Trust the experts (Notes on John 7:40-52)

On the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus has just stood up and cried, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:37-38). We pick up the story with the people's reactions.

[40] Many of the people therefore, when they heard this saying, said, "Of a truth this is the Prophet."

"The Prophet" means the Taheb, the prophet like unto Moses, whose coming is promised in Deut. 18. I assume the people reacted this way because providing "living" (i.e. running) water was one of the miracles of Moses, and there was a general expectation that the Taheb would do what Moses did.

As I mentioned in "The Samaritan understanding of the Messiah," one of the three signs by which the Samaritans were to identify the Taheb was that he "will produce, at his hand, the staff" of Moses "in order that miracles be performed thereby." In Exodus 17:1-7, the people come to Moses saying, "Give us water that we may drink," and the Lord instructs him to smite a rock with his rod, causing water to flow out.

Jesus didn't literally have Moses' rod, and thus would not qualify as the Taheb by the standards of early 20th-century Samaritans, but there is no reason to assume that first-century Judaeans had the same specific (and extra-biblical) list of requirements. The promise of "rivers of living water" is distinctly Mosaic, and in the context of Jesus' other teachings and miracles, it may have been enough to convince many people that he was the Taheb.

[41] Others said, "This is the Christ."

We know from the Fourth Gospel itself that some people understood the Taheb and the Messiah to be two separate figures (see John 1:25), while others equated the two (see John 1:45). Since I know of no prophecies that would specifically connect the Messiah with living water, I assume these people are saying that Jesus is not only the Taheb but also -- in light of the other things he has said and done -- the Messiah.

But some said, "Shall Christ come out of Galilee? [42] Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?"

The Taheb had no specified birthplace or ancestry (aside from being an Israelite) and was in fact often expected to come from the Northern Kingdom (including what later became Galilee). The Messiah, though, was to be a descendant of David, and thus a Judaean. The more specific expectation that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem is based on Micah 5:2.

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke, of course, tell us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, though the details are different. In Matthew 2, Jesus is born in Bethlehem because that's where his parents live, but the family has to flee to Egypt shortly after he is born; when they return from Egypt, Joseph is warned in a dream not to return to Judaea but to go to Galilee. In Luke 1-2, Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth, but they have to go to Bethlehem for a census, and Jesus is born while they are there.

If the author of the Fourth Gospel also knew that "Jesus of Nazareth" had actually been born in Bethlehem, it seems almost certain that he would have mentioned it here, but he doesn't. It therefore seems most likely to me that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, but that, due to the widespread understanding that the Messiah must be born there, various stories to that effect began circulating, two of which made it into the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. (See my post "The parentage and birth of Jesus in the four Gospels" for more details.)

[43] So there was a division among the people because of him.

Some thought he was both Taheb and Messiah, some thought he was Messiah only, and I'm sure some thought he was neither.

[44] And some of them would have taken him; but no man laid hands on him.

[45] Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, "Why have ye not brought him?"

[46] The officers answered, "Never man spake like this man."

This is referring back to v. 32, where, hearing that the people were entertaining the idea that Jesus was the Messiah, "the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him." This apparently means to arrest him. As we can see in John 18:31, the chief priests enjoyed some degree of autonomy under Roman rule and were allowed to enforce their law, though not to execute the death penalty.

"Would have" means "wanted to," so v. 44 in isolation makes it sound as though someone attempted to arrest Jesus but were unable to do so -- because he escaped, was miraculously protected, etc. In the following verses, though, we see that the officers didn't even attempt to arrest him, being impressed by his words and thinking that he might really be the Messiah after all. So those who "would have taken him" are the Pharisees and chief priests, and they failed to do so because the officers they sent were unwilling to carry out their orders.

[47] Then answered them the Pharisees, "Are ye also deceived? [48] Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him? [49] But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed."

For ordinary people, Jesus' miracles, teachings, and air of authority made it obvious that he was someone very special -- the prophet like unto Moses, or perhaps even the Messiah. The Pharisees, with their detailed knowledge of the Law (meaning not only the Torah of Moses but also the prophetic writings and, for Pharisees, the "Oral Torah" of tradition), knew that, despite his impressiveness, Jesus didn't actually fulfill the Messianic prophecies. And they were right; he didn't -- except in their broadest, most figurative sense. (See my post "Jesus and the Messianic prophecies: Summary and conclusions.")

"Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?" -- the first-century equivalent of our "Trust the experts!" Have you got any peer-reviewed papers to back that up? Any reliable sources? Rather than discern for themselves based on firsthand experience of Jesus, ordinary people were expected to defer to the spiritual "experts." And these experts in turn, rather than using their discernment, were primarily concerned with how well Jesus measured up against their bulleted list of Messiah Rules -- consisting of assorted lines of prophetic poetry (for all Old Testament prophecy is poetic in form) plucked from their context and collated to form a checklist.

These are the people who rejected Jesus, and this is why they rejected him. These are the people who were so blinded by the narrow specificity of their expectations that they could ask -- immediately after witnessing the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 -- "What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee?" (John 6:30). These are the people who dismissed one miraculous healing after another because, in the opinion of all the most respected Torah scholars, the mighty works had been performed on the wrong day of the week.

Those who believed in Jesus, in contrast, acknowledged such problems but trusted their own experience and discernment first. Pushed to condemn the man who had healed him as a sabbath-breaker, the man born blind said, "He is a prophet. . . . Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see" (John 9:17, 25). Faced with some of Jesus' shocking and seemingly unacceptable statements, Simon Peter's reaction was, "This is an hard saying; who can hear it? . . . [But] to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God" (John 6:60, 68-69).

Jesus' sabbath-breaking, his cryptic and deliberately provocative statements, his general failure to do what the Messiah was supposed to do -- one of the purposes of all this was surely to force this very separation of the sheep from the goats, to force people to choose to defer to authority and respectability or else to trust in their own direct experience of God. "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes" (Ps. 118:8-9).

For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:22-24).

Against the confident dismissal of the Torah-thumpers with their Messianic checklist, Nicodemus diffidently suggests that gaining some direct knowledge of who Jesus is (as he has already secretly done himself) might be in order before passing judgment.

[50] Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,) [51] "Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?"

Can we judge a man without even bothering to find out what he says or does? And the answer is: Yes, as a matter of fact we can. All we need to know is that he's from Galilee.

[52] They answered and said unto him, "Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet."

Now to be clear, nowhere in the Bible does it say there will never be any prophets from Galilee, and the canonical prophets came from various places and were not all even Israelites. In fact, if Nicodemus had followed the rhetorical suggestion that he "search, and look" in the prophecies for references to a Galilean prophet, he might have found one. Matthew did, at any rate:

And leaving Nazareth, [Jesus] came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is upon the sea coast, in the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, 'The land of Zabulon, and the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles; the people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up' (Matt. 4:13-16, quoting Isa. 9:1-2).

Nazareth itself is not coastal ("by way of the sea"), which is why Matthew, alone among the Gospels, has Jesus living in the coastal Galilean town of Capernaum for a while -- just as, to fulfill another "prophecy," he has him live in Egypt for a time. Matthew's reading of Isaiah is extremely dubious. In context, Isaiah 8-9 prophesies that Assyria will invade Judah (8:7-7), bringing "trouble and darkness" (8:22), but that this darkness will not be so severe as it was when the Assyrians invaded Galilee (9:1, this earlier invasion is recounted in 2 Kgs. 15:29) and will be followed by the "great light" Matthew cites. Whatever the merits of his (mis)readings of the prophets, though, Matthew uses the Pharisaic "prophecy checklist" method to support belief in Jesus and thereby demonstrates that sympathetic Pharisees like Nicodemus could have done the same. But they didn't, because that's not what their belief in Jesus was based on.

It's interesting that the mere absence of any positive prophecy of a Galilean prophet was taken as proof that no such prophet would arise. Must every prophet be himself the subject of prophecy? Was anything about the careers of Elijah, Isaiah, and the other biblical prophets foretold in advance? It appears that the Pharisees believed that Malachi was the last prophet with the three exceptions foretold in scripture: Elijah, the Taheb, and the Messiah. We can see this in their reaction to John: "Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet?" (John 1:25). The possibility that John, or Jesus, might just be a prophet, not one of the prophets whose coming was foretold, does not seem to have occurred to them. The Messiah comes from Bethlehem, Elijah comes from heaven, and the Taheb was generally expected to be either a Levite or from one of the tribes of Joseph -- ergo, no Galilean prophet.

