John 10:34-35
34 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? 35 If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;
An allusion to a rabbinical interpretation of Psalm 82, especially vv. 6-7 — BP
Bro Ken Gilmore writes:
Given that the polytheistic background of Psalm 82 is — outside the world of confessional/conservative scholarship — fairly well accepted, we need to look very carefully at John 10 to see what is actually intended. [Compare] the usual fundamentalist attempt to prove Adam and Eve were the first human beings ever to walk the earth by appealing to Mark 10:6/Matthew 19:4 when the context isn't anthropology but divorce. We can't for one moment forget that Jesus came from a Second Temple background and his exegetical habits were not standard historical-grammatical. Hossfeld and Zenger are arguably on the right track here:
"This Johannine way of dealing with the literal sense of a biblical text, which seems unusual from a present–day perspective, can in no way be evaluated as if John here intended to give an authoritative interpretation of Psalm 82. In our opinion that is absolutely never the case when a text of Israel’s “scripture” is quoted in the NT; “scripture” here has the function of legitimating and explicating Johannine Christology" [1]
Context again is important. John 10:31-38 isn't an argument about polytheism (or a cryptic denial-in-advance of contemporary understanding of Psalm 82). Jesus is responding to accusations of blasphemy, and is using the standard second temple interpretation of Psalm 82 against the Jews to confound them. This does not mean Jesus believed the 'gods' in Psalm 82 are human (they most certainly are not!) but is using their interpretation against them. Thom Stark, while arguing against fundamentalist abuse of this passage as a proof-text for inerrancy nonetheless also shows that Jesus' citation of the passage was for rhetorical advantage:
The standard interpretation of that passage in Jesus’ day was that the ones who are called “gods” are the Israelites at Sinai. Jesus assumes this interpretation when he says, “those to whom the word of God came.” In other words, when Israel was given the law at Sinai, according to this interpretation of the psalm, they were called “gods.” This meant either that they were God’s representatives on earth, or that they were rendered immortal at that time, until they later sinned again (as some Rabbis concluded). Regardless, in order to defend his application of the term “son of God” to himself, Jesus appeals to the fact that Israelites are all called “gods” at Sinai. What Jesus is doing is using his opponents’ own scriptures against them." [2]
Looking again at Psalm 82, any attempt to read the 'gods' as human figures is impossible to sustain, as v6 notes:
- I say, “You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.”
The key passage here is "you shall die like mortals". If this was referring to humans, then it would be meaningless. Telling humans you will die like mortals is pointless as humans are mortals. This condemnation has meaning only if the gods really are divine beings, and are being sentences to die like mortals.
- Disagreeing with this: It is most certainly not "meaningless" if read as referring, with bitterness and irony, to humans: paraphrasing, sure, you're gods, you mortals, but you'll die like any mere king, like the mortals you are. We can't be dogmatic about the original intent of the psalm, or of its appropriation of Canaanite mythology, but the Rabbinical interpretation that Jesus alludes to (whether or not he was agreeing with it) is not to be lightly dismissed. —BP
References
1. Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger, Psalms 2: A Commentary on Psalms 51-100, ed. Klaus Baltzer, trans. Linda M. Maloney, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 337.
2. Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God, (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2011), 51-52
