The "Silent Years": Shhh!
Keith D. Stanglin
A good chart, which can be an effective pedagogical aid, is typically and almost inevitably an oversimplification, particularly when the topic is history, and especially intellectual history. The less accurate ones are not so much an aid as a great foil in a class setting. Either way, they can provide occasion for real instruction.
I have long been amused by this image, taken from John Hannah’s Charts of Ancient and Medieval Church History, and I have used it for a couple of decades when teaching church history. In a genre inclined to inaccuracy, this chart approaches parody. I could nitpick a little. Of course, the Old Testament, New Testament, and Intertestamental Eras are all anachronistic designations. No big deal, though. More important, Malachi, the final book in the English OT’s order, is not the Hebrew Bible’s final book in order of placement or date. But most egregious, “the history of Israel” under consideration in this chart (and in Hannah’s entire book) has nothing whatsoever to do with the flag of the modern state of Israel, displayed prominently at the top. Even from a great distance, a viewer should suspect inaccuracies.
Perhaps there are some people out there who benefit from this chart. I can’t say, and I don’t want to know.
This chart’s inaccuracy on which I tend to focus in class is the designation of the intertestamental period as the “silent years.” To be fair, if the chart intends to teach something about the chronology of special, prophetic revelation in Israel—which intent could be spelled out more plainly (is it about oral prophecies alone or about writings later deemed canonical?)—then there may be something to it. For example, Josephus, writing in the late first century AD, assumed the cessation of prophetic utterance and writing: “From Artaxerxes to our own time the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets” (Contra Apionem I.viii.41). Sadducees and others presumably would have the prophetic writings begin and end with Moses. As the chart notes, for Christians, prophecy resumes with the coming of John the Baptist, though rabbinic Judaism or the modern state of Israel would disagree.
Again, all of this is still too simplistic. Some of our canonical OT books seem to have been written as late as the second century BC. And we have the voice of prophets like Simeon and Anna (Luke 2), who, even if Luke had not recorded them, were delivering oracles inspired by the Holy Spirit. Could Simeon and Anna, old prophets who spoke long before John the Baptist ever spoke, represent an intertestamental class of prophets? Perhaps the silent years were, instead, quieter years, but not silent. It reminds me of 1 Samuel 3:1: “In those days the word of the Lord was rare.” But not extinct.
Sadly, though, to exclude intertestamental writings from one’s reading list, and then call the years silent, contributes to ignorance in (especially Protestant) churches. In fact, much was going on and much was being written. To skip over about 400 years of history, from the Persian period of Israel’s history to Roman occupation, is, if nothing else, not helpful for understanding the New Testament and early church.
Imagine a survey of American history that starts early, goes to the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth in 1620, and then skips to the terrorist attacks of 2001. This gap could impede one’s current understanding of the United States. (This scenario only slightly exaggerates the way in which many American students engage American history.) Yet this is analogous to approaching the New Testament and early Christian history after skipping over nearly four centuries of Jewish history.
One easy way to help Christians understand what they are missing is to consider institutions and beliefs assumed in the New Testament that are either not prominent or not present at all in the Old Testament. Synagogues, Hanukkah, Pharisees and Sadducees, Herods, future bodily resurrection, and so on. The Greek language itself! “Silent-years” skippers, whose knowledge of the biblical story leaps from Medo-Persian to Roman Empires, should wonder why Palestinian Jews are writing their accounts of Jesus in Greek. Inquiring minds might want to know: What other impact did Hellenistic culture have on early Christianity?
One’s understanding of the New Testament and early Christian history and theology will be severely limited if there is no understanding of the intertestamental period. So, it is, after all, important to have some awareness of what happened in world history and Jewish history during those four centuries.
Which brings me to at least one practical application I’d like to pass along: Read the Apocrypha. These intertestamental or deutero-canonical books are a valuable window into the pre-Christian Jewish period, and one particularly relevant to early Christianity.
The status of the 14 or so books was not officially determined in an ecumenical council until the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, which, in 1546, included them in their OT canon. In the context of that debate, Protestant confessions began positively excluding these books from their OT canon. Yet, early Protestants typically followed up such notices of exclusion by exhorting Christians to read these books for historical instruction and moral or even doctrinal confirmation. They were simply not to be used as sole support for a doctrine or the main text of preaching. But they were still included in early printings of the Bible, for example, in the 1611 King James Version.
For some odd and lamentable reasons, the status of this corpus went from marginal but known and beloved, to (in 16th-century Protestantism) non-canonical but still known and beloved, to (for most modern Protestants) unknown, alien, and suspicious. This neglect is most unfortunate. So, after you read the 66 canonical books, but before you read the latest offering from Max Lucado (or whoever tops the popular lists these days), do yourself a favor and read the deuterocanonical books. Give the “silent years” a voice.
