You are hereBishop Spong's Articles May 2010
Bishop Spong's Articles May 2010
The Origins of New Testament, Part XXII: the Figure of Moses as the Interpretive Secret in Matthew
Origins of the New Testament, Part XXIII: Matthew and the Liturgical Year of the Synagogue
Lauren Elizabeth Failla
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXIV: Introducing Luke
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Thursday May 06, 2010
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The Origins of New Testament
Part XXII: the Figure of Moses as the Interpretive Secret in Matthew |
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Matthew's gospel has always fascinated me more than the others. It is not the most profound of the gospels, but it does open interpretive eyes for me more widely than the others. The doorway into this perception is found in the process of being able to ask the right questions. Matthew is the "Jewish Gospel," par excellence, and if one does not understand what it means to be a Jewish Gospel, one will never understand this book. Two biblical characters are taken by Matthew from the Jewish scriptures and used as symbols around which he weaves his story of Jesus. Today I will look at both of them in an effort to illustrate that Matthew is deeply dependent on his audience having a sufficient understanding of Judaism to recognize his allusions both to Jewish history and to Jewish scripture.
The first of these Jewish characters is Joseph, the patriarch whose story is told in Genesis 37-50. This is the Joseph of the coat of many colors, the first born son to Jacob by his favorite wife Rachel. In our earlier trek through the Old Testament, we noted the deep and historic division between Judah, the dominant tribe in the south and the Northern Kingdom of which Joseph was the principle ancestor. Recall that the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, both sons of this same Joseph, were the dominant tribes in that separate part of the Hebrew nation. You may also recall our earlier discussion of how it was that the tribe of Judah not only produced King David but also produced the Yahwist version of the Hebrew scriptures, while the Joseph tribes in the North produced the Elohist version of the same scriptures, and how these two strands of Jewish history were later put together by an interpreter to form a major step in the production of the Torah.
One agenda that drove Matthew's gospel was to present Jesus as the messianic life who was capable of binding up this deep historic division that had long divided the Jewish people. When we read Matthew knowing this background, we can watch just how he does it. Matthew opens his gospel with a seventeen verse genealogy in which he traces the lineage of Jesus through King David and the kings of the Jewish world that centered in Jerusalem. In this passage he clearly roots Jesus in the tribe of Judah, which was the tribe to which David and his royal house belonged. Jesus was clearly the son of Judah.
Then Matthew introduced into the developing tradition the story of Jesus' miraculous birth and, in the process, confronts us with a new character who is also going to be portrayed as Jesus' father. His name is Joseph and he has never before been mentioned anywhere in Christian writing. In the new story of Jesus' birth to a "virgin," there is a clear need for someone to play the role of "earthly father" and to give the child the protection that only a man could give in that fiercely patriarchal society. By having Joseph name this child, thus claiming him as his own, Matthew sought to dampen the rumors of illegitimacy that were swirling around from the ninth decade critics of the Christian movement. In this manner, Joseph, the name of the other major patriarch of Jewish history enters the story as this child's protector and defender. In this manner, Matthew has bound Jewish history together in the person of Jesus.
Next look at the portrait of Joseph as Matthew painted him. Everything we know about Matthew's character Joseph we learn in Matthew's birth narrative. Joseph never appears in any part of the gospel tradition except in the birth narratives. From Matthew's account we learn three things about Joseph. First, he has a father named Jacob (Matt. 1:16). Second, God only speaks to him in dreams (Matt. 1:20, 2:13, 2:19, and 2:22). Third, his role in the drama of salvation is to save the child of promise from death by taking him down to Egypt (2:13-16).
Now go back to the story of the patriarch Joseph in the book of Genesis (37-50) and read that narrative. There you will discover three things about the patriarch Joseph. First, he has a father named Jacob (Gen.37:2). Second, he is constantly associated with dreams (Gen. 37:5-11) and was even called the dreamer by his brothers (Gen. 37:19). As the story of his life unfolds he is noted primarily as the interpreter of dreams (Gen. 40:1-19), and even rides into political power in Egypt based on that gift (Gen. 41). Third, his role in the drama of salvation is to save the people of the covenant from death by taking them down to Egypt (Gen. 46).
Is this simply coincidence or are we beginning to discern how the Jewish Scriptures were used to interpret the Jesus experience? Matthew was not writing a biography of Jesus, he was interpreting Jesus in the light of the Jewish scriptures. Literalism is not the way to read a Jewish story. Literalism is, in fact, a late-developing Gentile heresy. To make Jesus simultaneously the son of Judah and the son of Joseph was something Matthew's Jewish readers would understand.
The second shadowy figure from the Hebrew Scriptures around which Matthew weaves the story of Jesus is Moses. Moses was the founder of the Jewish nation, the giver of the Law, or Torah, and the ultimate hero of Judaism. Moses makes his first appearance in Matthew's birth narrative in the account of the wicked King Herod, who slaughtered the male babies in Bethlehem in a vain attempt to wipe out this threat to his throne (Matt. 2:16-18). Every Jewish reader of Matthew's gospel would have recognized that story as a Moses story. When Moses was born, a wicked King Pharaoh decreed that all the Jewish boy babies were to be destroyed so that his power would not be threatened (Ex. 1:8-22). To save their son from this fate, Moses' parents put him in a basket on the River Nile where, according to that story, he was rescued by the Pharaoh's daughter. Matthew in these opening verses of his gospel is signaling to his readers that he was interpreting Jesus under the popular messianic image of the New Moses. This theme is picked up later in the birth narrative when Matthew quotes Hosea as saying, "Out of Egypt have I called my Son." This was once again a clear reference to Moses but used by Matthew to mark Jesus' return from his flight to Egypt to which he had fled to avoid Herod.
