[Dialogue] spong 9/25 bible, etc

[KroegerD at aol.com]

September 25, 2008 
The Origins of the Bible, Part  XII
Introducing the Prophet Isaiah  

Bernard Baruch, a Jewish American from Camden, South Carolina, was well known 
 in the first half of the 20th century as the unofficial advisor to 
Presidents.  He played key roles in the think tanks of Presidents Woodrow Wilson, 
Franklin  Roosevelt and Harry Truman. As the son of a surgeon who served on the 
staff of  Confederate General Robert E. Lee, dealing with power seemed to come 
naturally  to him. David Gergen, a native of Durham, North Carolina, played a 
similar role  in American history in the last half of the 20th century as an 
advisor to  Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Clinton. Baruch 
and Gergen  are representatives of that rare ability to ride a long political 
tide and to  provide objective analysis in the midst of partisan conflict and 
thus to guide  the ship of state through choppy waters.  
The biblical figure we call "I Isaiah" played a similar role in the ancient  
world. His writings are found in Isaiah, chapters 1-39. His life spanned the  
reigns of four monarchs who ruled in Jerusalem. Kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and 
 Hezekiah, according to Old Testament scholar William F. Albright, ruled 
between  783-687 BCE, a total of 96 years. Isaiah was center stage for more than 
50 of  them, a tribute to his longevity. He emerged into public view, he says, 
"In the  year that King Uzziah died" and he lived through one of the most 
difficult  periods of Jewish history.  
The great power abroad in those days was Assyria. This warlike nation had  
succeeded in conquering or reducing to vassalage status most of the nations in  
the Middle East. It was the Assyrians who in 721 BCE destroyed the Northern  
Kingdom of the Jews, known as Israel, and deported its people from their land  
for resettlement in the Assyrian Empire, from whence they never returned. They 
 became known as the ten lost tribes of Israel and, despite the mythology 
that  developed over the years with people claiming to be descendants of these 
"Lost  Tribes," the fact is that these Jews simply disappeared into the DNA of 
the  Middle East. It was the same fate that had befallen the Canaanites, the  
Amorites, the Amalekites and the Edomites before them.  
The Prophet Isaiah may himself have been a member of the royal family, all of 
 whom were descendants of King David. He certainly shared their life style,  
educational background, values and perspectives. Perhaps it was this "blood  
relative" connection that provided the doorway through which he walked into his 
 prophetic and perhaps priestly career in the upper echelons of political 
power  in Jerusalem.  
A number of passages in Isaiah have entered the consciousness of the western  
world sufficiently to be familiar to many people. Among them is his oracle 
about  whether or not God was moved by ritualistic activity and sacrifices. In 
chapter  1, Isaiah writes:  

"What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? 
I have had  enough of the burnt offering of rams…
I do not delight in the blood of  goats…
Incense is an abomination to me. 
When you spread forth your  hands, 
I will lift my eyes from you. 
Even though you make many  prayers, 
I will not listen." 

