The Amateur Exegete

Hugh Ross Fumbles on Psalm 22 (Evangelical Eisegesis)

One of the texts useful for understanding the Passion Narrative in the Gospel of Mark is Psalm 22. As Nathanael Vette writes in his recent monograph Writing with Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark, “[F]rom the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion until his death, one scriptural source comes to the fore: the episode of Jesus on the cross is framed by its use of Psalm 22 (LXX 21).”1 It is not merely that specific elements of the psalm show up in Mark’s account of Jesus’s death.2 It is also that, as Jonathan Robinson argues, “scriptural typology continues to play an important role in the Christological meaning of Mark’s Gospel. Most prominent are the psalms of the righteous sufferer, Psalms 22 and 41. They function to portray Jesus within a ‘righteous sufferer typology.’”3 

The Evangelist’s employment of Psalm 22 in the writing of his account of Jesus’s death is unsurprising given the various themes and motifs taken from the writings of ancient Israel found elsewhere in the Gospel.4 What is to be made of Mark’s use of texts like Psalm 22 is a matter of debate. In his excellent book Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite, L. Michael White contends that the Passion Narrative as we have it is in reality an attempt to take previous traditions and give them a fuller body. The Evangelists, Mark included, had a few techniques at their disposal to accomplish this, one of which was to take their cues from the sacred texts of Israel for “looking to the Jewish scriptures offers a means of fleshing out the narrative while also lending a sense of divine guidance to the events.”5 With overt references to Holy Writ, the Markan Evangelist was able to give the tragic story of Jesus of Nazareth an aura of divine complicity, a sense that what happened to the Messiah was part of God’s plan. Thus, when we read that for Jesus’s clothing they were “casting lots to decide what each should take”  in Mark 15:24 (NRSVue),6 a reader may recognize that this is precisely what happened to the character in Psalm 22 when, per v. 18, he says that “they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.” 

Is it any wonder, then, that so many Christians take Psalm 22 to be a prophecy about the death of Jesus? Setting aside some of the problems with this interpretation, chief among them the fact that the character in the psalm never dies, many an apologist has made use of Psalm 22 to bolster their case for Christianity. Recently, the astrophysicist Hugh Ross of the apologetics organization Reasons to Believe published a blog post claiming that “Psalm 22 stands as one of the most astounding prophetic texts in the Bible” and that it “depicts aspects of crucifixion at least a few hundred years before this horrific method of execution was devised and long before it was employed by the Romans.”7 The post is thin on exegesis, ignoring both textual issues that plague sections of the psalm8 and employing a hermeneutic that ignores the context of the psalmist’s words in service of apologetic aims. Nowhere is this clearer than in Ross’s thoughts on vv. 3-5. He writes, “According to Psalm 22, the man on the cross is more than a man. Verses 3-5 address him as Israel’s God.”

If you’ve read Psalm 22, you will no doubt be scratching your head. The psalmist begins writing using the first person singular and he continues that point of view throughout the entirety of the psalm. In the opening verse, he cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” Note first the use of first person pronouns by which the psalmist refers to himself – “my” and “me.” Then note how he addresses the deity, employing vocatives (“My God, my God”) and the second person singular pronoun “you.” This point of view continues into v. 2 – “O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night but find no rest.” Again, the first person to address himself and the second person to address the deity. 

When we get to v. 3, the beginning of the section Ross claims addresses the “man on the cross” as God, nothing about the point of view has changed. “Yet you are holy,” says the psalmist to the deity, “enthroned on the praises of Israel.” In keeping with the psalm thus far, the psalmist uses second person pronouns to reference God. If vv. 3-5 are, like vv. 1-2, the psalmist addressing the deity, whence Ross’s interpretation? He has invented it, pure and simple.9

Ross is not new to bizarre interpretations of biblical texts. In his book The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries Reveal God, Ross devotes an entire chapter to the relationship of modern cosmology to the Bible. Entitled “Big Bang – The Bible Taught It First,” it claims that texts like Job 9:8 (“he alone stretched out the heavens”) reveal an early understanding of cosmic expansion.10 He, of course, ignores the rest of the passage with its reference to Yahweh’s ancient foe Yam (“Sea”),11 a holdover from an ancient Ugaritic tale,12 or that a few verses earlier Job speaks of the earth’s “pillars,” an idea that is part and parcel of many ancient Near Eastern conceptions of the universe.13 

Long story short, Ross has often been a poor reader of biblical texts. Just add Psalm 22 to the list. 

  1. Nathanael Vette, Writing with Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark, Library of New Testament Studies 670 (T&T Clark, 2023), 181. ↩︎
  2. See the parallels between Psalm 22:1/Mark 15:34, Psalm 22:7/Mark 15:29, and Psalm 22:18/Mark 15:24. ↩︎
  3.  Jonathan Rivett Robinson, Markan Typology: Miracle, Scripture and Christology in Mark 4:35 – 6:45, Library of New Testament Studies 678(T&T Clark, 2023), 77. ↩︎
  4. For example, in Mark 4:35-41 we find the Evangelist making use of material from the book of Jonah. Multiple lines of evidence, including narrative and lexical correspondences, make it almost certain that the Evangelist made use of the book of Jonah to cast Jesus in a certain light. On this, see Robinson, Markan Typology, 81-99.  ↩︎
  5. L. Michael White, Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite (HarperCollins, 2010), 124-125. ↩︎
  6. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
  7. Hugh Ross, “Psalm 22: Jesus’ Crucifixion Predicted” (3.11.24), reasons.org. Accessed 4.24.24. ↩︎
  8. For example, Ross points to Psalm 22:16 and contends that the phrase rendered in the NIV as “they pierce my hands and my feet” is evidence that “the psalmist declares the means of execution.” Setting aside the fact that nowhere in the psalm is anyone executed, there is considerable difficultly with Psalm 22:16 (MT, 22:17) such that much ink has been spilled on the problem. See, for example, Kristen M. Swenson, “Psalm 22:17: Circling around the Problem Again,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123, no. 4 (2004), 637-648. The NRSVue includes a textual note after its translation of “they bound my hands and feet” that reads, “Meaning of Heb uncertain.”  ↩︎
  9. I am unaware of any exegete who asserts as Ross does that the psalmist addresses the sufferer as God.  ↩︎
  10. Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries Reveal God, fourth edition(RTB Press, 2018), 26-27. Ross also abuses texts like Isaiah 51:13 to argue that the Bible knew about plate tectonics.  ↩︎
  11. David J.A. Clines, Job 1-20, Word Biblical Commentary 17 (Word, Inc., 1989), 230-231. Clines thinks that the translation “waves of the Sea” is better “the back of the sea-monster.”  ↩︎
  12. See the discussion on stories from Ugaritic lore and their relationship to the Hebrew Bible in John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, second edition (Fortress Press, 2014), 40-44. ↩︎
  13. See Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, third edition (Oxford, 2014), 35. ↩︎
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