[Dialogue] {Spam?} {Disarmed} spong 8/1

[KroegerD at aol.com]

August 1, 2007 
Miracles and the  Resurrection
The Fourth Fundamental, Part I  

I return this week to our running series on the Five Fundamentals, that  
supposedly irreducible set of principles that believers were told had to be  
accepted as literally true if one wanted to be called a Christian. It was from  the 
publication of these five fundamentals between the years 1910-1915, in a  
series of widely distributed tracts financed by the Union Oil Company (Unocal)  
of California, that the term "fundamentalist" entered the Christian vocabulary. 
 
In the fourth fundamental, two concepts were coupled together both of which  
had to do with acknowledging that supernatural, miraculous power was present 
in  Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of God in human flesh. The literal  
historicity of the miracle stories of the New Testament was the first. These  
miracles were designed, it was said, to demonstrate the divinity of Christ who  
had the ability to do Godlike things. The second was the greatest miracle  
described in the New Testament that asserts that the divinity of Christ is best  
seen in the fact that he conquered death by walking physically and bodily out 
of  his tomb on the third day after his death by crucifixion. On this primary  
supernatural act of the resurrection of Jesus in a physical bodily form that  
could be handled, touched and on which the wounds of crucifixion were 
visible,  the fundamentalists declared that the whole Christian experience lives or 
dies.  
In the next few weeks in this column, I will examine both of these claims,  
biblically, historically and theologically. I need to note at the very 
beginning  that few, if any, world class biblical and theological scholars would  
acknowledge the literal accuracy of either claim. Much to the dismay of the  
fundamentalists, however, these scholars continue to be practicing Christians.  The 
gap between the Christian academy where biblical scholarship is engaged  
deeply and the pews, in which the typical worshiper sits on Sunday morning, has  
been growing for at least 250 years. I seek to bridge that gap in this series.  
Miracles first appear in the gospels in Mark, the first gospel to be written  
in the early seventies. They are in three general categories: first, the 
nature  miracles, by which I mean stories depicting Jesus as being able to control 
or  manipulate the natural laws of the universe. Examples of this category 
are the  stories of Jesus walking on the water, stilling the storm, cursing a 
fig tree  and causing it to die immediately and the feeding of the multitude in 
the  wilderness with a limited number of loaves and fish. This feeding story 
is  actually told twice in Mark, once on the Jewish side of the lake where five 
 loaves and two fish are expanded to feed 5000 men, plus women and children 
and  after all have eaten their fill twelve baskets of fragments are collected. 
Then  Jesus moves to the Gentile side of the lake and with seven loaves and a 
few fish  feeds 4000 people after which seven baskets of fragments are 
collected. Second  there are the healing miracles. These healing stories in Mark 
fall basically  into four categories: the blind receive their sight, the deaf 
hear, the lame  (those with crippled or withered limbs) are made whole and the 
tongues of the  mute are loosed so that they can speak or sing. Sometimes these 
categories are  mixed since the inability to hear and the status of being mute 
are in some  cases, two parts of the same affliction. Once we referred to 
this as being "deaf  and dumb." Third are the raising from the dead miracles. 
Mark records only one  such episode, the restoration to life by Jesus of the 
daughter of Jairus, a  synagogue leader. Every miraculous event attributed to 
Jesus in the first gospel  to be written falls into one of these three categories. 
 
When we come to the second gospel, written about a decade after Mark (82-85  
C. E.) and popularly attributed to Matthew, we note that this gospel is  
basically an expansion of Mark. Mathew clearly has Mark in front of him as he  
writes and quite literally incorporates about 90% of Mark's content into his  
gospel. He expands that content, however, with his own additions, making his  work 
a twenty-eight chapter book as opposed to Mark's sixteen chapters.  Matthew's 
expansions include the genealogy of Jesus with which he opens his  gospel, 
the introduction of the miraculous birth tradition, complete with stars  in the 
east, magi, gold, frankincense and myrrh, the narrative parts of the  
temptation in the wilderness story, the Sermon on the Mount and some uniquely  
Matthean parables like the parable of the Last Judgment in which the sheep and  the 
goats are separated. Matthew also expands Mark's story of the resurrection  
from Mark's original eight verses to twenty. For our purposes in discussing the  
miracles of Jesus, however, it is of note that Matthew includes every miracle  
story introduced by Mark. Matthew might vary the details in some of the  
recountings of Mark's miracles, but nothing is changed so dramatically that the  
story is not easily recognized. There are no new miracle stories in his gospel. 
 