Several religions have taught that their founder was the Last Prophet until the coming of the very last prophet. For the Samaritans, Moses is the last prophet until the New Moses, the Taheb. For Muslims, Muhammad is the last prophet until the Mahdi. For many Christians, Jesus is the last prophet until just before the Second Coming (when, according to the Apocalypse he will be preceded by two prophets playing Elijah- and Moses-like roles). Moses, Jesus, Muhammad -- these all make sense in the role of Ultimate Prophet -- but Malachi? A minor prophet who doesn't even get his own book in the Jewish version of the Bible? It appears as if prophecy just sort of petered out among the Hebrews, and at some point, after a sufficiently long time had passed with no plausible claimants to the title, it was retroactively decided that Malachi had been the last (except for the prophesied trio of Elijah, Taheb, and Messiah). Christians seem to have agreed with this assessment for the most part; in the King James Bible, it says "The end of the Prophets" after the last verse of Malachi; and John and Jesus are not exceptions, but were understood to be, respectively, Elijah and Taheb/Messiah. It's very curious, and I wonder how and when it was decided that there would be no ordinary prophets after Malachi. (Something roughly similar can be seen in the "end of the Apostolic Era" in Christianity. Jesus' own disciples were not the last, since Paul is accepted as an Apostle, but at some point after that the role of Apostle just quietly disappeared.)

Living water, the Holy Ghost, and Jesus as Elisha (Notes on John 7:37-39)

Jesus is in Jerusalem during the seven-day Feast of Tabernacles. His attendance at the feast was a surprise -- he had told his brothers he wasn't going to attend, let the Judaeans spend a few days asking, "Where is he?" and then finally made a public appearance on or around the fourth day. Now, on the seventh and last day of the feast, he makes another appearance.

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[37] In the last day, that great day of the feast,

The seventh and last day of the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) is Hoshana Rabbah, the Great Supplication. On this day (according to Mishnah Sukkah 4:5-6), worshipers would circle the altar seven times, to the accompaniment of trumpet blasts, and recite Psalm 118:25, "Save now, I beseech thee, O Lord: O Lord, I beseech thee, send now prosperity." This was supposed to recall the miraculous fall of the walls of Jericho, and also the seven Hebrew words of Psalm 26:6, "I will wash mine hands in innocency: So will I compass [i.e., circle] thine altar, O Lord." Furthermore, "There was a unique custom on the seventh day. They would bring palm branches to the Temple and place them on the ground at the sides of the altar, and that seventh day of Sukkot was called: The day of the placing of palm branches."

I mention all this by way of background, in case it should turn out to have any symbolic relevance to Jesus' words and actions on this day.

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Jesus stood and cried, saying, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. [38] He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."

No passage in the Old Testament says anything about living water flowing from the belly of the believer, so what is Jesus referring to here? Well, the lack of punctuation in the Greek original allows for quite a few different readings.

Reading A: "'If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink,' he that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said. Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."

Reading B: "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. 'He that believeth on me,' as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."

Reading C: "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink, he that believeth on me. As the scripture hath said, 'Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.'"

In Reading A, the "scripture" Jesus is referring to is presumably Isaiah 55:1 -- "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters" -- of which v. 37 is a tolerably close paraphrase.

In Reading B, the scripture reference is simply "he that believeth on me," which could be a paraphrase of any number of Old Testament passages. If Jesus had one in particular in mind, my best guess would be Jeremiah 17:5-8, which says that those who trust in men will be thirsty, but those who trust in the Lord will have plenty of water.

Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

Readings A and B, as well as the King James reading, say that it is from the believer's belly that the living water will flow. Reading C allows for the possibility that Jesus is quoting a scripture about himself: "The scripture says that 'out of his (the Messiah's) belly shall flow rivers of living water.' Therefore, anyone who is thirsty can come to me (the Messiah) and drink." I can't find any scripture that actually says that, though, and overall I think we should understand the living water to be flowing from the believer himself. This is consistent with John 4:14:

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

As here in John 7, the water first comes from Jesus ("If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink") but thereafter flows from within the believer himself ("He that believeth in me . . . out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."). This idea is also present to a certain extent in the Old Testament, where those who follow the Lord will be "like a spring of water, whose waters fail not" (Isa. 58:11).

