Liberating the Gospels

Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes

John Shelby Spong

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780060675578
• eBook ISBN: 9780061748424
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In this boldest book since Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Bishop John Shelby Spong offers a compelling view of the Gospels as thoroughly Jewish tests.Spong powerfully argues that many of the key Gospel accounts of events in the life of Jesus—from the stories of his birth to his physical resurrection—are not literally true. He offers convincing evidence that the Gospels are a collection of Jewish midrashic stories written to convey the significance of Jesus. This remarkable discovery brings us closer to how Jesus was really understood in his day and should be in ours.

Part One

Understanding the
Biblical Issues

1

The Crisis in Faith Today

Finding a New Question
and a New Starting Place

Did it really happen?

That is the question that people through the ages have always asked about the beginnings of their religious traditions. Certainly that has been the question asked of the gospel tradition of Christianity. Did it really happen? Did a virgin actually conceive? Did the heavens really open at the time of Jesus' baptism? Did Jesus walk on water or feed the multitude with five loaves? Did he literally restore sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and even more dramatically, life to the deceased? Did his resuscitated body walk physically out of the tomb at the dawn of Easter some thirty-six to seventy-two hours after his public execution? Did he rise from this earth and ascend into a heaven located just beyond the sky?

Traditionally, the only answers that these questions could possibly elicit were either yes or no. “Yes” was the answer of the believer. “No” was the answer of the unbeliever. In the years of Christian dominance in the Western world, the answer “no” was seldom heard in public places, for the pressure against doubting or questioning the conventional religious wisdom was enormous. The Bible had been proclaimed to be the literal Word of God. It was God's truth. It admitted to no error. Great theological systems of doctrine had been erected on the basis of this revealed Word of God. Belief in that creedal orthodoxy was equated with salvation. Unbelief was subject to condemnation.

Liturgical practices had been inaugurated by the Church so that these great objective moments of the gospel drama could be lived out annually and thus be riveted upon our memories. So at Christmas we heard the story of Jesus' birth, with all of its miraculous wonder that featured stars and angels, virgins, and close escapes into Egypt. During Holy Week we relived the literal drama of Jesus' suffering, from the betrayal, arrest, and torture, to his crucifixion on a hill named Calvary. At Easter we reveled in the stories of his restoration to life, which were replete with tangible proofs of his resurrected reality. He was seen by his disciples. He ate food before them. He invited them to handle him to make sure he was not a ghost. He opened the wounds in his hands and side to their tactile examination. On the Sunday of Pentecost, we celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church complete with accounts of a mighty rushing wind, tongues of fire, and the ability to speak in the language of the hearer. Over and over, year in and year out, the liturgy of the Church flowed over the conscious minds of the people until these events became part of the cultural selfidentity, thus enabling these concepts to be kept ever fresh in our memories.

The liturgy also served to make these defining moments in our faith story so dramatic and powerful that for centuries it occurred to no one to suggest anything other than that these were the objective memories of eyewitnesses who faithfully recorded them in the sacred text that came to be known as the Word of God. So to the question, “Did it really happen?” the believer would assert with great confidence, “Yes, of course. It happened just as the Bible says!”

But the Christian dominance of the Western world began to decline visibly by the sixteenth century, and with that decline the answer “yes” to the question, “Did it really happen?” became less and less secure. Believers had to face the fact that other answers were becoming conceivable. This shift did not happen quickly. At first, those few who would question or doubt publicly did so at the risk of some very real danger to their lives. Some were ostracized, others were excommunicated, and a few were even burned at the stake. To doubt or to question the literal truth of the Bible or the authority of the Holy Church was a dangerous occupation.

In this believing age, it never occurred to the Christian majority to ask whether “Did it really happen?” was the proper question with which to approach the Bible. That had been the unquestioned approach to scripture since at least the dawn of the second century. That was the way the Bible was read and interpreted by the leaders of the Christian Church. That was the way the “fathers” of the Church—Polycarp, Iranaeus, Chrysostom, Origen, Augustine, and Jerome—had taught them. Western consciousness in this era was such that it escaped the notice of the common mind that all of the fathers of the Church were gentiles of a Greek, Latin, or North African origin. It also did not occur to them to notice that the Gospels were books written by people who were Jewish, and that Jewish people did not relate to sacred history as if it were an objective description of literal events. Indeed, in the early years of the Christian Church in the Western world, a wretched spirit of anti-Jewish hatred was so pervasive that the very idea that the Gospels were the products of Jewish authors and that they represented a Jewish gift to the world would have seemed both incomprehensible and even revolting. So it was that the Christian Church locked itself into certain basic assumptions by which it lived and to which it admitted no challenge. Among these assumptions was that the Bible, especially the Gospels as the Word of God, were objectively true, that they described events of literal history, and that one could confidently assert that all that was contained therein did in fact happen just as it was written. This mentality produced a comfortable feeling of security that endured for centuries. It was, however, destined not to endure forever.

