Joachim Jeremias

And there's some cultural things here that we need to be aware of in that sharing a table means fellowship.

The Lutheran theologian Joachim Jeremias in his book, New Testament Theology, The Proclamation of Jesus, says, quote, to invite a man to a meal was an honor.

It was an offer of peace, trust, brotherhood, and forgiveness.

In short, sharing a table meant sharing life.

They had a Semitic view.

It was very common, and you can see this in the very fine work of Mircea Aliada, Joachim Jeremias, Johannes Betz in our Sacramentum Mundi.

If you just look up the article on the Eucharist, you can see that very clearly.

that this was, you know, okay, yeah, this probably was what Jesus was thinking, that, you know, his words, his prophetic words as the Son of God and Messiah could move into the future, grab the, you know, take that body, hang from the cross, and take the blood dripping from his side, put it into the, hosting the cup of wine, and then, of course, to have that be the case, you know, with the prophetic words uttered by the priest, That collapses the time in anamnesis.

Jesus was very memorable.

I just taught this in class last week, that there was a scholar named Joachim Jeremias, a German scholar from about 100-some years ago, and he wanted to do a commentary on Matthew.

So he had an interesting idea.

He said Jesus didn't speak Greek.

So there's basically eight of these principles of historicity out there.

They were originally constructed by a Protestant named Joachim Jeremias.

They were immediately adopted by the Catholic Church.

I frankly think that the Catholic Church ought to put a statue up to Joachim Jeremias because He really defended historical exegesis against, you know, the fangs of Bultmann and the clutches of Bultmann.

Because, of course, Bultmann had really put this historicism and this really pronounced skepticism and exegetical skepticism into the whole atmosphere.

He was a brilliant guy.

He was trying to create a Greek Jesus and later on a Greek and German Jesus.

You know, a German Protestant guy, you know, but Jeremias, boom, he just comes on the scene and he makes the corrective.

It's implied.

Now, a Protestant biblical scholar named Joachim Jeremias, uh, speculates, and I think plausibly, that this is an evidence of the early church practice that was called the disciplina arcani, the discipline of the secret, whereby the Church withheld the truth of the sacraments from outsiders but spoke about it in a kind of veiled or mystical way that would have been intelligible to the true believers, to the initiates.

If you were in John's community and you read this text, you knew patently well what it referred to, right? Outsiders would read it and scratch their heads, and that is in fact what happened, and the Church received the Eucharist and the gospels describing it within an unbroken and consistent tradition of interpretation that is datable to the first century and confirmed in the second and the third and so forth of affirming the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Outside that Catholic tradition, I would contend that the Bible is a more or less unintelligible book, right, a- as a unity, a- and that the only way to read it coherently is to read within the context of the community for which and by which it was written.