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.