Matthew next interprets the baptism of Jesus in such a way as to frame it as an analogy to Moses' crossing of the Red Sea, by separating the waters so that the people could walk through the sea on dry land. Once again Jewish readers would recognize this theme for splitting the waters was a regular theme in the Jewish Scriptures. Moses did it at the Red Sea; Joshua did it at the Jordan River. Both Elijah and Elisha also split the waters of the Jordan River on their way to and from the place of Elijah's departure in a fiery chariot. Now Matthew brings Jesus in the first story of his adult life to the Jordan River for baptism. In this narrative, he was clearly seeking to say that the God presence we have met in Jesus is even greater than the God presence our ancestors met in Moses. It was a stunning claim. How did he develop this theme? At the baptism, Jesus steps into the waters of the Jordan River, but he does not split these waters. That had been done so many times that it represented nothing special. Jesus rather splits the heavens that we are told in the creation story was "the firmament" that separates the waters above from the waters below (Gen.1:7). Jesus thus splits the heavenly waters, which then fall on him as the Holy Spirit, for that is what "living water" means in the Hebrew Scriptures (see Zech.14:8).
What did Moses do after his "baptism" in the Red Sea? The Torah says he wandered in the wilderness for forty years trying to determine what it meant to be the "chosen people." What did Matthew have Jesus do after his "Red Sea" experience in the Jordan River? He wandered in the wilderness for forty days trying to determine what it means to be the chosen messiah.
While Moses was in the wilderness he had three critical experiences. The first involved the shortage of food and it was solved with manna from heaven. The second was when the shortage of water forced Moses to "put God to the test" by striking a rock and demanding that water flow from it. The third occurred when his people in his absence turned away from God and began to worship a golden calf as "the god who brought them out of Egypt."
Matthew, as noted previously, is the first gospel writer to give content to the temptations, which Jesus had to endure in the wilderness. Examine that content. The first temptation involved the shortage of food. "Turn these stones into bread, Jesus." The second had to do with putting God to the test. "Cast yourself off the pinnacle of the Temple, Jesus. He will give his angels charge over you." The third temptation had to do with worshiping something other than God. "Bow down before me, Jesus, and I will give you all the kingdoms of this world."
Once more, do you think this is coincidental? Or are you beginning to see Matthew's gospel as interpretive writing designed to show that Jesus relived the messianic image of being the new Moses by having Moses' stories from the Hebrew Scriptures wrapped around him. Matthew's Jewish audience would immediately have understood the interpretive tools he was employing. Western, non-Jewish, literalists still do not comprehend.
The most distinguishing marks of Matthew's gospel begin to form a pattern. The baptism story with the heavens parting is a Red Sea story. The temptations are shaped by the Moses narrative. Then comes the powerful Matthean portrait of Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount. No other gospel in the New Testament includes the Sermon on the Mount. It is Matthew's special creation because it enables him to portray Jesus as the new Moses on a new mountain, giving a new interpretation of the Torah. In this sermon, Matthew has Jesus compare Moses with him: "You have heard it said of old----but I say unto you." He reinterprets Moses driving the external Law of Moses toward the internal level of motivation. Moses is quite clearly one of the great interpretive clues to Matthew's gospel. One has to read this book with Jewish eyes.
–John Shelby Spong
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Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong |
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Muzi Cindi, of the Republic of South Africa, writes:
I got to read your material after a spiritual experience I had in August 2007. A friend gave me your book Jesus for the Non-Religious. I've since read most of your books and read your weekly articles. I thank God for the impact you have had on my life. I was on the verge of abandoning the Christian faith completely when I came across your material. I have since read Lloyd Geering, Don Cupitt and others. I look forward with great anticipation to reading your new book. I would like to share my personal theology with you and hear your response. I believe we are living in heaven today; this is the heaven that 1st century Christians spoke about. If the Apostle Paul would wake up, he would definitely say we are in heaven. The heaven we speak about will be inhabi ted by future generations. Again, thanks for being all you were created to be in order for us to be all that we were created to be.
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Dear Muzi,
I am pleased that you have found my work important in your own spiritual journey. I am sure that my friends Lloyd Geering and Don Cupitt would be also.
I am confused by your letter and am not sure what you mean by 'heaven' so let me translate it into words that I do understand. I believe that I am living now in the presence of God, a word I cannot define, but I believe I experience as the "Source of Life," the "Source of Love" and the "Ground of Being." In this presence, I sense that I am also capable of transcending the limits of time and able to experience timelessness or what Paul Tillich called The Eternal Now. As such I already share in the meaning of eternity. I am, however, still aware of the pain and privation that many contend with in their lives. I recognize that suffering is almost universal and that life by no standard is ever going to be fair. So I don't think I could say that I am living in heaven now. I prefer St. Paul's words that suggest that I now see "through a glass darkly", but someday I will see "face to face."
