive him, the initial step toward the baptism that is the point of the story. Toward the end of this narrative, Vander Zee quotes Wood’s article, reflecting on the trials before this new Christian:

The repentant molester may return to his old habits, destroying both himself and others. It will take careful and prolonged nurture in the faith to free him from such bondage. But I believe it wrong to insist—as many voices would insist—that this man’s family should never have forgiven him, that to do so was to sanction his violence, indeed to collude in rape. I believe that this mother and daughter brought a dead man back to life. Their act of forgiveness opened him to the one reality by which our common slavery to sin can be broken, the power of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Look, the deal is, the guy was repentant, and because he’s imprisoned there is no option of returning the relationship to what it was—mom, dad, and daughter, all in the same house, a happy family—and it probably wouldn’t be wise to restore the relationship to what it was. But forgiveness was necessary, required by the Lord. I get that some people will say that such forgiveness enables abuse. But forgiveness doesn’t require naivete.

If you’re thinking of the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I am too. Perhaps a bit too much naivete there.

But let’s get to the third bucket.

Bucket 3: No Reconciliation

The person continues in his sin, without repentance and without asking for forgiveness. We might imagine a career criminal who waits until you’re at the beach before breaking into your house and stealing your stuff. He’s never caught. You have no idea who he is. Should you forgive him?

Or he is caught, but he makes no effort to reconcile with you.

What if it was a family friend who broke into your house? Or a cousin? Should you forgive that person?

What if your family was home, and this criminal harmed them? Should you forgive the perpetrator? Even if the perpetrator pleads not guilty and is convicted and serves time but never confesses and never asks for forgiveness? Does it change if the perpetrator pleads guilty but still won’t express to you any sorrow or ask for forgiveness?

What if the person who brings harm to you and your family is … no, I don’t want to use him, let’s change it up … what if it’s Joseph Stalin?—who, of course, never expresses any remorse.

Should you forgive?

This is Bucket #3. The offender does not repent, does not express sorrow, does not ask for forgiveness—and there can be no reconciliation. Should you forgive?

We have an example from Jesus. On the cross, he prayed for his persecutors: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). I am aware of the textual problem with this verse, but I accept it as an authentic part of Luke’s Gospel, partly because of the good arguments I’ve read for authenticity by Bart Ehrman and Dirk Jongkind, and partly because it sounds so Jesusy. Earlier in the Third Gospel, Jesus had instructed his followers: “pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:28). There are also other Lukan parallels (Acts 3:17; 7:60).

So, Jesus asked his Father to forgive his killers at the moment that they were killing him. Of course, they had not repented. They didn’t want forgiveness from Jesus, not in that moment, and they didn’t think they needed forgiveness from God. They thought—or, at least, they told themselves—that they were doing God’s work.

Does this prayer mean that Jesus forgave his murderers (while the murder was happening)? The text doesn’t say Jesus forgave them; it says he prayed for them. Certainly Jesus didn’t hold a grudge. Is that the same thing as forgiveness?

I don’t want to get distracted by terminology.

This Third Bucket—I don’t know if it really counts as a bucket of forgiveness. But I do know a couple of things about a situation in which the offender does not repent.

* We should, for our own sake, let go of the hurt and anger and bitterness. We should not hold a grudge. We should follow the example of Jesus and pray for the person. We should be ready for a restoration of the relationship. Followers of Jesus do not hate people, anyone, no matter what they have done or to whom they’ve done it. Followers of Jesus do not seek revenge. We pray for our persecutors so that we may be children of the God who is good to the just and the unjust.

* There are passages in Scripture giving counsel about cutting people out of a relationship. I’m thinking specifically of Matthew 18:15–18 and 1 Corinthians 5:5, but there are others. Those passages must apply to some situation, and it seems to me that they would apply to situations in which an offender does not repent. So there are situations in which Jesus counsels us not to restore the relationship, not to accept a reconciliation. I mean, good grief, there’s a situation in which Paul says that the thing to do is to “purge out the old leaven” (1 Corinthians 5:7).

Is this forgiveness, this response I have described, letting go of the anger, praying for the person, but not restoring the relationship?

Do we call that forgiveness? I don’t know.

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:18)

I know some people who say that forgiveness is dependent on you and not on the offender, that you should always forgive whether the offender repents or not. I don’t think the Bible exactly addresses the situation, so I don’t know whether the term forgiveness applies to the response I have described, but I’m fairly confident in saying that the response is correct and godly and biblical no matter what term is used for it.

