[Dialogue] 10/01/09, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part III: Placing the New Testament Onto the Grid of History

Thu Oct 1 10:34:05 CDT 2009

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Thursday October 01, 2009 

The Origins of the New Testament, Part III
Placing the New Testament Onto the Grid of History

The books of the New Testament did not drop from heaven, fully written, in the King James Version! Yes, that is a caricature, but it still has a tenacious hold on the minds of many Christians. This conviction guarantees that current, competent biblical scholarship will always be a source of much controversy in traditional religious circles.
The facts, however, are these. We have no original words of Jesus in the language in which he spoke. We have no firsthand accounts of the things he is supposed to have done. Even the earliest narrative describing the crucifixion is a creation of at least the second generation of Jesus' disciples and it is constructed not on eyewitness testimony, but on the interpretive use of the Hebrew Scriptures to portray Jesus as the f
ulfillment of all of their expectations. In the column last week we located the life of Jesus in terms of history, suggesting that the most informed guess for the date of his birth is 4 BCE and for the date of his death is 30 CE. With those dates in mind, let me line up today the books of the New Testament on a time grid of the first century and allow you to see how the New Testament developed. By doing that we can trace such things as when new claims, heightened accounts of the miraculous and the developing layers and traditions of the Jesus story were added to the narrative.

Assume that the life of Jesus was lived between 4 BCE and 30 CE. We face the fact that from the years 30 CE to about 50 CE, there is not a single word preserved of anything Jesus said or did. A tunnel of total silence exists, into which only speculation is possible.

In the years between 50 and 64 CE we come to the writings of Paul. Not all the epistles that bear his name are actually Pauline, but we are generally convinced that I Thessalonians, Galatians, I and II Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians are authentic. Almost all scholars dismiss the Pauline authorship of Hebrews, I and II Timothy, Titus and Ephesians, while the Pauline authorship of Colossians and II Thessalonians is still debated.

The four gospels were written between 70 and 100. The Book of Acts, the pseudo-Pauline epistles, the General Epistles (I, II, III John; I and II Peter; James and Jude) and the book of Revelation=2
0would all be dated between the 7th and 10th decades. With that dating system in mind let me go back and chronicle how the story developed between Paul, our earliest New Testament writer, and John, the last gospel writer.

Paul is the first person to give us any writing details about the life of Jesus, but these details are scanty indeed. Letter writer that Paul was, it was not his agenda to relate the words of Jesus, stories about Jesus or even the major events of his life, except inadvertently. Paul has no sense of Jesus having had a miraculous birth. He says of Jesus only that he was "born of a woman" like all human beings and that he was "born under the law" like all Jews. He does suggest that he is linked by heredity to King David, but since that was a popular messianic claim, it is hard to judge its historicity. Paul also indicates that he knows James, the brother of Jesus, but he never mentions the names of Jesus' parents nor shares any knowledge about them. 

Paul records no account of Jesus as a miracle worker. He reveals no knowledge of the tradition that Jesus was betrayed by one of his disciples. All he says is that "On the night in which Jesus was handed over, he took bread" and instituted the Christian Eucharist. The words handed over became the fragile basis upon which the betrayal story was constructed. Paul does not suggest that this "handing over" was done by one of his disciples, nor does he identify this "last supper" in any way with the Passover. Paul20makes no mention of the content of Jesus' teaching, nor does he reveal any familiarity with any of the parables.

When Paul comes to the final events in Jesus' life, his knowledge is equally scanty. The fact that Jesus was crucified is central to Paul, but none of the familiar details of that event are noted. All that Paul says is: "He died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." Paul never mentions Pilate, Herod, the soldiers, the two thieves crucified with him, any words that Jesus was supposed to have spoken from the cross or what his death might have looked like. To say that Jesus "died for our sins," appears to be an allusion drawn from the synagogue liturgy of Yom Kippur, while his words "in accordance with the scriptures" may relate to the way that early Christians interpreted the Hebrew prophets as having their words find literal fulfillment in the life and death of Jesus. We do know that the image of the "servant" drawn by II Isaiah (40-55) and of the "shepherd king" drawn by II Zechariah (9-14) were popular images for interpreting Jesus by the time the gospels were written. When he comes to the burial of Jesus Paul writes only "that he was buried." There is no tomb, no Joseph of Arimathea, no angels, no guards, no women visitors. Dead people are buried is all he claims.

