[Dialogue] Spong in Lent

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

Dear Dick,

Thanks for your Spong piece.  I had not seen this
particular piece before.  It is very illuminating.

Charles Hahn
--- KroegerD at aol.com wrote:

> February 16, 2005
> The Influence of The Jewish Festival of Sukkoth on
> the Passion Narrative: 
> Part III 
> 
> Western Christians find it hard to understand that
> the gospel writers were 
> not writing objective history. Yet nothing we know
> about the formation of the 
> New Testament supports that conclusion. Jesus lived
> between 4 BCE and 30 CE. He 
> spoke and taught in Aramaic. The gospels came 40 to
> 70 years after his death 
> and they were written in Greek. This means that
> almost everything that we know 
> about Jesus lived in oral transmission and underwent
> one translation before we 
> get to the earliest documents that we possess.
> During that time his followers 
> had continued to worship in the synagogues of their
> ancestral Jewish faith 
> before the movement that he had begun separated
> itself from Judaism in 88 CE and 
> came to be called Christianity. They were originally
> called "The Followers of 
> the Way."
> Realizing these facts, our claim to possess
> objective history in the gospels 
> begins to wobble. Next, we have become aware that
> after the writing of Mark's 
> gospel in the early 70's, the written record of
> Jesus expanded about every 
> decade with Matthew writing in the early 80s, Luke
> in the late 80s or early 90s 
> and John in the late 90s. By reading these accounts
> in the order in which they 
> are written, we can actually watch the story grow
> and the miraculous 
> heightened.
> The obvious question that these data raise is one
> that has been generally 
> ignored by Christian interpreters. So let me pose it
> in several forms. Where did 
> the sayings of Jesus, the parables of Jesus and the
> stories about Jesus reside 
> in that oral period between the end of his life and
> the first writing of the 
> gospels? In what context was the oral tradition
> maintained? In what ways did 
> that context shape, change and transform the
> message? The reason these 
> questions are seldom raised is directly related to
> the residual effect of the 
> idolatrous worship of the Bible that we call
> bibliolatry. Bibliolatry gripped the 
> early church and still resides in traditional parts
> of Christianity today. The 
> gospels have for far too long been treated as if
> they are history and therefore 
> are presumed to be accounts of what Jesus actually
> said and did. They have been 
> invested with the literal claim that they are the
> dictated words of God. When 
> people begin with that definition of the Bible, they
> are not disposed to 
> study the origins of their sacred story. It is
> easier to make excessive claims for 
> its inerrancy and to seek to maintain the now
> thoroughly discredited fiction 
> that the Bible was received by divine revelation.
> Incredible though it may 
> seem, after some 200 years of critical biblical
> scholarship, its impact, for the 
> most part, still has not escaped the hallowed halls
> of academia. The insights 
> gleaned from that study, and their impact on how the
> Bible can be competently 
> and accurately read, are still largely ignored in
> both Catholic and Protestant 
> circles. It is actually worse than that. Scholarly
> study of the scriptures is 
> still being attacked in these circles as "godless
> heresy." 
> A preliminary study of the gospels will, however,
> reveal the obvious fact 
> that the story of Jesus was repeated primarily in
> the synagogues during the years 
> after the death of Jesus and before the gospels were
> written. The clue here 
> is discovered in the wide use of Old Testament
> references that are both overt 
> and covert in the gospel narrative. Paul wrote that
> Jesus died and was raised 
> "in accordance with the scriptures." When Paul wrote
> the only scriptures he 
> knew were the Hebrew Scriptures. In the gospels the
> prophets are quoted to show 
> how Jesus fulfilled them. Micah is quoted to
> undergird the Bethlehem birth 
> story. Isaiah is quoted to develop the story of the
> Wise Men. Isaiah had written 
> that kings would come to the brightness of God's
> rising. They would come on 
> camels, they would come from Sheba and they would
> bring gold and frankincense. In 
> a book called the Wisdom of Solomon, Israel's most
> opulent king is quoted as 
> having said, "When I was born I was carefully
> swaddled for that is the only 
> way a king can come to his people." This line
> clearly shaped Luke's birth story 
> of how the infant Jesus was wrapped in 'swaddling
> clothes.' We could 
> illustrate this connection between the Hebrew
> Scriptures and the Jesus story quite 
> literally thousands of times. What we need to
> realize is that the only place the 
> people heard the Jewish Scriptures read was in the
> synagogues. In those days, 
> books were on scrolls, handwritten and very
> expensive. People did not own 
> copies of the Hebrew Bible to read at their leisure.
> The Gideon Society did not 
> place them in local hotels. If the Jesus story was
> interpreted by and understood 
> through references to the Hebrew Bible, the only
> place that could have 
> happened was in the synagogue where the reading of
> the Law and the Prophets and 
> expounding on their meaning constituted the major
> part of their liturgy.
> In this series of columns on the relationship
> between the Passover and the 
> telling of the story of the crucifixion, I have
> suggested that even the sacred 
> accounts, which propose to describe the final events
> in Jesus' life, are not 
> the recordings of historical memory. Rather they are
> the later developed, 
> synagogue-inspired liturgical interpretation of what
> his disciples had come to 
> believe, that in and through the life of Jesus, they
> had experienced the eternal 
> God. In the first of this series, I pointed out
> hints in the text itself that 
> suggest that the original dating of the crucifixion
> narrative appears to have 
> been changed. Passover came in mid to late March.
> There were no leafy branches 
> that could have been waved in a Palm Sunday
> procession at that time in 
> Palestine, even though the literal text suggests
> that Jesus' triumphal entry into 
> Jerusalem came just before the crucifixion. There
> was no fig tree whose failure to 
> produce figs in late March could have elicited the
> killing curse from Jesus 
> that both Mark and Matthew describe. The connection
> between Passover and 
> crucifixion seems to be rather forced in the
> gospels.
> Then we looked at the earliest version of the
> Passion of Christ narrative 
> found in Mark (14:17-15:47) that appears to be a
> liturgical form based on the 
> Passover but stretched into a twenty-four-hour vigil
> with the content of the 
> story drawn not from eye witness memory but from
> Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.
> The next step in this consciousness raising
> enterprise is to look at whether 
> the holy days of the Jewish liturgical year were
> also used to shape the story 
> of Jesus. I now want to bring one of those holy
> days, about which Christians 
> tend to know nothing, into our awareness.
> In the fall of the year, the Jews celebrated an
> eight day Harvest Festival 
> called Sukkoth (pronounced sue-coat), sometimes
> called the Feast of the 
> Tabernacles or Booths which drew Jewish pilgrims
> from all over the known world to 
> Jerusalem. Despite its enormous popularity Sukkoth
> is mentioned only once in the 
> Bible in John 7 so most Christians have no idea of
> how this festival was 
> observed. If they did they would recognize that the
> symbols of Sukkoth have been 
> subsumed in the details of the Christian story of
> Palm Sunday. Listen to the 
> similarities.
> The worshipers at Sukkoth marched in procession
> round the Temple waving in 
> their right hands something called a "lulab," which
> was a bundle of leafy 
> branches bound together, made up of myrtle, willow
> and palm. As they marched they 
> recited Psalm 118, the psalm of Sukkoth. Among the
> words of this psalm are 
> these: "Save us," which is an English translation of
> the Jewish word, "Hosanna," 
> 
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