Write again and tell me what you think of this proposed amendment to your thinking.
-John Shelby Spong
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Thursday May 13, 2010
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Origins of the New Testament
Part XXIII: Matthew and the Liturgical Year of the Synagogue |
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In one of my earlier columns on the gospel of Mark, I sought to demonstrate that it was the liturgical life of the synagogue that formed the organizing principle in the first gospel to be written. What Mark had done was to provide Jesus stories appropriate to the synagogue celebrations from Rosh Hashanah (the John the Baptist story) to Passover (the crucifixion story). Rosh Hashanah, however, comes in the mid fall of the year and Passover comes in the early spring, so the gospel of Mark only covered six and a half months of the twelve month year, leaving out the five and a half months that separate Passover from Rosh Hashanah. There was, therefore, a desire after Mark's gospel appeared to fill in that blank space with additional Jesus material, which soon became an imperative need. Within ab out a decade, Matthew wrote the first expansion of Mark and aimed his story at the disciples of Jesus who worshipped in rather traditional Jewish synagogues. Luke wrote the second expansion of Mark and he aimed his story at the community of Jesus' disciples who worshipped at synagogues that were made up of dispersed Jews and those Gentile proselytes, who were beginning to be drawn into the synagogue community. Recall once again that the split between the church and the synagogue would not occur until near the end of the ninth decade, so when Mark and Matthew were written, and maybe even Luke, Christians were still synagogue worshipers calling themselves "the followers of the Way." If one has ever wondered why Mark is so much shorter than the other two shortest of the gospels, the answer is quite simply that he wrote a Jesus narrative to provide material only from Rosh Hashanah (in October) to Passover (in April), or for just six and a half months of the calendar year. Ma tthew and Luke were longer because they both stretched Mark to cover a full year.
When Matthew, like Mark, correlates the crucifixion with the Passover (Matt. 26-27), he signals that the core of Mark will remain intact in his gospel. Like Mark, Matthew has also correlated the transfiguration with the festival of Dedication (Matt. 17:1-8), the harvest stories, including the Parable of the Sower, with the festival of Sukkoth or Tabernacles (Matt. 13), and Jesus' teaching on fasting, cleansing demons and curing sicknesses with Yom Kippur (Matthew 12). When, however, Matthew comes to Mark's correlation of John the Baptist with Rosh Hashanah, he has a problem. The baptism of Jesus by John was the first event in Jesus' ministry according to Mark, but Matthew must cover five and a half months of Jesus' story before he comes to Rosh Hashanah. In Mark the baptism of Jesus had inaugurated his ministry, but Matthew could not save that story for five and a half months. How Matthew managed this dilemma is fascinating.
Matthew follows Mark by having the baptism of Jesus come as the first event in Jesus' adult life so he uses this material early in his story. He begins his gospel with a genealogy and the story of Jesus' miraculous birth, which fills chapters one and two. Then he uses the John the Baptist story in chapter three, which means it had to come long before the seventh Jewish month of Tishri, where Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on Tishri 1. So when he gets to Rosh Hashanah in late September or early October, the baptism narrative material that Mark used as his Rosh Hashanah story has already been related. So what does he do? He uses a trick that has been frequently employed by the motion picture industry (think of Cecil B. DeMille!) and employs a "flashback."
In chapter 11 of his gospel, at the time when Rosh Hashanah rolls around, Matthew reintroduces John the Baptist, who is now in prison, by having him send a messenger to Jesus. "Are you the one who is to come (that is the messiah) or do we look for another?" the messenger inquires. Jesus does not answer directly, but refers him to a passage in Isaiah 35, a passage regularly used in the synagogue at the observance of Rosh Hashanah. "How will we know when the Kingdom of God is about to dawn?" the prophet is asked. To this query, Isaiah responds: The signs will be that the blind will see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing. To this litany of signs Jesus adds other things that demonstrate his messianic claims: "the lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them." It is the Jewish Rosh Hashanah, or New Year theme. Then Jesus moves on to speak about John the Baptist in glowing terms. It is a perfect Jesus story to be use d in the observance of Rosh Hashanah.
There is one other Jewish festival that Mark, with his truncated six and a half month format, had simply ignored. Fifty days after the Passover, the Jews celebrated Shavuot or Pentecost, as they called it, a name that simply means "fifty days." On this day, which would usually fall each year in late May or early June, the Jews celebrated the moment in their history at which time God gave the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. Shavuot was normally observed with a 24-hour vigil. The longest psalm in the Psalter, Psalm 119, was written to be used at this vigil. It is both a hymn to the beauty and power of the law and it is long enough to provide material for the entire vigil. Psalm 119 opens with an eight verse introduction, the first two verses of which begin with the word "Blessed." Then there are eight segments of three stanzas each, designed for use at each of the eight three-hour sections of the 24-hour vigil. To provide an appropriate Jesus story that demonstrates the t heme of Shavuot was the agenda that Matthew faced. Look now at how he did it.
