Peter’s Mistake (2)
And it shall happen afterward: I will pour My spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your elders shall dream dreams, your young men see visions. And even upon male slaves and slavegirls in those days will I pour My Spirit. Joel 3:1-2 Robert Alter
All flesh – The Hebrew word bāśar seems to be straightforwardly translated “flesh” or “body” and metaphorically “mankind.” In 272 occurrences, one of these choices fits. But bāśar has another semantic realm. Used only 30 times, it means “publish, bear (good) tidings, preach, show forth.”[1] You might speculate about how these two realms are connected. What this means for our investigation is the bāśar in Joel (and in Acts) is undoubtedly the idea of mankind, but intertwined is the act of proclaiming. God isn’t pouring out the spirit without a purpose, and the purpose isn’t to make you or me feel good. The purpose is transitive. We are tasked with proclaiming. Therefore, prophecy, dreams, and visions follow. You can wallow in the spirit all you want, but until the experience moves you to publish good tidings, you haven’t fulfilled Joel’s prophecy.
And while we’re on the subject, remember that prophecy is not prediction. God doesn’t pour His spirit on you so that you can start proclaiming the future. You aren’t tasked with telling someone else what God wants them to do. The prophets were not fortunetellers. They published God’s concern, for good or evil, with striking intensity, no matter what the personal cost. Prophecy is sympathy for God proclaimed to men.
“To the prophets, the attributes of God were drives, challenges, commandments, rather than timeless notions detached from His Being. They did not offer an exposition of the nature of God, but rather an exposition of God’s insight into man and His concern for man.”[2]
When Joel proclaims that God will pour His spirit on all mankind, he’s stating that all mankind will gush with praise, proclaim the majesty and sovereignty of God, and overflow with the good tidings of His kingdom. God’s goodness will show up in dreams and visions across all the boundaries of human existence. In other words, there won’t be any rich or poor, slave or free, male or female distinctions when it comes to extolling the graciousness of God. If Peter believed that Joel’s prophecy applied, then we should have seen an open-arms welcome to all who responded to the proclaiming of the gospel of God. But even Peter failed. That’s why he had to be taught about food on the roof. Joel obliterates human borders.
And that’s why Joel’s prophecy cannot be about the Church, even the ideal Church. The Church, as Reuther notes, is rabidly antisemitic, and used its Roman power to attempt to eradicate the Jews:
Justinian added other specifically religious laws, such as that which ordered that the Jewish Passover is never to fall ahead of the Christian Easter, and a remarkable demand that the scrolls of the Law be read in the vernacular, rather than Hebrew, and without rabbinic commentary, in the synagogue service. This latter law was a direct effort to make the synagogue service itself open to Christian proselytizing by eliminating the rabbinic interpretation of the Scriptures and hence, presumably, making the reading of the Old Testament open to Christian exegesis. Since Christianity was convinced that its own Christological exegesis of the Jewish Bible was self-evident, it was clear to Justinian that once the “blindness” of the rabbinic commentary was removed, the Jews would be able to hear directly the Christian meaning of their own Scriptures.[3]
As Ruether remarks, Justinian’s edicts converted the “Christian theological view into public social policy.”
The Church never believed that the spirit was poured on all men. It believed (and still does) that the spirit is poured on all Christians, but not the Jews. Jews are “incomplete Christians.” If it didn’t believe this as a fundamental tenet of faith, then a thesis like, “Preparing the Church to Evangelize Jewish People” by Theresa T. Newell (for her doctorate of ministry) couldn’t be possible. But it is possible. It’s actual. Even worse, it’s accepted. But it’s not Joel (or Peter).
The Church deliberately sacrificed the Jews in order to promote its own human agenda. This was not God’s plan, as even a cursory reading of the Bible suggests. This was empire-building on behalf of men whose objective was to raise themselves through religious manipulation and personal vendetta. And these men are the saints of the faith. Joel’s prophecy doesn’t even come close. Lloyd Gaston said it best, “It may be that the Church will survive if we fail to deal adequately with that question [the question of the church’s anti-Semitic perspective], but more serious is the question whether the Church should survive. A Christian Church with an antisemitic New Testament is abominable, but a Christian Church without a New Testament is inconceivable.”[4]
Believe me, Joel doesn’t help.
Topical Index: antisemitism, Replacement theology, flesh, mankind, bāśar, Joel 3:1-2, Joel 2:28-29, Gaston, Reuther
[1] Oswalt, J. N. (1999). 291 בָּשַׂר. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 135). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol 2, p. 1.
[3] Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, p. 196.
[4] Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah, p. 15.
