JESUS RABBI & LORD

by Dr. Robert L. Lindsey

Chapter 17 - Was Jesus A Reformer?

This is an excerpt from a book entitled: JESUS, RABBI & LORD: the
Hebrew Story of Jesus Behind our Gospel, by Dr. Robert L. Lindsey.
Dr. Lindsey was a pioneer in the studies of Hebraic (Jewish) roots. In
1945, Robert Lindsey from Norman, Oklahoma, found himself pastor of a
small Baptist congregation in Jerusalem, Israel. With his Hebrew-speaking
congregation in mind, he began a translation of the Greek texts of
Matthew, Mark and Luke and soon concluded there must lie behind these
gospels---even if distantly--an early Hebrew story of Jesus. To his surprise
he also found that Luke almost always showed Greek texts which could
easily be translated literally to Hebrew! The same was true of Matthew,
wherever he was not copying Mark's gospel.

In 1960, Lindsey met Professor David Flusser of Hebrew University and

the two pursued the question of whether we can get back to the earliest
Semitic story and the words of Jesus. "It is clear," said Lindsey and
Flusser, "that our synoptic texts originated mainly in one Greek translation
of a Hebrew biography of Jesus, probably, written by the Matthew of
tradition. The materials are too Hebraic to have originated in Greek, as
many scholars mistakenly think today. Happily, if we use the right tools
we can still hear Jesus speak as His fellow Jews of the first-century heard
Him."

Lindsey tells here the warm, personal account of how he and Flusser
struggled over many years to discover the earliest form of Jesus' words
and narratives of His life. They believe that the records, when properly
analyzed and studied show us an authentic picture of Jesus interacting
with the people of Jerusalem and Galilee. Jesus clearly heads a movement,
the "Kingdom of Heaven" and is a Divine Figure whose actions and words
are fully Messianic.
Dr. Lindsey died in 1995 but leaves a legacy of scholars, friends and
students following in his footsteps. We wish to thank HaKesher, Inc. for
allowing us to reproduce chapter 17 of this most important work. We pray
that this article will allow many of our students to discover in their studies
a new depth of scholarship and enhance their walk with our Messiah
Yeshua (Jesus).

Chapter 17 - Was Jesus A Reformer?

In the story of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus deliberately tells

to a strict, very religious interpreter of the Torah there is certainly
implied criticism of religious systems which try to regulate
societies according to what they think is the will of God.

We noticed before that in criticizing the people of Nazareth for

their failure to believe in his role as Messiah and Deliverer Jesus
referred to miracles performed by Elijah and Elisha on non-Jews
when plenty of ethnically-pure candidates existed right among the
people of Israel themselves. Do these and other examples of Jesus'
prophetic stance among his own people mean that he was
primarily a reformer?

If we mean by a reformer someone who wants to pull people in

the direction of a right understanding of the goodness and
immediacy of God, a goodness and immediacy which had been
covered over by a mass of religious regulations and tradition in
which this is "permitted" but this is "forbidden," one has to say
Yes. If we mean by a reformer one who hopes to bring an entire
nation into some kind of modification of the existing religious
practices one has to say No. There is no indication that Jesus was
that kind of reformer.

While preaching everywhere and demonstrating God's concern to

break through into the life of his people as he tirelessly moved
from town to town Jesus took a quite different path. He seems to
have seen no possibility of changing the encrusted ways of an
official religion and tradition, and to have do so would no doubt
have meant a semi-political revolution ending in the kind of
reform, Turkey went through under Ataturk. Under Ataturk the
blaring megaphones of the mosque have been silenced and the
mullahs displaced but the inclinations and habits of the multitude
have largely remained as entrenched in tradition as ever.

Jesus' way appears to have been to find the men, simple or

profound, who be willing to "leave all and follow him." He was to
make out of them a kingdom - a movement- which would build on
the good of Israel's past and revelation but eventually burst the
bonds of locality and nationality.

If we even for a moment consider our own religious traditions,

both Jewish and Christian, we can easily come up with
illustrations of the near hopelessness of our best religious
institutions and practices.

Some of my Israeli friends, both Orthodox and non- Orthodox,

express a certain sadness when they read the Tenach (Old
Testament) and note that Abraham our father, Rabbenu Moses,
David the King and all the prophets get direct words from Israel's
God and pray or speak to him without using a prayer book. They
say, that in today's synagogue service there is almost no
possibility for worshipers to say a personal prayer, though such a
possibility once existed.

