[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
**************Vote for your city's best dining and nightlife. City's Best
2008. (http://citysbest.aol.com?ncid=aolacg00050000000102)
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