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Review of John Through Old Testament Eyes: A Background and Application Commentary by Karen H. Jobes

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Review of John Through Old Testament Eyes: A Background and Application Commentary by Karen H. Jobes

Jobes, Karen H. John Through Old Testament Eyes: A Background and Application Commentary. Edited by Andrew T. Le Peau. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2021, 374 pages, $20.99, paperback.

John

Karen H. Jobes adds to her long list of valuable contributions with John Through Old Testament Eyes. Jobes, who serves as the Gerald F. Hawthorne Professor Emerita of New Testament Greek and Exegesis at Wheaton College and Graduate School, provides an in-depth dive into the Old Testament background of John, including but not limited to extensive treatment of how John’s uses Old Testament texts and themes.

As a commentary, the monograph follows a typical style, although Jobes does not treat each verse individually. Jobes’s goal is not to provide a verse-by-verse commentary, but rather to show how the Old Testament influences John’s thought and to comment on passages that demonstrate that influence.

In addition to the commentary, Jobes includes discussions entitled “What the Structure Means,” “Through Old Testament Eyes,” and “Going Deeper.” These helpful sections usually offer a broader consideration of issues than commentary on individual verses would allow, and they often bridge the gap between scholarly exegesis and practical application.

Jobes’s commentary is precise, succinct, and accessible. While her focus is on the influence of the Old Testament on John’s Gospel, she also spends time discussing debated passages or thorny grammatical issues, including discussion of Greek syntax or textual critical issues as needed (e.g., her discussion of John 8:1-11 on pp. 149-50). The reader benefits from her expertise in Greek, especially her knowledge of the LXX. For a scholar who is known most widely for her work in New Testament exegesis, she demonstrates a keen sensitivity to Old Testament echoes, citations, allusions, and overall influence.

One example of her excellent treatment of the text is her commentary on the first miracle of Jesus, the turning of water into wine at Cana of Galilee. She includes discussion on important details such as the chronological difficulty of John’s statement about the third day in 2:1 (pp. 57-58), and the meaning of “sign” from the perspective of both lexical analysis and Old Testament background (p. 61). She places these details within John’s overarching design to show Jesus’s ministry as the initial fulfillment of many Old Testament messianic expectations and predictions (e.g., Isa 55:1-5; Jer 31:1; Joel 2:19, 24, 3:15; Am 9:13, see p. 59). The new wine Jesus produced was “a small tasting, a sign pointing to Jesus’s messianic significance” (p. 59).

Jobes notes that the signs of Jesus can be read on three levels: the level of the “unknowledgable” first reader; the level of biblical-theology with a full awareness both of Old Testament and first century context; and the eschatological-soteriological level that sees Jesus’s death and resurrection as the hermeneutical crux of the Gospel (see pp. 63-66). In general, Jobes sees Jesus’s signs as a means of confirming his identity as stated in the prologue and explicated in Jesus’s teachings (pp. 63-64), an identity which cannot be understood without reference to Old Testament predictions and antecedents.

The reader will no doubt find many gems in the treatment of individual passages, but two contributions of the book deserve particular attention. The first is Jobes’s contention that “The resurrection of Jesus was not only a historical event, it was a hermeneutical event as well. Without his resurrection and the coming of the Spirit Jesus’ life probably would have made little sense” (emphasis original, p. 81). Jobes understands John to be intentionally crafting his account with the resurrection of Jesus as the hermeneutical key. The original disciples could only understand the identity of Jesus, both as eternal Word of God and Israel’s Messiah, after the events of his life, death, and resurrection. John understood this, and so he structured his Gospel in such a way to foreshadow the resurrection from the beginning (e.g., John 2:19) and accentuate its significance after it occurred (e.g., John 20:31). Similarly, the fulness of Old Testament symbolism and prophecy is only possible to understand through the lens of the resurrection.