"We have lost something," they say, "but no one knows how to
revamp tradition and return to the spontaneity of the old."

The same thing has happened over and over again in the history of
the Christian Church.

How different is the story of the early Jewish-Christian Church.

Almost every page of the New Testament glows with the sense of
God's immediacy and love. Prayer is personal as well as corporate
and God answers the prayers of his people. When Peter is thrown
into prison by one of the Herods and condemned to die the next
day the Church in Jerusalem gathers to pray, and the very same
night an angel visits peter in the prison and says, "Get up!" Prison
chains fall off and the angel leads Peter through open doors to the
street where he proceeds alone to the house of a "brother." He
knocks and so casual is the story that it tells of a young girl named
Rhoda who comes to the gate to open it but on seeing Peter is so
excited she runs back to the believers without even opening the
gate!
Who says the Bible does not record some comic things that
happened to ordinary people in the course of quite supernatural
events?

But modern Christians, no matter how orthodox their religious

convictions, tend to relegate the possibility that God might do
something as miraculous as what he did to Peter to "that ancient
beginning of our faith two thousand years ago." Quite marvelous
theories are seriously presented which suggest, for example, that
when the cannon of Scripture (including Old testament and New
Testaments) was completed in the first century, miracles "ceased"
because there was no longer any need for them - since we have
the Scriptures and that is enough!

Several years ago one of my Baptist colleagues who lives in the

Tel Aviv area was visiting the United States with his wife and
family. A lady in the church they were attending fell sick with
cancer and was given only three months to live. David and his
wife, Jean, were fresh from Israel and a fellowship where they had
experienced real answers to many prayers and they wondered if
they should take some initiative in going to see the sick lady to
pray for her.

The three months she had been given to live were almost over
when David and Jean got up the courage to go visit the lady.
Because there is a passage in the Epistle of James in the New
Testament which advises the early believers to ask the elders of
the local congregation to anoint the sick with oil since "like
Elijah" the fervent, effectual prayer a good man will be answered,
David took along a little vial of olive oil, "just in case."

To their surprise the lady asked them whether they thought that
passage in James' Letter was still applicable for today. That was
their signal to use the oil and pray over her, which, of course, they
did.

The next day the lady called David. "You know," she said,
"something seems to be happening to me. My feet are not black
today!" David said, "Mine are not black either!"

To make a long story short, this lady, immediately recovered from

her disease was said to be "in remission" by her doctor. The
people of the church were happy, but a little in shock. They
believed in God but they were not used to having answers that
were so miraculous!
More difficult was the whole experience for the lady's husband,
however. He was happy that his wife was well but he was not
used to seeing the Almighty step into his life so dramatically. He
felt, as he confessed, a kind of confusion; though why he felt this
way he could not really tell.

His wife, who was perhaps a strong believer than he, decided she
would ask her Lord to do something to make her husband more
certain that God is willing to penetrate supernaturally into our
lives.

It never occurred to her that a table they had in their front room
for some years and which had been put in their basement because
the top had warped so badly that it could not be repaired might
have something to do with helping her husband.

But one day soon after her healing her husband came up from the
basement and said to her, "Honey, you know the table we put in
the basement?" he asked. She replied,
"Yes," having almost forgotten it.
"Did you it repaired?"
"No," she said.
"Well," he said slowly, "we've got some kind of miracle. That top
is no longer warped. It is perfect."

To the amusement of the wife and everyone who later heard the
story the husband brought the table up from the basement and
placed it in the very center of the living room. As friends came by
to see them he related the story of the table.

To relate to his wife's healing seemed too difficult. The healing of

the table was quite a different story!

Settled practices, habits and tradition can often be very good

indeed but they can also prevent us from finding reality and the
joy of truth, no matter how emancipating it may be. Jesus still
shocks most of us when he talks of prayer and says so casually,

"Ask and you will receive.

 Seek and you will find.
Knock and it shall be opened to you.

For everyone who asks receives

And he who seeks finds,
And to him who knocks it will be opened" (Matthew 7:7-8).

Mailing Address:
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Tulsa, OK 74133-6224

Web Site:
http://www.hakesher.org/

Robert Lisle Lindsey, also known as Bob Lindsey (1917–1995), founded together with
David Flusser the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research.

