From Bro. George Booker Dear Brethren Peter and John,
I agree wholeheartedly with Bro. Barling’s statement, which Bro. Bromet questions in his letter (Them Tidings, Sept. 2015, p. 420). In the filler Bro. Barling quotes John 16:32: “I am not alone, because the Father is with me”. Other passages also help to explain and mitigate what appears to be the temporary feeling of abandonment which our Lord experienced, when he cried, “My God… why have you forsaken me?” from the cross (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34; Luke 24:44, citing Psa 22:1).
In addition to John 16:32, which Bro. Barling quoted, a long list of other such mitigating passages also point in the same direction, such as vs 24 from the same Psalm 22, presumably also quoted by Jesus on the cross: “For he [the LORD] has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from but has listened to his cry for help.” This suggests that Jesus’ “Why have you forsaken me?” was a cry for help, which the Father heard.
A whole group of other Messianic psalms suggest our Lord’s temporary fear or doubt. As we know, these are very human emotions, common to all of us. But whatever reservations Jesus felt were then answered by his own renewal of faith and trust in his heavenly Father. These include the following:
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” (Psa 42:5,6).
“Do not forsake me when my strength is gone. For my enemies speak against me; those who wait to kill me conspire together. They say, ‘God has forsaken him; pursue him and seize him, for no one will rescue him.’ Be not far from me, O God; come quickly, O my God, to help me” (Psa 71:9-12). These verses actually suggest another possibility: that Jesus’ “My God…” cry was, to some extent, referring to the taunts of his enemies.
“Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence… My heart was grieved and my spirit embittered… Yet… you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory” (Psa 73:13,21,23,24).
“Unless the LORD had given me help, I would soon have dwelt in the silence of death. When I said, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your love, O LORD, supported me. When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul” (Psa 74:17-19).
Bro. Bromet refers to the “seemingly disturbing utterance” of Jesus on the cross (“My God, why have your forsaken me?”). But when I consider what it must have meant for Jesus to be a man, born of a woman, and thus destined by his very nature to be tried in all matters like we are, then I do not find such a cry disturbing at all; I find it reassuring. Jesus’ words give voice to our own fears and doubts, and help us to see the man in Gethsemane, and on the cross, as our Savior and our Redeemer, for he has experienced our weaknesses too.
Did God truly “forsake” His Son? Or does Jesus’ perfectly understandable feeling of abandonment, expressed at that moment, explain the words? If it was the latter, then we have the very best example in his words and actions for how we ought to deal with our own similar feelings: by resorting to the Word of God and its assurances, and by reminding ourselves of how our heavenly Father has cared for us in the past.
Is a brief or momentary fear a sin? How can it be? If we see even the slightest hesitation or wavering in Jesus’ purpose and faith as a sin, — and try to explain it away by looking for dubious translations or alternative readings — then I believe we are on the way to creating in our minds a would-be Savior who is much less man and more “Angel” or “God”, and that is simply wrong. That Jesus felt such fears is proof that he was “tempted in every way, just as we are”; that he did not succumb to such fears, but overcame them by a continuing exercise of faith, is proof that he “was without sin” (Heb 4:15).
Bro. Bromet offers, as an absolute statement, that Jesus really said, “Why have you spared me?”, and he cites as his only authority the Aramaic English New Testament. He then says — another absolute statement — that the AENT is “a translation of the oldest New Testament ever discovered, the Khabouris Codex written entirely in Aramaic”. This is simply wrong for several reasons, as a quick search of the writings of such eminent New Testament scholars as F.F. Bruce and Bruce Metzger will confirm.
F.F. Bruce writes:
“Because the Syriac Bible is written in a variant dialect of the language that Jesus spoke, extreme views are sometimes expressed about the forms in which his sayings appear in the Syriac Gospels, as though his actual words in the language in which they were uttered might be found there. The ordinary reader, for example, may readily infer from the writings of Mr. George Lamsa [an early translator of the Aramaic Gospels] that the Peshitta Gospels preserve the very words of our Lord better than the Greek Gospels do. This, of course, is quite wrong; the Peshitta New Testament is simply a translation of the Greek.”1
Bruce Metzger, probably the leading world authority on the New Testament text until his recent death, has stated that Lamsa’s claim to have translated the New Testament from original Aramaic manuscripts is a fraud, and that he would never produce the manuscripts from which he was supposedly translating. Metzger also points out that the whole of the New Testament could not have been written in Aramaic because the language would have been unknown to some of the ecclesias to whom Paul wrote, such as Rome or Corinth.2
Ironically, the recent (August 2015) special issue of The Tidings, entitled “God Has Spoken”, goes a long way toward refuting such claims about the Aramaic English New Testament and others. On page 354, Bro. Joe Hill lists a number of the most useful books on the textual criticism of the New Testament, including Bruce Metzger’s definitive work, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. The serious study of the history and background of the New Testament should start with such books as these. Again, on page 367, Bro. Steve Davis writes: “Aramaic is only used in about 250 verses in Daniel and Ezra.” And the “Further Reading” compiled on the last page of the special issue is another very useful resource.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One