(Another sample from Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text.)
Acts 2:25-28
Peter continues his Pentecostal defense of the ecstatic behavior of the Christians in Jerusalem, this time quoting David from Psalm 16:8-11. Once again, it is the Old Testament writer who spiritualizes. Not only does it leave the door wide open for Peter to do the same, but it rather requires he take liberties to apply it more widely than the mere literal meaning.
The core of David’s poetry here is the unspeakable joy of moral purity, the sheer ecstasy of close communion with God and His entire Creation. This is the real deal that mere emotion counterfeits. True serenity in heart will produce emotion, but the emotional thrill is merely a symptom. David’s choice of words is more of that old Hebrew hyperbole. He doesn’t fear that his adventures will get him killed, or that he will experience a sad existence akin to living death. For such a man, death is a friend who liberates, not some awful master eventually collecting the final payment. David has the joy of living during the calling of His God, and the even greater joy of seeing His face after he retires from that calling and this life. Peter spiritualizes this into a prophecy of the Messiah.
Our Western bias blinds us to the rich meaning in Hebrew culture of the term “sheol.” We have good reason to believe the Hebrew people used it as a literary term, in which only the most poorly educated would actually take the implied meaning literally. Suffice to say the better educated Hebrews of the Old Testament knew that death was passage into the afterlife, and that one could go to be with God or could end up in eternal punishment. When Jesus refers to “Gehenna” as a derivative of “Hinnom Valley” where Jerusalem dumped their trash and then burned it, the idea of afterlife was not a rabbinical novelty. What was new was how specific the more recent rabbinical talk had become. Jesus had no quarrel with some of that. Our biggest problem is that the earlier Hebrew scholarship simply avoided pretending they knew enough about the afterlife to say much about it. So any terminology is loose and flexible. Jesus frequently mocked the Hellenized rabbis by using their own assertions against them.
So it’s not a question of Jesus going to “Hell” as we Westerners think of it, but that He was dead for a time, whereas Peter notes that David was very much still dead at that moment. Chasing the rabbits of literalism will get you lost. The whole discourse is supposed to be a spiritualizing of poetic imagery. Peter carefully chose Old Testament passages familiar to his audience, which happened to include some of those Pharisaical rabbis scolding them for their un-Talmudic behavior. Answering them in terms they would understand, he comes very close to using some legalistic literalism to shoot down their legalism. However, the net effect is spiritualizing the text of the Old Testament.
