[Dialogue] Spong on Jesus

[KroegerD@aol.com]

February 15, 2006 
Jesus for the  Non-Religious, Part I

Most Christians seem to assume that the details of their faith system  
dropped out of heaven in a fully developed form. Nothing could be further from  the 
truth. The creeds began as baptismal formulas in the 3rd century and did not  
receive the shape we now recognize until the 4th century. Doctrines like the  
Trinity and Incarnation were still being formed in the 5th century.  
Moving closer to the life of Jesus, scholars now suggest that miracles were  
added to the Jesus story only in the 7th and 8th decades of the Christian era. 
 The Virgin birth and the suggestion that resurrection meant physical  
resuscitation are products of the 9th decade, and the account of Jesus’  ascension 
enters the tradition only in the 10th decade. Perhaps the biggest gap  in our 
knowledge of Jesus, however, occurs in those years between 30 C.E. when  Jesus’ 
earthly life came to an end and 70 C.E. when gospels began to achieve  
written form. Today, by lining up the gospels in chronological order with Mark  
first (ca. 70 C.E.), then Matthew (ca. 80 C.E.), Luke (ca 90 C.E.) and finally  
John (ca 100 C.E.), we can see how the miraculous was heightened; the details  
become more graphic and supernatural activity more pronounced. If the story  
could grow as dramatically as it did from 70-100 C.E., is it not reasonable to  
assume that it also grew from 30-70 C.E.? Yet with no written sources, 
entering  that time of oral transmission is a problem. For the past year that 
forty-year  oral phase of Christian history has been the primary focus of my study. 
In a  series of columns not necessarily on successive weeks, but as a theme to 
which I  will return often during the next six months, I want to begin to 
share this  study with my audience under the general topic of “Jesus for the 
Non-Religious.”   
How can we gain access to an oral period of history when by definition no  
written records exist? Is that not a dead end for research? These are valid  
questions, yet studies of the gospels yield numerous clues that lead us into  
these primitive moments in our faith story.  
The obvious fact is that the story of Jesus was passed on or we would not  
have it today. So the questions are by whom, how and in what context. Was it  
simply personal? Did parents convey the Jesus story to their children? Did it  
pass from person to person in the marketplace? The context of the gospel  
narratives appears far too complex and patterned to have been handed on in that  
personal and individual way. We need to search for a better explanation.  
The gospels make it clear that before the story of Jesus was written a heavy  
dependency on the Hebrew Scriptures was already evident. That could not have  
happened accidentally. Mark, for example, opens his gospel with two 
quotations  from the Hebrew prophets, one from Malachi and the other from II Isaiah. He 
then  builds into his narrative of Jesus image after image from the Jewish 
scriptures.  Matthew seems to imply in his gospel that everything Jesus does is 
in  fulfillment of the words of the prophets. He retells a story of the birth 
of  Moses as if it actually happened to Jesus (see Exodus 1:15-22, Matthew 
2:16-18).  He patterns the Sermon on the Mount (Matt.5-7) on Psalm 119 portraying 
Jesus as  the new Moses. Matthew and Luke both provide us with genealogies of 
Jesus that  relate him to both Abraham and King David. They both quote Jesus 
as using texts  from the Hebrew Scriptures to ward off the attacks by Satan in 
the story of the  temptation. Luke models the life of Jesus frequently on the 
life of the prophet  Elijah. On two occasions Luke says the role of the 
resurrected Jesus was to open  their minds to understand the scriptures as the way 
to make sense out of his  death. The Fourth Gospel opens with a hymn of praise 
to the “Logos” or the  “Word” that John believes he has discovered in 
Jesus. This hymn was patterned on  a hymn to wisdom from the book of Proverbs. John 
constantly has Jesus invoke the  name of God, “I am,” given to Moses at the 
burning bush as part of his own  divine claim. One cannot read the gospels 
without confronting the Hebrew  Scriptures on every page. These facts point 
powerfully to the source of the oral  tradition.  