It was a powerful denunciation  of worship designed to manipulate the deity 
and a call instead to "Remove the  evil of your doings from before my eyes; 
cease to do evil; learn to do good,  seek justice, correct oppression, defend the 
fatherless and plead for the  widow." The tension between the words and acts 
of worship and the quality of the  lives of the worshipers has always been 
present in both Jewish and Christian  religious life.  
Also in Chapter 1 are the words that President Lyndon Johnson quoted  
regularly during his days as Senate Majority Leader and later in the White  House: 
"Come let us reason together, saith the Lord." Unfortunately, Johnson's  idea of 
reasoning together was for his opponents to line up, drop their pants  and 
have the LBJ brand burned into what the Bible called "their hindquarters."  
Probably the most influential passage of Isaiah in religious history occurs  
in the seventh chapter, where the prophet writes in verse 14 the words that 
were  later translated to read: "Behold a virgin will conceive and bring forth a 
son  and you shall call his name Immanuel." That text was the inspiration 
that caused  Matthew, the writer of the second gospel, to create the narrative 
that we now  know as the Virgin Birth. That story, which did not enter the 
Christian  tradition until the 9th decade of the Christian era, was destined to 
shape both  the Christian creeds and later doctrinal development. The facts are 
that neither  Paul, who wrote between 51-64, nor Mark, written in the early 
70s, had ever  heard of this virgin birth tradition. Paul says of Jesus' birth 
only that he was  born of a woman like everyone else, and that he was born 
"under the law" like  every Jew (Gal. 4:4). Mark portrays Jesus' mother as thinking 
that her adult son  was out of his mind and seeking to put him away (Mark 
3:19-35). That is hardly  the behavior of one whom an angel had promised, "the 
child to be born will be  called holy, the Son of God (Lk. 1:35)."  
Matthew clearly misused this text, whether by design or by mistake we will  
never know. First, he did not quote Isaiah accurately. The original Hebrew in  
Isaiah chapter 7 does not say, "Behold a virgin will conceive," it says, 
"Behold  a woman is with child." These two statements are clearly not the same and 
the  Christian Church has known of this mistake since the middle years of the 
second  century, when Trypho the Jew pointed it out to Justin Martyr in a 
written  dialogue whose contents are still available.  
The second thing that is wrong with Matthew's peculiar use of the text is  
that the child who is anticipated by Isaiah was to be a sign to King Ahaz in the 
 8th century BCE that the besieging armies of King Pekah of the Northern 
Kingdom  of Israel and King Rezin of Syria, who were surrounding Jerusalem at that 
 moment, would not bring down the Holy City. Pekah and Resin had gone to war  
against Judah for not joining them in a defense alliance against the growing  
Assyrian power. King Ahaz preferred vassal status to defeat, and so after 
this  threat he signed a treaty with the Assyrians. The Northern Kingdom, bent on 
 resistance, was destroyed.  
It was a straight line from Matthew's misquotation of this text to the  
inclusion of "born of the Virgin Mary" in the creeds, to the contents of the  
Christmas pageants, to the development in Christian history that turned Mary  first 
into a virgin mother, then into a permanent virgin, then into a post  partum 
virgin, then into herself being immaculately conceived and finally into  being 
bodily assumed into heaven. Words do have power and ideas do have  
consequences.  
The next part of Isaiah that has been influential in religious history is his 
 description of what the coming of the Kingdom of God would mean that is 
found in  his apocalyptic chapters 34 and 35. Here the prophet begs the nations of 
the  world to listen. He informs them that the Lord is angry and will avenge 
the  nations of the world for their evil and bring about the Kingdom of God on 
earth.  It will be, said Isaiah, a day of vengeance against the enemies of 
God's people.  Tribal religion was in full force.  
When "The day of the Lord arrives," Isaiah proclaimed, the signs will be that 
 of fulfillment and wholeness. He writes:  
"The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, 
The desert  shall rejoice and bloom, 
Like the crocus, it shall bloom abundantly
And  rejoice with joy and singing. 

Then the eyes of the blind shall be  opened, 
And the ears of the deaf unstopped; 
Then shall the lame man  leap like a hart, 
And the tongue of the mute sing for joy. 
The waters  shall break forth in the wilderness
And streams in the desert; 
The  burning sand shall become a pool, 
And the thirsty ground, springs of  water. 

