[Dialogue] Spong 2/13

[KroegerD at aol.com]

 Publisher's Note:John Shelby Spong will soon launch through  this Column a 
new series of articles on "How the Bible Came to Be Written." In  this series 
he will develop the full case for the contemporary biblical  scholarship that 
because of space requirements could only be hinted at in this  column. We hope 
readers will be on the lookout for this. 
February 13, 2008 
The Pope's Jesus and My  Jesus  

On February 26, 2008, my latest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious,  will be 
released by my publisher, Harper Collins, in a paperback version. Since  its 
original publication on February 27, 2007, I have traveled extensively to  speak 
about this book, delivering 168 public addresses in 16 states, eight  
countries and four continents, including two trips into the southern hemisphere.   
Two other things occurred, however, during that 365 day period that serve to  
make the launch of this paperback noteworthy. First, this book has enjoyed  
record sales even making it to the New York Times' extended best seller list in 
 non fiction and rising to position number 24 on the Amazon daily list of all 
 books sold. It also made the best seller list in Australia. Two foreign  
publishers, one in Germany and one in Korea, bought the rights to translate this  
book. It has also been reviewed extensively drawing praise from some, while  
being almost universally condemned in evangelical and fundamentalist circles. 
It  was arguably the best book launch in my career.  
The second thing that happened was totally unanticipated, but has proven to  
be quite extraordinary. Later in that same year of 2007, another book, 
entitled  Jesus of Nazareth, hit the bookstands with great fanfare. Written by  
Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI, this book also climbed the  
New York Times' best seller list to a higher position than I had achieved and  
remained there far longer than did my book. I was eager to read it, but when I  
did I found myself profoundly shocked. The contrast between the Pope's book 
and  mine could not have been more total. Indeed it was as if the Pope's book 
was  line by line a counterpoint to mine. That sense was so apparent that my  
publisher redesigned the cover for the paperback edition and placed a  
promotional piece on the back that reads: "The Pope describes the ancient  traditional 
Jesus; John Shelby Spong brings us a Jesus by whom modern people can  be 
inspired."  
As if to provide a clue to his understanding, the Pope's subtitle proclaimed  
that his book was designed to "cover the life of Jesus from his baptism to 
the  transfiguration," words that led me to suspect that the Pope would treat 
the  gospels as accurate historical biographies. He did. That is a point of view 
that  has been all but universally abandoned since the rise of critical 
biblical  scholarship in Germany more that 200 years ago, when Christians first 
began to  take note of the contradictions, exaggerations and elaborations that 
are present  in the gospels and to face new understandings about how and when 
the gospels  came to be written. This field of study has, not surprisingly, 
included  competent Roman Catholic scholars, like Edward Schillebeeckx of the 
Netherlands,  Hans Kung of Germany and America's Raymond Brown, all of whom shaped 
my own  thinking in powerful ways, but who are never mentioned in the Pope's 
book. A  clue to understanding this is revealed when one is aware of the fact 
that when  Benedict XVI was Joseph Ratzinger, the Cardinal in charge of the 
Vatican's  inquisitorial office, he was responsible for the removal of Hans Kung 
from his  position as the Catholic theologian at Tubingen University and for 
the constant  Vatican harassment of Edward Schillebeeckx. Perhaps this also 
explains why  Raymond Brown had to add to the conclusion of his books statements 
reaffirming  his commitment to traditional Catholic doctrine, even though in 
the corpus of  those same books he had been devastating to the claims that 
these biblical  passages supported the doctrinal conclusions the church had drawn 
from them, to  say nothing of demonstrating that the original authors of the 
gospels never  understood them that way. Benedict XVI is not an unlearned man. 
Early in this  Jesus book he takes cognizance of this critical biblical 
scholarship, but then  he proceeds to dismiss it since it violates his basic and 
still unchallenged  assumption that the faith of the Catholic Church is the 
ultimate truth revealed  by God and that anything that does not undergird that 
faith must be wrong by  definition. So he simply refuses to engage it.  