A second strength is Jobes’s recognition of the resonances of the Old Testament beyond direct quotations. As an example of this, in her treatment of John 3, Jobes gives significant attention to Jesus as the sheliach, the one sent of God. The sheliach deserved the full honor of and exercised the full authority of the one who sent him. Jobes notes that John 3 does not include a single specific quotation from the Old Testament, but still the Old Testament clearly shapes “John’s understanding of who Jesus is and the significance of his incarnation, death, and resurrection” (p. 94). The Old Testament is baked into the cake, as it were, of John’s worldview and authorial aims.

Jobes also highlights the importance of the temple and feasts in John’s presentation of Jesus. Indeed, Jobes comments in her conclusion, “Instead of quotations and direct allusions to the texts of the Old Testament, the beloved disciple employs images, metaphors, and the traditions of Israel that originated in the Hebrew Bible, especially those of the temple and the feasts” (p. 320, see also p.109). Jobes’s sensitivity to the broader influence of the Old Testament is refreshing, incisive, and perhaps a needed correction to the somewhat fashionable attempts to focus merely on one text’s use of another. Jobes does not engage in hyperbole when in her final words she writes, “Reading the gospel of John through Old Testament eyes makes all the difference” (p. 320).

Overall, Jobes’s contribution is substantial, both in terms of its quality and its accessibility. Scholars, students, and teachers of the fourth Gospel will greatly benefit from her work and will find this volume a helpful accessory to other commentaries. Jobes’s focus on the Old Testament background makes this commentary unique, as far as this reviewer is aware, among resources currently available.

Timothy Howe

Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

Review of Creation and Christ: An Exploration of the Topic of Creation in the Epistle to the Hebrews by Angela Costley

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Review of Creation and Christ: An Exploration of the Topic of Creation in the Epistle to the Hebrews by Angela Costley

Costley, Angela. Creation and Christ: An Exploration of the Topic of Creation in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020, pp. 385, 94.00€, paperback.

Creation and Christ

When thinking about what makes the Christology of Hebrews distinctive, perhaps the first image that comes to mind is that of Jesus as high priest. Other topics of perennial interest in the study of Hebrews include the intriguing utilization of the Sabbath and the deployment of tabernacle, temple, and other cultic imagery. Angela Costley draws attention to the important role played by references to creation in Hebrews and argues that the author of Hebrews employs these allusions to creation in order to portray Jesus as the creator who descends to earth in order to lead believers into God’s primordial rest. Creation and Christ is a revision of the author’s 2018 Ph.D. dissertation, which was completed at St. Patrick’s College in the Pontifical University of Maynooth, Ireland. Costley currently teaches Greek and Wisdom literature at St. Mary’s College in Oscott.

After establishing her research focus, Costley outlines the methodological tools that she will use in order to exegete creation language in Hebrews. Following a line of recent Hebrews scholars (e.g. Neeley, Westfall, and Dyer), Costley utilizes discourse analysis in order to bring clarity to the way in which the author of Hebrews orders their thought. Discourse analysis does not denigrate historical criticism but rather recognizes its limitations and offers a literary, historically oriented set of tools with which to examine ancient texts. When it comes to Hebrews, Costley dates the text generally to the last half of the first century (ca. 60–90 CE), but she does not think that Hebrews offers enough information to, for example, locate the text before or after the fall of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. The author is unknown, the geographical location is tentatively said to be in Alexandria, and the intended audience was likely to have been of Hellenistic Jewish origins (pp. 32–44).

The literature review is likewise expansive and can be found in chapter 2. This chapter more clearly outlines the topic of creation in Hebrews and highlights the need for Costley’s monograph by demonstrating the absence of another such book. Costley highlights other studies of Hebrews and discourse analysis, the application of narrative and rhetorical approaches to Hebrews, the relative absence of creation in thematic studies of Hebrews by Vanhoye and Lindars, and historical critical investigations into the author’s possible sources and dialogue partners. One of the nearest neighbors to Costley’s study is a 2009 chapter on the cosmology of Hebrews by Edward Adams (“The Cosmology of Hebrews,” in The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology, ed. Richard Bauckham et al. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009], 122–139), but Costley rightly argues that more remains to be done on the theological contribution of creation to the argument in Hebrews.

