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KroegerD@aol.com KroegerD at aol.com
Wed Apr 12 17:50:04 EDT 2006


 
April 12, 2006 
The Final Days: Walking  from Palm Sunday to Easter

We Christians are now in the midst of Holy Week, the most solemn season of  
the liturgical year. This sacred time still exercises compelling power since  
church attendance always rises on Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week and  
reaches its crescendo for the year on Easter, the last day. Whatever the  
Christian faith ultimately means, it is obvious that the central moments of our  
faith story are revealed, acknowledged and celebrated in this special week.  
Recognizing that reality, it is surprising to realize how little both  
traditional and fringe Christians actually know about the climactic narratives  
standing at the heart of our faith story. Many have never read the crucifixion  
and resurrection stories of the Bible. Nor can they isolate the details of  
either the cross or the empty tomb and assign them correctly to the proper  gospel 
writer. Long ago the stories were blended into an indistinguishable whole  in 
which all of the contradictions were smoothed over. A clever filmmaker like  
Mel Gibson can portray these narratives in a motion picture and claim that he 
is  being faithful to the biblical record, and many assume his claim is 
correct. It  is, however, not even close to being accurate and every serious scholar 
of the  scriptures knows it. Yet more people will see “The Passion of the 
Christ” than  will ever read the writings of the scholars. So in this Holy Week 
column I want  to focus on some biblical facts that call into question, not the 
truth of the  Christian faith but the way that faith is so often interpreted 
by well meaning  but uninformed people.  
The death of Jesus occurred around 30 C.E. We know this because Pontius  
Pilate was the procurator of Judea from 26 C.E. to 36 C.E. Mark, however, the  
first gospel did not appear until some 40 years later. This 40-year tunnel of  
silence is called “the oral period” when there are no known written sources  
other than Paul, who wrote his epistles between 50 and 64, and he gives us  
almost no biographical details about Jesus. All he says about the crucifixion is  
that “he died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” He tells us  
nothing of Judas Iscariot, the arrest, the Garden of Gethsemane, the trial,  
Pontius Pilate, the crown of thorns, the walk to Calvary, the thieves crucified  
with him, the words from the cross, the tomb, Joseph of Arimathea or the 
visit  of the women. These details do not appear in the tradition before Mark in 
the  8th decade of the Christian era. Were these things unknown because no one 
had  yet written them down? Or were they unknown because these interpretive 
details  were not developed until a later date?  
The same thing is true about the Easter story. In the oral period between the 
 first Easter around 30 C.E. and the writing of Mark around 70 C.E. the only  
written account of the resurrection is once again in Paul. To the Corinthians 
in  the mid-fifties, Paul described Easter in this way: “On the third day he 
was  raised in accordance with the scriptures.” Then he tells us that this 
raised  Christ appeared to Cephus, to the 12, to 500 brethren, to James, to the 
Apostles  and to Paul himself. No detail, however, about either the form or 
content of  these appearances is given. The fact that Paul includes himself in 
the list of  those to whom the raised Christ appeared, causes me to believe that 
Easter  originally had nothing to do with a resuscitated body walking 
physically out of  a tomb. Certainly that was not Paul’s experience, since his 
conversion is dated  anywhere from 1 to 6 years after the crucifixion. It is worth 
noting in this  connection that Mark records no story of the raised Christ 
appearing to anyone.  In this first gospel there is only an announcement by a 
messenger and the  promise of a future meeting. Forty years after the fact there 
is still no  narrative of an appearance of the resurrected Jesus. Appearance 
stories commence  in the 9th decade of the Christian era. There are eight 
resurrection narratives  in the Gospels. Matthew has 2, Luke 2 and John 4. Many 
other parts of the Jesus  story are covered in more than one gospel, sometimes 
almost identically. With  the resurrection each story is unique. It is also 
important to note that the  Easter story seems to grow with the passage of time. 
Mark only accords 8 verses  to this central moment in our faith story. That 
number rises to 20 verses in  Matthew, 53 verses in Luke and finally to 56 verses 
in John. Embrace the fact  that the narrative gets longer and more detailed 
the farther one gets from the  actual event.  
Because biblical scholars today know that Matthew had Mark’s gospel in front  
of him when he wrote (he copied much of it verbatim), we can observe those  
places where Matthew expands or changes Mark. In Mark, for example, the women  
headed for the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week, wondering how they  
would roll back the stone. Arriving they found the stone already removed. No  
explanation is given. In Matthew, the mystery is solved. Matthew adds an  
earthquake, and then proclaims that an angel had descended from heaven, rolled  
back the stone and sat upon it. The magic is growing. The angel’s appearance was 
 like lightning, causing the guards, whom only Matthew places at the tomb, to 
 tremble into a state of unconsciousness. 
In Mark the women are commanded to tell the disciples to go to Galilee where  
they will meet Jesus, but they did the opposite, fleeing in fear and saying  
nothing to anyone. However, the women in Matthew do as the angel has commanded 
 and are rewarded by seeing Jesus in the garden in this the first narrated  
appearance story in Christian written history. It is a direct contradiction of  
Mark, and enters the tradition 55 years after the final events in Jesus’ 
life.  
In Mark, the messenger of the resurrection, described as “a young man in a  
white robe,” promises the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. There 
 is, however, no story of that meeting. Once again, Matthew fills in this 
blank.  In his account Jesus comes to them out of the sky, clothed with the 
authority of  heaven and earth. He is not a resuscitated body returning to the life 
of this  world. He is a transformed presence from heaven, giving them the 
command to go  into all the world, to proclaim the gospel, to make disciples and 
to know that  the risen Christ is always with them. Two things are noteworthy: 
First, no story  of Jesus’ ascension into heaven has yet been written, so 
Matthew must have  assumed that resurrection was the act of Jesus being raised 
into God, not being  resuscitated back into the life of this world. Second, no 
story of the coming of  the Holy Spirit has yet been written. Matthew says it 
will be the risen Christ,  not the Holy Spirit, who will abide with them 
forever, for that is what Emmanuel  means.  
Luke also has Mark in front of him when he writes, also copying much of it  
verbatim into his gospel. He changes Mark to suit his agenda. The messenger in  
Mark, who became an angel in Matthew, now in Luke becomes two angels. The  
message of these angels to the disciples is also dramatically different. They  
are told not to go to Galilee but to remain in the Jerusalem area until 
equipped  with ‘power from on high.’ Luke’s stories of the appearances of the raised 
Jesus  occur in Emmaus, a village near Jerusalem and in Jerusalem itself. In 
Luke the  raised Jesus has become so physical that he can walk, talk, 
interpret Scripture,  offer his body for handling and eat a piece of broiled fish. Luke
’s gospel is  also the first time in the written tradition of the Christian 
Church in which  the Risen Christ and the disciples come together in Jerusalem. 
The physicality  of the resurrected Jesus is so enhanced in Luke as to 
suggest that he understood  Easter as the resuscitation of a deceased body. It also 
meant that in Luke’s  story, if Jesus cannot get out of this world by dying, 
then a cosmic ascension  becomes the only viable alternative for him to return 
to the God above the sky.  In his gospel Luke has that ascension occur on 
Easter afternoon but in the book  of Acts a few years later, he says it was 40 
days after the resurrection.  Inconsistency abounds.  
John’s gospel introduces other diverse elements into the story: the presence  
of the burial cloths left in the tomb, the visit to the empty tomb by Peter 
and  the beloved disciple, the appearance of Magdalene alone at the tomb, the 
two  appearances to the disciples in the locked and barred upper room, the 
story of  Thomas and his need to touch the wounds and a later story of an 
appearance to  Peter and a group of seven disciples by the lake in Galilee. No one can 
put all  of the gospel stories into a consistent picture. They do not 
overlap.  
Does this analysis not make us aware that whatever the reality of the first  
Easter was; it is not quite as concrete, visible and photographic as many have 
 claimed? Is there not a strong possibility that the first experience of 
Easter  was not the seeing of a physical body but a powerful transformation inside 
the  disciples that enabled them to break open time and space, words and 
concepts and  to achieve a new consciousness of who we are and who or what God is? 
 
