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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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