Inevitably, the day arrived when knowledge expanded to a place where biblical assumptions had to be challenged despite the personal cost to the challenger. The opening shot, at least in the public battle of ideas, was fired in the early years of the seventeenth century by a resident of the city of Padua named Galileo. Building on the work of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo, challenged the common wisdom that the earth was a stationary body around which the heavenly bodies moved. This implied that the earth was not the center of the universe and therefore it might not be the object of the constant attention of its divine creator—the unwritten premise against which the whole biblical drama unfurled. The Bible portrayed God not only as the creator, but also as one regularly involved in the affairs of human history. This God had walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening (Gen. 3:8). This Divine One had chosen one special tribe to be the elect people of God (Gen. 12:2-3). This deity had freed these people from bondage in Egypt (Exod. 13:3 ff.), split the waters of the Red Sea to facilitate their escape (Exod. 14:21 ff.), fed them with quails and heavenly bread in the wilderness (Exod. 16:13 ff.), and finally led them victoriously into the promised land of Canaan (Josh. 3:14 ff.).

Later, this God raised up prophets to speak the Divine Word. And “when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son” (Gal. 4:4), said the scriptures. That was Paul's understanding of Jesus—who, he believed, had come forth from God at his birth and who, following his crucifixion, had returned to God by his exaltation into heaven. The God who dominated the biblical narrative was a God who was conceived of inside a worldview that Copernicus and Galileo had rendered all but meaningless. It was no wonder that the leaders of the Church reacted with such vehemence to the publication of Galileo's ideas, for they struck at the very heart of the Church's authority. The entire biblical frame of reference was challenged by Galileo's concepts. So the Church condemned Galileo and forced him to choose between recanting and death. The text used to challenge the work of Galileo was found in the book of Joshua, where Joshua ordered the sun to stand still in the sky (Josh. 10:12). This proved to the leaders of the Church that the earth was the static center of the universe around which the sun moved each day. The Bible, every word of it, had been invested with ultimate and literal truth. Therefore anything contrary to the Bible was, by definition, false. Galileo did recant in order to save his life, and the Church presumed that a great victory had been won. However, no external authority can ultimately repress truth, and Galileo was exonerated as his ideas gained ascendancy. Finally, in 1991, the Vatican admitted that Galileo had been correct and the Church and the Bible had been wrong. This confession of error on the part of the Church was 350 years too late. By that time Galileo hardly cared, and the credibility of the Church was as poorly served by that arrogant confession as it had been by its original closed-minded ignorance. Besides that, the Church, even in its admission of guilt, hardly dealt with the major threat to its power: namely, that if Galileo was correct, what happens to the whole context in which the Bible was written? It had been immediately rendered all but unbelievable by the sea change in thought inaugurated by Galileo. Perhaps the religious hierarchy assumed that no one would raise this question.

Within a century of Galileo, an English physicist named Isaac Newton applied Galileo's insights to create his vision of a mathematically precise universe operating according to fixed physical laws. When Newton had completed his work, the realm in which miracle and magic had once been thought to operate had all but vanished from our sight.

Yet the story of the Bible was written to validate an intervening deity who performed miracles and magic with regularity. This God was said to have turned the Nile River into blood and to have sent various other plagues on the recalcitrant Egyptians (Exod. 8-11). This God had called to Moses out of a burning bush that was not consumed (Exod. 3:1-6) and had equipped Moses with magical tricks, such as providing Aaron with a staff that would turn into a serpent when thrown to the ground. This feat supposedly gave credibility to Moses' demands for his people's freedom (Exod. 7:10 ff.). When the pharaoh's magicians were able to accomplish the same trick, God's power was further demonstrated in that the serpent that belonged to Moses and Aaron simply ate up the serpents belonging to the magicians!

These qualities of miracle and magic permeated the entire biblical story. Elijah was fed by ravens (1 Kings 17:4-6) and by angels (1 Kings 19:4-8). He called down fire from heaven to burn up his (and presumably God's) enemies (1 Kings 1:9-12). He expanded a widow's bread and oil supply so that it was never exhausted (1 Kings 17:8-16), and he even restored the widow's son to life after he had died (1 Kings 17:17-24).

