Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy

John Shelby Spong

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062362339
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

A global and pioneering leader of progressive Christianity and the bestselling author of Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Eternal Life explains why a literal reading of the Gospels is actually heretical, and how this mistaken notion only entered the church once Gentiles had pushed out all the Jewish followers of Jesus.

A man who has consciously and deliberately walked the path of Christ, John Shelby Spong has lived his entire life inside the Christian Church. In this profound and considered work, he offers a radical new way to look at the gospels today as he shows just how deeply Jewish the Christian Gospels are and how much they reflect the Jewish scriptures, history, and patterns of worship. Pulling back the layers of a long-standing Gentile ignorance, he reveals how the church's literal reading of the Bible is so far removed from these original Jewish authors' intent that it is an act of heresy.

Using the Gospel of Matthew as a guide, Spong explores the Bible's literary and liturgical roots—its grounding in Jewish culture, symbols, icons, and storytelling tradition—to explain how the events of Jesus' life, including the virgin birth, the miracles, the details of the passion story, and the resurrection and ascension, would have been understood by both the Jewish authors of the various gospels and by the Jewish audiences for which they were originally written. Spong makes clear that it was only after the church became fully Gentile that readers of the Gospels took these stories to be factual, distorting their original meaning.

In Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy, Spong illuminates the gospels as never before and provides a better blueprint for the future than where the church's leaden and heretical reading of the story of Jesus has led us—one that allows the faithful to live inside the Christian story in the modern world.

PART I

How the Gospels Came to Be Written: The Liturgical Year of the Synagogue as the Organizing Principle

CHAPTER 1

Stating the Problem, Setting the Stage

I WILL TRY IN THIS VOLUME to reclaim the Jewish past that can illumine our gospel narratives in a way that is almost unimaginable. I will seek to demonstrate that the presence of an anti-Jewish bias over the centuries has kept the Christian church locked inside an anti-Semitic, Gentile exile. Part of my task in this book will be to pull back the layers of a long-standing Gentile ignorance of all things Jewish that has marked our traditional approach to the New Testament. In the process I will reveal that biblical fundamentalism is, in fact, a product of that ignorance. I will also seek to show just how deeply Jewish the Christian gospels are and just how much they reflect the Jewish scriptures, Jewish history and Jewish patterns of worship. To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.” Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally. It was this same Gentile ignorance, I will argue, that created in the minds of Christians over the centuries the necessity of defending the literalness of such events in the life of Jesus as the virgin birth, the miracles, the details of the passion narrative, the understanding of resurrection as physical resuscitation and the cosmic ascension as an act that actually took place in both time and space. In this book I will show how these stories would have been understood by both the Jewish authors of the various gospels and by the Jewish audiences for which these gospels were originally written. I hope it will be a work that will radically reorient my readers to look at the gospels with a brand-new set of eyes.

Before I can begin that task, however, I must seek to explain how it was that Christianity, born in a Jewish world, developed into the primary source of the anti-Semitism that has plagued our world and that remains today as the darkest blemish on the Christian soul.

I have a second and equally compelling reason for writing this book. Since I regard biblical literalism as a Gentile heresy, I feel a burning necessity to expose fundamentalism for what I believe it is. Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith. It is not just a benign nuisance that afflicts Christianity at its edges; it is a mentality that renders the Christian faith unbelievable to an increasing number of the citizens of our world. The irony of the task that I undertake in this book is that many literalistic Christians will see this book as an attack on Christianity itself. Not knowing any other way to read the Bible except to claim literal truth for it, they will suggest that I have abandoned “every tenet of traditional Christian thought.” I have heard that charge more than once. So distorted will this point of view be that they will be unable to see either how deeply Christian I am or how deeply Christian this book is. So let me begin with a brief autobiographical statement.

I have lived my life professionally and personally between two polarities that seem to tear at the deepest part of my soul. The first reality is that I am a convinced and committed Christian. The second is that I despair daily about the state of institutional Christianity, including its denominational seminaries. Is it possible for both of these things to be true? Read carefully and I think you will discover that it is.

I walk the Christ path by a deliberate and conscious choice. I have lived my entire life inside the Christian church. The church for me has been like a second home. I cannot remember a time in my life that I did not want to be a priest. Indeed I still treasure that vocation. I had the pleasure, indeed the privilege, of serving in that role for twenty-one years. Then, after being elected a bishop by the clergy and laypeople of the diocese of Newark, I had the even greater privilege of serving in that capacity for twenty-four years. The Christian church and its faith are not tangential to who I am; they are at the heart of who I am.

Being a priest opened doors that allowed me to enter deeply into the lives of many people. I have rejoiced with new parents at the birth of a child, and then celebrated that event publically in that child’s baptism. I have worked with young adolescents struggling with their identity issues as they lived through that period of life when they ceased to be children but had not yet become adults. I have been with these teenagers when they were trying to deal with all their conflicting emotions and clanging hormones. Then I have celebrated their maturity publicly in the act of confirmation, the church’s liturgical “puberty rite.” I have sat with passionate lovers as they contemplated forging a life together. Then I have celebrated publicly their union in the liturgical event we call “holy matrimony.”

