[Dialogue] spong 6/12 More Torah

KroegerD at aol.com KroegerD at aol.com
Wed Jun 11 20:32:19 EDT 2008


 
June 12, 2008 
The Origin of the Bible, Part  VII: 
The Final Strand of the Torah, 
The Priestly Document (A)  

Time after time we discover that it was the external events of human history  
that more than anything else shaped the content of those writings that would  
someday be called the Holy Scriptures. That should not surprise us since all  
books have human authors who live in a context of both time and place. Only  
those who ascribe a supernatural source to these ancient texts find this 
insight  disturbing. There is, however, no rational argument in the world that 
would  assert a divine origin for either the Bible or the Koran. We have already 
traced  this interplay in the first three stages of the development of the 
Torah. This  week we come to the fourth and final stage.  
The earliest document in the Bible was a 10th century BCE product of the  
dominant tribe of Judah, which focused on the power symbols of that part of the  
Jewish world: the city of Jerusalem, the royal house of David, the Temple and  
the high priest. It was written probably during the reign of King Solomon, 
but  its ultimate hero was King David. We call it the "J" version for it 
referred to  God by the name JHWH.  
The next strand of the Torah was a 9th century product of the Northern  
Kingdom, written after its successful revolution, which separated it from Judah,  
creating a second Hebrew state. The Northern Kingdom, which called itself  
Israel, was, not surprisingly, far more democratic in nature. Power was vested  in 
the people, allowing them to choose and to dismiss their rulers. This version 
 called god Elohim and was known as the "E" document. It also made Joseph, 
the  favorite son of the patriarch Jacob, the hero of its story, not King David, 
as  the "J" document had done.  
In 721 B.C. this Northern Kingdom was overrun and destroyed by the Assyrians, 
 their people becoming in the process the "ten lost tribes of Israel." The  
conquering Assyrians resettled the citizens of that defeated nation in foreign  
lands, where they disappeared into the DNA of the Middle East. A survivor of  
this crushing war, however, did escape to Jerusalem with a copy of the "E"  
document. In time this material was woven into the "J" document and the Jewish  
story was now the "JE" version, which remained for a century the scriptures 
of  the Jews.  
In 621 BCE a "new book of Moses" was "discovered" hidden in the walls of the  
Temple during a period of Temple repairs. It was called Deuteronomy from  
"deutero," second, and "nomas," law. Under its influence a massive reform of  
Temple worship was carried out. We suspect that the prophet Jeremiah was a part  
of this reforming group that wrote, planted and discovered the book. When  
Deuteronomy was woven into the JE version, the Deuteronomic writers also edited  
the entire corpus, placing their stamp onto Israel's history. This JED account 
 was the Jewish sacred scriptures for only a brief time before Judah's worst  
calamity unfolded.  
This tragedy began in 609 B.C.E. when Pharaoh Necho of Egypt sent troops to  
attack his enemy, the Assyrians, on the plains of Megiddo. King Josiah of 
Judah,  the hero of the Deuteronomic reforms and an ally of the Assyrians, 
intercepted  the invading Egyptians. In the ensuing battle, King Josiah, probably the 
most  popular king of the Jews since David, was slain. Despair and fear now 
set in  among the Jews. Assyria was declining and the Babylonians, led by their 
warrior  king, Nebuchadnezzar, proceeded to defeat its army, destroy Nineveh 
its capital,  and to replace it as the dominant power in that region of the 
world.  
In the early years of the sixth century BCE, Nebuchadnezzar consolidated his  
power sufficiently to begin a war of conquest. Sweeping out of the North, he  
conquered everything in sight before arriving at the walls of Jerusalem to 
begin  a siege in 598. Jerusalem was eminently defendable, located as it was 
high on a  fortress-like hill and possessing an internal water supply. It had not 
been  conquered by a foreign army in the last 400 years. The Jewish strategy 
before  marauding armies was to retreat into "Fortress Jerusalem," where they 
always  kept sufficient food supplies to wait out a siege. Normally, the enemy 
would  grow weary and a negotiated settlement would be reached, leaving Judah 
free but  poor. Jerusalem had thus developed an aura of invincibility, 
causing the Jews to  assert that as the earthly dwelling place of God, God would not 
allow it to be  either conquered or destroyed. The Babylonians, however, 
proved to be more  persistent than any previous enemy and the siege lasted for two 
full years, by  which time both the food and the weapons of war were 
exhausted. Even rocks and  spears once hurled were not retrievable. Finally, the walls 
were breached and  the Babylonian army poured in, destroying everything 
before them. Even God's  house, the Temple, was leveled.  
The Babylonians rounded up the captive people and prepared them for  
deportation to Babylon. Only the elderly and the physically impaired would  remain. 
The period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian Captivity was about  to 
begin. A puppet ruler named Zedekiah, of the house of David but loyal to  Judah's 
new master, was placed on the throne. All others were forced to march  into 
resettlement in Babylon. This experience would remain the darkest moment in  
Jewish history until it was superseded by the Holocaust in the 20th century.  
These Jewish exiles left everything they knew. They would never again see the 
 sacred soil of Judah. They were removed from their Temple with its sacred 
feasts  and fasts, which had served to give a sense of order and purpose to 
their lives.  They even assumed that to be removed from the Temple was to be 
removed from God.  According to one of the psalms (137), the conquered Jews were 
taunted by their  captors. The words of this psalm are plaintive: "By the waters 
of Babylon we sat  down and wept, when we remembered thee O Zion. As for our 
harps we hanged them  upon the trees that are therein. For they that led us 
away captive required of  us then a song and melody in our heaviness: Sing us 
one of the songs of Zion.  How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" 
They were destined to live  as slaves or as a perpetual underclass in a land 
where the name of their God was  never to be spoken in public. They did not 
believe that God could even hear  their prayers in this foreign place.  
Their spiritual crisis was even deeper than this. In this primitive time the  
defeat of a nation was understood to be a defeat for their God. This meant 
that  their God had been demonstrated to be impotent in the face of the gods of  
