Daily Old Testament and Early Christian Writings: Leviticus 26-27 and Irenaeus Selections: Gnostic Writers

Leviticus 26 – There can be no idols or sacred pillars and the Sabbath must be honored.

Then comes the setting forth of blessings and curses—this was common in contracts in the ancient Near East according to Schocken (632]. The reward for obedience will be God’s care—rain, harvests, food in abundance, security in the land, peace (26:5-6).

“I will set my Dwelling among you, and will not disdain you. Ever present in your midst, I will be your God, and you will be my people; for it is I, the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of the Egyptians and freed you from their slavery, breaking the yoke they had laid upon you and letting you walk erect” (26:11-13).

        

But if you reject me, “then I, in turn, will give you your deserts” (26: 16)—no crops, devastation, war, pestilence.  Five stages of disobedience and punishment are described, the last of which will be that the Lord will scatter them among the nations (26:33).  

But then, “when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they make amends for their guilt, I will remember my covenant with Jacob, my covenant with Isaac, and my covenant with Abraham; and of the land, too, I will be mindful.  But the land must first be rid of them, that in its desolation it may make up its lost Sabbaths, and that they, too, may make good the debt of their guilt for having spurned my precepts and abhorred my statutes.  Yet even so, even while they are in their enemies’ land, I will not reject or spurn them, lest, by wiping them out, I make void my covenant with them; for I, the Lord, am their God” (26:41-45).

[The Book of Leviticus ended here once.  The next chapter is an appendix, meant to go over how the sanctuary was to be supported monetarily]

Leviticus 27 – Covers the price of “redeeming” people or offerings of other kinds (houses, fields, made or  “dedicated” (given in a “vow of offering”) to the Lord.  These are offerings other than “first-born,” which are necessarily dedicated to the Lord. It refers to human beings that are “doomed” (27:28).  They cannot be redeemed.

Irenaeus of Lyons (c.180 AD)

Valentinus, Secundus, Cerdon and Marcion

11 – Irenaeus notes that there are a number of different gnostic thinkers – “two or three of them anyway” and they don’t necessarily agree on the ideas they have. Valentinus seems to be his greatest concern. He goes on to outline the key concepts of Valentinus’ approach. There are many names associated with the different parts of the system: the “unnamable Dyad” [Ineffable and Silence], “a second Dyad” [Father and Truth]; a “Tetrad” from which come “Logos and Zoe [Wisdom], Anthropos [Man] and Ecclesia [Church].” There are powers that come from these. This is just to give you all a flavor of what he is trying to explain. He obviously does understand their entire system of thinking. I think the key things are the following: Gnostics like Valentinus thought that the God of the Old Testament was only what he called a “Demiurge.”

The other gnostic thinkers see things somewhat differently but use the same big concepts – Ogdoad, Tetrad, Aeons, Proarche, Monad – Look them up - they are interesting but way beyond what I can analyze here. He makes fun of the complexity of their thinking. They all believed that only those who immersed themselves in the mystical and deeply complex “truths” they saw could ever “come to salvation.” The body “cannot be saved.”

The gnostics denigrated the Jewish scriptures. Marcion “dared publicly to mutilate the Scriptures, and more than any others to malign God shamelessly” but Irenaeus seeks in his treatises to refute them, “convicting him from his own writings, and from the words of the Lord and the apostles, which he preserves and uses, I will overthrow him, with the help of the Lord.”

He says that “all those who corrupt the truth and injure the teaching of the Church are the disciples and successors of Simon Magus the Samaritan. Although, in order to deceive others, they do not confess the name of their teacher, yet they teach his views. Setting up the name of Christ Jesus as a kind of decoy, but in one way or another introducing the impiety of Simon, they bring many to destruction, spreading their evil teachings under a good name . . .”

Daily Old Testament and Early Christian Writings: Leviticus 24-25 and Irenaeus Selections

Leviticus 24 –A perpetual flame of olive oil shall burn regularly in the lamp-stand of the sanctuary.  “It shall burn there before YHWH from evening to morning continually. This is a perpetual law for your descendants: Aaron is to see to the lamps on the pure lamp-stand before YHWH, continually” (24:3-4).

Showbread of fine flour shall be baked into twelve cakes and put in two piles on the gold table that stands before YHWH (24:6). On each row, there must be frankincense. They are to be set out fresh each Sabbath, and they shall be eaten by Aaron and his sons in a holy place (24:9).

        

A story is told about a man “whose mother was an Israelite woman and whose father was an Egyptian” 24:10). He got into a quarrel with an Israelite and “blasphemed the name and curse it” (24:11). Moses meditated on what to do and “YHWH spoke to Moses” (24:13) and instructed him to have the man taken outside the camp and killed – stoned to death (24:16). This precedent becomes a law: blasphemers are to be stoned by everyone in the community after everyone who heard him lays hands on his head.