At exactly the right time in the year, assuming that Matthew was stretching Mark's six and a half months out to twelve, we find in Matthew's gospel three chapters, 5, 6 and 7, what we call "The Sermon on the Mount." Here, Matthew portrays Jesus as the new Moses going up to a new mountain to deliver a new interpretation of the Torah. Matthew patterns this sermon after the Shavuot Psalm 119. He opens with an eight-verse introduction in which each verse, not just the first two, begin with the word "blessed." We now call these eight "blesseds" the Beatitudes. Then in the rest of the sermon, Matthew provides a commentary on each of these beatitudes, in reverse order from eight to one, which in effect supplies the Christian content for the eight three-hour segments of this 24-houor vigil. It is a perfect fit.
In the body of the sermon the contrast is between Moses and Jesus with the Ten Commandments a major part of the focus. "You have heard that it was said by men of old — You shall not kill." Jesus is quoting Moses since this is the sixth commandment. Then, to set the contrast, he says, "But I say unto you" and sets himself as the interpreter of Moses by driving the law from external behavior to internal motivation. Murder finds its genesis in human anger and human insults, he says, so to stop murder one has to deal with the anger that precedes it. Jesus does the same thing with commandment number seven. Adultery, he says, starts in the lust of desire that grows out of our insecurity, and until that is addressed, adultery is all but inevitable. Jesus then takes the summary of the law, which commands us to love our neighbor and he drives it so deeply into life by defining our neighbor as including even our enemies. Matthew constructs the Sermon on the Mount in such a way as to drive the Torah to a new level of inward motivation. When the Sermon on the Mount was over (7:22-23), Matthew said "the crowds were astonished at his teaching." His authority was confirmed. It was authentic, that is it was not the secondary type of authority that came by quoting the scriptures, which was the method employed by the Scribes.
Covering Shavuot also completed the last festival of the synagogue year. To provide Jesus material to carry the worshippers from Passover, where Mark had told the story of the crucifixion, to Rosh Hashanah, where he had told the story of Jesus' baptism, Matthew had to front end load Mark. Look again at exactly how he did it. Matthew added the genealogy and the birth story to fill up chapters one and two. He used the story of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus to introduce Jesus to the public as Mark has done, but he has expanded that story by including some of the content of John's preaching. In chapter four, he has taken Mark's two verse account of the temptations in the wilderness and included in it the content and full descriptions of the three temptations and indeed of exactly how Jesus responded to each. Then he adds the Sermon on the Mount in chapter 5-7. When Matthew gets to chapter 13, he has finally caught up with where Mark was in chapter 4. From that point on , the two gospels track very closely together.
Matthew has expanded Mark's content to give the worshipping disciples a sufficient supply of Jesus stories to enable them to cover the entire year. Now when we read it closely, we begin to discern another Matthean interpretive tool. He has woven his Jesus story around the biography of Moses, the greatest hero in the Jewish world view and clearly Matthew's model. Next we will pull the analogy of Moses out of Matthew's text and raise to our consciousness his editorial genius. From the story of the wicked king who tried to destroy the great deliverer at birth to likening the crucifixion of Jesus to a new exodus not from physical slavery, but to the slavery to sin, Moses is clearly in the background of Matthew's Jesus story. The New Testament is quite exciting as soon as you dismiss a literal meaning and begin to discover the interpretive meaning that each gospel writer sought to convey.
– John Shelby Spong
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Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong |
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Taylor Chambers, via the Internet, writes:
I believe there is a human need to worship. Christians believe in the divinity of Christ and can, therefore, worship him. But, if Christ is not divine, was not physically incarnated, did not perform the miracles attributed to him, then what or whom do we worship? Since to Christians, the relationship of Christ to God is so close (the Trinity), does not denying Christ's divinity also deny the reality of God? Personally, I can still enjoy a choral communion in the Episcopal Church, but I am connecting with and worshiping a force and reality that I do not truly understand and upon which I cannot place a name. Does your approach to Christianity supply that name?
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Dear Taylor,
It is not a denial of divinity in Jesus, the account of his being the incarnation of God or even the miracles attributed to him that is my agenda. My task is to find a way to communicate what the biblical writers meant by divinity, what the early church leaders understood when they made incarnation a doctrine and what they were saying when they attributed miracles to Jesus. None of those things are inside the experience of the people of my generation.
I attempted to do just that in my book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, which is still one of my favorites of all the books I have written. I particularly enjoyed when I was writing that book working on the miracles that are introduced as part of the Jesus story according to the Synoptic gospels, that is, Mark, Matthew, and Luke. I find it fascinating that I can find no evidence of Jesus being thought of as a miracle worker prior to the 8th decade of the Christian era. There are no miracles that appear in the writings of Paul (50-6), the "Q" document or the book now known as the Gospel of Thomas. These are the only documents that any scholar suggests might be earlier than Mark. I personally do not believe that either "Q" or Thomas is that early, but others whom I greatly respect do and so I include them in this analysis. This means that from approximately 30 CE to 70 CE, the story of Jesus circulated without miracles. What was the Jesus story like then? Why were miracles added? Those are the questions I believe we must address.
As for the Incarnation as the way to explain the divine nature of Christ, that is a 4th century CE doctrine established primarily at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. So Jesus had to have been understood differently in the first, second and third centuries. I do not believe that Paul, for example, was a Trinitarian. What was the early understanding of Jesus? I cannot address that in a question and answer format. It is far too complex for that. Once again I refer you to Jesus for the Non-Religious where I specifically addressed that question.
