Interview 4: Christopher Ash on the Psalms, Part 1

In this episode, Tony interviews our writer-in-residence, Christopher Ash, on his new 4 volume commentary on the Psalms. Christopher shares how he came to write the commentary, the importance of the psalms, and why he thinks that the Psalms are inseparable from Christ.

This is part 1 of the interview and part 2 will be released next week.

The Commentary is available to order now:
The Psalms: A Christ-Centred Commentary (Crossway, 2024) https://www.crossway.org/books/the-psalms-hcj-5/

Editing by Tyndale House. 
Music: Acoustic Happy Background used via Adobe Stock with a standard license.

Transcript

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Hello

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and welcome to another episode of the Tyndale House podcast.

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Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Christopher Ash,

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who is Writer in Residence here at Tyndale House, and has been hanging

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around the library for a few years now as Writer in Residence.

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What does that actually mean, Christopher?

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It's a wonderful job.

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I have no duties, and it means I have a desk,

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and I have a base to work and some lovely people to get to know.

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Wonderful.

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Well, we very much appreciate you and Carolyn

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and your your pastoral care of, staff and readers alike.

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It's great having you around, but we are talking today

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not because you're a writer in residence, but because of these monster volumes,

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which a full volume commentary on the Psalms,

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which I guess took a couple of days to write.

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Yeah, two or three. Yeah. And so

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tell us about the gestation process of these.

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How long have you been working on them? Why?

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Why did you even set about such a monstrous task?

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It's a really good question.

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There's a lot of Psalms and a lot of words in the commentary.

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How many? About three quarters of a million.

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That's a lot of … Whether they're good, who knows?

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Time will tell.

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I've had a gradually growing love affair with the Psalms.

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It started in London teaching Old Testament poetry

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and particularly Psalms to students on the Cornhill Training Course.

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And then just gradually worrying away at them and trying to understand

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them better, writing one or two lighter, shorter books on the Psalms.

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And then I suggested to Crossway, the American publisher,

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maybe having a go at a longer one.

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And Justin Taylor, who's their

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head of their book division, said two or three volumes.

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I said, well, maybe three, and then it became four.

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So why did it become four?

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Because you needed so much in the introduction? No.

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Yes. Yes, it became four because the suggestion was made that

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the introductory volume might be a…  it was going to be a standalone volume.

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and then the thought was that it might be better if it was part of the set.

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Yeah. Great.

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It is a fabulous set.

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It’s beautifully produced.

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I have to confess, I have not read it all yet.

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That's very disappointing.

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I know, I know,

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because it was the beginning of this week that you lent these to me.

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Yes, you've had all these, you know, hours.

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I know, but there we are.

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You can't get the staff these days.

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But what I have read in volume one

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is wonderful, as I expected.

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I've read your previous books on Psalms, or at least some of them.

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And the two ‘Teaching the Psalms’ volumes and ‘Psalms for You’.

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They're great.

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And so I came to this

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expecting further, deeper riches.

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And that's exactly what you're getting with this.

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It's just wonderful.

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So it's a delight to see them out, having

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talked to you at several points on the last part of the journey,

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as you've been getting them, getting them done and off.

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So, yeah, it's great.

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What you're very kind, Tony.

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And certainly Crossway have produced them beautifully.

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They are. They’re, they are beautiful.

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They will look good on on any sets of shelves.

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They will, even if they stay on the shelves.

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Whether that be rather more useful on the desks.

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But have

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they take up a lot of room so they can't be on the desk all the time.

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Now, you argue in here that Psalms are essential

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for Christians and for the Church,

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and that Christ is central to the Psalms.

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And that seems to make this approach,

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not unique but quite distinctive, because it seems to me

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there are lot of commentaries on the Psalms that don't

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see either of those things in those terms.

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Do you want to unpack those two questions for us, and why…

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The first conviction of the importance of the Psalms

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is, and I haven't spent very much time on that, but

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in terms of Christian history, it's pretty mainstream that the Psalms

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should be part of our corporate worship, our corporate lives of prayer and praise.