When we turn to Luke, who wrote either near the end of the 9th decade or in  
the early years of the 10th decade (88-92 C.E.), we discover that Luke also 
has  Mark in front of him as he writes, but he is not nearly so dependent on 
Mark as  Matthew has been. Luke incorporates about 50% of Mark into his gospel 
and also  expands Mark dramatically, but in a different manner from Matthew. 
While Luke,  like Matthew, adds a birth narrative and a genealogy, his major 
expansion is in  the section of the gospel in which Jesus is teaching his 
disciples on the  journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. The journey section in Luke is 
about three  times the length found in Mark. Luke also includes those parables 
of Jesus that  are the most familiar to most of us and that appear nowhere else 
in the gospel  tradition - the Good Samaritan; the Prodigal Son; the Unjust 
Ruler, and Lazarus  and the Rich Man. Luke also changes the resurrection 
material dramatically,  relocating it from Galilee, where it is centered in both 
Mark and Matthew, to  Jerusalem. He also makes Jesus' resurrection more obviously 
physical, while  stretching his appearances out over 40 days. In addition 
Luke writes a new  climax to the Jesus story by adding narratives of Jesus' 
cosmic ascension and  the Day of Pentecost, which are told only in Luke's second 
volume that we know  by the name of the Book of Acts.  
It is noteworthy to recognize that Luke edits Mark's miracle stories  
dramatically, while adding new miracle accounts about which Mark seems not to  know. 
For example, Luke omits Mark's second feeding of the multitude story, but  
adds both a healing story (the cleansing of the ten lepers of whom only one, a  
Samaritan, returns to give thanks) and a new raising of the dead story (the 
only  son of a widow in the village of Nain).  
When we come to the Fourth Gospel, John calls these supernatural events not  
miracles but "signs" and he develops them into long elaborate narratives with  
great theological monologues attached. Most of the Johannine signs can be  
correlated with earlier miracle stories, but two are unique to John. One is a  
nature miracle story, the account of Jesus turning water into wine at the  
wedding feast in Cana of Galilee and the other, a raising of the dead story that  
we know as the dramatic narrative in which Lazarus is raised from his four 
days  old grave.  
That is the briefest possible summary of the miracles attributed to Jesus in  
the New Testament. If we are going to talk about and understand in any way 
what  these supernatural events mean we must begin by becoming aware of their 
number  and their nature. One cannot make sense of the miracle stories of the 
gospels  with only a vague awareness of their content.  
One further observation will complete this first phase in our study of the  
miracles attributed to Jesus. No evidence has been found of miracles being  
attributed to Jesus in any other Christian writing prior to Mark in the 8th  
decade. Paul who wrote between 50-64 C.E. never refers to or mentions a  
supernatural act or a miracle that he attributes to Jesus. That omission in no  way 
made Jesus less divine in the writings of Paul. It is clear in all of Paul's  
writings that in Jesus God has been met, engaged or, in some way not always  
clearly articulated, experienced in a dramatically new way. Knowledge of Jesus  
possessing supernatural, miraculous ability, however, clearly did not seem to be 
 part of Paul's consciousness.  
A second source that many scholars date earlier than Mark is called Q, a  
hypothetical collection of the sayings of Jesus. When all of Mark was deleted  
from both Matthew and Luke, it was discovered that there were other sayings of  
Jesus that were identical or near identical in Matthew and Luke that were not  
Marcan. So the theory was developed that Matthew and Luke both had a second  
common source on which they drew in the composition of their gospels. Once 
this  source was identified some scholars began to date this Q material even 
earlier  than any of the gospels. I am not convinced by these arguments but those 
who  espouse the Q hypothesis are learned people whose opinions must be taken  
seriously. However, my point is that if these scholars are accurate in their  
early dating of Q, it is noteworthy that there are no miracle stories in Q. 
Nor  are there any in the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in the late 1940's at 
Nag  Hamadi and which some scholars believe was written before Mark.  
So these are the data we need to explore in this segment of our study of the  
five fundamentals. Miracle stories attributed to Jesus are no earlier than 
the  8th decade. They are in three categories: nature miracles, healing miracles 
and  the raising of the dead miracles. Are they literal descriptions of 
historic  happenings? I don't think so. Is belief in the historicity of the 
biblical  miracles a fundamental truth upon which Christianity hangs? Well only if 
you  want to say Paul would not therefore have been a Christian. I hope this 
whets  your appetite. This study will continue next week. John Shelby Spong  
_Note  from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores  everywhere and by clicking here!_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060762071/104-6221748-5882304)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Bill Goodwin, via the Internet, writes:  
I have just finished reading Jesus for the Non-Religious, which I  found to 
be as informative and challenging as all your prior books. I have  struggled 
with Jesus' Resurrection as far back as I can remember, and have read  keenly 
what you have to say on this subject. It has been several years since I  read 
Resurrection: Myth or Reality?, but I recall that you said you did  not know 
what actually happened, but that you believed something profound must  have 
occurred to ignite a movement that put its early followers at grave risk -  and 
attracted billions of people over two millennia. In your latest book, your  
thinking appears to have changed somewhat, with a greater emphasis on the theory  
that Jesus' Resurrection evolved as part of a grief-coping mechanism used by 
his  disciples. Am I missing something here? I look forward to your next book in 
 2009.  
Dear Bill,  
"Resurrection: Myth or Reality" was written in 1994. "Jesus for the  
Non-Religious" was written in 2007. I suspect there has been change and movement  in 
those 13 years. I certainly hope so. Having said that, I do not find any  
incompatibility in the attempt to understand the Resurrection in these two  books.  
I do not know what the first Easter experience was. Neither does anyone else. 
 The earliest record in Paul ascribed the Resurrection to an act of God 
raising  Jesus into the presence of God. In Paul, God raised Jesus, Jesus does not 
rise.  If this is an action of God then that act does not occur in human 
history.  However, people living in human history seek to make sense out of that  
experience. Whatever Easter was it caused the disciples, who had forsaken Jesus 
 in fear when he was arrested, to be reconstituted and empowered in dramatic  
ways. It caused his Jewish disciples to redefine God so that Jesus was 
included  in that definition. It caused a new holy day, the first day of the week to 
be  born and eventually to rival the Sabbath. So the effects of Easter were 
in  history but Easter itself was not.  
It is fascinating to me to note that the first gospel writer, Mark, tells the 
 story of Easter without portraying anyone as ever seeing the risen Christ. 
The  first stories of people seeing the raised Jesus occur only in the 9th 
decade  when Matthew writes. Matthew gives us two resurrection episodes, both of 
which  are strange. First, he has the women see the risen Christ in the garden 
and says  that "they worshipped him." That is interesting because Mark, 
Matthew's primary  source, says the women never saw him. Luke relates Mark's version 
not Matthew's.  So the gospels are two to one against it being accurate to 
say that the women  saw the raised Jesus.  
Matthew's second resurrection story depicts a transformed Jesus coming out of 
 the clouds of heaven. To view the resurrection as a physical, bodily coming 
back  to the life of this world event, is an idea that is added to 
Christianity in the  9th decade. It is not original to the Easter story. So I fail to see 
how anyone  can say that physical resuscitation is what the resurrection was. 
 