What I want you to hear is that there are more ways than one to communicate the God presence experienced in Jesus of Nazareth. So, far from the theological debate about Jesus serving to deny the reality of God in him, for me the effect is exactly the opposite.
Thanks for struggling with important issues.
– John Shelby Spong
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Thursday May 20, 2010
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Lauren Elizabeth Failla
1985-2010 |
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When I got the telephone call, it was like absorbing a blow to the chest that left my heart pounding and my body breathless, "Can you come right away. Lauren has been killed." The voice had an urgency that did not allow for further questions. Christine and I went at once.
Lauren was Lauren Elizabeth Failla, a young 25-year-old woman, the sole surviving child of two close friends. Their other child Emily, Lauren's older sister, had been killed just four years ago at age 24 in a mountain climbing accident. I could not believe that a similar tragedy had struck this family yet again, removing from their lives their last child.
I had known Lauren since she was a babe in arms. I met her, if one can be said "to meet" an infant, about twenty-five years ago in church on an August Sunday. Her family of four had just moved to Morristown and was attending this church for the first time.
We watched these two girls grow up as they and their parents, Kay and Frank, created a special dimension in the life of our congregation. Far too quickly they became inquisitive pre-adolescents with beautiful voices that found an outlet in the girls' choir. Then, as if overnight, they became teenagers — talented and self-giving persons, who pressed the boundaries of life at every turn as if they might miss something if they did not. Then Emily went off to Vanderbilt University and Lauren became a single star, shining even more brightly. Since I was at this time a very active bishop, I did not get to this church except when off duty at Christmas or in the summer, so I did not see them often, but there was a bond which was obvious whenever I saw them. Both of them always made me glad to be alive. All who knew them had a similar response.
Then the first tragedy struck. Emily, by now a university graduate and a primary school teacher in the state of Washington, was engaging in her favorite sport of rock climbing, rappelling as it is called, when her ropes broke and she fell 400 feet to her death. She was 24. The devastation experienced by those who knew her was palpable, but it tore most deeply into the soul of her sister Lauren. Emily's death was the most painful pastoral moment I had ever known until I got this call and learned that Lauren had herself been the victim of a tragic accident, attacked by a crocodile while scuba diving, ending her life at age 25.
It is not as if I am unfamiliar with death and human tragedy; one does not enter the priesthood and not expect to deal with pain. The fact is, however, that some experiences in life are more rending than others. For parents to lose their only two children, both in bizarre and unnatural ways, seemed to me to be something no one should have to bear. When human suffering gets this intense, I begin to understand just why it was that the biblical character we call Job wanted to curse God and die!
I have lived long enough to know that life is not fair. Yet the idea, which is probably more a hope than a conviction, that God is both just and loving is tested, even shattered, in our embrace of human tragedy. Something is clearly not right with the logic of religion. Where in these circumstances was the God who promised to "deliver us from evil?" If God has supernatural power, as the Bible suggests and as most of us assume, but does not intervene in a tragedy like this, is God not malevolent and even blameworthy? If God does not have this supernatural power then is God impotent? Are we then simply the victims of an impersonal world of chance? We cannot help but wonder if God is anything more than a pious delusion? Those appear to be the options. Must our choice be a malevolent God or no God at all? Why was the God who was said to have saved the Jews from slavery in Egypt more than 3000 years ago, not able to save the Jews from the Holocaust in the 20th century? Tra gedy sends us into the darkness of the soul, where we grope to find meaning in unfathomable human pain that causes so many of our religious concerns to sound empty and devoid of reality.
If there is a God, there must be more to this concept than religion seems to understand, becomes our inevitable conclusion. It is this hardness of reality, the inequality of suffering in life that has propelled me, and I suspect many others, onto a different kind of journey that has now carried me beyond the boundaries of traditional religion and into the mystery of life itself. That journey has been the hallmark of my entire priestly career. In the hope that others might resonate with this quest I wish now to share some aspects of that journey with you briefly.
My first step was to recognize that the traditional definition of God as the "supernatural, external being" was, at best, little more than an inadequate human definition, probably expressing our hope more than our confidence. So, I started this journey by setting that definition aside. The external deity who would do for us what we could not do for ourselves died, and I turned my gaze away from the skies that seemed so empty and began a search for God in a new place. I journeyed into a study of the meaning of life in general and human life in particular.