Tellingly, in this book he omits the birth narratives, promising to return to 
 them in a later book. It should be interesting if he ever actually does 
that,  since I know of no reputable biblical scholar, either Catholic or 
Protestant,  who treats the stories of Jesus' miraculous birth as literal history. The  
narratives of Jesus' virgin birth do not enter the Christian tradition until 
the  9th decade, or more than 80 years after the fact of his birth. The 
earlier  Christian writings, specifically the work of both Paul and Mark, appear 
never to  have heard of such a tradition. Both of these writers include in their 
works  words that make a miraculous birth an impossibility for them. By the 
time we  come to the writing of John's gospel, the miraculous birth story has 
disappeared  and Jesus is called in that gospel "the son of Joseph" on two 
occasions (John  1:45, 6:42). Throughout the Pope's book there is the constant 
assumption that  the gospels were eyewitness accounts written from first hand 
memory or available  notes, when they were in fact composed 40-70 years after the 
crucifixion of  Jesus by the second or third generation of Christians. He does 
not embrace the  fact that all of the gospels were written in Greek, a 
language neither Jesus nor  his disciples spoke, and that they all reveal a highly 
developed interpretation  of Jesus that could not have occurred until after his 
earthly life was over. The  Pope treats as literal history the story of 
Jesus' baptism, complete with the  heavens of a three-tiered universe opening to 
allow the Holy Spirit to drop down  on Jesus. He assumes that the words, "You 
are my beloved son," supposedly spoken  by God at the time of the baptism, to be 
so literal that they could have been  recorded for posterity if only such 
recording devices had been available at that  time. Benedict XVI does not seem to 
recognize that those words were lifted out  of Isaiah 42 and were used 
primarily to wrap the story of the servant figure  from II Isaiah (40-55) around 
Jesus of Nazareth as one of the many interpretive  traditions applied to him by 
his early followers.  
The Pope suggests that the Sermon on the Mount, recorded only in Matthew  
(5-7) is "Jesus' Torah." One senses that he would be in full sympathy with my  
tour guide on an earlier trip to Israel, who showed me the exact spot on the  
exact mountain where Jesus stood to deliver the Sermon on the Mount. He never  
acknowledges the fact that no other gospel writer included this sermon. He 
seems  not to know that the Sermon on the Mount is a beautifully crafted piece of 
work  based on Psalm 119, a hymn to the beauty and wonder of the Torah, which 
was used  by the Jews as part of a 24 hour vigil called Shavuot, that marked 
the Jewish  annual celebration of the time when, according to their tradition, 
Moses  received the Torah directly from God on Mount Sinai. Matthew had a 
clear agenda  to present Jesus as the "New Moses."  
He treats the transfiguration story as another moment of history despite the  
fact that it suggests that Jesus actually conferred with Moses, who by that 
time  had been dead for more than 1200 years, and with Elijah, who had been 
dead for  more than 800 years. He does not recognize that this story was an early 
 Christian attempt to portray Jesus as the one in whom the law (Moses) and 
the  prophets (Elijah) found their fulfillment, another early interpretation by 
his  Jewish followers. He does not see the luminous whiteness in which Jesus 
is  bathed as related to the Jewish Festival of Dedication (Hanukkah), when the 
true  light of God was said to have been restored to the Temple. When the  
Transfiguration story was first written I suspect the Roman destruction of the  
Temple in 70 C.E. had already occurred and Jesus' Jewish followers were  
beginning to talk about the body of Jesus as the new temple, the new meeting  place 
between God and human life. That idea would grow until Jesus would be  quoted 
in John's gospel, written between 95 and 100, as saying: "Destroy this  
Temple and in three days I will raise it up (2:19)." John adds that they did not  
realize that he "spoke of the Temple of his body (2:21)."  
Perhaps in the most egregious claim of all, Benedict argues that the long  
discourses in John's gospel in which other messianic images are developed, are  
authentic quotations from the Jesus himself. This would also imply that the  
various "I Am" sayings, which appear only in the Fourth Gospel, are also to be  
understood literally and not as interpretations placed on Jesus' lips by his  
followers sometime after the expulsion from the synagogue of the Jewish  
followers of Jesus around the year 88 C.E. The excommunicating Orthodox Party  
claimed that those whom they called "revisionist Jews" no longer had any part in  
the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. According to the  
Fourth Gospel, these excommunicated ones responded to this charge by taking 
the  holy name of God, "I Am" revealed to Moses at the burning bush, and used it 
as  their counter claim that the God of Abraham and Moses was exactly the God 
they  had encountered in Jesus.  