Babylon. Their God had in effect been destroyed. If they were to continue to 
be  believers, they would have to be, to use a phrase I would coin some 2600 
years  later, "believers in exile." They were now separated from everything 
that under  girded their understanding of God. It was a crisis of dire 
proportions in which  their God would either perish or grow. There were no other 
alternatives.  
Most ancient peoples did not survive such an ordeal. This norm had in fact  
been the fate of the people of the Northern Kingdom. In only two or three  
generations they had completely lost their identity and were soon absorbed into  
the general population, becoming what we now call the "ten lost tribes of  
Israel." The only hope a conquered people had for survival lay in their ability  
to remain separate and distinct from their neighbors, thus making it impossible 
 for amalgamation to occur. The Jews now lived with the ultimate hope that  
someday, in some unknown future their descendants, if still cohesive and  
recognized as Jews, might just have the opportunity to return to their homeland  
and rebuild their nation and Jerusalem. This hope became their dream and the  
ultimate value for which they lived while in captivity.  
Included among those who were taken into exile was the man we know as  
Ezekiel, along with a number of other priests. Almost inevitably they became the  
new leaders of the exiled people, moving at once to build and to install into  
the consciousness of these conquered people the virtues of remaining separate  
from the Babylonians and to guarantee that their descendants would cling to 
the  dream and the tribal duty of returning someday to their homeland.  
In the service of that dream these priestly leaders identified three  
essential marks of Judaism that they set out to stamp so deeply on the psyches  of 
their people that they would serve to keep them separate from the others in  
Babylon. First, they reintroduced the Sabbath, making it the sign of their  
national identity. These Jews became known as those strange people who refused  to 
work on the seventh day. This custom disrupted work crews to which they had  
been assigned as laborers, causing frustration and anger to grow among the  
Babylonians, but it also served to identify the Jews as "different," perhaps  
weird, thus aiding the Jewish desire to remain separate. Second, these priestly  
leaders urged upon their people the adoption of kosher dietary laws, mandating 
 that the food that the captive people ate had to be prepared in kosher 
kitchens.  This meant, effectively, that all social discourse with those who were 
not Jews  was cut off. Since Jews could not eat with non-Jews, this meant that 
there was  little chance that close relationships could ever grow, since most 
human  relationships develop in the act of eating together. Third, these 
priestly  leaders revived the practice of circumcision as the distinguishing mark 
of  Judaism, literally cutting that mark into the bodies of every Jewish male 
at the  time of puberty. This made it impossible for a Jewish male to hide his 
Judaism  from the world, which also served to make intermarriage difficult. 
The plan  worked. The Jews became a people separate from all others. All of 
these  practices were seen to be religious mandates. Ezekiel and his priestly 
leaders  then decided that the sacred story of the Jewish people had to be revised 
to  include these mandates as part of Jewish life and practice from the very  
beginning of their nation's history. They now undertook a major editorial  
revision of what had been the Yahwist-Elohist-Deuteronomic story of the Jewish  
people. This fourth strand of material was to be called the priestly or the 
"P"  document and to its content I will turn next week.  
John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Dale Mason, from Cromwell College at the University of Queensland, asks:  
What store or value do you put into or get from:  
The Gospel of Mary (the mother of Jesus)
The Gospel of Mary  Magdalene
The Gospel of Judas
The Gospel of Thomas  
Can we open them to new meaning? Can we attribute to them the status of  
Scripture? Can they contribute to or enhance the mission of the Christian  Church, 
which in your terms is to make us truly human?  
Dear Dale,  
The gospels to which you refer are not of equal value, so your question  
cannot be answered generally. All of them are later works that were not  
incorporated into the official canon of Scripture for a variety of reasons, not  all of 
which we will ever know. Perhaps it was because they were later in  history. 
Perhaps it was that they were not judged as authentic. Perhaps they  were 
caught up in early church struggles and wound up on the losing side.  
The thing we gain from them is a vision of early Christian history that is  
different from the orthodox view with which most of us were raised. It also  
confirms the recent scholarship that has successfully challenged ecclesiastical  
propaganda, that in the beginning of the Christian era there was not a single 
 Christianity, but a variety of Christianities that were competing with one  
another. The gospels to which you refer reflect that early variety.  
The Gospel of Mary, the mother of Jesus, is not thought of very highly. I am  
always suspicious of "lost" gospels and can find very little about it except 
in  circles of Catholic piety. Surely it is not authentic and we have no 
record of  the mother of Jesus writing anything and surely she was not alive when 
this  second century work was written.  
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene has been treated in a book by Karen King of the  
Harvard Divinity School, who found great meaning in that work.  
The Gospel of Judas has been treated in a book by Bart Ehrman of the  
University of North Carolina, who is one of the great scholars in early church  
history.  
The Gospel of Thomas is treated with great respect by the scholars of the  
Jesus Seminar, who actually elevated it into the Canon in the book edited by  
Robert Funk called The Five Gospels. Elaine Pagels at Princeton has done  what I 
regard as the best work on the Gospel of Thomas in her book Beyond  Belief.  
I commend all of them to you for your study. Having said that, however, I do  
not feel any great desire to take much time to study these late sources, 
since I  do not believe that they contain much that is worthy of serious scholarly 
 attention. The Gospel of Thomas would be the only exception to this 
statement. I  am not nearly as impressed with these works as some of my colleagues 
seem to be.  Time will tell who is correct. I am willing to be convinced, but 
that has not  yet happened.  
John Shelby Spong 



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