[Dialogue] Spong 1/17/07

[KroegerD at aol.com]

January 17, 2006 
Did Jesus Raise People from the  Dead? The Story of Jairus' Daughter  

This week, I begin a series of columns on the claims made in the New  Test
ament that Jesus of Nazareth had the power to raise the dead back to life.  For 
most people that claim is both vague and firm. I will try to clarify its  
vagueness and in the process destabilize its firmness. First, we need to look at  
what the New Testament says on this subject. I suspect it will be revealing.  
There are only five narratives in the canonical gospels about Jesus raising  
someone who has died back to life. Three of them, however, describe the same  
event. This is the story of Jesus raising from death the daughter of the ruler 
 of the synagogue. It is found in Mark 5:21-43, Matthew 9:18-26, and Luke  
8:40-56. The second episode is the story of Jesus raising the widow's son in the 
 village at Nain, which is told only in Luke (7:11-17). Finally there is the  
familiar story of Jesus raising Lazarus from his grave that is told only in 
John  (11:1-57). To complete the New Testament material, I need to note that 
there is  a single biblical reference in Matthew (27:50-53) to the dead coming 
out of  graves at the time of Jesus' death, but this is almost universally 
thought to be  an apocalyptic reference and not an event that occurred in history. 
That is the  sum of the 'raising of the dead' stories about Jesus in the 
gospels. Of course,  there are the stories of Jesus' resurrection that stand at 
the heart of the  Christian tradition but they are not, technically speaking, 
acts of Jesus, but  rather are described as an act of God who was said to have 
raised Jesus from the  dead. I will examine that part of the gospel tradition 
in a series that will run  in this column during the Lent and Easter seasons. 
Over the next few weeks I  will look deeply at those gospel stories which 
specifically purport to say that  Jesus actually raised to life one who had died.  
My questions will be these: Did any of these events happen in a literal way?  
Could they have happened? Is there any other way to understand these stories  
than to view them as events that took place in history? Are there clues in 
these  stories themselves that lead us into a non-literal view of them?  
Before proceeding with this study, the first observation I need to make is  
that the understanding of death present in first century Jewish life was vastly 
 different from our understanding today. The ancient Jews thought that death  
meant that the deceased person had "given up the spirit or the ghost." They 
also  believed that the spirit or ghost of that person could return in the time 
 immediately following death and reanimate the deceased body. There was a 
hint  that the life force hovered near the deceased body for a period of time 
during  which death was in fact reversible.  
All of these ideas have been obliterated by the development of a scientific  
understanding of what death actually is. Today we recognize the complex and  
interdependent functioning of the various parts of the physical body. We know,  
for example, that our lungs take into our bodies the oxygen necessary to 
remain  alive with each breath that we draw. We also know that when breathing 
stops and  the life sustaining power of oxygen is removed, every cell in the body 
begins to  decay. We know that the heart pumps blood through our arteries and 
veins and  that this blood carries that vital oxygen to the brain without 
which the cells  of the brain are destroyed quickly. We know that if one is "dead" 
for only a  very few minutes, even if artificial respiration finally restores 
breathing, the  brain in the victim is, for all practical purposes, destroyed 
and is incapable  of being regenerated. We know that when the body shuts 
down, the death process  is irreversible. Bodily decay begins immediately, 
although it is not discernible  until the odor of death, caused by the decaying 
process, begins to make itself  known. We know that to reverse that process 
requires the stopping of time and  indeed its reversal. Since time cannot flow 
backwards, the literal raising to  life of a deceased person is quite impossible 
unless one postulates an  intervening deity who can both reverse time and 
reestablish cellular integrity.  This means that God must fashion literally billions 
of supernatural miraculous  acts that would run counter to everything we now 
know about natural law and the  way the world operates. If in fact God has the 
kind of power to act in that  fashion, then we are left with an even more 
difficult question of why God does  not choose to utilize this supernatural power 
in other ways: to stop a tsunami,  to protect the poor in New Orleans from the 
ravages of Hurricane Katrina, to  rescue the Jews in Nazi Germany from the 
Holocaust or to intervene in every  human tragedy. If we believe that this 
supernatural deity can do these things  and that this God for some unknown reason 
simply chooses not to use that power,  then God must be seen as demonic, Yet, 
on the other hand, once we say that God  does not have the power to do these 
miraculous things then the traditional  understanding of God is no longer 
viable. So the stakes are high for people of  faith as we undertake this study.  