The day has long passed when many people in the world will accept the Pope's  
portrait of Jesus simply because he is the Pope. The struggle for the soul of 
 the Christian Church today is a struggle between those like the Pope, who 
cannot  move beyond their religious ghetto and refuse to examine any idea that  
contradicts or challenges their "revealed truth," and others like me and those 
 for whom I write, who believe that the reality of the God experience in 
Jesus  must be understood in the light of the knowledge available to each new  
generation. The Pope's call in his book Jesus of Nazareth is to look at  a 
pre-modern Jesus devotionally, the way the Church has always presented him. My  call 
in my book Jesus for the Non-Religious is to look at Jesus through  the lens 
of our contemporary knowledge. I do not believe the heart will ever  worship 
what the mind can no longer embrace. I am delighted that Harper Collins  has 
decided to promote my book as an alternative and as a counterpoint to the  
Pope's. Jesus is bigger and far more profound than Joseph Ratzinger, locked as  he 
is in the past, seems able to imagine.  
JSS  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Suze Miller, the Executive Director of the Texas Partnership for End-of-Life  
Care, writes:  
I am a Christian, a person of faith, but one who ascribes to the spirituality 
 of it all, not the religiosity. I have found a church in the Presbyterian  
tradition in which I can worship, one that is very active in social justice.  
Recent conversations with my atheist brother have posed a problem for me. He 
has  decided to write an article about the "mistakes in the Bible" and draw the  
conclusion from these that there is no God. Because, he believes, if God is  
omnipotent and is the author of the Bible, why would God give information to 
the  writers that was not true? This is such a basic assumption that I found 
myself  at a loss to delve into a theological discussion that would assist him 
in his  quest. Can you suggest any of your writings that might be helpful for 
him? He is  open to reading more.  
Dear Suze,  
First, I celebrate the fact that you have found a church that meets you where 
 you live. They are precious when you discover them. They come in all  
denominations and are usually looked upon with suspicion by those who occupy the  
denominational headquarters. They play a vital role, however, in keeping the  
various denominations located in a real world. I, therefore, applaud those  
churches and the courageous clergy who lead them. It has been my privilege to  
visit many of these churches across America and to feel the power of their  
witness. Were I to live in a city where my own church was busy trying to  
artificially resuscitate the patterns of the 1st, 4th or 13th century  Christianity 
that informs so many congregations, I would not hesitate to seek  out one of 
those churches and make it my worship center.  
In regard to your brother, I feel great sympathy for him because the  
Christianity against which he is reacting is the same Christianity against which  I 
react. Of course there are mistakes in the Bible. Anyone can point them out.  
There are also places where God is said to act in a way that most people today  
would regard as immoral. The Bible is in many places a tribal story, about a  
tribal deity who is in the service of a very national tribal agenda. I do not 
 believe that God hates Egyptians as the book of Exodus portrays, that God 
hates  the Ammonites as the book of Joshua suggests or that God desires genocide 
 against the people of Amalek as the first book of Samuel suggests. I do not  
believe that slavery is ever moral, or that women were ever designed to be  
second-class citizens or the property of men as various parts of the Bible,  
including the New Testament, suggest. I do not believe that women should keep  
quiet in church, should never have authority over men or should be submissive 
to  their husbands as Paul suggests. I do not believe that homosexuals are evil 
or  that homosexuality is God's punishment on those who do not worship God 
properly  as various passages of the Bible are now interpreted to say.  
Of course, God is not the author of the Bible. It was written by a variety of 
 human beings over about 1000 years of human history trying to interpret 
their  God experience in their time. While I would not say that God grows, it is 
very  clear in the Bible that the human understanding of God grows 
dramatically. One  might compare God's attitude towards the Egyptians at the time of the 
Exodus  with Jesus' words "Love your enemies," or the tribal claims for the 
Jews as  God's favored people with the words of Malachi who says that God's love 
is  universal, "from the rising of the sun to its setting" and that "In every  
nation, incense shall be offered to my name."  
I wrote my book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism just for  people like 
your brother. I applaud his honesty in rejecting what he was taught  in his 
childhood as not believable. I would encourage him to recognize that  
Christianity is far more than that terrible image that so many Protestant  
fundamentalists and conservative Roman Catholics have turned it into being.  Thank him for 
his willingness to be open to something more.  
John Shelby Spong 



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