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And, I suppose the basis is Ephesians 5 and Colossians

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3, where Paul speaks of, just in passing really almost, of

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Christian churches singing

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psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, which primarily

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I think means Psalms.

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And he just assumes that churches will do that.

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And the associations in both Ephesians in Colossians with the church,

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with the filling of the Spirit, with life in Christ, with godliness,

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suggest that there’s great blessing in that

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and so I’m one of probably a number of voices saying,

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let's try and get the Psalms back into our church life.

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So that's the first part of it.

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The argument that the Psalms are inseparable from Christ

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is… I mean, I sometimes slightly mischievously say that I've been trying

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to reconnect with the first three quarters of Christian history.

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That's a little bit mischievous, but there's something in that

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because it's very striking.

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And one of the things I most enjoyed writing

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in volume one was,

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rather shallow, but a sort of attempt

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at an overview of how the Psalms have been read

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in Christian history.

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And it's just very striking.

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I mean, obviously it's a huge, you know, century after century,

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all sorts of riches and nuances and so on.

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But it's very striking that when you read the patristic writers

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and one or two of the medieval, I think probably most of the medieval writers,

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and then the Renaissance, the Reformation writers –

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Christ is everywhere really.

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Right.

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I mean, there are differences in the ways in which

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they relate the Psalms to Christ, but

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they read the Psalms as Christian

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literature unashamedly, really.

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It's very striking and so I've, what I've tried to do,

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I've tried to argue it from the Psalter

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and from the New Testament quotations and echoes.

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Yes. Right.

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We'll come back to that

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in a second, but since you've commented on the historical side

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and the way the Psalms have been read down through history, what went wrong?

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Why… you said the first three quarters of Christian history,

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why did the Psalms become maybe marginalized, but,

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well, yeah, marginalized in some sense,

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relativised perhaps in a sense? Yes.

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Yeah, why did we take a wrong turn?

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I suppose there are two questions.

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One is why are Psalms in many of our churches

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preached occasionally, but not much else?

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They're not sung or said much.

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Right.

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And that's … I'm not quite sure why that is, though

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I suspect that a culture of entertainment has something to do with it, but

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we find stylistically that Psalms

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don't quite fit with the way we like to sing.

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And I'm not competent, really, to judge that. Interesting.

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But there's something in that, I suspect.

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Do you know when that shift happened in most …?

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No, I don’t.

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But it's interesting that in … I mean, I was brought up in Anglican

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churches, and, I mean, when I was an undergraduate here in Cambridge

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at the Round Church, we sang Psalms, we chanted Psalms.

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We didn't always do it very well,

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but that was just the normal thing in Anglican churches that you did.

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Yeah.

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So I guess it's in the last half century that it's

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drifted out of favour, certainly in evangelical or Reformed.

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Right. Anglican churches.

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Yeah. Interesting.

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Yeah, I grew up

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in a free church background, and they were not a big part of it at all.

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I don't I don't ever remember us … we certainly never singing Psalms.

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That was a very Anglican thing to do in our heads, I think.

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So yeah, that's interesting.

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I don't know why.

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I don't know why, the reason for that.

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But the reason for Christ becoming marginal

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in our reading of the Psalms is, I think, very interesting,

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because there has been very considerable eclipse, really, of Christ.

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You pick a scholarly commentary off the shelves,

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or even a popular commentary in the last few decades, and

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Christ may not be there at all.

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Or Christ may be a sort of footnote or an end note:

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Oh, by the way, the New Testament echoes some of that somehow.

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But it would be an overstatement to say that Christ was central

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to the way the Psalms, presented.

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And I think that goes back to

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the so-called enlightenment.

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The movement, again, away from trusting the superscription

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was very important, I think, in that.

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Right.

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Why do you think, sorry, why do you think the superscriptions

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made a difference to the way that we see them as Christ centred?

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Yes. I think because they … the superscript … and this has come back –

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I mean, it's a big subject of scholarly study in recent decades,

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and the recognition that the Psalter is intentionally redacted,

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it's put together in purposeful ways, even if we can't be sure about everything.

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But there are pretty clear indications

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of purpose in the shape of the Psalter.

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And one of the

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takeaways from that has been the sense

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that the Psalter in itself is forward facing.

