Hello All,
First, THANK YOU VERY MUCH for the wonderful card and gifts you gave me last Friday! My Great Adventure bible is already in the case and we look forward to trying the milk and honey liqueur!
I would also like to sincerely thank you for all for the very inspiring discussions we have had during the past nine months! My job as facilitator was made very very easy by all of you (and by the Holy Spirit!)!
I will send you an email in early to mid-May to alert you to sign up for Revelation which will begin in September and will run for 10 weeks. Sign-up for Galatians which will run February-March 2020 will be in November/December 2019.
Here are answers to questions asked last week.
1. Please send a summary of how the apostles died (Jeff ran through this information quickly at the end of his talk) and how was this information known? The second source is not a Catholic one-but the bottom line is that there were historical sources and other books that were not chosen by the Church to be part of the scriptures in which this information appeared:
https://catholicism.org/how-did-the-apostles-die.html
2. Why the Ethiopian eunuch? Is this Ethiopia as we know it now? It was so far away from Israel.
The land of Ethiopia, was also called Cush.
In Biblical times Ethiopia encompassed the territory of what we now see as Ethiopia, as well as Sudan and Somalia. In the times of the Patriarchs there were historically recurring invasions between Egypt and Ethiopia (Cush).
During the early life of Moses there was an ongoing battle which was finally won by Moses as general of the Egyptian Army. The historian Josephus, quoting Herodotus, in his Antiquities Ch.10 tells us that Moses married Tharbis, the Daughter of the King of Ethiopia, and obtained a peaceful surrender.
There are a few major references to Ethiopia found in Isaiah, 18:1, 20:3-4, and 45:14.
The King of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, claimed that the royal ancestry of the Kings of Ethiopia went back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Certainly there was a Semitic strain in the royal line. There is an interesting quotation in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia that states,
"The Sabean inscriptions found in Abyssinia go back some 2,600 years and give a new value to the Bible references as well as to the constant claim of Josephus that the queen of Sheba (Saba), was a "Queen of Ethiopia."
In Ethiopia there were many Black Jews, who claimed the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as their God. I observed many Black Jews in Jerusalem in November 1966, all of them wearing the Kippah, and obviously Jewish in dress.
In the days of the early church, very shortly after Jesus had been raised from the dead and ascended to His father in Heaven, an important Ethiopian Government Official came to Jerusalem to Worship the God of Israel. The story of this event is recorded by Dr. Luke in Acts 8:26.
The strong possibility is that the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 is a castrated male and a slave, since these eunuchs were often made so in order to serve in royal courts without suspicion of sexual infelicities (Johnson, Acts, 155). Since the eunuch serves the Candace, a royal title of Ethiopian queens, not a personal name, he might have been made a eunuch, even as a boy, to serve in her court. Whether he was a slave cannot be determined definitively, but eunuchs often were, and it was not unusual for such a slave to have a high-ranking position in a royal court, such as the chief of the treasury (Page, Acts, 134).
As to why had he had "come to Jerusalem to worship" and was found "reading the prophet Isaiah" if he was not Jewish is a fascinating question, whether an actual historical event is described here or not (Johnson, Acts, 159), since the import of the scene is the opening up of the people of God to all, even those previously excluded. As noted above, Leviticus 21:20 and Deuteronomy 23:1 would exclude a eunuch from the people of God, even if he had been born a Jew and later enslaved and castrated. Yet, there are also passages in the Old Testament which look forward to a time of entry, both of Gentiles and eunuchs, into the people of God (Johnson, Acts, 159).
As Gary Gilbert points out, Psalm 68:31 looked forward to Ethiopia "reaching out to God" and more significantly for our purposes Isaiah 56:4-5 foresees a time when eunuchs would be included among the people of God (Gilbert, "Acts" in JANT, 216): "4 For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, 5 I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off" The whole point of this scene is that what was promised to the prophet Isaiah is now coming to pass in the life of the Church. A Gentile and a eunuch is welcomed among God's people.
