[Dialogue] spong 9/25 bible, etc

[carl larsen]

Dick:   Was there an episode of The Origins of the Bible, Part XI.  If there was I missed it.  Carl Larsen
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  From: KroegerD at aol.com 
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  Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 9:23 AM
  Subject: [Dialogue] spong 9/25 bible, etc


  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, 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





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