11 Mar '07 03:29>1 edit
Originally posted by whodeyWell, this is what I get for wandering into NT territory... I belong as a midrashist of the Hebrew scriptures.
Thanks for the response. In all honesty it does not really suprise me that the word "logos" has so many various meanings. After all, if God were to be equated with its meaning, I would not expect a one word simplistic meaning. However, I am not sure how this changes what scripture says in regards to it being God's word. Do keep in mind that Christ went ar ...[text shortened]... stament verbatum. He did not ever seem to take liberties with the words of those scriptures.
Now, the author of the gospel of Matthew seems to me to be an excellent midrashist. Paul was a profound midrashist (he apparently could quote from the Hebrew texts, the Greek Septuagint, or the Aramaic Targums (aramaic translation of the Hebrew Scriptures), depending on which version gave strongest support to his argument.
We moderns seem to have lost this sense of reading into the text, of bringing our torah to the Torah—it is in that engagement that the true Torah is composed; the Torah that is not yet complete because our torahs are not yet complete.
In the NT, the word that most captures the essence of “Torah,” as I use it above, is logos. The written logos is not the whole logos. It is the logos that was manifest in Jesus, and is manifest in you. It is the logos that is continually manifest.
“That God should have clothed himself in our nature is a fact that should not seem strange or extravagant to minds that do not form too paltry an idea of reality...that God is all in all; that he clothes himself with the universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it.
“If then all is in him and he is in all, why blush for the faith that teaches us that one day God was born in the human condition, God who still today exists in humanity?
“Indeed, if the presence of God in us does not take the same form now as it did then, we can at least agree in recognizing that he is in us today no less than he was then.”
—St. Gregory of Nyssa
EDIT: Jesus did not always quote the Hebrew scriptures verbatim; he sometimes added his own "spin." Compare, for example, Deuteronomy 6:5 with Matthew 22:37 and Luke 10:27.