Saint-Spotting in Scripture Οἱ Ἅγιοι in the New (and Old) Testament

My assigned topic this morning focuses speci!cally on ‘the saints‘ — οἱ ἅγιοι — in Scripture. When I agreed to speak with you on the subject, I supposed this would be a straightforward matter; I knew what I thought true about the usage of οἱ ἅγιοι in the New Testament, and I imagined that closer study wold support the conclusion with which I started. The more carefully I examined the topic, however, the more complicated it became. This morning’s topic involves three levels of semantic ambiguity, pertaining to usage in Hebrew (and Aramaic), Greek, and modern languages, especially English. Confusion arises when the English word “saints” casts its semantic shadow backward through the millennia, and sideways to German and French ecclesiastical discourse (where, as in Greek, there is not a word for “saint” apart from the general word-family for “holiness”). Since “the saints” are the topic for our investigation this week, one would hope that the Bible’s description of “saints” would help clarify our discussions — but one of the fundamental questions for a biblical scholar is “Are there in fact ‘saints’ in the Bible, when ‘saints’ is understood in a way that corresponds roughly to the way that the word in used by Catholic and Protestant theology?” The answer, surely, is “yes” — but that “yes” must be quali!ed by the frustrating reservation that the Greek words which are most often translated into English as “saints” and related word-forms may not be the most helpful avenue for understanding the Bible’s teaching on saints. In fact, I submit that although study of the word ἅγιος illuminates our topic for the week, the most helpful angle on biblical saints comes from passages that do not even use the ἅγιος word-group.

If we take the English word “saint” as our starting-point, we !rst must note that we run the risk of prejudicing the outcome of our inquiries; the equivalence of ἅγιοι with “saints” has to be shown, not taken for granted. Therefore I will generally avoid the term “saints” when referring to the biblical texts. For the purposes of this paper, Paul writes to the holy ones in Corinth, and Daniel sees the people of the holy ones. As long as we’re conducting our discussion in translation (in multiple translations) we have to avoid using terms from the one language that complicates the discourse.

which ,קדש ,The Hebrew word that provides a centreboard for our inquiry is qodesh typically corresponds to ἅγιος in the Septuagint. Allowing for varieties of usage, qodesh and its associated forms tends to refer to the speci!c quality of God’s own divinity, God’s holiness, and as such it identi!es God as “the Holy One” (2 Kgs 19:22, Ps 71:22, Prov 9:10, Isa 5:24 et al.) and as God’s self-identifying characterisation “I am holy” (Lev 11:44f). By strongest association, the word applies to the sanctuary of the Tabernacle and Temple, the Holy of Holies, qodesh haqqodashim (Ex 26:34). In more expansive usage, “the holy place” refers to the Temple itself (Ps 24:3). The furnishings of the Temple and the food sacri!ced there are the “holy things” (Num 4:15; Lev 22:4). The high priest is especially holy; the other priests are ordinarily holy. And in keeping with this general pattern, the plural noun “holy ones” in the Hebrew Bible refers almost exclusively to angelic or semi-divine beings (Dt 33:2f; Job 5:1, 15:15; Ps 89:6, 8). The leading apparent exception is Ps 16:3, “As for the holy ones in the land, they are the noble, in whom is all my delight”, where the “holy ones” must be mortal citizens. In any case, though, one can see that the qodesh word-group generally points to characteristics of divine intensity: holiness, indeed. Two other Hebrew words will !gure in our analysis before this talk is over. The !rst is steadfast faithfulness” or “loving kindness”; this word commands our attention“ ,חֶסֶד ,frequently refers to humans חָסִיד ,rarely refers to humans קֹדֶשׁ because although also צַדִּיק ,especially with regard to their divinely-motivated behaviour. By the same token often identi!es a person of outstanding virtue. Although these terms do not denote holiness does, their usefulness for characterising human proximity to קֹדֶשׁ in the sense that godliness will emerge as an important element in our discussion later on. as ἅγιος; most of the usage of ἅγιος in the קֹדֶשׁ The Septuagint most usually renders Septuagint follows the observations I have just made about the God-centred, Temple- centred tenor of “holiness.” When ἅγιος applies to living entities other than God, it usually indicates heavenly beings. In one case, Aaron is identi!ed as holy; in Psalm 16, as we have seen, the psalmist characterises the noble in the land as God’s holy ones, and more often than is true of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint characterises the people of Israel in general as “holy ones,” as in Ps 82:4 LXX:

They lay crafty plans against your people; they consult together against your holy ones.

