[Dialogue] {Disarmed} spong 8/22 The dead rise and Spinoza resurfraces

[KroegerD at aol.com]

August 22, 2007 
The Fourth Fundamental:  Miracles and the Resurrection, Part IV  

The idea that one can raise a deceased person to life entered the biblical  
story in two narratives from the Elijah-Elisha cycle of stories. It is then  
picked up and repeated in the gospel tradition. Was this meant to be read  
literally? Did Jesus really raise the dead? Is it biologically possible to bring  
back to life one who has been dead for four days? Does one have to make this  
assertion in order to be a Christian as literal minded believers seem to  
believe? Fundamentalists say that since stories that make this claim are in the  
Bible and the Bible is the word of God, they have to be true. They argue that  
since Jesus was the incarnation of the holy God, he was capable of doing  
anything that God could do. It is a circular argument which depends, of course,  on 
the acceptance of the first of the five fundamentals, which asserts that the  
Bible is indeed inerrant since God is its author. People living in the 21st  
century respond to these absurdities by saying if that is what Christianity is 
 all about then they want no part of it. As universal education grows, more 
and  more people begin to embrace what we know about the way the universe works 
and  more and more educated people take leave of their religious heritage, 
choosing  citizenship in what Harvard's Harvey Cox called "the secular city," 
but I call  the "Church Alumni Association." That sterile choice, which requires 
a closed  mind, has risen in our time, I believe, because Christians have 
literalized  their time bound and time warped explanations of both the God 
experience and the  Jesus experience. Modern people can no longer believe the 
literalizations,  because to believe literally violates their minds giving them the 
choice of  sacrificing their brains or their faith. This week I focus this 
discussion on  New Testament stories where Jesus is said to have raised to life 
one who has  died.  
There are five biblical episodes that purport to show Jesus raising the dead. 
 However, there are only three people who are raised since one of these 
stories  is told three times, once in each of the synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew 
and  Luke. That gospel repetition should not surprise us because it is now  
universally understood that Mark was the original gospel and that both Matthew  
and Luke copied much of Mark into their expanded stories.  
The people that Jesus is said to have raised from the dead are: Jairus'  
daughter, told in Mark, Matthew and Luke; the only son of an unnamed widow  raised 
from his funeral bier, told only in Luke, and Lazarus, the most dramatic  
story of all, told only by the gospel of John.  
As we have done before, the first thing we do is to look for parallels among  
the miracle stories surrounding the foundational Jewish heroes of 
Moses-Joshua  and Elijah-Elisha. The Moses-Joshua stories, as previously noted, are  
exclusively nature miracles and they have clearly shaped the nature miracles  
attributed to Jesus. Besides nature miracles the Elijah-Elisha cycle introduces  
one healing miracle, but on two occasions presents us with the idea that the  
dead can actually be raised back to life by a religious leader. When we examine 
 these narratives it becomes clear that the accounts of Jesus raising a 
person  back to life are closely connected to these Elijah-Elisha stories. The 
gospel  account of Jesus raising the child of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, 
is  patterned so totally on the account of Elisha raising a child from the 
dead,  that it is hard to escape the conclusion that the raising of Jairus' 
daughter is  simply an Elisha story magnified and applied to Jesus. We need to 
recall that  the power to raise the dead was a sign of messiah's arrival so this 
story was  designed to interpret Jesus as "the one that should come."  
Encouraged by that pattern we search for a narrative that might lie under  
Luke's unique story of Jesus raising from the dead the only son of a widow. In  
the Elijah narrative, this time we find a remarkable similarity. First note 
that  Elijah-Elisha stories are a primary interpretive tool for Luke. Luke alone 
among  the synoptic gospels does not identify John the Baptist with Elijah; 
rather he  saves Elijah to be his primary model for Jesus. The one healing 
story in the  Elijah-Elisha cycle in which a foreigner, named Naaman, is cured of 
leprosy by  bathing in the Jordan River shows up in an account only in Luke of 
a Samaritan  who is cured of his leprosy by bathing in the Jordan River. Now, 
like Elijah,  Luke has Jesus raise from the dead the only son of a widow. 
This occurs, Luke  says, in the village of Nain. The details are dramatically 
similar. In both  stories it is an only son; in both stories the mother is a 
widow; in both  stories the young man is ready for burial; in both stories the 
healing person  touches the deceased body, and in both stories the restored son 
is delivered to  his mother.  
Once again, we cannot escape the conclusion that Luke has simply adapted this 
 Elijah story to serve his image of Jesus as the new Elijah and thus fulfill  
another messianic expectation. It is interesting to note the placement in 
Luke's  gospel of the story of this widow's son. It comes just before the episode 
in  which John the Baptist sends messengers to Jesus asking the messianic 
question:  "Are you the one that should come or do we look for another?" Jesus 
replies by  saying go tell John what you see and hear and then he quotes the 
prophet Isaiah,  who said that when the messiah comes you will know it because 
the blind will  see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing. To that 
list Jesus adds the  uniquely Christian signs, "the dead are raised and the poor 
have the gospel  preached to them." Up to this moment, however, Luke has no 
story about the dead  being raised. The narrative about Jairus' daughter comes 
later in his gospel. So  if Luke is going to have Jesus tell John that in his 
life the dead are raised,  he has to provide an example. So, I am suggesting, 
he simply adapts Elijah's  story and makes it a Jesus story. The story of the 
widow's son is thus not  intended to be a supernatural event that actually 