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[39] (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)

This is the author's interpretation of what Jesus meant, but I think it is a plausible one. As I have said, both Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 portray the living water as something that comes from Jesus first but thereafter flows from within the believer. In the same way, the Holy Ghost comes from God but then dwells in the Christian's heart and becomes an internal source of guidance and inspiration.

This idea that the Holy Ghost could not be given until after Jesus was "glorified" (resurrected and ascended) is based on something Jesus himself says later in the Gospel:

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you (John 16:7).

Was the Holy Ghost something new that was given after Jesus "departed" and was "glorified," or was it the return of something old that was paused during Jesus' mortal life? Does the Holy Ghost appear in the Old Testament? There are only two occurrences of "holy spirit" in the OT. The first is Psalm 51:11, quoted below in its poetic context (vv. 10-12).

Create in me a clean heart, O God;

    and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence;

    and take not thy holy spirit from me.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation;

    and uphold me with thy free spirit.

I think it is tolerably clear in context that "thy holy spirit" is parallel with "a right spirit" and "thy free spirit," and that none of these refers to the Holy Ghost in anything like the Christian conception. The penitent (for this is one of the Penitential Psalms) is asking the Lord to make him a good person, to put a good spirit in him -- "thy" spirit because it comes from God, but still the Psalmist's own spirit, not the literal indwelling Spirit of God himself. This was apparently the understanding of the King James translators as well, as they left "holy spirit" uncapitalized.

The second reference is in Isaiah 63:10-12, which is also poetry.

But they rebelled,

    and vexed his holy Spirit:

therefore he was turned to be their enemy,

    and he fought against them.

Then he remembered the days of old,

    Moses, and his people, saying,

Where is he that brought them up out of the sea

    with the shepherd of his flock?

where is he that put his holy Spirit within him?

That led them by the right hand of Moses

    with his glorious arm,

dividing the water before them,

    to make himself an everlasting name?

In the first reference, "his holy Spirit" pretty clearly refers to God. The pronouns in the second reference are a bit ambiguous, but the most likely reading is "he (God) that put his (God's) holy Spirit within him (either Moses or Israel)."

If we include references that don't use the word "holy," we can find references to the "spirit of God" or "spirit of the Lord" entering or "coming upon" Joseph (Gen. 41:38), Bezaleel (Ex. 31:3; 35:31), Balaam (Num. 24:2), Othniel (Judg. 3:10), Gideon (Judg. 6:34), Jephthah (Judg. 11:29), Samson (Judg. 14:6, 19; 15:14), Saul (1 Sam. 10:6, 10; 11:6; 19:23), David (1 Sam. 16:13), Saul's messengers (1 Sam. 19:20), Azariah (2 Chron. 15:1), Jahaziel (2 Chron. 20:14), Zechariah (2 Chron. 24:20), and probably several others. (I have excluded ambiguous references, such as those in Job and Isaiah.)

In the Gospel of Luke, the Holy Ghost "falls upon" or "fills" John the Baptist (1:15), Mary (1:35), Elisabeth (1:41), Zacharias (1:67), Simeon (2:25-26) -- all technically before the birth of Jesus, and so consistent with the idea that the activity of the Holy Ghost was suspended during his mortal life. John the Baptist is almost certainly an exception, though. An angel tells John's father that John "shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb." This would be a strange thing to say if the Holy Ghost were going to leave John as soon as Jesus was born -- especially given that John was only about six months older than Jesus!

And of course the most obvious exception to "no Holy Ghost during Christ's mortality" is Christ himself. Luke says this most explicitly: At Jesus' baptism, "the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him . . . and Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness" (Luke 3:22, 4:1). In the other Gospels, what fell on Jesus at his baptism is called the "Spirit of God" (Matt. 3:16) or just "the Spirit" (Mark 1:10, John 1:32-33).