My focus goes first to the raising the dead event found in each of the first  
three gospels. It is a story involving the daughter of the ruler of the  
synagogue. We need to recall first that having three accounts of the same  episode 
does not mean that we have three independent sources validating this  single 
miraculous story. Today we know that Mark was the first gospel to be  written 
and that both Matthew and Luke had Mark in front of them when they  wrote. So 
we have one source, Mark, and two narratives, one in Matthew and one  in Luke 
that copy this original source. It is interesting and revealing to look  at 
how they altered Mark's account, as we seek to understand why Matthew and  Luke 
felt that their particular changes were necessary.  
We note first that Mark and Luke say the Ruler of the Synagogue, whose  
daughter is ill, is named Jairus. Matthew omits the name. Mark and Luke have  Jesus 
accompanied by Peter, James and John when he enters the child's room. In  
Matthew Jesus goes alone. Mark and Luke tell us that a message comes to Jesus  
before he arrives at the ruler's house informing him that the child has died.  
Matthew omits that detail. This means that Matthew can place more emphasis on  
the words of Jesus that the child is not actually dead but is only sleeping. 
He  can thus minimize the sense of amazement that both Mark and Luke appear to  
maximize. So a careful comparison of these stories reveals that Matthew does 
not  seem to agree with the supernatural elements in Mark's version of this 
story.  That in itself is unusual because normally Matthew heightens the 
miraculous in  such narratives as the crucifixion and resurrection.  
Once we have the details of this story clearly in mind, our second step is to 
 ask if the narrative has any Old Testament antecedents. Not surprisingly, 
there  is one in the Elisha cycle of stories from the Book of Kings (see II 
kings  4:32-37). The similarities are these: In both stories it is a child who is  
raised. In both stories the healers, Jesus and Elisha, are journeying toward 
the  destination. In both stories there is some conversation prior to arrival 
as to  whether the child is already dead. In both stories there is physical 
contact  between the healer and the child. Jesus takes the child by the hand; 
Elisha  stretches himself over the child as if to give mouth-to-mouth 
resuscitation.  Please note that according to the Torah, physical contact with the dead, 
even  for a priest, left the touching person unclean for seven days. In both 
stories,  the child's spirit is restored. In the Elisha story this is 
symbolized when the  child sneezes seven times. In the Jesus story the symbol is that 
the child gets  up, walks and is given food to eat. There is clearly a 
connection between these  two stories. The gospel writers are in fact retelling an 
Elisha story about  Jesus and thus are using an Elisha story to interpret Jesus. 
This means that  this story is in all probability not a description of an 
event that actually  happened, but is presented as an interpretive narrative. It 
should, therefore,  not be read as a description of a supernatural event, 
since that is clearly not  what the gospel writer intended. It was designed rather 
to show people how to  look at Jesus through the lens of Elisha, a hero from 
the Jewish past. That  alone should be sufficient to shift our minds away from 
a literal reading of the  gospels and toward recognizing that the gospels are 
part of an interpretive  process. That is the conclusion to which we arrive 
almost every time we take a  gospel story and look at it deeply enough.  
It is also worth noting that there are no miracle stories connected to Jesus  
in those years between the end of his earthly life and the writing of the  
gospels some 40-70 years later. There are no miracle stories in either Paul or  
the document called Q, the only Christian writings believed to antedate the  
gospels. Miracle stories, and especially raising from the dead miracle stories, 
 appear to be a late developing tradition introduced first in the gospel 
writing  tradition and designed primarily to reveal not something that Jesus did 
but to  interpret the life changing power people experienced in Jesus. It was 
the gospel  writer's way of seeing messiah in him, the messiah about whom 
Isaiah wrote that  when the Kingdom of God dawned, signs of wholeness would 
accompany the messianic  figure who ushered in the day of the Lord. Around this 
messiah would be wrapped  the nature miracles drawn from the Moses-Joshua and 
Elijah-Elisha cycles for he  would be portrayed as both the new Moses and the new 
Elijah. The Jewish readers  for whom the gospels were first written would 
understand this message. Later  Gentile Christians, however, ignorant of the Jewish 
roots of the gospels, would  begin to read them as literal history. That is 
when the distorting literalism  began to invade our understanding of the Jesus 
story. The gospels are not  photographs of what Jesus actually did. They are 
not tape recordings of what  Jesus actually said. They are rather portraits 
painted by Jewish artists to try  to capture the essence of what they believed 
Jesus was. His was a life, they  believed, before whom death shrank in fear. 