(where the parallelism requires that “your holy ones”refers to the residents of the land). for קְדוֹשִׁים Scholars sometimes take the shift from an almost exclusive reservation of heavenly beings to the more comfortable use of ἅγιος for human beings as a binary switch from angelic to mortal holiness. I am more cautious about this point; it seems more likely to me that the linguistic imagination and usage simply extended the demonstrable semantic range of ἅγιος. Whereas in most of the Old Testament, holiness applies appropriately to the God and the Temple, it eventually comes to refer to the people associated with the Temple as well. That tendency is accentuated in apocalyptic literature, where the conventions of that literary mode support a correlation between personages and events in heaven with personages and events on earth. In the apocalyptic scenario, the heavenly aspect of the holy ones would be the angels; the earthly equivalent of the heavenly angels would be the people of God, who on earth !ght the battles that the angels !ght against the forces of evil. In other words, the language of holiness began at the heart of the Temple, and was extended to apply to the people and material objects within the Temple; and gradually came to include the people who came to worship at the Temple. (In a similar way, there is a vogue in contemporary theology for suggesting that any number of things is a sacrament; not that they actually are ecclesially-mediated instruments of grace, but that practically anything that brings the topic of God to mind can be understood as sacrament.) This extended — not altered — sense of helps explain the controversies that arise in interpreting the many apocalyptic texts in which the term οἱ ἅγιοι appears without obviously referring to either angels or humans. In the key texts of Daniel 7, for instance, earthly kings and empires give way to “the holy ones of the Most High” (7:18), a phrase which has provoked extensive argument: are these “the saints of the Most High” or the “angelic forces of the Most High”? Dan 7:25 describes the eleventh horn, or beast, or king, who humbles three kings and who “shall speak words against the Most High, shall wear out the holy ones of the Most High, and shall attempt to change the sacred seasons and the law.” This has been taken to refer to human holy ones — historic English translations render 7:25 with “the saints of the Most High” — presumably because the following verses read …they shall be given into his power for a time, two times, and half a time. 7:26 Then the court shall sit in judgment, and his dominion shall be taken away, to be consumed and totally destroyed. 7:27 The kingship and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the holy ones [NRSV, NIV; “saints” RSV, ASV, Douay, KJV, NASB; “People of God”, Good News; “dem Volk der Heiligen” Einheitsübersetzung, Luther 1984] of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them.

John Collins makes a strong case that these holy ones are not the human faithful worshippers of God, but are heavenly powers that protect God’s people on earth.1 Whether we accept that reading, or adhere to the reading that has generally prevailed over the centuries, we cannot a#ord to overlook either the demonstrable ambiguity of the phrase or the words’ appearing in an apocalyptic setting that allows for — if it does not indeed demand — a reading that encompasses both heavenly and terrestrial referents. As Paul Trebilco sums the matter up, “If God’s angelic holy ones receive the kingdom, then God’s people on earth will also receive it.”2 Other deuterocanonical literature also deploys the “holy ones” as an identi!cation of heavenly beings (Jub 17:11 — “an angel of God, one of the holy ones, said unto her, 'Why weepest thou, Hagar?”3). The Qumran texts frequently identify their community as the

1 Dan 7:13f also seems to identify the “one like a Son of Man” as the one who will inherit the kingdom, as do the “holy ones” of 7:18. Collins, J. J. Daniel. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