The only setting in which this interweaving of the Jesus story with the  
Hebrew scriptures could have occurred was in the synagogue, since that was the  
only place where people heard the scriptures read and interpreted. In the first  
century no one owned books since few people could either read or write. There 
 was no Gideon Society to place the sacred scriptures in hotel rooms. The 
books  of the Jewish Bible had to be copied by hand on great scrolls. They were  
enormously expensive. They were the treasured possessions of the whole  
community, kept in the Tabernacle of the Synagogue and brought forth with great  
solemnity to be read aloud in public worship on the Sabbath. They were always  
read in order. One does not skip around with scrolls. The handles of the scrolls 
 were laboriously turned as they were read and the male reader began the next 
 Sabbath where he had stopped the previous Sabbath.  
The next problem in this interpretive process is that most people today have  
no idea what the liturgy of the Synagogue was like in the first century, so 
they  have no way of imagining this setting. Fortunately, a brief description 
of  synagogue worship included in the Book of Acts (13:13-16), gives us our 
next  clue in this probe of the oral period of Christian history.  
Synagogue worship consisted of long readings from the three major sections of 
 the Hebrew Bible. The first was a reading “from Moses,” that is from the 
Torah,  that included the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and 
Deuteronomy.  It was a requirement of first century Judaism that the entire Torah, 
as the most  sacred part of the Hebrew Scriptures, be read in public worship 
in the synagogue  over the Sabbaths of a single year. This would mean that just 
the first lesson  “from Moses” would last at least thirty minutes each 
Sabbath.  
The second reading came from what the Jews called “The Early Prophets,” 
which  included the books from Joshua to II Kings. There was no compulsion to 
complete  the reading of this material in any specific time frame; hence this 
lesson was  much shorter. The early prophets were simply read in order until 
completed and  then the process would begin again.  
The third reading came from what they called “the Latter Prophets,” which  
were four in number: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and what was called the Book of  
the Twelve. Today Christians refer to this Book of the Twelve as “the minor  
prophets,” and list them separately as the books from Hosea to Malachi, the 
last  book in the Old Testament. In the Jewish world, however, these twelve 
books were  all on a single scroll and treated as a single work. Thus the four 
scrolls of  the “Latter Prophets” tended to be read over a four-year cycle at 
the rate of  approximately a chapter a Sabbath. One year would therefore be the 
Isaiah year,  one the Jeremiah year, one the Ezekiel year and one the year of 
the twelve. In  the liturgy of the Synagogue these three major readings, 
interspersed with  prayers and Psalms would constitute the core of the worship 
experience. After  the final reading, the leader of the Synagogue would normally 
inquire, as  happens in Acts 13, whether anyone had a message to bring that 
would illumine  the morning’s readings. This became the setting in which his 
followers told  stories about Jesus, recalled the sayings and parables of Jesus 
and remembered  and shared the developing Jesus tradition. In this fashion, over 
the years, the  Hebrew Scriptures were wrapped around Jesus and through them 
Jesus was  interpreted. The content of the memory of Jesus was thus organized 
by the  liturgy of the Synagogue. To recognize this connection becomes a major 
 breakthrough into the oral period of Christian history.  
By the time the gospels were written the memory of Jesus had been so deeply  
shaped by the Synagogue context that it is impossible now to separate history  
from scriptural interpretation. That is what makes the perpetual quest to 
find  the Jesus of history so difficult. The conclusion of the scholars of the 
Jesus  Seminar, for example, was that only 16% of the sayings attributed to 
Jesus in  the gospels are actually authentic, accurate portrayals of what Jesus 
really  said. The other 84% are words read into the Jesus of history by an 
interpreting  community during the oral period. Much of what the gospels call the 
acts of  Jesus fall into a similar statistical spread.  
For example, was Jesus really born in Bethlehem or was the Bethlehem birth  
story an attempt on the part of people during the oral period to claim for him  
the messianic status of being heir to the throne of David? Did Jesus really 
feed  5000 people in the wilderness or was that an attempt to portray him as a 
new  Moses who also fed a multitude in the wilderness with bread called manna? 