He spend most of his adult life as pastor in the Holy Land. He is especially known for
pastoring the Narkis Street Baptist Church in Jerusalem. His biography has recently been
published under the name One Foot In Heaven: The Story of Bob Lindsey of Jerusalem.[1]

He was an Israeli New Testament scholar. He was a contributor to the Jerusalem

Perspective, an academic journal of a consortium of Israeli scholars, including Jews,
Christians, and others, of Jesus Research, the Quest for the Historical Jesus.

Contributions to scholarship
Lindsey is the author of A Hebrew Translation of The Gospel of Mark. The book is
notable for its solution to the Synoptic Problem. He argues the existence of a Proto-Mark
gospel ("Ur Markus"), which was a highly literal translation from an originally Hebrew
source into Greek, which he calls the Proto-Narrative. The text of the Gospel of Luke is
the most faithful to and best preserves this Proto-Narrative. Especially in the "minor
agreements" between Matthew and Luke against Mark, it is evident that Mark deviates
paraphrastically from the Proto-Narrative. Mark's paraphrases Graecize the text moresoe,
including many phrases that are "non-Hebraic", being common in Greek but lacking an
idiomatic counterpart in Hebrew. Luke knows this Mark-like Hebraic Proto-Narrative,
but does not know the Gospel of Mark as we know it today.[2]

While it is easy to show that Luke knows a Proto-Mark (which happens to be closer to
Hebrew) and not Mark, Lindsey speculates further with more surprising conclusions, and
argues for Lucan Priority. Thus, The first gospel texts are in Hebrew. These were
translated into Greek as the Proto-Narrative and the collection of sayings, often called Q.
Luke knows PN and Q. Lindsey argues Mark knows both PN and Luke, as well as other
New Testament documents, including Acts, James, and Paul's Colossians 1&2,
Thessalonians 1&2, and Romans. Then Matthew knows both PN and Mark (but not
Luke). Matthew is faithful to both PN and Mark and weaves their texts together, thus
often agrees with Luke thru PN against Mark.

Despite the surprising claim that Mark depends partially on Luke, Lindsey emphasizes
that his solution to the Synoptic Problem agrees substantially with the majority who
hypothesize Markan Priority, since this Proto-Narrative is identical with "Ur-Markus",
and that all three synoptic gospels - Luke, Mark, and Matthew - depend directly on the
Proto-Narrative.

During his life he published a few books and articles, namely (this list may not be
exhaustive):

• Jesus, Rabbi and Lord: The Hebrew Story of Jesus Behind Our Gospels, Oak
Creek, WI: Cornerstone Publishing, 1990, ISBN 0962395005
• The Jesus Sources, Tulsa, OK: Hakesher, 1990
• A Comparative Greek Concordance of the Synoptic Gospels, 3 volumes,
Jerusalem: Dugit, 1985-1989
• A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark: A Greek-Hebrew Diglot with
English Introduction, Second Edition, Jerusalem: Dugit, 1973
• "A Modified Two-Document Theory of the Synoptic Dependence and
Interdependence" in Novum Testamentum 6 (1963), 239-263.

"Remembering Lindsey"

