[Dialogue] Spong in Lent

[george]

To get a fuller explanation of Spong's understanding of the Gospels as 
liturgy rather than history you can read Liberating the Gospels, 
Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes by John Shelby Spong.  He does a 
very thorough job.

George Holcombe

On Feb 16, 2005, at 6:33 PM, 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,"
> and "Blessed is he who enters (comes) in the Name of the Lord." This 
> psalm goes
> on to say, "Bind the festal procession with branches," and it contains 
> other
> words later interpreted as referring to Jesus, "The stone which the 
> builders
> rejected has become the head of the corner." There is little question 
> that the
> Palm Sunday story was dependent on the details of this harvest 
> festival holiday
> of the Jews. Since Sukkoth shares common content with Palm Sunday, we 
> have
> another piece of evidence suggesting that crucifixion and Passover 
> were linked
> together for interpretive not historical reasons.
> There are other symbols of Sukkoth that seem to have entered the
> crucifixion/resurrection narrative of the early church. While 
> worshipers carried a lulab
> to wave in their right hand in the Sukkoth procession, in their left 
> hand they
> carried an "ethrog" (pronounced e-trog), a box of sweet-smelling 
> spices,
> usually the blossom, leaves or fruit of the citron tree, once again 
> possibilities
> only in the fall of the year. I wonder if the sweet smelling spices, 
> that the
> women were said to have carried to the tomb of Jesus on Easter 
> morning, are a
> reflection of this.
> Also as part of this celebration, Jewish families were instructed to 
> build a
> temporary booth outside their homes to remind them of the time their 
> ancestors
> spent wandering in the wilderness after their escape from Egypt when 
> they had
> no permanent home. This booth was to be a place in which they ate a
> ceremonial meal during the eight-day celebration. I cannot help but 
> wonder whether this
> temporary and ceremonial dwelling place got transformed into a 
> temporary tomb
> in Joseph's garden. I also wonder whether the shelter to which Cleopas 
> and
> his friend turned aside to enter in Luke's Emmaus Road resurrection 
> story, and
> in which they ate a ceremonial meal with the Risen Christ, was yet 
> another echo
> in which the Sukkoth liturgy shaped the basic Christian story.
> Once we begin to dig beneath the surface of the gospels we discover
> interpretive clues to which the literalism of the past has blinded us. 
> This exercise
> may destabilize yesterday's literalism but it also open for us the 
> real question
> that we ought to ask today: What was there about this Jesus that 
> caused them
> to see him as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets; as the 
> human life
> through which the holy God was experienced? How was it that they came 
> to see
> his death as similar to the death of the paschal lamb of Passover and 
> thus
> allowed the Passover to frame their telling of the Passion of Jesus?
> To the issues raised by these questions I will turn next week as our 
> journey
> towards Easter continues.
> -- John Shelby Spong
> Question and Answer
> With John Shelby Spong
> The Rev. Finley Schaef from Woodstock, N.Y., asks:
> Why did you defend the invasion of Afghanistan by the U.S.? Is revenge 
> a
> justifiable motive for war? A million or so innocents were killed or 
> driven from
> their homes. What, pray tell, was accomplished to advance the spirit 
> of Christ?
> Dear Finley,
> If the purpose of the Afghanistan invasion was to break up the 
> terrorist
> training centers that were responsible for the 9/11 attacks then I 
> regard that as
> an appropriate response. I do not see it as revenge. I see it as 
> trying to
> defend yourself against a further attack. I'm not sure that it 
> advanced the
> "Spirit of Christ" at all but neither did being the recipient of the 
> 9/11 attacks.
> Of course innocents were killed and driven from their homes but not 
> anything
> approaching your figure of "a million or so." Critics must stick to 
> the facts
> even if their criticism arises from religious passion and sources. 
> However,
> whether it was "a million or so" or just a single victim is relatively
> unimportant for it is wrong in either case.
> We do not live in a perfect world. Injustice abounds. The strong 
> violate the
> weak every day. The voice of Christ needs to raise consciousness on 
> issues
> like this constantly. I see the human race ever fighting the battle 
> for survival.
> We have been hard wired to do this since emerging out of the tooth and 
> claw
> struggle of our evolutionary history. The only way this will cease is 
> for us to
> evolve into something we are not yet. I believe that is what 
> Christianity at
> its deepest core is all about. This means that some day we will learn 
> that one
> does not fight terrorism by fighting or killing terrorists but by 
> addressing
> the human despair that breeds terrorism. Ultimately, that means 
> evolving
> beyond tribal thinking, beyond prejudices and beyond the religious 
> systems that
> encourage both tribalism and prejudice. That is how we advance the 
> Spirit of
> Christ. It is not easy being human. Unless we evolve to a new 
> understanding of our
> common humanity, I do not believe that human life will continue. It is 
> a
> scary time. I urge you not to fight the tribal battle but to 
> concentrate on
> building the new humanity.
> -- John Shelby Spong
>
> Dick Kroeger
> 65 Stubbs Bay Road
> Maple Plain, MN 55359
> 952-476-6126
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