2 Trebilco, Self-designations and Group Identity in the New Testament (Cambridge UP, 2012), 124.

3 Cf. also Jub 31:14 (likely — “as the angels of the presence and as the holy ones”), arguably 33:12 (“And again, it is written a second time: 'Cursed be he who lieth with the wife of his father, for he hath uncovered his father's shame'; and all the holy ones of the Lord said 'So be it; so be it.'”); arguably Ps Sol 17:49 (“the holy ones in the midst of sancti"ed peoples” — Brock in Sparks gives “holy men”, Gray, “angels”); Tobit 8:15; Sir 42:17, 45:2; Wis 5:5, possibly 10:10 (“holy things” or “holy ones”); 3 Macc 2:2; 1 Enoch 1:9, 9:3, 12:2, 14:23; 39:5, 47:2, 81:5, 106:19; 3 Enoch 28:5; TLevi 3:3. Jubilees 2:24f refers to Jacob and his o#spring as “the blessed and holy ones of the "rst testimony and law”; Tobit 12:15 (“I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who transmit the prayers of the holy ones and who enter before the glory of the Holy One”); Wis 18:9 (“For in secret the ὅσιοι children of good people o#ered sacri"ces, and with one accord agreed to the divine law, so that the ἁγίους would share alike the same things, both blessings and dangers”); 1 Macc 1:46 (ἁγίους = “priests”). 1 Enoch 99:16 provides an ambiguous example (oppressors will be destroyed by the sword, “and all the holy and righteous ones shall remember your sins”) clari"ed by 100:5, wherein God “wills et a guard of holy angels over all the righteous and holy ones.” “men of holiness”, and envision the interaction of the holy ones with angels4— another illustration of the $uidity of the boundary between heavenly and terrestrial holy ones. In many of these passages the usage is quite unambiguous, underscoring the extent to which any suggestion of a “wholesale reversal in characteristic usage”5 would have entailed an improbable sudden transformation of these texts’ audiences.

Thus we come to the New Testament usage of the terminology of holiness. Beginning from unambiguous cases, we should !rst note that ἅγιος in the New Testament occurs very frequently as the adjectival modi!er for the Holy Spirit — a data point that rea%rms the close association of holiness with God’s person and presence. Likewise, whereas the Old Testament very often identi!es the God of Israel as the Holy One, the New Testament directs that epithet to Jesus. (The question of whether Jesus is “the Holy One” with regard to his humanity or his divinity is not yet, I think, a question contemplated by the New Testament authors.) Without suggesting too highly-developed a Trinitarian NT theology, these two points cohere with the primary usage of the language of holiness in the Old Testament: Jesus and the Holy Spirit bear the closest possible association with God, and therefore appropriately share the description “holy.”

If Jesus is the Holy One, and the Spirit is the Holy Spirit, how are we to think of the holy ones — that is, the people whom English translation has traditionally identi!ed as “the saints” — of whom we read in the Pauline epistles and the Acts? First, I remind you that in what follows, I will use the phrase “holy ones” in place of “saints”, since I don’t want to reinforce any assumptions about what the phrase οἱ ἅγιοι refers to. Second, then, I call your attention to the fact that the usage of the term applies very often in conjunction with designations of place — “To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be holy ones” (Rom 1:5), or “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sancti!ed in Christ Jesus, called to be holy ones” (1 Cor 1:2) — or in settings where particular associations are clear (“Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all

4 Spittler, “The Testament of Job” in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 1, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1983) 855 note d.

