[Dialogue] Spong in Lent

[jameswiegel]

I find I get lost in some of this conversation about biblical study and the
Jesus seminar.  I understand that an additional 30 or so years of biblical
study and all has introduced a lot more ambiguity into understanding the
gospels, etc.   We are still left with the historical witness of, now, close
to a billion people, that this was / is a central event in their
understanding of history, their own personal history as well as the history
of our species.

I get hung up on that last box, last row on the old christ lecture, about
this is my story.  Is it my story?  Is it a decisive story?  Is it a story
that is real enough to base my life on?  There was a short theme about 10
days ago about where the notion of absolution comes from --- Margaret
started it, Evelyn and a couple of others had great responses as well --
Isn't part of what got discovered in and around Jesus the notion of
absolution?  And don't we know about it because there is a community in
history that bears witness to it?

"Food tastes better in a small house."
                                                    Queen Victoria


Jim Wiegel
401 North Beverly Way
Tolleson, Arizona 85353
jameswiegel at mindspring.com
623-936-8671 (h)
623-363-3277 (c)


-----Original Message-----
From: Dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:Dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net]On Behalf Of Charles or Doris
Hahn
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 6:48 PM
To: Colleague Dialogue
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Spong in Lent


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,"
>
=== message truncated ===


_______________________________________________
Dialogue mailing list
Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net