occurred; it is an  interpretive Elijah story, wrapped around Jesus to demonstrate 
his claim to be  the new and greater Elijah, which was one of the images that 
shaped the  messianic expectations of that day.  
That brings us to the final and best known New Testament story about a dead  
person being raised. It is the story of Lazarus and it is told only in the  
Fourth Gospel, a book that was not written until between 95-100 C.E. There are  
many strange things about this Lazarus story that should raise our suspicions  
about its historicity. First, Lazarus is introduced as the brother of Mary 
and  Martha. Mary and Martha, as well as their home in Bethany, have long been 
part  of the synoptic tradition, but this is the first time their brother has 
been  introduced. Second, Mary, Martha's sister, is identified in John's 
Lazarus story  as the woman who washed Jesus' feet and anointed them, an 
identification never  advanced before. Third, the episode to which this reference refers 
has not  happened yet in John's gospel. Fourth, we are told that when Jesus is 
made aware  of Lazarus' sickness, he makes no effort to go to Bethany. Indeed 
he waits four  days after Lazarus has died. Fifth, both Mary and Martha give 
voice to their  resentment when they say that Jesus' slowness in arriving 
doomed their brother  to death. Finally, the Johannine author uses this narrative 
to record one of the  "I am" sayings for which this gospel is noted. The "I 
am" saying combines the  name of God, "I am," with a claim about Jesus' power, 
in this case portraying  Jesus as "resurrection and life," and thus as the only 
doorway to God.  
We need to grasp in these details the impossibility of this being a literal  
story. Note the way the story is told. The funeral is a public event attended 
by  many, including some who are enemies of Jesus. The body has been dead for 
four  days, the process of decay is well advanced. Jesus approaches the cave 
over  which a large stone has been placed. He orders the stone removed. Martha 
objects  because of the length of days he has been dead. The King James Bible 
quotes her  as saying, "already he stinketh." Jesus overrules her objection. 
The stone is  rolled away. Jesus calls Lazarus to come forth. This strange 
creature wrapped in  burial clothes that cover his entire body comes out of the 
tomb and is unbound.  Everyone attending this public event reacts. The enemies 
of Jesus move  immediately to rid the world of Jesus. Yet, despite the public 
nature of this  very dramatic event, no one anywhere records this story for 
65-70 years until  John does so in his gospel! Surely something else besides 
literal history is  going on here.  
There are no biblical antecedents to this narrative. No miracle story  
anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is similar to this one. We search the Moses  and 
Elijah cycles for leads in vain. There is, however, one other Lazarus in the  
New Testament. Could he be a clue? He is a character in a parable told only by  
Luke. In that parable, Lazarus, a poor beggar, and a rich man both die. 
Lazarus  goes to Abraham's bosom; the rich man to a place of torment. The rich man 
begs  Abraham to send Lazarus with water to quench his thirst. Abraham replies 
there  is no route than can take one from where Lazarus is to where the rich 
man is.  Then the rich man begs Abraham to warn his brethren lest they too 
come to this  place of torment. Abraham reminds the rich man that his brothers 
have Moses and  the prophets. If they don't hear Moses and the prophets, he 
says, they will not  listen even if one is raised from the dead.  
This parable of Luke has surely been turned into history by John. Lazarus  
returns from the dead. No one listens. Indeed the raising of Lazarus, says John, 
 actually sets in motion the crucifixion of Jesus. The story is not a  
supernatural act, it is another interpretive symbol. This convinces me that  there 
is a way to interpret 1st century miracle stories other than as  supernatural 
events. We have imposed an unnatural literalness on these stories  that was 
never intended by the gospel writers. These miraculous narratives are  
interpretive signs used to tell the Jesus story.  
The requirement made by the fundamentalists that miracle stories must be  
accepted as literally true is thus revealed again to be an irrational  
fundamentalist claim based on misunderstood realties. Christianity is indeed far  more 
than this.  
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 
Al Gaither, via the Internet, writes:  
I have enjoyed your writing for some time. As a devotee of the philosopher  
Spinoza, I would be interested in your comments on this very special man.  
Dear Al,  
I have not read Spinoza in over fifty years. I majored in Philosophy at the  
University of North Carolina and, under the inspired teaching of people like  
Louis Katzoff, William. H. Poteat and Maynard Adams, I read most of the great  
thinkers in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. So much of a  
university education, however, is wasted on university age students so I did not  
understand the context in which these philosophers lived and worked, nor did I 
 comprehend all of the elements that had helped to destroy the classical 
lines of  authority and in the process produced the need for people like Spinoza 
to locate  value in new places and to relate to the sources of knowledge in new 
ways.  
I am interested that you call yourself a devotee of Spinoza. I suspect there  
are few who share that passion. I have not run into a member of the Spinoza 
fan  club since my college days when we each had our favorites. Mine was Blaise 
 Pascal and a small group of us met weekly in Chapel Hill to read and discuss 
 Pascal's "Pensees." I, however, abandoned my relationship with Pascal long 
ago  and when I read him recently, he was about 180º different from where I am 
now.  
So I would like to know what in Spinoza gives meaning to your life. How does  
Spinoza enlighten your world? What is there about your life that makes you 
feel  a connection with him?  
If you would write and tell me the answer to these things in a half page or  
so, I will publish it in the Question & Answer feature. You might lead us  all 
to a Spinoza revival.  
John Shelby Spong 



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