While life has been on this planet for 3.8 billion years, consciousness emerged less that a billion years ago and the self-conscious life that marks our humanity is probably no more than 250,000 years old. To be self-conscious is to relate to life in a new way. We become aware first that only self-conscious human beings know that we are alive and thus only self-conscious beings also know that we will die. No plant, no other animal knows that it is the destiny of all living things to die. That is something that only human beings share. It is not easy to embrace mortality and yet human beings must do it every day. Only self-conscious human beings live knowingly inside the medium of time. Plants are not aware of time. Animals appear to experience time as an eternal present. Only human beings, therefore, can forge lifelong relationships, for that requires time. Only human beings know who our parents are or who our children are after those children are weaned. No lion, tiger, ape or dog grieves when one of its grownup offspring dies. That is a human capacity alone. One of the glories of self-consciousness is that human beings form lifelong relationships, which remember the past, transcend the present and anticipate the future. Because of this capacity we are able to give ourselves to those we love. It is in that gift, however, that we also awaken to the vulnerability of losing the ones we love. Yet who among us would sacrifice our most precious life-giving relationships to avoid the inevitable pain of losing that relationship? Would any of us, who have known Emily and Lauren Failla, be willing to exchange our present pain and grief if the only way we could do that was never to have known or loved each of them? Is it not in loving another and in giving ourselves to another that the essence of living and the joy of meaning are found? It is not easy to be human, but does not the joy outweigh the pain? So we have to choose. I choose life and love. I choose life-giving relationships even though this means that I must eventually endure pain and loss. Making that choice is the second step in my journey.
Having once made that decision, I recognize next that in embracing the self-consciousness of humanity, I am propelled beyond my limits to a new vision of what life can be. I escape the limits of time and space and there I encounter an ultimate reality, which I can experience but never define. That is the reality, but still the mystery, that I now call God.
In the depth of my self-conscious humanity, I confront the essence of life, which has now transformed the way I think about God. I no longer see God as a supernatural being able and ready to come to my aid, but as the source of life flowing through the universe, present in every living cell, every plant, every animal, but coming to self-consciousness only in human beings. If God is experienced as the source of life, then the only way to worship God is by living fully and, the more fully I live, the more this God, this source of life, becomes visible. I now see God as the source of love that is also in every living thing. Love is the power that enhances life and it is present in plants that turn their leaves to the sun, in the birds that feed their young in the nest, in the cat that licks the fur of its kittens, but this instinctual life-giving power comes to self-consciousness only in human beings. If God is experienced as the source of love, then the only way I can wor ship God is by loving wastefully, and the more wastefully I love, the more I make God visible. Finally, I now experience God not as a being, but as the ground of all being, which means that if God is identified with being, the only way I can worship God is to have the courage to be all that I can be. The more I am myself the more I make God visible. That is when I am forced to acknowledge that living is not about the quantity of days, but about the quality of life.
I will not avoid the vulnerability that comes with self-consciousness because that is what enables me to live, to love and to be, and that is the experience that also relates me to God who is the source of life, the source of love and the ground of being. It is also in giving myself to others in relationships that I discover that I transcend time, and that is the moment when I touch eternity. Eternity is entered when I allow someone else to be part of me and allow myself to be part of someone else. Eternity involves recognizing that no one can be human alone.
So I weep openly at the graves of Emily and Lauren Failla, but even as I weep I also know that it is only in being self-conscious that I was privileged to know them so deeply that the pain of their deaths is now so rending and so traumatic. It is not easy to be human, but only in that humanity is meaning discovered and love shared. I have also learned that it is in sharing life, love and being with others that I begin to recognize that I am part of who God is and God is part of who I am, and that all of us are part of those we love and they are part of us. That is now for me the place where God becomes visible and again, for me, that is where eternal life begins.
– John Shelby Spong
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Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong |
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Anne Fox, via the Internet, writes:
I have recently read a lot of your work in my search for a Christianity that makes sense and doesn't involve blind faith ignoring the contradictions of the Bible. Although your books have helped me to finally have the courage to walk away from many of the "traditional" beliefs, without fearing retribution, I find myself searching for the meaning of our existence. I used to find comfort in believing that innocent people who had miserable lives would no longer suffer after death and go on to a new "chapter" in their spiritual existence in some form of life after death which was a positive experience, wherever and whatever that many be. Now I found myself struggling to find meaning in life when so many people suffer. I really want to believe there is something more to us that just the physical cells. What do you think happens to us when our bodies die?
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Dear Anne,
You are wrestling not with some tangential idea, but with reality itself. I congratulate you on that and urge you not to give up your quest. You are just at the beginning of discovery.
Western religion has traditionally taught us to think of God as external to this world, but who is nonetheless the source of life's meaning. It was the assumption of this theological position that this God can and will invade this world to make things right. That is why the unfair world is so difficult for most people to understand and why we have traditionally invested our hope for fairness, not in this life, but in life after death.
Many things have shaken our confidence in these concepts. This God above the sky seemed far more real when we thought the earth was the center of a three tiered universe. The all-seeing God above the sky was then endowed with record-book-keeping efficiency so that the afterlife would be appropriately be used to reward or punish us based on our deeds and misdeeds. What does one do with these ideas in the light of Copernicus and Galileo and the field of astrophysics that has flowed from them, confronting us with a universe so vast that our minds boggle to embrace it? The universe seems to be empty of this kind of divine presence.
We once defined this God above the sky as a "being," maybe the "Supreme Being," who possessed supernatural power and we expected this God to intervene into history on our behalf to accomplish the divine will or to answer our sometimes very self-centered and immature prayers. The work of Isaac Newton challenged this supernatural world of miracles and magic and left it gasping for life.
We once defined human life as a special creation made in the image of God, endowed with an immortal soul and "just a little lower than the angels." Then came Charles Darwin who defined us instead as "just a little higher than the apes." We began to see ourselves not as fallen angels, but as highly developed animals linked by DNA to everything from the plankton of the sea, to the cabbages, to the chimpanzees. Suddenly we wondered if there was any meaning to life other than the biological processes of being born, maturing, mating, reproducing and dying.