I have also walked with families through valleys of excruciating pain. I think of an eleven-year-old girl who died of Hodgkin’s disease; a two-year-old baby who died after ingesting a poisonous substance in a house that was not “childproof”; a mother and father who lost their only two children, both daughters, in separate, strange, unrelated and unpredictable accidents before either of these young women reached the age of twenty-six. I have tried then to make sense of these events in a liturgy called “the burial of the dead.” I have walked as a friend and confidant with a young doctor, barely into his forties, married and with small children, who would soon die of a virulent form of leukemia that he understood completely and that he knew full well would be both mortal and quick. I have accompanied couples at different ages, who once had pledged their love to each other “till death us do part,” as they now endured the pain and the embarrassment of public hearings in a domestic relations court prior to their being granted a divorce. I have sat with elderly people in their twilight years as they journeyed through stages of an illness that both they and I knew would soon bring their lives to an end.

Throughout these highs and lows of human experience, I have loved my priestly vocation, and I cannot imagine any other profession in which I could have found a more fulfilling, expanding or affirming life. If I had the chance to live my life a second time, I would not change my journey in any appreciable way. I identify myself quite self-consciously with a man named Melchizedek, who was described in the book of Psalms as “a priest forever” (Ps. 110:4).

Yet I also live in despair when I see the state of the Christian church today. The Bible, a text that the Christian church claims to hold dear, is frequently an embarrassment in the way it is used and understood. The Bible reflects a worldview of an ancient, premodern time and holds as truth many things that no one believes today. I watch members of the church continuing to quote these literal texts as if they should still be authoritative. The Bible on almost every page depicts God as a supernatural, miracle-working deity who lives just beyond the sky of a three-tiered universe. I see the centuries of Christian history as a time when the literal words of the Bible have been used in such a way as to guarantee the development of killing prejudices. I see a biblically based anti-Semitism that has resulted in the beating, robbing, relocating, ghettoizing, torturing and killing of Jews from the time of “the church fathers” in the second century to the Holocaust in the twentieth century. I weep at the evil and the pain that we Christians have done to Jewish people in the name of God.

I watch representatives of a militant Islam beheading or burning alive their prisoners in televised murders in order to protest what they believe the Christian world has done to the followers of Muhammad throughout Western history. There were first the crusades of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, led by the Vatican, in which the murder of “infidels”—that is, Muslims—was made a virtue. Later, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Muslim nations were once again deeply violated by the industrializing “Christian” world’s thirst for oil. The nations of the West have placed the Islamic citizens of the Middle East into a state of constant turmoil, war and devastation.

I have seen how in our history, people of color have been enslaved by “Bible-quoting” Christians. When slavery was finally threatened with being relegated to the dustbins of history in America, it was that section of this country known as “the Bible Belt” that rose to defend the enslavement of black people in the bloodiest war of American history. When slavery finally died as a legal option on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Antietam and Appomattox, the Christians of the Bible Belt, once again quoting their scriptures for justification, instituted laws of segregation with the full support of the federal government. When those segregation laws finally began to fall in the 1950s and 1960s, I watched the Bible being quoted to justify the use of lead pipes, police dogs, fire hoses and even the bombing of black churches in which little girls in their Easter finery were killed—all in an attempt to preserve “white supremacy.” I notice that even today the political party in America that most claims to represent what is called “the Christian vote” is still working to impede the political process for black people, to make voting so difficult as to prevent them from casting their ballot.

I have watched women being denigrated, reduced to second-class citizenship, and denied education and access to the professions, while this life-destroying, prejudiced behavior was being justified time after time with quotations from the Bible.

I have watched a killing homophobia being promoted by the Christian churches of the world, both Catholic and Protestant, based on literal texts from an ancient Bible. I have heard Pope Benedict XVI refer to gay and lesbian people as “deviant.” I have listened to the Reverend Pat Robertson, a television evangelist, interpret all sorts of natural disasters as God’s punishment for our culture’s toleration of homosexual people. I have listened to the Reverend Jerry Falwell, another of America’s well-known evangelical personalities, blame the disaster of September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, on the leaders of this nation for allowing legal abortions, encouraging feminism, giving public support to homosexual people and tolerating such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, because it was a known supporter of the rights of minorities. It is so often embarrassing to continue to identify oneself as a Christian and to see how the Christian church’s holy book is used in the service of prejudice, hatred and oppression.

