[Dialogue] {Spam?} Re: {Spam?} {Disarmed} Resend Spong 8/1

[elliestock at aol.com]

Dick,

Is there a Part II to this 4th Fundamental?  Part III was sent this week and Part I two weeks ago, but no Part II yet.  Thanks.

Ellie


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From: KroegerD at aol.com
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Subject: [Dialogue] {Spam?} {Disarmed} Resend Spong 8/1








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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! 



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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