The Spirit directed Philip to "Go over to this chariot and join it" (Acts 8:29). When Philip comes to the Ethiopian eunuch he "heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, 'Do you understand what you are reading?' He replied, 'How can I, unless someone guides me?' And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him" (Acts 8:30-31). The scene progresses quickly, Philip and the eunuch being guided by the Spirit and by Scripture. The significance of Isaiah 56:4-5 is confirmed when we learn that the eunuch is actually reading another passage from the prophet Isaiah.
Indeed, the eunuch is reading from Isaiah 53:7-8, the suffering servant song: "Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth" (Acts 8:32-33). The fact that the eunuch can read and that he has a copy of Isaiah might be seen as odd, but it does indicate both his wealth and his education as well as his interest. We are told, after all, that "he had come to Jerusalem to worship" (Acts 8:27), though he would not have been able to go to the Temple, at least not licitly, and we do not know of what his worship consisted or with whom, if anyone, he worshipped.
He has been studying Isaiah, however, because he wants to know the identity of the suffering servant in Isaiah 52-53, a question scholars, if not Christians, still debate today: "the eunuch asked Philip, 'About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?' Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus" (Acts 8:34-35). Isaiah 52-53 is the most significant prophetic passage which was applied to Jesus and his passion for the early Christians and it is the entrée for Philip's evangelization.
For the early Christians, only they had the key for proper exegesis of this passage, a belief maintained by other Jewish groups of the time and frankly by many religious groups throughout the ages. "As Jesus on the road to Emmaus opened the meaning of the Scripture concerning himself, so does Philip on the road to Gaza open the text of Isaiah to the Ethiopian, showing how it speaks of Jesus" (Johnson, Acts, 160). Clearly, Philip's exegesis has convinced the eunuch, for when they arrive at "some water" the eunuch wants to be baptized. He asks, "What is to prevent me from being baptized?" (Acts 8:36) and instead of answering, Philip simply baptizes him (Acts 8:36-38).[3] The scene is presented so matter-of-factly when it is in fact momentous, even earth-shattering, for the Christians. It is the first step to bringing Gentiles into the Church and into, as they understand it, the people of God. Ricard Dillon, in fact, understands this as an "account of the first Gentile conversion, told in Hellenistic circles and rival to the Cornelius story (chap. 10)" (Dillon, "Acts," in NJBC, 743). Dillon believes that Luke has left the story vague as to whether the eunuch is a Gentile to make certain not to distract from the Cornelius story which has Peter, not the evangelist Philip, at the heart of the Gentile conversion (Dillon, "Acts," in NJBC, 743).
The story also indicates how rapidly such missionary activity progresses, both in terms of witness, but also in terms of the actual performance of the ritual. We will see this rapidity in evangelization throughout the Gentile mission presented in Acts. Even allowing for literary license and historical imprecision, this must reflect the practice of the earliest Christians.
The passage ends as abruptly as it began and with a miracle performed directly by the Holy Spirit, who clearly has been directing all of the events up to this point (Dillon, "Acts," in NJBC, 743; Johnson, Acts, 151). "When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea" (Acts 8:39-40). The catechesis of the Ethiopian eunuch has ended as quickly as it began; Philip has been spirited away, literally, and finds himself miles away. The language of "caught up" reflects the tradition of heavenly assumptions found in the biblical tradition, such as Enoch in Genesis 5:24 and Elijah in 2 Kings 2:16. The eunuch, thank goodness, is not troubled by this absence and rejoices. Philip just continues his evangelization, he, too, untroubled by his heavenly journey. After all, in Acts the Holy Spirit takes all of the initiative and here the initiative is direct.
Finally, I would like to thank you for your prayers for my dear mother-in-law, Anne Smith. She was placed on in-home hospice yesterday. Please pray for the grace of a happy death for her.
Thank you and God bless,
Krishna Smith