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There's something about an expectation of …

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that Psalm 2 will be fulfilled.

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Even though at the end of the compilation of the Psalter, where

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in or after the exile, there's no king,

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there's no sign of Psalm 2 being fulfilled, but there’s

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a number of indications in the Psalter that there's that expectation.

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But if you if you dismiss, as Gunkel

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did, the superscriptions as

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not giving historical information,

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and therefore not relevant, Right.

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then you lose all that. Yeah.

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That's interesting.

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Do you think that

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… Or, yeah, how would you respond to the charge

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that you see the Psalms as forward looking

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because you are coming to it wanting to see Christ there?

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Yes, yes.

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And that if you weren't, you wouldn't see it as forward looking.

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How would you respond… And that you’re reading Christ into the Psalms? Yes.

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What I've tried to do in the first volume is a sort of

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hermeneutical pincer movement, really, to start with the Psalter and see what

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indications might there be in the Psalter that cry out for completion.

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And the biggest is the King. Yeah, right.

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The prevalence of the king, of David at the head of nearly half the Psalms,

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the 13 historical superscriptions

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about the life of David; the positioning of David: Psalm 2,

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and then Psalm 72 and Psalm 89, you know, very significant placings.

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And the two big ‘Of David’ collections in books five.

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Yeah. Very interesting.

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You know, why do you … why, after the exile, do you put these ‘Of

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David’ collections in Book 5: 108,

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9, 10, and then 138 to 145.

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Because it does look like Book five is post-exilic in its framing.

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Yes, it rather suggests that.

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I mean Psalm 137 would suggest that about Babylon.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, so then then your conviction is that

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the Psalms that are genuinely

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by David, hence the [Hebrew] *ledavid* Yes.

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superscription.

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They've been put into that collection,

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but you would reject the idea that they are post-exilic Psalms

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that have been … had an ‘of David’

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superscription because … in order to evoke David in some way.

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Yes, yes.

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Which is very popular, isn't it, in scholarly circles.

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You know, the idea that the superscriptions are,

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well, that ‘of David’, for example, is an indication of authorship

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and reliable is a very marginal position.

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I've tried to argue it in an appendix, and it was just

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interesting studying for that

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the superscription were accepted

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and then they were rejected,

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and one of the reasons they were rejected is that it was said

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that the content of the Psalms didn't relate to the superscription.

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Right.

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And then in more recent years, people have said,

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Yeah, well, they're not historical, but there's some very significant links

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between them.

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At which point you're thinking,

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yeah, well, maybe, maybe there's a reason for that.

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And so it's sort of … it hasn't come full circle, Right.

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Yeah.

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but I would be one of those rather

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rare voices arguing that maybe it should.

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Right.

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And they’d be questioning the superscription on the basis

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that we can't work out how the Psalm works in relation to David,

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actually is more about our inability to read the Psalm properly

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rather than about the superscription, and … Yes, yes.

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And you're arguing that

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that seeing them as Christ centred actually helps in that process.

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Yes. If I understand correctly.

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Yes, yes, yes.

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I'm arguing that seeing – well, particularly seeing David as a foreshadowing of

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the greater King,

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brings Psalms into focus, which otherwise would be

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puzzling.

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Yeah, right.

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So can you give us an example of that?

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Well, I suppose, Psalm 22 would be an example, Right.

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where ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ – this,

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this tremendous suffering that

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David speaks of experiencing.

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And then two thirds of the way through the Psalm,

00:14:49:09 - 00:14:52:17
he says, ‘I’m going to proclaim your name to my brothers.

00:14:52:17 - 00:14:56:06
I’m going to … In the great congregation I'm going to sing your praises.’

00:14:56:23 - 00:14:59:20
And you're thinking, so where did that come from?

00:14:59:20 - 00:15:00:13
And you can say, well,

00:15:00:13 - 00:15:03:16
maybe there was some experience in David's life of suffering,

00:15:03:16 - 00:15:07:12
and then there was some vindication, some victory.

00:15:08:05 - 00:15:12:19
But it feels pretty big.

00:15:13:17 - 00:15:15:06
Yeah. Right.