Elisha did many of these same things but was also said to have had other magical powers. When the iron head of a borrowed ax fell into the river Jordan, Elisha made the iron ax head float so that it could be recovered (1 Kings 6:1-7). The biblical world apparently was not governed exclusively by the laws of physics about which Newton wrote.

The Jesus story was also told in terms of this world of miracle and magic that Newton in large measure laid to rest. Jesus walked on water (Matt. 14:23), expanded food supplies (Mark 6:38 ff.), and violated the laws of gravity by rising from this earth to ascend into God's heavenly presence (Luke 24:51, Acts 1:9).

After the writings of Isaac Newton, it became much more difficult to answer “yes” to the question, “Did it really happen?” which we had been taught was the only proper question that people of faith could ask of the stories in the gospel tradition.

The intellectual revolution of the modern world after Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton continued to chip away at the assumptions made by the biblical writers. Charles Darwin not only destroyed the objective truth of the literalized story of creation, but he also forced the world to question whether or not human life was a special creation made in the image of God. Perhaps, Darwin suggested, human beings were but an accident of the evolutionary process.

Darwin also presented us with a vision of a universe that was still evolving and was thus unfinished and therefore incomplete. After Darwin, human beings began to recognize that, in contradistinction to the popular Christian assumptions, there has never been a human perfection from which we have fallen away. There has been rather only the evolution of a higher consciousness that has occurred over billions of years and in which Homo sapiens are still participating. So it becomes meaningless for theologians to talk about the Fall or even about original sin. There can be no fall from a perfect creation in the garden of Eden if there has never been a perfect creation.

Suddenly, it began to dawn on us that portraying Jesus as the divine rescuer who came to save human beings and the rest of the fallen creation and to restore us and our world to the perfection that God had intended in creation was no longer a translatable concept. If life was still evolving, restoration was not the proper idea. All of the atonement theories and the atonement stories, especially those that speak of Jesus as the sacrifice or ransom, began, in the light of Darwin's thought, to be nonsensical. For that reason the thought of Charles Darwin represented a radical threat to religious folk and to religious leaders.

The Christian Church in the nineteenth century did not have the power to force Darwin to recant as it had once forced Galileo to do. But that did not mean that Christian leaders did not open up a ferocious attack on the writings of Charles Darwin. In the United Kingdom, that attack was led by the Anglican bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who debated with Darwin's advocate, Thomas Huxley, throughout the realm. Because of his oratorical proclivities, Bishop Wilberforce acquired the nickname “Soapy Sam.” By and large, however, the Wilberforce attacks amounted to little more than an uninformed ridicule and the exaggeration of some complete misconceptions found in Darwin's thought. Today few people are aware of Samuel Wilberforce, but all the world still knows the name of Charles Darwin.

Once again, this intellectual giant left the Christian traditions built on the literal biblical record in tatters. For the Bible was both written and understood in terms of a worldview that, after Darwin, was no longer believed to exist. The clash between Darwin and the Bible came to public attention in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, at the trial of a high school teacher named John T. Scopes. He was charged with teaching evolution, which was specifically against the law in Bible-believing Tennessee. Like Galileo, Scopes was found guilty of violating the truth of holy scripture. He was fined a nominal sum and removed from his teaching post.

Galileo's sentence was imposed in Catholic Europe, so an official apology could come from the Vatican centuries later. Scopes was found guilty in Protestant America, so no central authority exists that could speak the word of apology to him. But the fact remains that the whole social order has long ago overturned the guilty verdict against Mr. Scopes in a thousand ways. Despite the fact that an occasional southern or rural community in the United States still seeks to establish in the local school curriculum an alternative to evolution called “creation science,” it is nonetheless true that the whole field of biology and medicine today assumes that the principles of Charles Darwin are true, and school textbooks for six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds across the world have incorporated these principles into their content. This is even true for Tennessee. Once more, a portion of the Bible, like the story of a seven-day creation, a couple named Adam and Eve, a serpent, and the tempting fruit of a tree had been demonstrated not to be literally true. So when the question, “Did it really happen?” continued to be asked, the answer “no” began to be heard with increasing frequency. However, the pressure against viewing the Bible as literal truth did not stop with these identified onslaughts against its perceived inerrancy.

Sigmund Freud rose in the early years of the twentieth century to challenge and probably even to destroy those naive religious assumptions that had portrayed God as either a rewarding or a punishing parent figure. Freud suggested that all religious systems represented an infantile neurosis from which human beings would someday emerge as mature adults. He exposed the power needs that organized religion had developed in which to hide from truth. He also laid bare the religious defensiveness that lies hidden underneath those peculiar religious claims to be the true faith or to worship the true God or to possess the only true revelation, and thus to be the only authorized spokesperson for that revelation. Freud made such claims inoperative.