We can document that the Easter experience changed lives, restoring disciples 
 who had fled; transforming the meaning of God so dramatically that Jesus and 
God  are seen as one, and giving birth to a new holy day and a new liturgy, “
He was  known to us in the breaking of the bread.” Easter was clearly more 
than a  physical earthly happening. It was a divine encounter, something beyond 
words,  beyond seeing, beyond touching but life changing and infinitely real.  
If one wants to know more about these wondrously complex Easter stories, I  
recommend, THE LAST WEEK, just published by Harper Collins, written by two 
Jesus  scholars, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. These gifted authors carry 
their  readers from Palm Sunday to Easter, looking at the facts and 
confronting  occasions when the details were changed from gospel to gospel. It will 
drive  your understanding of Easter from the concrete to the abstract, from 
history to  parable, from explanation into experience. Then Easter will become real 
but the  conflicting details will become what they have always been, a frantic 
human  effort to capture a transforming moment in concrete language. The 
tragedy of  Christian history has been that we have so often assumed that ecstatic 
language  is literally true and that the experience of God can be bound by 
human words.  
John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Rodney Pirtle of Dallas writes:
I believe I have read all your books, and find your philosophy and theology  
compatible with my own. In fact, your books share “probable cause” for this, 
I  suspect. My question is this: Is there a Bible concordance or reference 
work  that you would term “liberal” or “progressive"...one that comports 
favorably  with your current ideas about Christianity and its necessary evolution? 
Dear  Rodney,
I know of no such thing as a liberal or conservative Bible concordance.  
Indeed I know of no such thing as liberal or conservative biblical scholarship.  
There is only a competent or an incompetent concordance and only competent or  
incompetent biblical scholarship. Competent insights can surely be used to  
buttress a liberal or conservative perspective but the insight itself can be  
neither. The test of the truth of any new insight is whether or not it has the  
power to develop and to engage a competent audience in debate. The problem 
with  all biblical reference material is our need to determine and to identify 
the  bias of the author. 
John Shelby Spong 
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