00:15:15:06 - 00:15:19:06
And you when the New Testament quotes … well Jesus quotes,

00:15:19:24 - 00:15:22:21
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ most famously,

00:15:22:21 - 00:15:26:17
and then when the Letter to the Hebrews quotes, ‘I’m going to proclaim

00:15:26:17 - 00:15:31:15
your name amongst my brothers,’ you're thinking, well, maybe they were right.

00:15:31:15 - 00:15:34:15
Maybe, maybe there's something there that Yes

00:15:34:18 - 00:15:38:22
makes sense, that takes David's experience

00:15:39:01 - 00:15:42:01
and sees it as real,

00:15:42:08 - 00:15:45:08
but a foreshadowing of something bigger.

00:15:45:16 - 00:15:46:00
Yeah.

00:15:47:22 - 00:15:48:05
Okay.

00:15:48:05 - 00:15:50:03
That's, that's great.

00:15:50:03 - 00:15:54:04
You have a number of core convictions about how

00:15:55:14 - 00:15:59:17
the Psalms relate to Christ that are related to what you've just been saying.

00:16:00:21 - 00:16:03:03
What, what are those convictions

00:16:03:03 - 00:16:06:03
and why do you hold them so strongly?

00:16:06:12 - 00:16:09:12
Yes, yes.

00:16:09:13 - 00:16:13:22
I guess the most important test from my point of view was trying to do

00:16:13:22 - 00:16:17:02
as carefully study as I could, not only of the quotations

00:16:17:02 - 00:16:21:21
in the New Testament, but of clear or reasonably clear echoes.

00:16:22:08 - 00:16:23:05
And that's obviously

00:16:23:05 - 00:16:26:07
something where people can argue about whether something is an echo or not.

00:16:26:07 - 00:16:29:22
But nonetheless, there's a fair bit of echoing going on.

00:16:29:23 - 00:16:32:06
Right. Some very clear.

00:16:32:06 - 00:16:35:06
And you're using the word echo rather than allusions there

00:16:35:13 - 00:16:38:01
because it's … \ Yes, I'm using echo because

00:16:41:02 - 00:16:42:11
I suppose

00:16:42:11 - 00:16:46:06
I'm not necessarily talking about a conscious Right.

00:16:46:06 - 00:16:49:06
allusion by the author.

00:16:49:21 - 00:16:52:24
It may or may not have been, but … By the human author.

00:16:53:03 - 00:16:56:03
By the human author. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

00:16:56:10 - 00:17:00:07
Because I think human authorial intent is often a good principle,

00:17:00:07 - 00:17:05:02
but it has difficulties if, as Peter suggested … Well, Peter

00:17:05:02 - 00:17:12:04
teaches in 1 Peter 1, the prophets who are speaking by the Spirit of Christ,

00:17:12:04 - 00:17:15:10
and they were searching and inquiring, and there was something going on

00:17:15:10 - 00:17:17:10
that was bigger than what they were Yes.

00:17:17:10 - 00:17:19:21
perhaps entirely consciously saying. Yeah.

00:17:19:21 - 00:17:22:20
So they write more than they they can know in some sense.

00:17:22:20 - 00:17:24:02
Yes, yes.

00:17:24:02 - 00:17:26:03
It is undoubtedly true of prophecies. Yeah.

00:17:26:03 - 00:17:29:08
I mean even, you know, Ciaphas in John 11 Yeah.

00:17:29:16 - 00:17:33:03
As you can ask, what's his intention in prophesying ‘It's better

00:17:33:03 - 00:17:34:17
for one man to die for the people’?

00:17:34:17 - 00:17:38:19
Answer: his conscious intention is pretty obviously straightforwardly political.

00:17:39:06 - 00:17:41:05
But he spoke better than he knew. Yes.

00:17:41:05 - 00:17:42:11
Yeah, absolutely.

00:17:42:11 - 00:17:44:11
So there … You see there are,

00:17:44:11 - 00:17:46:19
there are echoes … Sorry, I cut across what you were saying.