        

Murderers are to die too; killers of animals must make restitution. “Limb for limb, eye for eye, tooth for tooth! The same injury that a man gives another shall be inflicted on him in return” (24:19-20)—everyone, alien and Israelite alike—is to be treated the same.

Leviticus 25 – The land too is to keep a Sabbath for the Lord.  Sow fields for six years, but in the seventh, the land should rest, leaving the after-growth to be eaten by anyone.

        

The Jubilee year comes after 7 times 7 years.  On the 10^th day of 7^th month, let the trumpet sound. “You shall make [this 50^th year] sacred by proclaiming liberty in the land for all its inhabitants” (25:10). There shall be no sowing, nor reaping the after-growth except directly from fields and vines.  Return to your own property, and let there be no unfair dealing in repurchasing lands transferred during the preceding 50 years.  No lands shall be alienated in perpetuity, except in walled towns. No kinsmen may be slaves.  Alien slaves may be bought and sold, but you must not ‘lord it over them” harshly.

Irenaeus (c. 180)

Selections from the Work Against Heresies

The Faith of the Church

10 – Irenaeus’ words are so to the point, it is hard not to just write every word out, so there will be a lot of quoting.

“Now the Church, although scattered over the whole civilized world to the end of the earth, received from the apostles and their disciples its faith in one God, the Father Almighty, who made the heaven, and the earth, and the seas, and all that is in them, and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets proclaimed the dispensations of God—the comings, the birth of a virgin, the suffering, the resurrection from the dead, and the bodily reception into the heavens of the beloved, Christ Jesus our Lord, and his coming from the heavens in the glory of the Father to restore all things, and to raise up all flesh, that is, the whole human race, so that every knee may bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Savior and King, according to the pleasure of the invisible Father, and every tongue may confess him, and that he may execute righteous judgment on all.”

The power of wickedness and the “angels who transgress and fell into apostasy, and the godless and wicked and lawless and blasphemers among men he will send into the eternal firs. But to the righteous and holy, and those who have kept his commandments and have remained in his love, some from the beginning [of life] and some since their repentance, he will by his grace give life incorrupt, and will clothe them with eternal glory.”

“Having received this preaching and this faith, as I have said, the Church, although scattered in the whole world, carefully preserves it, as if living in one house. She believes these things [everywhere] alike, as if she had but one heart and one soul, and preaches them harmoniously, teaches them, and hands them down, as if she had but one mouth.”

The languages of the world may be varied, but the message of the Church is the same wherever the faithful are.

It is true that some have more understanding than others of the basic idea, and can articulate it better, but the “faith is one and the same, [and] he who can say much about it does not add to it, nor does he who can say little diminish it.”

He addresses the mistaken view of the Gnostics who “imagine another God above [what they call] the Demiurge and Maker and Nourisher of this universe, as if he were not enough for us.” What the Gnostics called the Demiurge was the Old Testament Creator-God depicted in Genesis. They thought that the narrative of God that in so many ways personifies or “humanizes” him could never really be the eternal and fathomless deity they imagined God to be. But Irenaeus thinks they just don’t get the complex truth of the Old Testament narrative.

“[I]t consists in working out the things that have been said in parables, and building them into the foundation of the faith: in expounding the activity and dispensation of God for the sake of mankind; in showing clearly how God was long-suffering over the apostasy of the angels who transgressed, and over the disobedience of men; in declaring why one and the same God made some things subject to time, others eternal, some heavenly, and some earthly; in understanding why God, being invisible, appeared to the prophets, not in one form, but differently to different ones; in showing why there were a number of covenants with mankind, and in teaching what is the character of each of the covenants; in searching out why God shut up all in disobedience that he might have mercy on all; in giving thanks that the Word of God was made flesh, and suffered; in declaring why the coming of the Son of God [was] at the last times, that is, the Beginning was made manifest at the end; in unfolding what is found in the prophets about the end and the things to come; in not being silent that God has made the despaired-of Gentiles fellow heirs and of the same body and partners with the saints . . .”

He ends the section with discussion of terms that modern people are completely ignorant of – I was at least. Aeons and Pleroma. Gnostics believed that Aeons [30 of them] were emanations from the Pleroma, which is the fullness of the highest God. Irenaeus’ goal in most of his writings was to refute the claims of the Gnostics, so there will be a lot of very detailed discussion of their ideas, most of which I have only the lamest understanding of. I am hoping I will not have to go too deeply into these details. I am just looking forward to his explanation of the apostolic message that he embraced.