I regard the Easter moment as more a life-changing experience than it was a  
miraculous event. I believe, however, that this experience was real for the  
believers who were transformed by it. I believed the Easter moment occurred  
somewhere between six months and a year after the crucifixion. I regard "three  
days" only as a liturgical symbol. The three-day time frame allowed 
worshippers  to observe Jesus' death on Friday and his victory over death on Sunday, the 
 first day of the week. I am confident that the Easter awakening had 
something to  do with the common meal, that is, the words: "He was made known to them 
in the  breaking of the bread," represents a remembered context. I am also 
convinced  that the disciples were in Galilee and not in Jerusalem when Easter 
dawned on  their consciousness. I regard the Jerusalem Easter tradition as both 
secondary  and quite mythological. I do not think that there was a burial that 
anyone would  have remembered, or that Joseph of Arimathea actually existed. 
I do not think  any women came to the tomb on the first day of the week 
because there was no  tomb to which they could come. I do not believe that a 
resuscitated body  appeared to anyone. I do believe that Peter was the first to 
"see," but I do not  know what kind of sight that was: Insight? Second sight? A 
vision to the eyes of  the mind? I do believe that Peter called others to see 
whatever it was that he  saw and thus that he opened the eyes of the others.  
I do not think there would be something called Christianity if the Easter  
experience had not been real. I do not think that Easter has anything to do with 
 a body walking out of a tomb after dying. I still affirm the tentative  
reconstruction of these crucial moments in our faith story as I described them  
when I wrote "Resurrection: Myth or Reality." Indeed, I would not change a word  
of it if I were to write it again.  
John Shelby Spong 



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