5 Woodward, “The Provenance of the Term ‘Saints’: A Religionsgeschichtliche Study,” JETS 24/2 (1987), 108 (including the NT in the scope of his description). the holy ones who are with them.” Rom 16:15). In one particular setting, however, Paul casually uses the term οἱ ἅγιοι without further speci!cation: when he discusses his fund- raising e#orts on behalf of the faithful in Jerusalem, he can refer to “the collection for the holy ones” without always specifying “the holy ones who are in Jerusalem.” In Romans 15, he reveals “I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the holy ones, for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the holy ones at Jerusalem”, “that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the holy ones.” The Book of Acts likewise strongly associates “the holy ones” with Jerusalem (9:13, 26:10). On the basis of this pattern, we may form a heuristic rule to the e#ect that usually, when “the saints” is sued apart from a clear explicit or implicit identi!cation of locale, it refers to the Jerusalem community. Some cases, however, do not adhere to this pattern. For instance, 1 Cor 14:33f (if one treats it as belonging to the original version of 1 Cor) — “As in all the churches of the holy ones, women should be silent in the churches” — appears to refer to all congregations apart from the problematic Corinthian community. This does not invalidate the provisional guideline I propose above, however; here, the phrase “all the congregations of the holy ones” explicitly asserts that in every location, congregations observe this rule. Some take this pattern to re$ect Paul’s e#orts to devise a theological rhetoric that associates his Gentile addressees, who would de!nitely not have been reckoned “holy” according to the classical Old Testament schema of sanctity, together with the Judaic congregations — especially the Jerusalem congregation. Paul does indeed make frequent recourse to all when addressing his Gentile congregations: “ To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be holy ones” (Rom 1:7), “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sancti!ed in Christ Jesus, called to be holy ones, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours” (1 Cor 1:2); “To the church of God that is in Corinth, including all the holy ones throughout Achaia” (2 Cor 1:1); “To all the holy ones in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi” (Phil 1:1), and so on. In this way, Paul supposedly underscores his point that Jewish Christians are knit together with Gentiles on an equal basis before the God who makes no distinction of persons. This is certainly one possible explanation for Paul’s usage. One of Paul’s overriding concerns in the letters is to puzzle out how the God of Israel, manifest in the (then still- standing) Temple in Jerusalem to which Gentiles are forbidden entry, has come to incorporate these thoroughly pagan Gentiles into the people of God. Emphatically identifying Gentile believers as counting among “the holy people” which had up to now included only Jews would signi!cantly advance his purposes. But this argument relies, I think, on too sharp a distinction between heavenly holy ones and earthly saints. As we have seen, the usage of “holy” incorporates God, and places, and people, and things, to the extent that they are near to God (or “identi!ed with God”); simply reading Paul’s rhetoric as applying to Gentiles the label of “saints” that had beforehand belonged only to Jews misses the broader point that these new congregations now take their place in a comprehensive system of holiness centred on God and radiating (as it were) from the Holy of Holies outward to a holy people. If we adhere to the convention of using the English- language term “saints” in this context, we break the conceptual continuity of holiness from the Temple and we institute a new (more distinctively Christian) terminology (though we do not encounter the same problem with German Heiligen or French saints). Understanding οἱ ἅγιοι as “holy ones,” human sharers in a !eld of holiness encompassing a wide range of physical, spiritual, and temporal dimensions, brings several bene!ts over and above simply re!ning a biblical picture of “sainthood.” For example, we understand the Epistle to the Hebrews better when we can read the characterisations of the Temple, of Jesus, of the priests, and of the sacri!ces against the background of a sense of how holiness orders the cosmos. Hebrews, and (arguably) Paul, and the Septuagint use the term for holiness to express a sense of the world whose centre is God, surrounded by a court which re$ects God’s own identity, peopled by “holy ones.” In accordance with the apocalyptic cosmology, “as above, so below”; the holy ones above are the heavenly angels in heaven, and the holy ones below are the terrestrial people of God. And for New Testament authors, the earthly holy ones — whom the English-language tradition has conventionally identi!ed as “the saints” — now includes Gentile believers as well as the children of Jacob.

