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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 
Anne from Pennsylvania writes:  
Can you please comment on Communion? I’m a church-going Christian, and  I 
don't feel like a sinner or that Jesus died for me. I have read all your  books, 
but I’m confused about why I receive "the body and blood" of Jesus.  It’s got 
to be more than remembrance. Can you share your thoughts on it?  
Richard P. Hawkes, via the Internet, writes:  
Your credentials are outstanding and I thoroughly enjoyed your recent  recap 
of events on your lecture tour of Norway and Sweden. The poem by Tor  Littmark 
that you included in one column was deep and moving. I wish I  could share it 
with ALL my friends and relatives. You must, however, have  encountered more 
than a little backlash from the complaining conservative  evangelical elements 
in both countries or did they just roll over and play  dead?  
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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