Only the Fourth Gospel explicitly says that the Holy Ghost could not be given until after Jesus' death and glorification, but the other three Gospels are more or less consistent with this. Acts (a continuation of Luke) relates how the disciples received the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, shortly after the Ascension -- and it is implied, if not stated directly, that this was something new, which they had not received during Jesus' mortal ministry.

Nowhere is it said that anyone other than Jesus himself received the Holy Ghost during Jesus' mortal life -- but John, having received it in the womb, before Jesus was born, presumably retained it even while Jesus was alive. Can it be a coincidence, then, that Jesus received the Holy Ghost when he was baptized by John? Was John, prior to baptizing Jesus, "full of the Holy Ghost" in some unique and unprecedented way? ("A prophet?" Jesus had said of him. "Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet." What did that "much more" mean?) And at Jesus' baptism, did this unique gift pass from John into Jesus? ("He must increase, but I must decrease.") Jesus said that John was in some sense Elijah, and one of the things Elijah is famous for is passing on "a double portion of his spirit" to his successor, Elisha (see 2 Kgs. 2) -- and this even took place at the River Jordan, the very place where Jesus was baptized! The names Elisha and Jesus have the same meaning, except that a different name of God is used. (Elisha means "My God is salvation"; Jesus means "Yahweh is salvation." Elijah, very neatly, means "My God is Yahweh.") 

The author of the Fourth Gospel writes of Jesus that "God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand" (John 3:34-35). Is this a subtle reference to Elisha's "double portion" of prophetic spirit? Elisha received a double portion of the spirit that had been in Elijah, but Jesus received the whole -- an infinitely greater portion -- of the Holy Spirit that had been in the new Elijah, John. And could that somehow be the reason that the Holy Ghost was not available to anyone else while Jesus was alive -- that he had "all of it"? This is a strange thought, as we are not accustomed to thinking of God as being limited in such ways, but it seems like a possibility worth exploring.

We are in the habit of seeing Jesus as a new Moses and a new David. A "new Elisha" is not an idea that comes readily to mind, partly because Elisha, despite supposedly receiving a double portion of Elijah's spirit, didn't really outshine Elijah in anything like the way that Jesus outshone John, and therefore seems like a relatively minor prophet. It makes perfect sense, though, that Jesus would symbolically be Elisha to John's Elijah, and I have already noted that the feeding of the five thousand, particularly as told in the Fourth Gospel, alludes unmistakably to that prophet.

I'm not sure yet where this line of thinking is going to lead. I'm just throwing out ideas and trying to connect some dots.

I was going to do the rest of Chapter 7, but I think this post is long enough as it is.

Was Jesus acting as King of the Jews during the Feast of Tabernacles?

In John 7:14-15, we are told that "about the midst of the feast [of Tabernacles] Jesus went up into the temple, and taught. And the Jews marvelled, saying, 'How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?'" From the reaction, it is clear that Jesus' teaching involved reading from the scriptures, and I have argued that the passage he read was likely Malachi 2:1-3:1.

Today I became aware of another possibility: Every seven years, during the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), the king -- when there was a king -- was supposed to stand up in the temple and read from Deuteronomy. We are told in Mishnah Sotah 7:8 that Herod Agrippa (who reigned AD 41-44, just after the time of Christ) did this.

How is the portion of the Torah that is read by the king recited at the assembly, when all the Jewish people would assemble? At the conclusion of the first day of the festival of Sukkot, on the eighth, after the conclusion of the Sabbatical Year, they make a wooden platform for the king in the Temple courtyard, and he sits on it, as it is stated: “At the end of every seven years, in the Festival of the Sabbatical Year” (Deuteronomy 31:10).

The synagogue attendant takes a Torah scroll and gives it to the head of the synagogue that stands on the Temple Mount. And the head of the synagogue gives it to the deputy High Priest, and the deputy High Priest gives it to the High Priest, and the High priest gives it to the king. And the king stands, and receives the Torah scroll, and reads from it while sitting.

King Agrippa arose, and received the Torah scroll, and read from it while standing, and the Sages praised him for this. And when Agrippa arrived at the verse in the portion read by the king that states: “You may not appoint a foreigner over you” (Deuteronomy 17:15), tears flowed from his eyes, because he was a descendant of the house of Herod and was not of Jewish origin. The entire nation said to him: Fear not, Agrippa. You are our brother, you are our brother.