00:17:46:19 - 00:17:50:08
Yes. And, and, and, and what I tried to do was I tried to

00:17:51:22 - 00:17:53:14
sort of collect together the echoes

00:17:53:14 - 00:17:57:24
and then tried to think, how do these … how can you classify them?

00:17:57:24 - 00:18:00:24
How can you sort of fit them together theologically?

00:18:01:03 - 00:18:04:03
And it was really interesting because

00:18:04:14 - 00:18:07:20
huge numbers related to the Lord

00:18:07:20 - 00:18:11:20
Jesus Christ in his incarnation, in his human

00:18:12:22 - 00:18:15:18
nature, in his sufferings,

00:18:15:18 - 00:18:19:02
as the King who prayed for an expected

00:18:19:02 - 00:18:22:02
vindication, as the teacher

00:18:22:22 - 00:18:26:17
teaching his people – the covenant head of them, you know, the covenant King

00:18:26:17 - 00:18:32:13
teaching his people – all sorts of things which which related to Christ.

00:18:32:21 - 00:18:35:14
But the really interesting thing was

00:18:35:14 - 00:18:38:13
that you also got this sort of overflow

00:18:38:13 - 00:18:41:05
again and again where … So,

00:18:41:05 - 00:18:44:05
the sufferings in the Psalms

00:18:45:06 - 00:18:47:04
are understood by the New Testament

00:18:47:04 - 00:18:50:04
as fulfilled in the sufferings of Christ,

00:18:51:01 - 00:18:54:19
but they're also understood as overflowing to the sufferings of the Church.

00:18:54:19 - 00:18:59:01
So Psalm 44, we’re as, you know, sheep to the slaughter and so on, Romans

00:18:59:01 - 00:19:03:07
8 says, that’s, that's what it is to be the Church of Christ.

00:19:04:01 - 00:19:08:06
And I found myself profoundly agreeing with … I mean, Augustine

00:19:08:06 - 00:19:12:10
makes such a big deal of Acts 9: ‘Saul,

00:19:12:10 - 00:19:16:01
Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ Right.

00:19:16:10 - 00:19:22:05
And the other New Testament teachings about the Church as the body of Christ.

00:19:22:05 - 00:19:26:08
And so he had this big thing of the whole Christ, head and members.

00:19:26:08 - 00:19:27:03
Yeah, right.

00:19:27:03 - 00:19:29:22
And, which is not Augustine, it's the New Testament, but

00:19:31:10 - 00:19:32:24
he made it … He talked about it quite strongly.

00:19:32:24 - 00:19:34:24
He talked about it quite a bit. Yeah.

00:19:34:24 - 00:19:38:23
And I found myself thinking, Yes, I think, I think that's profoundly right.

00:19:39:01 - 00:19:44:02
The, the, the Psalms are, are saying, yes, this is

00:19:45:13 - 00:19:50:11
Christ's songbook, but it's the songbook of all

00:19:50:11 - 00:19:54:12
who are in Christ, and therefore it is our songbook Right.

00:19:54:12 - 00:19:57:03
as we are in Christ.

00:19:57:03 - 00:19:59:23
So we'll come back to this

00:19:59:23 - 00:20:03:09
a little bit later in a bit more detail,

00:20:03:09 - 00:20:07:00
but it's one of the things we do with the Psalms in the modern world

00:20:07:00 - 00:20:09:06
is that we apply them very individualistically.

00:20:09:06 - 00:20:13:07
We want to see, where am I, you know, how does this speak to me? Yes.

00:20:13:19 - 00:20:16:07
So your approach says

00:20:16:07 - 00:20:20:07
that we see us in the Psalms because we are in Christ.

00:20:20:20 - 00:20:23:19
Yes it is really. Yes, yes, yes.

00:20:23:19 - 00:20:26:12
And, it helps to play

00:20:26:12 - 00:20:26:17
I suppose what I'm what I'm saying is that I'm trying to, what I'm trying to argue here is something which I think is profoundly old.

00:20:26:17 - 00:20:30:07
against our Western individualism because we see ourselves

00:20:30:07 - 00:20:34:24
as part of the Church of Christ, not just today, but down the centuries.

00:20:34:24 - 00:20:35:15
Yeah, right.