Having clarified the need for her study and set forth the methodological tools to be employed, the remainder of the book turns to a thorough investigation of five passages in Heb 1–4. These are Heb 1:2–3; 1:10–12; 2:5–9; 3:1–6; and 4:1–11 (esp. 4:3–4, 9–10). The author of Hebrews opens the address by stating that God has spoken through the Son (Heb 1:2). Costley emphasizes that the Son is identified as the one “through whom (God) made the aeons,” which is the most reportable event in the exordium according to her discourse analysis (pp. 91–95). The identification of the Son in Heb 1:2–3 can thus be interpreted in terms of descent and ascent as the Son’s work of creation, purification, and session come to the fore at the start of the text. The allusion to the Son’s laying of the foundations in the scriptural catena (Heb 1:10) is likewise understood with reference to creation. Whereas the exordium works from creation to descent to ascent, the catena moves from the ascension to Christ’s descension and finally to his act of creation. The importance of Jesus’s role in creation and the presence of the descent-ascent motif becomes clearer in Heb 2:5–9 as Jesus is the only one for whom humanity’s intended original status applies in the present. Focusing attention on Heb 3:4, Costley argues that Jesus’s activity in creation provides one of the reasons for the Son’s superiority to Moses in Heb 3:1–6. Finally, God’s rest and the discussion of Sabbath in Heb 3:7–4:11 are interpreted with a view to God’s primordial rest, into which believers can enter due to the Son’s entrance ahead of believers as pioneer (pp. 269–287).

Costley enhances her exegetical arguments with a sixteen-page appendix justifying her translations of the chief passages examined in the book (pp. 299–314) as well as an additional appendix examining recent approaches to the macrostructure of Hebrews (pp. 315–323). A substantial bibliography follows along with indexes of sources, authors, and subjects.

Creation and Christ thus draws attention to an important topic that is too often overlooked in studies of Hebrews. By examining the relationship between creation and Christology, Costley sheds fresh light on the Son’s role in much of the first four chapters in Hebrews. By emphasizing the Son’s activity in creation from the exordium on, she uncovers the presence of a descent-ascent motif into which the presentation of Jesus as high priest may be fitted. In addition, Costley highlights several points of connection to the Wisdom of Solomon and the Epistle to the Hebrews. While the similarity between the portrayal of wisdom in Wis 7:26–27 and the description of Jesus in Heb 1:3 is regularly noted by scholars of Hebrews, Costley patiently and subtly places more sustained focus to parallels in the thought of Wisdom and Hebrews (e.g. pp. 76–77, 123–128).

An additional strength of the book is its thorough examination of nearly every imaginable nook and cranny that can be considered with regard to creation language in Heb 1–4. This thoroughness is evident even in the early chapters of the book on methodology and previous studies, where a sustained introduction to discourse analysis may be found along with a description of related studies that indicate the need for Costley’s study. When exegeting Hebrews, Costley’s book is similarly expansive in the ground that it covers, suggesting that the house in Heb 3:1–6 should be read with a view not only to the people of God but also with connotations of the sanctuary and of the cosmos. When studying creation language in the exordium, Costley provides a detailed examination of the word aion in Heb 1:2. She traces the development of the term’s meaning in the history of the Greek language before giving extended attention to Philo, Septuagintal translations, apocalyptic Second Temple literature, and some New Testament instances of the word. Such a consistently exhaustive study repays close reading, while simultaneously providing an important resource for other scholars of Hebrews.

In sum, Creation and Christ is an important addition to scholarship on the Epistle to the Hebrews that draws attention to an underexplored topic in creative ways. By exploring Christ’s role as creator in Heb 1–4, Costley offers fresh insight into how one understands not only the depiction of Jesus in the text but also its understanding of salvation. Costley’s book will be of particular interest to those who conduct research on Hebrews as well as the libraries who support them.

Jonathon Lookadoo

Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary, Seoul