Here is a first draft of the Preface to my projected book on Isaiah.
Jerome, the fourth century biblical scholar who translated
the Hebrew Scriptures into Latin, described Isaiah as “not so much a prophet as
an evangelist”. He pointed out how that book contains “all the mysteries of the
faith”: the promise of Immanuel, the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, his suffering,
his death and his resurrection. He was probably using the word “evangelist” in
the sense of a Gospel writer. A modern scholar, J F A Sawyer, wrote an account
of the history of Christian interpretation of Isaiah with the title The Fifth Gospel (CUP 1986). This is quite an apt description. For
most of us today it is impossible to read some parts of Isaiah without hearing
the music of Handel’s Messiah in the
back of our minds. Christmas and Easter services are replete with quotations from
Isaiah, from “Unto us a child is born” to “He was despised and rejected of men”.
Most people with a Christian background find it easy to assume that the Book of
Isaiah is all about Jesus.
Isaiah gives us other favourite quotations too. The vision
of universal peace, when “they shall turn their swords into ploughshares and
their spears into pruning hooks” comes from Isaiah 2. “The wolf shall dwell
with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid … and a little child
shall lead them” is from chapter 12, and “the desert shall rejoice and blossom as
the rose” is from chapter 35. Even the phrase “a new heaven and a new earth”,
familiar from the Book of Revelation, is actually a quotation from Isaiah
65:17. The hymn “Holy, holy, holy” is inspired by Isaiah’s vision of God in chapter
6. When we call someone “a voice crying in the wilderness” we are using a
phrase from Mark's Gospel (1:3) that is first found in Isaiah 40:3. In fact,
it has been calculated that the New Testament either quotes or alludes
to the Book of Isaiah about four hundred times.
Christians down through the ages have seen the Book of
Isaiah as a rich storehouse of predictions of Jesus Christ. To us today, some
of their interpretations seem a bit far-fetched. Not only that, but today we are
not so convinced that we can “prove” that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the
Son of God by pointing out how he fulfilled prophecies in the Old Testament. Many
modern scholars are more inclined to believe the opposite: that some of the
stories of Jesus in the New Testament were made up on the basis of these “prophecies”.
There is certainly one glaring example of this in the way Nativity plays always
show kings bringing gifts to the new-born Jesus, while the story in Matthew’s
Gospel calls them “wise men”. This is most probably inspired by the saying “the
Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising” in
Isaiah 60:3.
Our modern sense of history makes us look at the
Bible in a different way. The idea that the Old Testament exists simply for the
purpose of pointing forward to Jesus seems to treat the original writings and
their authors unfairly. Apart from anything else it is rather insulting to the Jewish
tradition that produced these books in the first place. Many generations of
Jews have found inspiration in these writing without ever associating them with
Jesus. It is also rather slighting to the original writers and preachers who
had their own immediate concerns. Isaiah was not sitting down to write
predictions of someone who would come into the world seven hundred years after
his time. He was reacting to the situation of his own time, and the poetic
richness of his words meant that people down through the generations could see new
and deeper meaning in them, culminating (for Christians) in the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus.
My aim in this book is to introduce readers who may not know
the Bible very well, or may not have read it in this kind of way before, to the
world that produced the Book of Isaiah: to see behind the words to the passions
and dreams of the people who first spoke them and to understand them in terms
of their own time. I want also to show the way in which many of those words
have a sometimes startling relevance for our world today. Whatever different
Christians may think of whether, or how, the Bible is “inspired”, my experience
is that beyond any doubt it is able to inspire,
and it would be a great pity for us to lose this because we are unable to
identify with the traditional ways in which it has been interpreted.