Now although we have sketched the usage of ἅγιος in the Septuagint and the New Testament, we don’t yet have the semantic side of the discussion sorted. Two other words pertain closely to our discussion, developing from my passing reference earlier in the talk to the Hebrew chesed and tsedekah. Chesed — the quality of steadfast love, or loving-kindness — constitutes one of the most prominent God’s qualities, which God asks Israel to emulate. The substantive adjectival use of chesed — chasid — is conventionally translated as ὅσιος in the Septuagint. The convergent use of chasid/ὅσιος points toward a quality of godliness, goodness, being true to God and one’s neighbours, which is often translated into English as “godly [one]”, or in certain cases as “saint” (Ps 31:23 “Love the LORD, all you his saints”, “all seine Frommen” [Einheitsübersetzung], “alle seine Heiligen” [Luther 1984]— kol- chasidayv, πᾶς ὅσιος). This pattern foreshadows the designation of outstanding !gures in the Judaic tradition as chasidim, as people whose spirits were so attuned to God that they desired the good for its own sake, not because it was commanded by the Torah. (The tsadiq, by contrast, adheres attentively to the Law itself; there is nothing insu%cient about the tsadiq (would that there were more of them!), but whereas the tsadiq !lls the cup of righteousness, the chasid over$ows with holy goodness. The chasidim have been enumerated di#erently by di#erent sources, but the names of biblical chasidim have in various circumstances included Adam (b. Erubin 18b), Moses, Job (b. B. Bat. 15b), and so on have been attributed the status of chasid. The words tsadiq and chasid can function synonymously in post-biblical Judaism (as also ἔλεος and ἅγιος and δίκαιος in Greek), a persistent nuance of distinction reserves an emphasis on pure piety — holiness — for the chasid, such that chasidim have been identi!ed with the Christian category of “the saint.” Now that we have an overview of how words associated with saintliness function in the Bible, we need to bear in mind the principle that we cannot infer from the fact that a language doesn’t represent an idea in a single words, or series of words, to the conclusion that the concept is unintelligible to that language. Linguistics scholars have come to refer to this mistaken inference as a “snowclone,” alluding to the cliché that Inuit peoples of the Arctic have twenty-two words for “snow” because they understand snow so much more profoundly than peoples further to the south. As a matter of fact, English has many ways of characterising di#erent sorts of snow as well, though it uses synonyms, phrases, and metaphors to convey the di#erences. The fact that the USA doesn’t have a Parliament doesn’t mean that they have no representative legislative bodies; they call their legislators di#erent things. Similarly, although the Bible does not typically use the word ἅγιος to identify a person as a saint (in the sense of “someone of exemplary piety”), we cannot infer from that usage that biblical writers had no concept of exemplary goodness and love of God. The most prominent example of attention to exemplary heroes in the biblical literature comes in Sirach 44-50, the passage which begins “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers in their generations” (Sir 44:1). Immediately following an extended rehearsal of God’s almighty power, Sirach devotes six chapters to a survey of the great characters in the Judaic tradition. This roster of illustrious men (in Greek, ἔνδοξος; in the Einheitsübersetzung, “ehrwürdig”) unfolds with very few uses of ἅγιος words; epithets of might, glory, bravery, and righteousness generally prevail over references to sanctity, with two signi!cant exceptions. The !rst exception concerns Moses and Aaron. Moses, “whose memory is blessed...[God] made equal in glory to the holy ones” (45:1f), which here must refer to heavenly beings; and Aaron was “a holy man like Moses” (44:6), whom Moses anointed with holy oil (45:15) and who wore a crown inscribed with the very word “Holiness” (45:12). All this emphasis on ἅγιος presumably derives from Moses’ and Aaron’s roles as founders of the Tabernacle (predecessor of the Temple) and its priesthood; the context practically demands that their holiness be foregrounded. The second exception concerns the high priest Simeon the Just, whom Sirach describes in radiant poetry, and whom the rabbinic tradition remembers as one of the Tannaim. His tomb, by tradition, can be found in Jerusalem, and it is visited on the holiday Lag B’Omer. The catalogue of heroes in Sirach provides a precedent for the similar list in Hebrews 11. The list in Hebrews overlaps with the famous men of Sirach, though it is much shorter. Hebrews, also, eschews the language of sanctity in this catalogue; instead, Hebrews emphasises faith and belief, and steadfastness. The absence of the words we typically associate with “saint” does not diminish the manifest extent to which these texts demonstrate an early awareness of what later generations would categorise as “sainthood.” Hebrews pays particular attention to martyrdom: “Others were tortured…. Others su#ered mocking and $ogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented…” (11:35-37). Both Hebrews and Sirach call attention to !gures who, through the power of God, accomplished miraculous feats. Both Hebrews and Sirach invoke these heroes with the purpose of providing positive role models for their audiences to emulate. And — interestingly — both Hebrews and Sirach show an interest in holiness apart from the attributes of the heroes they enumerate; in Hebrews, the holiness of Jesus and his heavenly Temple contrast with the continual sacri!ces of the earthly Temple, and in Sirach the gloriously-restored Temple of Simeon the Just calls for appropriate exaltation from the people whom Sirach addresses. That is, we can’t just say that Hebrews and Sirach avoid the use of “saint” terminology because they are uninterested in holiness — rather, their sense of the tremendous signi!cance of holiness has not made a semantic connection with the phenomenon of exemplary heroic piety. Once we see that heroes need not be termed “saints” in order to be functioning in the same way that those who would later categorised as saints would function, we can see more examples of sainthood in the Bible. The speech of the mother of the brother-martyrs in 4 Maccabees calls on the examples of Abraham, Daniel, and the young men Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael (4 Maccabees 16:21). The invocation of Abraham as “father Abraham” in Luke 16:24-30 and, arguably, John 8:39 & 53 might !t this pattern. Judas Maccabeus’s dream in which the dead Onias and the prophet Jeremiah interceded for the Maccabean army suggests the intercessory role of saints.6 The appearances of Moses and Elijah at the Trans!guration and — if they are the two witnesses — in the Book of Revelation suggest a representative function. None of these may constitute evidence for a precise category in which the Bible recognises and promotes “saints”, but the overall picture provides extensive cases in which !gures who are not called “saints” function in the way someone who would later be called a saint functions. To sum up: the situation with regard to saints and the Bible shows !rst, an underlying imagination of the world whose ideological centre is God, “the Holy One,” whose heavenly court comprises “holy ones” (angels and other semi-divine beings); whose geographical centre is the sanctuary of the Temple, “the Holy of Holies,” where the earthly Holy One is the Levitical high priest; which centre is bounded by the Temple itself, “the holy place,” where God is served by the holy priests, using holy things; the Temple being located in Jerusalem, the holy city. All of this is recognised and shared with a holy population. In the heavenly sphere of the Bible’s narrative, “holy ones” are angels or other semi-divine beings; in the terrestrial order which re$ects the heaven sphere — “as above, so below” — the place