That is the message found in the  narratives about Jesus raising the dead.  
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 
Bill Kaster from Indiana writes:  
Belief Net is currently offering a self-administered theological inventory.  
You answer a series of theological questions and end with a score that places  
you in one of five categories along a spectrum ranging from atheism to  
fundamentalism. Each of the five categories is characterized by typical beliefs,  
plus the name of a prominent American churchman whose teaching and preaching 
are  examples of that style of belief. You will be relieved to learn that you 
are the  poster boy for the most liberal category, next to atheism at the end of 
the  spectrum.  
Dear Bill,  
With all due respect to my friends at BeliefNet, that chart is both  
misleading and profoundly inadequate to ascertain any data about anyone,  primarily 
because they do not define any of their terms. For example, strictly  speaking, 
atheism does not mean asserting that there is no God. It is rather an  
assertion that the theistic understanding of God has become unbelievable. That  is a 
distinction that the people at BeliefNet do not understand.  
We are in our world today in a period of intense theological upheaval. That  
upheaval is characterized by both a rise in fundamentalism and a corresponding 
 increase in the number of people who reject all religious symbols as no 
longer  meaningful. So we have religious fanaticism confronting an increasingly 
secular  society. In this divisive atmosphere, there are the Jerry Falwells and 
Pat  Robertsons on one side and the Richard Dawkins' and Sam Harris' on the 
other.  
I find myself generally in agreement with the criticisms of organized  
religion, including Christianity, leveled by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.  Their 
biggest problem is not their criticism, which I find quite accurate, but  that 
the Christianity they reject is a very poor representation of what  
Christianity was meant to be. It is because they know no other Christianity than  this 
popular expression, they believe that atheism is the only viable  alternative 
to the Christianity they have known and rejected. They have never  explored 
the essence of Christianity because that essence lives in such tiny and  hidden 
places. I think the theism of popular Christianity is dying and that is  why 
many people think Christianity is dying. The idea that God is a supernatural  
being, who inhabits outer space somewhere and who occasionally intervenes in  
this world in miraculous ways, is not a credible concept to me. Since this is  
the only concept of God that many people can imagine, they see atheism as the  
only viable alternative. Nothing reveals better the bleakness of so much of  
contemporary Christianity.  
I am a believer who is not a theist. Some people mistakenly assume that an  
atheist is the same thing as a non-theist. Nothing could be further from the  
truth. If anything, I am a god-intoxicated human being, perhaps even a mystic. 
I  experience God as 'Other,' as 'Transcendence,' as 'Depth,' and as the 
ultimate  meaning of life. I believe that humanity and divinity are not separate  
categories, but represent the eternal spectrum of human experience. Divinity is 
 the depth dimension of humanity. I see this God presence lived out in the 
human  life of Jesus of Nazareth. I search the Scriptures to find images of God 
that  transcend the theistic images of the childhood of our humanity; the old 
man in  the sky with the magic power that permeated primitive religious 
thought. I find  it in the unwillingness of the ancient Jewish writers of our sacred 
story to  have the name of God spoken by human lips since no human mind can 
embrace the  reality of God sufficiently to speak the divine name. I see it in 
the Jewish  commandment that we are never to make an image of God since 
nothing made with  human hands or constructed by the human mind can finally be big 
enough to  capture the Holy God. Yet religious people constantly think that the 
human  creations of scripture, creeds and doctrines have somehow embraced the 
wonder of  the holy. These are nothing more, however, than verbal "graven 
images." I find  the Bible in some places is reduced to defining God in 
impersonal images because  the personal ones become so false when literalized. So God 
is defined in what I  call the minority voices of the Bible as like unto the 
wind, the rock and even  as the power and source of love.  
When human beings talk about God, all they are really doing is talking about  
their human experience of God. When that truth is faced, certainty of 
expression  disappears but the experience of God does not. I wish not only that the 
people  at BeliefNet, but also most religious reporters in our newspapers and 
above all  the radio preachers, were aware of and could embrace that human 
limitation.  
John Shelby Spong 
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