And a highway shall be there, 
And it shall be called the  holy way…
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, 
And come to Zion  with singing." (Is. 35:1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10) 
This passage in Isaiah  shaped the gospel story of Jesus dramatically. We 
need to be aware that it was  Mark who first added miracles to the story of 
Jesus. Paul knew nothing about  Jesus as a miracle worker. Matthew and Luke, both 
of whom copied substantial  parts of Mark into their narratives, expanded the 
miracles and even connected  them to Isaiah 35 so there would be no mistaking 
their source. According to  Matthew and Luke, John the Baptist sent messengers 
to Jesus inquiring as to  whether he was "the one who is to come (i.e. the 
messiah) or shall we look for  another?" Jesus responded by saying, "Go tell John 
what you hear and see," and  then he quotes Isaiah 35, claiming that the 
signs of the Kingdom are occurring  in his life: The blind see, the deaf hear, the 
lame leap and the mute sing (see  Mt.11:1-6, Lk. 7:18-23)  
Well after his crucifixion, when the disciples of Jesus came to believe that  
in his life the Kingdom of God had actually arrived or at least the "first  
fruits" of that Kingdom had come, they placed the signs of the Kingdom into  
their story of Jesus. This is how the miracles came to be part of the story.  
They were not literal events, but signs that in Jesus the Kingdom of God was  
dawning. No, the Kingdom did not fully come with Jesus. His life was but a  
"foretaste of glory divine." For his work of establishing the Kingdom fully,  
Jesus was required to "come again." That is how the image of the second coming  of 
Jesus became part of the Christian narrative.  
These are a few of the major contributions of the prophet Isaiah to  
Christianity. It needs to be noted, however, that these contributions all come  from 
chapters 1-39 of this book, which is from what scholars call I Isaiah.  
Chapters 40-55 were written by a second Isaiah and probably a third Isaiah wrote  
chapters 56-66. I will turn to II Isaiah when this series continues. 
–John Shelby Spong
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Bruce Barrett, from Mobile, Alabama, writes:  
I want you to know that I have an advanced education where understanding the  
Bible is concerned. I took Old Testament and New Testament at Wittenberg  
University in the early '60s. Wittenberg was then a liberal LCA college. While I  
understood the concept of the "historical critical method," the connotations 
of  "critical" have always bothered me on an emotional level. Why can we all 
not say  "analytical" instead? After all, that's what it is. We read and 
analyze relative  to the available knowledge about the times, and draw conclusions 
based on that  analysis (scripture, reason and tradition). We're all (well, the 
intelligent  folks, anyway) trying to understand God's revelation of God's 
marvelous self to  humankind. Terminology affects the ease of sharing insight.  
An example of the problem: At a Lenten Wednesday evening lecture/discussion  
several years ago, our curate announced that we would be studying Mark by the  
historical critical method. The discomfort in our mostly college educated  
faithful was palpable. Our curate, being prepared to present seminary level  
material, was a bit taken aback by the tension and didn't grasp that it was just  
the terminology that was bothering the group. Now these members are the 
serious  members of the congregation, not the twice a year folks. They're not 
literalists  by any stretch of the imagination. It's the connotation of the word 
"critical"  (admittedly, taken out of the academic context) that bothered them. 
I don't mean  to brag, but the mood relaxed significantly when I piped up and 
said something  like, "So we're analyzing the story, not criticizing the 
Bible, then?" The  curate grudgingly agreed. I suggest this to you because you have 
a wide audience  that (I suspect) includes clergy as well as intelligent 
laity. It's my opinion  that intelligent understanding of scripture can be 
facilitated by appropriate  terminology. Don't you agree?  
Dear Bruce,  
No, I do not agree.  
Surely if the word "critical" causes people to turn negative then some other  
word (like "analytical," as you suggest) might be substituted. I think, 
however,  that this still looks like placating the fundamentalists and I have 
little  patience with that. The time has come for scholarship not to be defensive 
about  the Bible. Much of the Bible needs to be criticized. It has been 
proclaimed as  literally true for far too long and a literal Bible turns off far more 
people  than the word "critical" ever will.  
I recently published a book called _The  Sins of Scripture, _ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060778407/104-8230684-1071158) which looked 
at what the literal Bible has done to  the environment, to women, to left 
handed people, to people of color, to  homosexual people. The Bible has been 
quoted to justify things as evil as the  Crusades, the Inquisition and slavery.  
You say that the people of your church are not literalists, but I have been  
to Alabama and Mobile many times and biblical fundamentalism is surely in the  
culture there, indeed in the very air one breathes. My father was a native of 
 Montgomery, so that world is not unknown to me. The Episcopal Bishop of 
Alabama,  Henry N. Parsley, Jr., is not a literalist, but he does not want to 
disturb the  literalists by allowing them to be educated. I regard that as just as 
bad, to  say nothing of being an example of ineffective leadership. I suggest 
that  literalism is deeper than you might imagine. For example, I do not know 
of a  single reputable New Testament scholar in the world who thinks that the 
stories  of Jesus' virginal birth are actually historical or that the 
resuscitation of a  deceased physical body is the meaning of resurrection. Try those 
ideas on those  you say are "certainly not literalists" and see if you don't 
get critical  responses.  
The gospels are distorted by literalism. The depth of these ancient stories  
is violated by literalism. That needs to be heard. I think using the words  
"critical biblical scholarship" opens people to new possibilities and, if they  
are afraid of these words, then it is because they are defending their literal 
 understanding of the Bible. Sorry, but I vote with the curate.  
–John Shelby Spong




**************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial 
challenges?  Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and 
calculators.      (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20080925/128dafcf/attachment-0001.html>