Kerygmania: And the Lord said unto Moses... via angels!!1! (Hebrews 2:2 et al)
In one of those "I've read this more times than I can count but this is the first time it's hit me between the eyes" moments, I suddenly discover that Hebrews 2:2 says
And just before we put that down to the writer of the Hebrews being a bit iffy, we find Paul in Galatians 3:19 making it much clearer:
And if we want a third source, how about Stephen in Acts 7:53?
Hands up all those who would have asserted that the law was given by angels. Not me, anyway.
What on earth does this mean? Where did the idea spring from?
the message spoken through angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment
And just before we put that down to the writer of the Hebrews being a bit iffy, we find Paul in Galatians 3:19 making it much clearer:
The law was given through angels and entrusted to a mediator
And if we want a third source, how about Stephen in Acts 7:53?
you who have received the law that was given through angels but have not obeyed it
Hands up all those who would have asserted that the law was given by angels. Not me, anyway.
What on earth does this mean? Where did the idea spring from?
Comments
I thought of the Koran, too. God told Gabriel, who told Mohammed.
He points ou that in Deut 33:2 Moses declares that God came “with myriads of holy ones,” and in the LXX it says, “angels were with him at his right hand” (ἐκ δεξιῶν αὐτοῦ ἄγγελοι μετ᾿ αὐτοῦ) Lane references Ps 68:17 (not an obvious connection in all translations).
Lane states that before first century, the idea had grown that angels had played a mediatorial role in the transmission of the law, and he references examples in the Book of Jubilees (1:26; 2:1) which refers to the law being dictated to Moses by “the Angel of the Presence.”
Although, having said that, I note that later in this same chapter, the angel comes back a second time and goes out of his way to say "thus says the Lord...", which kind of goes against my theory. I guess that is why that scene has always struck me as curious: who's in charge here???
But I'm fairly sure it would be cheating to refer to the involvement of the preincarnate Christ in terms like "delivered by angels." That to me says "delivered by created beings," or what's the point of bringing up the matter at all? Seems a tad nitpicky to specify precisely which member of the Trinity actually handed off the Law.
Meanwhile after a bit of digging on my own account I found this. It notes the same text that @BroJames found, Dt 33:2, which does indeed give some precedent that I'd not seen, and adds this intriguing tidbit: That seems to be a deliberate echo of the narrative pattern in the OT accounts referring to Sinai - indeed, Revelation reads a lot more like an OT book than an NT one in many ways.
That connected, in my tortuous thinking, to a thought of mine on the Getting vestments wrong... thread in Ecclesiantics, that the "bzzt/clank" noise in movie jail scenes across the world is, as I can attest, far from literally accurate, but functions as an auditory signal to the viewer that "this is a prison".
I wonder if these NT references to angels are a biblical equivalent to that "bzzt/clank" noise? Not intended as a literalistic description of what exactly is going on every time, but a sort of "hey, we're talking old covenant revelation here" signal? That seems to be not too far from what Bentley Hart is saying.
Thx.
*(? I never remember which term applies when.)
**Any theories and/or known evidence that the Hebrews influenced their captor cultures, and that the influence stayed?
***I'm kindly leaving out references to "Stargate", "Battlestar Galactica", etc.
This is going way over my head.
Could it be that the OT references to angels such as Dt 33:2 reflected the actual, prevailing cosmology of the time, but that when the NT refers back to them (as in the references I cited in my OP) the writers are not necessarily subscribing to the cosmology they refer to but making a sort of 'meta' allusion to it? Like if we talked in general speech about somebody about 'going back to his old demons' without necessarily meaning actual demons?