Yet these were the very claims that echoed throughout the biblical story. These claims also had been enveloped by the hierarchy of the Church into a body of doctrine and dogma that some parts of the Church have insisted must be believed on pain of the loss of salvation. But now, in the light of this intellectual revolution, it became increasingly obvious that the primary theological structures of the Church, including its doctrines and dogmas, depended on that literal view of scripture, which was no longer intellectually defensible. The Church was thus in a battle for its very life.

For most of its history, the Church had approached its scriptures through no other lens except the question, “Did this really happen?” and assumed that the answer to that question was a resounding “yes!” Now that same Church began to face the fact that this “yes” answer was increasingly without credibility. Of course the “no” answer, which seemed to be the only alternative, would mean the end of Christianity. If these things did not really happen, then Christianity was suspect at best, perhaps fraudulent at worst. That was not a viable notion for Christians to entertain. So the answer “yes” was surrendered slowly and begrudgingly. Biblical foundations once thought to be invincible no longer appeared to be so. Indeed they appeared to many to be no longer even credible. For the leadership of the Church, the writings of Sigmund Freud represented a devastating challenge. So he was vilified and resisted as long as possible. That seemed to the Church leaders the only choice available, but penetrating truth can finally be neither ignored nor resisted.

Before Freud's challenge was fully admitted, to say nothing of being entertained or even absorbed by the religious public, Albert Einstein had arisen to destroy any remaining credibility that might have existed after Galileo to the biblical notion that this planet was the center of the universe. Einstein also put nails into the coffin of the concept that human life was the purpose of creation. This great physicist even rendered our traditional concepts of both time and space to be less than objective categories, and he demonstrated the relativity of all articulated truth. Yet, once again, these were the very foundations upon which the Christian faith had been built. These were the assumptions upon which the Christian story had always been told. The ability of a modern person to continue to view the Bible literally had all but disappeared. If there was no other way to read the Bible than literally, then the sunset of Christianity had entered the Western world. This challenge was so basic and so severe that it is no wonder that denial was destined to be the primary way in which Christians dealt with this crisis. For it was fast becoming inescapably obvious that people living in the modern world could no longer answer the question “Did this really happen?” with a convincing “yes.” But those who believed themselves to be Christians were also not willing to admit that their faith tradition was in fact built on a hoax or on ignorance or on a total misconception. Yet, in the expansion of knowledge and in the insatiable human search for truth, such a defensive religious system could not be expected to endure. These are the realities and the tensions that now haunt the ranks of organized religion.

I see three primary responses emanating from those ranks today that seek to deal with this crisis in the integrity of our faith. One is the response of the monolithic Roman Catholic hierarchy. The other two are the responses of conservative and liberal Protestant Christianity respectively. None of these responses, in my opinion, offers any hope for the future.

The Roman Catholic response is basically built on the perpetuation of that previous denial. This was an easier approach for the Roman Catholics than it would have been for Protestants because scripture has never been a major source of Catholic authority. Critical biblical scholarship did not invade Catholic consciousness until the twentieth century. It is a bit easier to ignore the erosion of biblical authority if you have historically down-played the Bible. Authority for Rome had been located in the Church's official teaching, residing in the magisterium and operating underneath the infallibility vested in the papal office.

However, far more than even Rome might imagine, their original doctrinal positions, which the magisterium has defended so vehemently, were built on a very literal use of the Bible by the fathers of the early Church. If one examined the formation of Christian doctrine in the first few centuries of the Christian era, one would discover that it was totally dependent on a literal understanding of biblical texts. Great efforts were made by the fathers to harmonize biblical contradictions if they could not be simply ignored. It is also fair to say that during the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, when such doctrines as the Incarnation and the Trinity were being formulated, it was the literalized words of the Fourth Gospel, above all others, that buttressed their arguments. To base theology on the literal words of John is to erect the most fragile of structures. The first cause for suspicion is that there is hardly a word attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel that was recorded in any of the earlier Gospels. So the Johannine words are quite late and thus clearly are not original. More and more scholars acknowledge that most of the words attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Part One: Understanding the Biblical Issues
• Part Two: Examining the Gospel Texts from a Jewish Perspective
• Part Three: Looking with Jewish Eyes at Critical Moments in the Christian Faith Story
• Notes
• Epilogue: Entering the God Presence of the Bible and Jesus
• Bibliography
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN SHELBY SPONG
• Copyright
• About the Publisher