And the king reads from the beginning of Deuteronomy, from the verse that states: “And these are the words” (Deuteronomy 1:1), until the words: “Hear, O Israel” (Deuteronomy 6:4). And he then reads the sections beginning with: “Hear, O Israel” (Deuteronomy 6:4–9), “And it shall come to pass, if you shall hearken” (Deuteronomy 11:13–21), “You shall tithe” (Deuteronomy 14:22–29), “When you have made an end of the tithing” (Deuteronomy 26:12–15), and the passage concerning the appointment of a king (Deuteronomy 17:14–20), and the blessings and curses (Deuteronomy 28), until he finishes the entire portion.

The same blessings that the High Priest recites on Yom Kippur, the king recites at this ceremony, but he delivers a blessing concerning the Festivals in place of the blessing concerning forgiveness for iniquity.

Is it possible that Jesus read from Deuteronomy in the Temple during the Feast of Tabernacles, thus implicitly taking on the role of King of the Jews?

The first thing is to consider is the date. Was it a Sabbatical Year when Jesus taught in the Temple? Well, John 2:20 tells us that the first Passover of Jesus ministry was the 46th year of the construction of the Temple of Herod, which historians estimate to be around AD 27-29. This was after Jesus was baptized by John, and Luke 3:1-2 tells us that John didn't begin baptizing until the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, which year began in September of AD 28. Passover is in March or April, so the best estimate for the first Passover of Jesus' ministry would be AD 29. After that, one more Passover is mentioned (John 6:4) and then the Feast of Tabernacles we are presently considering. Assuming there were no other intervening Passovers left unmentioned by the author, we can estimate that Jesus preached in the Temple in the fall of AD 30.

The Sabbatical Year in Agrippa's reign ended in AD 42, so the previous two Sabbatical Years would have ended in AD 35 and AD 28. Thus, based on such (admittedly spotty) chronological information as we have, it was not a Sabbatical Year when Jesus preached in the Temple.

Turning to the details in the Mishnah, we are told, rather confusingly, that the Torah reading took place "at the conclusion of the first day of the festival of Sukkot, on the eighth." What does "on the eighth" mean here? Sukkot is a seven-day festival, running from 15 to 21 Tishrei, so there is no eighth day of Sukkot, and no day of Sukkot is on the eighth of the month. And in any case, how could the eighth come "at the conclusion of the first day"? Anyway, we are told that Jesus appeared in the Temple "about the midst of the feast" -- and whatever the Mishnah is trying to say, it pretty clearly isn't talking about the middle of the festival. So even if it had been the right year for the king to read from Deuteronomy, it wasn't the right day.

Finally, the Mishnah describes a rather elaborate ceremony: The attendant gives the Torah scroll to the deputy high priest, who gives it to the high priest, who gives it to the king. In the absence of a king, some other "leader of the Jews" (someone of Nicodemus's class) would do the honors. It seems highly unlikely that some random Galilean rabbi would have been able to waltz in, take the Torah scroll, and read -- at least not on this special day.

I'm not sure how access to the scrolls would have been managed on other days. The Jews' surprise at discovering that Jesus is literate makes sense only if he has just read from the scriptures. Quoting bits of scripture from memory -- well, any Jew could do that, even John the Baptist, who lived in the desert and ate bugs.

In Luke 4:16-21, Jesus stands up in a synagogue, and "there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias," from which he proceeds to read. This was a local synagogue in Nazareth, though, and even there someone had to "deliver" the scroll to him. Would it have been as easy as that in the Temple itself, during a major festival? I guess the answer to that must be yes, since Jesus did read from the scriptures in the Temple. Perhaps during the less important middle days of the feast, the scrolls were made available to any rabbi who wished to preach.

All in all, I think Jesus' reading from the scriptures in the Temple during Sukkot was supposed to hint at his identity as Messiah -- but only in a broad way. Since it was not the correct year, nor the correct day, I don't think there would be any need for him to read from the correct book, Deuteronomy. I therefore stand by my earlier proposal that the book he read from was Malachi.