00:20:35:15 - 00:20:39:11
Which has a profound effect on the way we read them and the way

00:20:39:11 - 00:20:45:03
we understand ourselves as a part of Christ's Church.

00:20:45:12 - 00:20:47:13
Yeah. So yes, there is that.

00:20:47:13 - 00:20:50:13
And of course, that was one of the things with the so-called Enlightenment,

00:20:50:14 - 00:20:53:03
this move towards individualism. Right.

00:20:53:03 - 00:20:58:03
And reading the Psalms in that sense of being together in

00:20:58:11 - 00:21:02:02
Christ does play against that in ways that, of course,

00:21:02:20 - 00:21:05:20
much of the world finds much easier to understand Yeah.

00:21:05:20 - 00:21:07:06
than a Western a like me.

00:21:07:06 - 00:21:09:04
Yeah. Well, that's so true.

00:21:10:13 - 00:21:13:10
Yeah.

00:21:13:10 - 00:21:14:22
To what extent

00:21:14:22 - 00:21:18:20
is it possible, then, for somebody to read the Psalms

00:21:18:20 - 00:21:23:07
and really understand them without a relation to Christ?

00:21:23:15 - 00:21:27:21
I mean, is it possible or can they only be understood in relation to Jesus?

00:21:28:09 - 00:21:30:22
I guess I'm arguing that

00:21:30:22 - 00:21:34:11
it seems to me that the New Testament is saying

00:21:34:11 - 00:21:37:11
we need to read them in Christ.

00:21:38:05 - 00:21:42:15
Of course we can, we can read them, but we have to be quite selective.

00:21:42:16 - 00:21:43:12
That's the problem.

00:21:43:12 - 00:21:47:18
If we just read them individually, we do have to pick and choose.

00:21:47:18 - 00:21:49:13
So Yeah.

00:21:49:13 - 00:21:53:05
what I sometimes call a calendar verse approach.

00:21:53:05 - 00:21:53:23
Right.

00:21:53:23 - 00:21:57:17
And some of my students at the Cornhill Training Course one year produced

00:21:57:17 - 00:22:01:24
a sort of spoof devotional calendar which they gave me,

00:22:01:24 - 00:22:05:12
which had inappropriate verses for January, February, March,

00:22:05:21 - 00:22:08:19
you know, from the Psalms, just to illustrate

00:22:08:19 - 00:22:12:06
the point that we do have to be selective if it's just going to take to me.

00:22:12:09 - 00:22:13:17
Yeah, yeah.

00:22:13:17 - 00:22:17:00
But I suppose most of us, when we first come

00:22:17:00 - 00:22:20:01
to faith in Christ, sort of do that a bit don't we?

00:22:20:01 - 00:22:21:17
We begin reading the Psalms

00:22:21:17 - 00:22:25:06
and we think, oh yes, yes, I can see that this makes sense for me.

00:22:25:18 - 00:22:28:21
And we leave other things on the side of the plate, as it were.

00:22:28:21 - 00:22:34:21
And that's … I think I'm saying that let's try and get further than that Right.

00:22:34:21 - 00:22:37:07
rather than completely rubbish that.

00:22:37:07 - 00:22:38:14
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

00:22:38:14 - 00:22:39:22
That’s, that, that's helpful.

00:22:41:19 - 00:22:44:19
So the …

00:22:45:09 - 00:22:47:09
you … a lot of this, then, is coming from

00:22:47:09 - 00:22:50:12
you're … seeing how the New Testament sees the Psalms.

00:22:50:15 - 00:22:54:20
And, so has there been a hermeneutical shift then between how,

00:22:54:20 - 00:22:58:00
how the songs would have been seen in the Old Covenant world,

00:22:58:08 - 00:23:00:18
how they're seen by the New Testament writers?

00:23:00:18 - 00:23:04:08
And then again, is there another hermeneutical shift to how we read them

00:23:04:17 - 00:23:05:19
today?

00:23:05:19 - 00:23:09:21
I guess I would be inclined to speak in terms of clarification.

00:23:09:22 - 00:23:10:11
Okay.

00:23:10:11 - 00:23:10:17
Yeah.