Edmund Dantes is a good example for us to ponder. I highly recommend the recent 8-part Masterpiece series on The Count of Monte Cristo. If the plot (of the book or an adaptation) is not fresh in your mind, sorry! You can skip this paragraph. Anyway, Dantes is a good example to ponder—and a very bad example to imitate. He should have let it go. But also those men needed to repent. It’s not like they did one bad thing and stopped. They did not stop; they continued to promote injustice. What was needed was to confront them and call for their repentance, even publicly expose them, to stop them from harming others and themselves. If motivated by love, one would go about this a very different way from Edmund Dantes. Would that be forgiveness? I don’t know.

Refusing to Forgive

What is clear from Scripture is that Christians forgive the penitent. There’s no such thing in Scripture as a follower of Jesus withholding forgiveness from someone who seeks it.

Of course, we’ve seen it. And we can imagine it. And Jesus tells that wonderful and troubling parable about it, the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. And we recall the ending of the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:14–15.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matt 6:14–15)

Reflecting on that passage makes me want to be very liberal in my forgiveness of others.

We can ponder all kinds of terrible situations. What would I do if it had been my kid abused by those Catholic priests, or by someone in church leadership here? Would I sue the church, something explicitly forbidden by Paul (1 Corinthians 6)? Or would I say, “There but for the grace of God, go I”? (John Bradford) Could I say that about my child’s abuser? Could I, in that moment, think about all the people whom I have wronged and from whom I have sought forgiveness? But I never abused anyone, certainly not children! So, I’m better than the child abuser? Is that what I want to stand before God with?

Back to that episode of Blue Bloods with which I started. I find it hard to blame Sarah Grant for feeling the way she did, though I also recognize that her response is not a Christian response. It’s a human response.

The Christian response is seen in Charleston in 2015, or from the Amish (here, here), or from the family of Botham Jean.

Maybe Sarah Grant wasn’t ready.

They say time heals everythingbut I’m still waiting.

I’m not sure if “in that moment” is the right time to demand forgiveness, but the Christian way does demand it. I am reminded of Anita Bryant getting a pie in the face (1977, Des Moines), and her man (I don’t know who the man was) telling her immediately to pray for the forgiveness of the perpetrator, before she had time to process.

I recognize that the man who pied Anita Bryant didn’t repent—indeed, he was defiant—and yet she and the man she was with her offered forgiveness. I think the same is true for some of the examples I mentioned earlier: Charleston, the Amish. But whatever, I think this is a semantics game, and the point is that they released the hate and anger, as all Christians should.

Still, sometimes it takes some time to be ready for that. If we’re not ready, we ought to pray to God to prepare us to release the anger and hatred, to get our hearts ready to offer forgiveness.

But, God does not need a moment.

Divine Forgiveness

A few quotations about God’s capacity for forgiveness.

When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions. (Psalm 65:3)

We do not have to make God willing to forgive. In fact, it is God who is working to make us willing to seek his forgiveness. (Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, ch. 10 (“Confession”)

For a biblical example of this quotation from Foster, think about the Ninevites in Jonah 3.

God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy. Christ, who told us to forgive one another ‘seventy times seven’ (Mt 18:22) has given us his example: he has forgiven us seventy times seven. (Pope Francis, Joy of the Gospel, 3)

What blocks forgiveness is not God’s reticence … but ours. (Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing about Grace? 52)

Conclusion

A friend of mine asked me how to spell the phrase “you are the man” in Hebrew, because he wanted to get the Hebrew expression tattooed on his arm. Why? Because that sentence, “you are the man,” appears in a famous story in the Hebrew Bible—2 Samuel 12, when the prophet Nathan confronts David about his sin with Bathsheba and her late first husband, Uriah. Read 2 Samuel 11–12 if you need to refresh your memory about the details of the story. When Nathan came to David in chapter 12, David ended up trying to blame someone else, but Nathan and David both knew that David was the responsible party—he was the one to blame. The sins Nathan was describing to David were David’s sins. David realized—at least by the time the parable had ended—that God had come for judgment. And he thought, hoped, that he would be the one to decide on the judgment. But Nathan said to David: “You are the man.” The sin is yours.

When we stand before God on Judgment Day, and if God asks us, what do people deserve who do not fully obey my word—how shall we respond? Maybe we would be tempted to respond like David: such a person should die and pay back four times as much! And perhaps God will look at us: you are the man!

Better to ask God to be merciful. Better to be merciful now.

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