6 Cf. also Talmud Sotah 34b “Caleb held aloof from the plan of the spies and went and prostrated himself upon the graves of the patriarchs, saying to them, 'My fathers, pray on my behalf that I may be delivered from the plan of the spies'.” of the angels is !lled by a people who is holy. Once, the holy people of God included only the descendants of Israel; subsequently (as Christians have it), the boundary of holiness has been extended to all who unite themselves with Christ. This cosmic schema of “holiness” operates as a model, an ideal, from which (of course) speci!c people and practices and texts may depart, but which depicts the presumed way that the world is, apart from individual ethical or theological conditions. All who have been united to Christ in a baptism like his can appropriately be considered “holy ones”, “saints”, in this sense; to adopt the approach that forms the foundational rhetoric for Hebrews, “Therefore, my friends, since we have con!dence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his $esh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (10:19-22). Second, we see that the Bible shows a general interest in people of exemplary holiness. Some of our forebears stand out among others, and the Bible is unembarrassed about calling attention to them. We even see the beginnings of the idea that these ancestors may be e#ectual in interceding on behalf of the living. Such outstanding examples of divine love are not called “saints” or “holy ones” in the Bible, but the early church turns to such !gures as these for inspiration and intercession. Such recognition does not make them a distinct caste of God’s people, but does acknowledge that as we learn day by day to re$ect ever more clearly the ways of God among us, particular exemplars help us to envision, and encourage us to practice, the discipleship that bears convincing witness to the God in whom we trust. The same Paul who addresses all in his congregations as “holy ones” also reminds them to be imitators of other congregations, of him, and of God, in order that other people may observe what sanctity looks like, and (as Hebrews says) so that like heroes of preceding generations they may inherit the good things that God has promised. Thus, the Bible warrants both a holiness without internal distinctions — “The Saints Are Flat,” to paraphrase the title of Thomas Friedman’s best-seller about the revolution in communications technology7 — and a holiness whose intensity varies from one member to another. Both “the sainthood of all believers” and the veneration of the saints !nd a basis in

7 Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); Die Welt ist !ach (Suhrkamp Verlag KG, 2006). biblical teaching. But both also draw on a shared conceptual thesaurus wherein holiness — sainthood —bespeaks proximity to God, both spatial and spiritual. Whatever we learn about saints and ecumenism in the seminar to come, we can help keep open channels of communication by attending to the shared elements from which we construct our articulated theologies of sainthood, central among which may be the vision of angels and archangels joining with all the holy people of God in praise and thanksgiving o#ered to the uniquely Holy One.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balz, Horst. “ἅγιος,” in Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, Volume 1. Edited by Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 16-20.

Brown, Colin. “ἅγιος,” in New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Volume 1. Edited by Colin Brown (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), 224-232.

Collins, J. J. Daniel. Hermeneia. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press: 1994).

Hodgson, Robert Jr. “Holiness (New Testament),” Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 3. Edited by David Noel Freedman et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 249-254.

Jacobs, Louis. “The Concept of Hasid in the Biblical and Rabbinic Literature.” Journal of Jewish Studies 8 ( 1957), 143–155. Trebilco, Paul. Self-designations and Group Identity in the New Testament. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Whittle, Sarah Kate. A Holy People: Covenant Renewal and the Consecration of the Gentiles in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Manchester, 2011.

Woodward, Stephen. “The Provenance of the Term ‘Saints’: A Religionsgeschichtliche Study,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 24/2 (1981), 107-116.

Wright, David P. “Holiness (Old Testament),” Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 3. Edited by David Noel Freedman et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 237-249.

Wyschogrod, Edith. Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).