Rejected Then Resurrected

Foundations of Hope for Salvation in Ps 118 and Acts 4:8–12

(avg. read time: 19–37 mins.)

When Luke describes the resurrected Jesus as showing his disciples that his death and resurrection were in accordance with the Scriptures (Luke 24:25–27, 44–47), he illustrates an impetus of the earliest Christians to find testimony before the fact to these events, which he himself shows in Acts (2:22–36; 3:18–26; 4:11–12; 8:32–35; 10:43; 13:27–37; 17:2–3, 11; 18:28; 26:22–23; 28:23). In my previous work, I examined the foundations of hope as well as the dynamics of continuity and discontinuity in the use of Ps 16 in Acts 2:24–31.¹ In that case, the reader witnesses the earliest Christians reading a text that presents imagery conducive to a resurrection interpretation as applying to the resurrected Jesus. Foundations of hope—in terms of both continuity and discontinuity—shape other uses of the OT in Acts in similar ways. Interestingly, one such case is in Acts 4, where Peter interprets Jesus’s resurrection in connection with a text that does not likewise present resurrection imagery: Ps 118.² Although I consider historical explanations for this interpretation that some scholars have provided in terms of Jewish precedent, I am more interested in the theological reasoning that explains this interpretation in terms of the connections between the foundations of hope. That is, I am interested in examining the foundations of hope: foundational beliefs upon which hope—the confident trust in the accomplishment of a positive purpose/goal in the future—rests. In both of these texts, the accomplishment of hope is expressed in salvific terms, with the many nuances thereby implied.

I argue that the ultimate basis of the textual association of Ps 118 with resurrection in Acts 4 is the fundamental, theological continuity expressed in the foundations of hope for salvation inscribed in the narrative dynamics of both texts.³ To demonstrate this claim, I analyze the foundations of hope in Ps 118, consider historical explanations for how Ps 118 became a resurrection text in Acts 4, and finally analyze the foundations of hope in Acts 4 to demonstrate the overall continuity in the foundations of hope, despite the new shape that hope has taken in this new context.