So it is that faith wavers in the modern world and the external supernatural being we once thought of as God might just turn out to be little more than a stage in human development. Certainly the God who is the one who rewards and punishes is little more than the behavior controlling parental deity that immature children seek.
I urge you to turn your attention inward not outward, to go so deeply into your own humanity that you escape its limits and begin to experience that which is transcendent or the divine presence. That is the only doorway that in my experience enables me to contemplate life after death. At least that is the path I sought to develop in my recent book, Eternal Life: A New Vision.
– John Shelby Spong
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Thursday May 27, 2010
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The Origins of the New Testament
Part XXIV: Introducing Luke |
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By the time the third gospel, the one we call Luke, was written, history had moved to the last years of the 9th decade at the earliest and quite possibly to the early years of the 10th decade. The Christian movement had journeyed beyond its earlier traumas and tensions and was now concerned about making a case for its legitimacy in the Roman Empire. I date Luke between 89 and 93, though with all proposed dating there is debate on both ends. This gospel, however, does reflect Christianity's transition out of Judaism and toward to the Gentile world. The community for which Luke's gospel was written appears to have been made up primarily of dispersed Jews, who no longer followed their traditions in a rigid pattern and, as a consequence, are beginning to attract a rising tide of converts from the Gentile world. These Gentile proselytes, as they came to be called, had little dedication to or interest in the cultic practices of circumcision, kosher dietary rules and unfamiliar liturgical practices such as a 24-hour vigil around Shavuot or Pentecost and the eight-day celebrations of the Harvest Festival known as Sukkoth. They were not intent on discarding or losing the meaning of these holy days, but they clearly were eager to reduce their place of importance and the hold they had once had on their lives.
The author of Luke is unknown, but the tradition has always identified this book with Luke the physician, who accompanied Paul and is mentioned in both Colossians 4:14 and in II Timothy 4:11. Please recall, however, that Colossians is disputed as to its being genuinely Pauline, with the weight of scholarship against it, while no New Testament scholar of significance would attribute II Timothy to the pen of Paul, so this identification is tenuous at best. What we do know about the author of the gospel of Luke, and the same person clearly wrote the book of Acts as Volume II of his gospel, is that in all probability he was born a Gentile and had been drawn first into the ethical monotheism that marked Judaism. He appears to have actually converted to Judaism and to have joined the synagogue through which he moved into Christianity. He may well have been a convert of Paul's, at least he has clearly identified himself with Paul's point of view and he champions it in both the gospel and the book of Acts.
The internal data that point us to these conclusions are plentiful. First, there is the genealogy of Luke in chapter three, which, quite unlike the genealogy in Matthew, carries the ancestry of Jesus back not just to Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, but to Adam, who would have been understood in the world view of that day as the father of the whole human race, which would include the Gentiles. Also in Luke's genealogy it needs to be noted that while he ties Jesus to King David, he does not carry that lineage through the royal lines of the kings of the Southern Kingdom as Matthew does, but suggests that the line ran not from David to Solomon but from David to Nathan. Biblical sources tell us of no son of David named Nathan, but David had many wives so he might have had many sons whose names we do not know. Where Luke got the name Nathan or why he settled on it is hard to say, but the moral hero of the story of David and Bathsheba was a prophet named Nathan, about whom I have written before. In other places, Luke appears to borrow names from Old Testament characters if it suits the message he is trying to articulate, so the connection with Nathan, the prophet, might be a good guess. We also know that Luke was not impressed with royalty or with magi, as they both get de-emphasized in this gospel.
In other notes that may give us insight into Luke's values, we note that this is the first gospel, and thus the first place in the Bible, ever to mention the Samaritans, and Luke does so with sensitivity and inclusiveness. Only Luke, for example, tells us the parable of the "Good Samaritan." That is just one more indication that his community has moved beyond the Jewish point of view. Later in the book of Acts (chapter two), Luke emphasizes anew the universal theme in his narrative when he suggests that when the Holy Spirit fell on the gathered Christian community. He is quite pointed in noting that Pentecost was a worldwide event in which the Spirit fell not only on the Jews but on the peoples of the world, who then proclaimed the gospel in whatever language those hearing spoke. To make sure that his readers understood this point, he named those who were present. They were: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Egypt and Rome (Acts 3:4-10). Clearly Luke envisioned a Christianity loosed from the ethnic limits of Judaism and propelled into being a universal faith.
We note also that the author of this gospel makes no claim to his ever having been an eye witness, but rather mentions the research that he has done, which enabled him to produce this work. He says in his preamble that "many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of the things which are surely believed among us, even as they delivered them to us, which from the beginning were eye witnesses and servants of the word (Luke 1:1-5)." We can now be certain that Mark was one of these sources since Luke reproduces in his gospel about half of Mark. Many scholars also suggest that Luke and Matthew both had a common source made up of a collection of Jesus sayings from which they both quote frequently and almost identically. This popular hypothesis requires the existence of a now lost book to which the title Q has been attached. There are some other scholars, a minority, who dismiss the Q hypothesis and assert instead that Luke also had Matthew in front of him when he wrote and that, while he preferred Mark, he did use a number of Matthew's additions to Mark and that is what created the similarities between Luke and Matthew that are attributed to Q. While the majority of scholars still follow the Q hypothesis, I for one have never been convinced of it. It is not important to enter that debate here; I merely state it as a way of keeping the argument open.