00:23:10:17 - 00:23:13:20
The, the Old Covenant understands that the King

00:23:13:20 - 00:23:16:20
is the covenant head of his people. Yeah.

00:23:16:21 - 00:23:19:05
And that's just

00:23:19:05 - 00:23:22:05
mainstream Old Covenant thinking.

00:23:22:11 - 00:23:23:12
But it’s forward looking.

00:23:23:12 - 00:23:28:06
But it's forward looking, and the searching and inquiring that goes

00:23:28:06 - 00:23:33:04
with the prophetic voices then, it sort of comes into focus in Christ.

00:23:33:04 - 00:23:33:24
Right.

00:23:33:24 - 00:23:37:06
As to what's happened since then,

00:23:37:06 - 00:23:40:18
I mean, that's a huge question.

00:23:40:18 - 00:23:42:10
Do you want to go into that a bit?

00:23:42:10 - 00:23:43:24
I mean, it's Oh go on.

00:23:43:24 - 00:23:48:18
it’s, it's very interesting in the, in the Patristic period … I remember

00:23:48:18 - 00:23:53:12
when I was taught Patristics in Oxford, I was taught there are two main strands.

00:23:53:12 - 00:23:57:06
There's the Alexandrian strand, which has wild and wacky

00:23:57:06 - 00:24:00:24
people like Clement of Alexandria with wild, uncontrolled allegorising.

00:24:01:12 - 00:24:01:22
Right.

00:24:01:22 - 00:24:05:23
And then there are the sensible people, the Antiochene

00:24:06:01 - 00:24:09:11
strand like Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia.

00:24:09:11 - 00:24:12:20
And they were the good guys because they read them sensibly.

00:24:13:11 - 00:24:16:15
And the more I read round it, the more I thought, actually, it's

00:24:16:15 - 00:24:19:24
not quite as simple as that, because the, the Antiochenes,

00:24:19:24 - 00:24:25:10
I mean, Theodore of Mopsuestia was condemned at an ecumenical council

00:24:25:10 - 00:24:28:23
in Constantinople, partly for his reading of the Psalms.

00:24:29:20 - 00:24:34:03
As Bruce Waltke comments in one of his books, It's, it’s, it's

00:24:34:09 - 00:24:37:10
unusual for people to be condemned by a church council

00:24:37:10 - 00:24:38:15
for their reading of the Psalms.

00:24:38:15 - 00:24:41:06
It’s quite sobering when you're writing commentaries to think

00:24:41:06 - 00:24:42:03
this might happen to you.

00:24:43:08 - 00:24:46:08
But the, the Antiochenes …

00:24:46:22 - 00:24:49:10
I think my Oxford teachers thought they were great

00:24:49:10 - 00:24:54:02
because they were, they were sort of more like post-Enlightenment people. 

00:24:54:09 - 00:24:57:17
C: And actually, when you read some of the so-called

00:24:57:17 - 00:25:00:17
Alexandrians,

00:25:01:05 - 00:25:04:05
actually they're not as wildly uncontrolled as they...

00:25:05:00 - 00:25:07:11
Well, well, they are sometimes.

00:25:07:11 - 00:25:10:11
But, but sometimes they're on to something

00:25:10:14 - 00:25:14:19
and sometimes they're more in tune with New Testament readings.

00:25:14:20 - 00:25:17:07
T: Right. But they don't fit our modern categories very easily.

00:25:17:07 - 00:25:19:18
C: They don't fit our modern categories. No.

00:25:19:18 - 00:25:20:13
T: Yeah. Okay.

00:25:20:13 - 00:25:24:15
C: No. So I suppose what I'm what I'm saying is that I'm trying to,

00:25:25:01 - 00:25:28:15
what I'm trying to argue here is something which I think is profoundly old.

00:25:29:05 - 00:25:30:11
We'll leave that conversation there.

00:25:30:11 - 00:25:33:23
And if you're happy, we'll have a second conversation

00:25:34:06 - 00:25:36:08
and take 1 or 2 of these things a little bit further.

00:25:36:08 - 00:25:38:22
But for now, Christopher, thank you very much. Thank you.