Did  Jesus really march triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey or was that 
an  attempt to identify him with the figure of the Shepherd King in the Book of 
 Zechariah, who also came to Jerusalem, humbly riding on a donkey (9:9-11)? 
Did  Jesus really drive out the moneychangers from the Temple and reclaim that 
place  as “a house of prayer for all people” or was this an early Christian 
attempt to  show that what the prophet Zechariah said about the Messiah had 
been acted out  by Jesus? That prophet had written that when the Day of the Lord 
comes, there  would no longer be a trader in the House of the Lord (14:21). 
Did Jesus really  pray for the soldiers who crucified him, as only Luke records, 
or was this story  developed to identify Jesus with the Servant of II Isaiah 
(53:12), who made  “intercessions for the transgressors?” On and on we could 
go, posing this same  question in literally hundreds of different ways about 
hundreds of familiar  stories.  
At the very least, this study begins to give us a glimpse of who Jesus was  
before gospels were written, creeds formed or doctrines developed. If we are  
willing to journey to this place with openness, I think we can be assured that  
Jesus will look very different. As this series develops I hope to show you 
this  Jesus. Perhaps in the words of my friend Marcus Borg, we might “see Jesus 
again  for the first time.”  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
The Rev. Dr. Kathleen from Michigan writes:  
Overcoming the widespread Christian belief that “Jesus died for my sins”  
seems an insurmountable challenge! Preachers, liturgical rites, hymns and  
religious education curricula continue to reinforce “atonement  theology/theories.”
 Would you do a series on “atonement theology/theories” -  their origins, 
rationale, continued justification, etc.? Personally and  pastorally, “atonement”
 thinking creates a mire of destructive results and I,  for one, would well 
appreciate your cogent analysis of how we might best  approach this.  
Dear Kathleen,  
Thank you for your letter and its challenge. There is no doubt that  
atonement/sacrifice theology constitutes a deep burden that weighs down the  Christian 
faith today. I work on this subject constantly. It is a major theme in  two 
of my books, Why Christianity Must Change or Die and A New Christianity for  a 
New World. I am still engaged in this study as I begin to work on a new book  
scheduled for publication in 2007 and tentatively entitled, Jesus for the  
Non-Religious.  
Atonement theology, however, involves far more than a salvation doctrine. It  
brings into question the theistic understanding of God and even the morality 
of  God. This theology assumes that God is an external Being who invades the 
world  to heal the fallen creation. It also assumes that this God enters this 
fallen  world in the person of the Son to pay the price of human evil on the 
cross. It  was the central theme in Mel Gibson’s motion picture; “The Passion 
of the  Christ” which might have been dramatically compelling but it 
represented a  barbaric, sado-masochistic, badly dated and terribly distorted biblical 
and  theological perspective.  
All atonement theories root in a sense of human alienation and with it a  
sense of human powerlessness. “Without Thee we can do nothing good!” So we  
develop legends about the God who does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  
For Christianity, I am convinced that our basic atonement theology finds its  
taproot not in the story of the cross but in the liturgy of the synagogue,  
especially Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. In the Yom Kippur liturgy an  
innocent lamb was slain and the people were symbolically cleansed by the 
saving  blood of this sacrificed Lamb of God. Jesus was similarly portrayed as the 
new  Lamb of God. As we Christians tell the story of Jesus’ dying for our sins 
in  doctrine, hymns and liturgy, we quite unknowingly turn God into an ogre, 
a deity  who practices child sacrifice and a guilt-producing figure, who tells 
us that  our sinfulness is the cause of the death of Jesus. God did it to him 
instead of  to us who deserved it. Somehow that is supposed to make it both 
antiseptic and  worthwhile. It doesn’t. I think we can and must break the power 
of these images.  Just the fact that you are sensitive to it and offended by 
it is a start.  
Consciousness is rising on this issue all over the Church, and as it does,  
Christianity will either change or die. There is no alternative. I vote for  
change, obviously you do too.  
John Shelby Spong 
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