Luke also introduces a number of things into the developing Christian story that have not to our knowledge been there before. The first one is the account of the birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1). It is a fascinating story from many angles, but it is clearly not history. It reminds me of a song popular in my teenage years entitled, "Anything you can do, I can do better." John is born to post-menopausal parents. That is a wonder, but it pales into insignificance in the light of the story of Jesus being born to a virgin. When the birth of John occurs, the neighbors gather to celebrate. When Jesus was born, however, it was not neighbors, but angels who come crashing through the midnight sky to celebrate his arrival. Clearly, when Luke wrote, there was still some tension between the followers of Jesus and the followers of John the Baptist. That is why there is such a concentrated effort in all the gospels to assert that John the Baptist, who was clearly the first of th e two on the scene, knew that he was subservient to Jesus: "He must increase, I must decrease." Luke pushes this to the extreme by having the fetus of John the Baptist in the womb of Elizabeth leap to salute the fetus of Jesus in the womb of Mary (1:39-45). In this narrative, Luke appears to have borrowed a story from Genesis and applied it to his narrative (see Gen. 25:12-23). In both stories, a baby leaps in the womb of its mother. In the Genesis story, it is Rebekah, Isaac's wife, who is pregnant with twins. As these twins struggle in Rebekah's womb, she seeks the counsel of an oracle to determine the meaning of this leaping only to learn from the oracle that the older son (Esau) would ultimately serve the younger son (Jacob). In Luke's story the babies are not twins, but Luke does make them kin — perhaps cousins — but the meaning is the same, the older boy, John, will serve the younger boy, Jesus.
The custom of taking material from familiar Old Testament sources, such as the book of Genesis to tell the Jesus story, is discernable in other places. In Luke's narrative about the birth of John, he says that the Baptist's parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, conceived him when they were both post-menopausal. That motif was clearly borrowed from the story of Abraham and Sarah, who did the same thing when Isaac was born. The names of John the Baptist's parents were also, in all probability, plucked from Old Testament sources. Luke will portray John the Baptist not as Elijah, but as "the voice crying in the wilderness," a phrase that comes from the book of Malachi. The immediate predecessor to the book of Malachi in the Bible was the book of Zechariah, so Luke uses that name for the father or immediate predecessor of John the Baptist. Identifying the source of the name Elizabeth for John's mother is more difficult. There is only one other Elizabeth in the Bible and she is the wife of Aaron, the brother of Moses and the sister of Miriam. Elizabeth, written as Elisheba in Hebrew, and Miriam (written as Mary in Greek) would thus be sisters in law and thus their children would be first cousins. Only Luke implies kinship between Jesus and John and I believe that he accomplishes this by his creative use of names drawn from the story of Moses and his siblings.
As we look more deeply into Luke's unique way of telling the Jesus story, we will see again and again that Luke's purpose is to interpret Jesus in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures not to recreate him historically. Unless we understand this clearly and thus free our minds from the shackling literalism that distorts the modern ability to study the scriptures, we will never be able to hear the powerful message of Luke. This new vision also introduces into the study of the Bible a playful kind of speculation that leads us deeper and deeper into its truth. As our consideration of Luke moves on that will become clearer and even more obvious.
– John Shelby Spong
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Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong |
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Lilly, via the Internet, writes:
I have a friend who belongs to the Jehovah's Witness Church. In a conversation about Jesus, I told her that nobody knows exactly the day and the year he was born. Then she asked why is our calendar based on his birth if we don't now exactly the year? I have to admit I did not know when and how the decision was made to count the years the way we do. Could you explain? Thank you.
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Dear Lilly,
What makes your friend think that our calendar is based on Jesus' birth? It is based on twelve lunar cycles with other days added to give us enough time to measure the earth's journey around the sun, which means that our rotating planet tilts to the northern hemisphere in our summer and to the southern hemisphere in their winter.
In the fourth century of the Christian era, when Christianity became established in the Roman Empire, there was an effort to change the way history was counted from the founding of the city of Rome to the birth of Jesus. They did not have the knowledge or the ability to count the years exactly, but they came remarkably close. The best guess today as to when Jesus was born is 4 BCE, but even that is based on the accuracy of the detail in the biblical narratives of Jesus' birth that his birth came during but near the end of King Herod's life and reign. We know from secular records that Herod died in 4 BCE.
The identification of the birth of Jesus with the 25th of December is not based on history, but rather on the fact that Christians chose the festival called Saturnalia on which to celebrate his birthday. Even that was not universal, as the Eastern part of the Christian Church celebrated January 6 as the birthday of Jesus. Trying to reach agreement, the western church made January 6 the Feast of the Epiphany and then by counting the days between December 25 and January 6 they came up with the "Twelve Days of Christmas," which allowed my true love to give me gifts for twelve days. All of that is tradition, none of it is history.
So you and your friend in Jehovah's Witness have lots to discuss.
– John Shelby Spong
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