Dr. Halvor Ronning, Home for Bible Translators

The 2008 Robert L. Lindsey Lectures
Narkis Street Congregation, 4 Narkis Street, Jerusalem
1 July 2008
Let's look at the Lindsey legacy from a personal perspective starting some 46 years ago,
when he was my
pastor, a scholar, my mentor and a friend. I’d like to speak about him both as Pastor Bob
and as a scholar. I
knew him in the Narkis St. Congregation when there was just a little chapel here with
about twenty-five of us
in attendance on Saturdays. He had a Hebrew Bible study class for a handful of us
students at the Hebrew
University, including David Bivin and Bradley Young. We were fascinated as we would
read the Greek New
Testament and asked, “What did Jesus say in Hebrew?” He had this special point of view
that Luke was the
most Hebraic of the gospels. This is all the more remarkable when you look in the second
half of
Acts, because when Luke says, "we" (Paul and I) do something (starting in chap.16), all
the Hebraisms are
gone. So what is he doing in his gospel which is so full of Hebraisms? He is doing
exactly what he said,
“Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been
accomplished
among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were
eyewitnesses and
ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for
some time past, to
write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus.” That’s the inspired word of
God letting you
know that there are other narratives that he is relating to and from which, it appears, he is
bringing that rich
Hebraic idiom into his Greek, viz., from other sources.
But not just the Bible studies—soup! You could go to his house as a poor student, and
you’d be there at
mealtime, and he’d put the kettle on (if his wife Margaret wasn’t around, he’d do it
himself), and stir up soup
for a bunch of us who would be sitting around the table over these matters. I knew that he
was really
functioning as my pastor when I had a dream one night. There he was, sitting on the other
side of a table and
saying, “You really don’t live according to Galatians 5, do you?" You’d better believe I
woke up and read
Galatians 5 that next morning - about standing in the freedom that Christ gives us. He
said that as a pastor
that some of his best time was when he was a piano tuner up in Tiberius, because he got
into people’s homes
and could talk informally and discuss with them.
As a scholar he had a hideout library, whose location was known to few. Once I was
privileged to be in that
hideout library which had no telephone. He kept up-to-date by attending the weekly
seminars of Dr. David
Flusser. Dr. Flusser, a Czechoslovakian Jew, loved everything that Jews had written in
Greek…so that
meant he read the New Testament. He eventually ran into Bob Lindsey, and to watch the
two of them going
at each other was a fantastic privilege for us students in those weekly seminars in
Flusser’s home.
Dr. Lindsey was on the committee of the United Bible Society for the translation of the
Greek New
Testament into modern Hebrew. My wife and I were on that committee, and just to show
you how intensive
things could get, once all of us on the whole committee were standing on our chairs as we
were trying to
make our points as forcefully as we could to each other. More in humor than in anger.
Pastor Bob could get
exasperated…one time he told me, “Go to bed! You need sleep! Sleep over this and
you’ll be brighter and
understand better what we’re discussing here.”
He was also a revivalist. He was asked by the Arab Baptist pastor of east Jerusalem to go
and pray for a lady
in Bethlehem. As they were praying for her, she started screaming and writhing on the
floor, and he got
scared. The Arab pastor was used to unusual behavior and just kept praying away. Then
Bob told me of his
part. I got it fresh because the very next morning I talked to him on the phone and he
said, “The strangest
thing happened to me last night” and then he told this story. He said, “I started praying
for her too, and then I
started speaking to her in a very loud voice. But what I was speaking wasn’t English or
French or German or
Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic. She got quiet and got up and sat down on her chair.” What
had happened?
God gave him the gift of tongues even though he didn’t ask for it, and it was the
beginning of what changed
that little congregation into a revivalist congregation that was growing. This growth
disturbed some people
and someone burned down the chapel. We met in a tent out here in the parking lot, and
then a tin shack for a
number of years until this structure was built. It was made to look like a tent on purpose.
We felt that we
wanted the idea that we’re in a temporary structure. We do not want to be comfortable
inside our structures,
but we want to be living lives of outreach.
Bob the revivalist and piano thumper and trumpet player - whatever he did, his theme
was always the
Kingdom. This is a fantastic Jewish concept of taking the yoke of the Kingdom of
Heaven, taking on your
shoulders the responsibility of living out God’s will in your life. That was the underlying
theme of every
sermon he ever gave and that’s why this passage that we sang was so important to him,
because in Jesus, God
was finally ruling perfectly. God in His love gave the Torah in writing and then came and
lived it our
Himself in the life of Jesus. And so Jesus says, “Go tell John, what you hear and see. The
blind receive their
sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the
poor have good news
preached to them, and blessed is the one who’s not offended by me.”
In conclusion, we have reflected on how Bob sought to let the Lord Jesus rule in his life,
and how he
impacted some of the rest of us, but you’ll have to read his biography to find out why it’s
called, One Foot In
Heaven. He had one wooden leg from just below the knee down. You have to read the
book to find out, but
the idea was that his foot went to heaven before him. But who came out of his circle of
students and friends?
1. The Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research, founded by one of the students, David
Bivin who also
edited the Jerusalem Perspective magazine that came out for fifteen years and is now
online; 2.The Center for
Judaic Christian Studies with Dwight Pryor; 3.The Center for Study of Biblical Research
with William
Bean; 4.The Gospel Research Foundation with Bradley Young; 5.The Biblical Ulpan of
the Biblical
Language Center with Randall Buth; 6.The Home for Bible Translators and Scholars in
Jerusalem, Halvor
and Mirja Ronning; 7.The Manhattan Educational Services with Steven Notley, and 8.
HaKesher with his
daughter and son-in-law, Lenore and Ken Mullican--all a part of his great heritage of
promoting the Kingdom of Jesus, as Messiah and Lord.