There is one other great challenge with which I struggle in order to pursue my continued loyalty to the Christian faith. This challenge is not new. Indeed it has been part of the life of our world for almost five hundred years. In those years succeeding generations have watched the incredible explosion of new knowledge and new understandings of how our world operates. Our discoveries have ranged from a startling sense of the enormity of the universe, to a new non-interventionist understanding of the weather and to new knowledge of the meaning of sickness that does not include divine punishment. A literal understanding of the Bible has been used as the weapon of choice in opposition to almost every one of these new discoveries. Galileo was condemned at a heresy trial in the seventeenth century for his challenge to the idea that the planet earth was the center of a three-tiered universe. The biblical text quoted to seal Galileo’s fate was from the book of Joshua, a passage that described God as stopping the sun on its path around the earth so that Joshua could have more daylight in which to kill more of his enemies (Josh. 10:12–14). Later the work of Charles Darwin was attacked and ridiculed by Christians on the basis of the literal accuracy of the seven-day creation story in the book of Genesis (chapter 1) and on the biblical calculation made by Irish Bishop James Ussher that the world was created in 4004 BCE. There are artifacts that clearly refute his dating, such as a 27,000-year-old sculpture in a cave in the south of France that I have seen and which I know to be authentic, but which literalists dismiss as a forgery, since it does not fit into their biblical worldview. I have watched as local school boards, in the service of “biblical truth,” seek to impose “creation science” or “intelligent design” on the science departments of local high schools as a way of providing equal treatment for what they absurdly suggest are “equally valid” theories.

When Louis Pasteur discovered germs, and when later generations discovered and learned to treat viruses, coronary occlusions, tumors, and leukemia, I watched as various Christian groups, quoting the Bible, opposed these breakthroughs in medical science because “they removed God from the arena of sickness and health.”

I recall reading the charges made by the Reverend Dr. Timothy Dwight, a Congregationalist clergyman and the president of Yale University from 1795 to 1817, who railed against vaccinations because if God had intended to punish people by sending sickness upon the wicked, then those vaccinations were standing between God and the divine ability to punish sinners.

So this is my dilemma. At one and the same time, I have found the Bible and my study of it to be a deep resource to my life and my faith, but I have also been deeply embarrassed by the way the Bible has been used over the centuries to justify one dehumanizing attitude after another. I cannot apparently have it both ways. I must either reject the Bible to live in a modern world or I must reject the modern world in order to cling to the Bible. That is a choice I cannot and will not make. So I am driven to find a different way to read the Bible that allows me simultaneously to be both a person of faith and a person thankful for and dedicated to the century in which I am privileged to live. For anyone to call the Bible the “Word of God” or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate. To read from this book in a Sunday worship service and then to end that reading with some version of the phrase “this is the Word of the Lord” is, to me, little more than the perpetuation of religious ignorance and religious prejudice. To watch a church procession in which someone holds the Bible, or the book of the gospel readings, high above his or her head, as if to offer this book to the people as an object of worship, is repulsive to me. Yet I love this book. My life has been fed by this book, and I do not want to see it abandoned in an increasingly secular society. This is what drives me to search for an alternative way to read and to study the Bible. That is what compels me to go so deeply into this book that I can free it from the peril of literalism that has been imposed on it by well-meaning but uninformed “believers.” I feel called to free the Bible from those who read it literally, no matter how much they say that they are associated with either God or Jesus.

Can biblical ignorance be attacked and laid bare by one who is not an enemy of the Christian faith, but a committed practitioner of that faith? Can one who defines himself as a disciple of Jesus open people’s minds to see that biblical idolatry is not a virtue? Can I help to bring to the general public the kind of biblical knowledge that renders biblical fundamentalism inoperative, indeed that reveals it to be both ignorant and unlearned, and still present myself as a Christian, a believer and one who by conviction continues to walk the Christ path? That is my goal in this book, and I shall pursue that goal with passion.

In the process I will disturb many. That is not my desire, but I believe it is inevitable. The Bible has been misunderstood for so long by so many that overturning what most churchgoers have been taught to believe as “gospel truth” will inevitably destabilize their religious convictions. That will naturally bring distress and anger. I also expect that I will irritate many in academia who will suggest that all the things I say have been known for hundreds of years! They will conclude, therefore, that I am guilty of some unequivocal need for sensationalism. I only ask these people, who have lived their lives behind the ivy-covered walls of academia, to step out of their intellectual ghetto for just a minute, where they can see clearly that very few people seem to have heard the news that those academicians say is hundreds of years old. They will also see that people are today walking away from Christianity in droves because it seems so out of touch with the world in which they live. More importantly, these academic Christians need to face the fact that their work has never been successful in helping to define “popular” Christianity. That rather was the accomplishment of the biblical literalists. So in this book I will begin with a brief story of the Bible in general, which, if successfully conveyed, will inevitably destroy the unthinking assumptions of fundamentalism. I will not stop there, however. Then I will develop a very different way of reading the text of the Bible itself. When I get to this second phase of this book, I will lean on one gospel as my guide. I will do that for two reasons. First, to do more than one gospel would make this book so long that no one would read it. Second, the principle I seek to show can be established and developed by using one gospel alone. Matthew is the gospel I have chosen, because it was the one that the early church placed first in the New Testament and it lends itself to a non-literal reading better than any other. I have loved my study in preparing to write this book. I hope my readers will love the results. More than that, I hope they will discover a way to worship God with their minds. I hope they will find themselves able to live inside the Christian story without denying the tenets of the world in which they are also citiz...