About the resurrection Paul says only that "on the third day" Jesus was raised "in accordance with the scriptures," but he does not say into what he was raised. Was it into the life of this 
world or into the life of God? Was the resurrection a resuscitation of a dead body or an ascension into heaven? There were three stories in Jewish tradition in which a holy man (Enoch, Moses and Elijah) is victoriously translated into heaven. Paul would have been familiar with each of them. Most of Paul's later writing points to the understanding that he believed that Jesus was raised into the eternity of God, rather than being physically resuscitated back into this life.

Paul goes on to give a list of those people to whom the raised Christ was "made manifest." He includes "the twelve," which seems to say that Judas was still among them. He also includes himself, claiming his experience of the risen Christ was like all the others except that his was last. When Paul's epistles, written between 50 and 64, were all that the Christian Church had in writing, the fact is that the remembered details on Jesus' life were few indeed.

The first gospel was Mark, written in the early 70's, followed by Matthew in the early 80's and Luke in the late 80's and finally by John in the late 90's. Both Matthew and Luke copied large portions of Mark into their works, with Matthew utilizing about 90% of Mark's content and Luke utilizing about 50%. John appears to be aware of the first three gospels, but he was not dependent on them, except very slightly. So when we line up the books of the New Testament, in the historic order of their writing we can see the developing story line quite clearly. 

Mark20in the 8th decade is the first to introduce John the Baptist, to say that Jesus performed miracles or to suggest that his mother's name was Mary. None of those things had ever been mentioned before. He never refers to a father figure at all, much less one named Joseph. Mark is the first writer to introduce Judas as the traitor and the first to write a narrative of the cross. In that narrative, now-familiar details such as Peter's denial, the crown of thorns, the crucified thieves and the cry of dereliction, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" enter the tradition. Mark also is the first to introduce Joseph of Arimathea and to relate the story of Jesus' burial. When Mark gets to Easter, he portrays only an empty tomb and a messenger who makes a resurrection announcement, but never in the first gospel is the raised Christ seen by anyone. That is all we have until the 9th decade.

Matthew, writing about a decade after Mark, adds other touches. He is the first to provide a genealogy, the first to introduce the virgin birth story of Jesus and the first to weave the story of Jesus around the narrative of Moses. Only in Matthew is there a Moses story about a wicked king trying to destroy Jewish male babies, but now told about Jesus, and only in Matthew does Jesus preach the Sermon on the Mount, re-interpreting the Law of Moses in a new way from on top of a new mountain. Matthew adds the parable of the sheep and the goats found nowhere else. He also copies all of Mark's miracles,=2
0adding none of his own. Finally, Matthew is the first gospel to portray Jesus as physically raised from the dead, though he is quite ambivalent. The raised Christ is physical with the women in the garden, but not with the disciples in Galilee.

Luke, writing a little less than a decade after Matthew, builds on the miraculous birth story, adding details that do not harmonize with Matthew. In Luke angels replace the star and shepherds replace the magi. He adds two new miracle stories to the tradition, the healing of the ten lepers and the raising from the dead of a widow's only son in Nain. Luke is also the source of the best known of Jesus' parables: the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and Lazarus and the Rich Man, which appear in no other gospel. Luke adds words to the cross unheard of before and he makes the resurrection quite physical. The stories of Ascension and Pentecost are also Lucan.

John adds two new miracles: turning of water into wine and raising Lazarus from the dead. He expands the teaching of Jesus, frequently turning it into long, highly developed theological monologues. He prefers the word "sign" to the word "miracle" and makes the ascension something that occurs before Jesus appears to the disciples, not afterwards.

This very brief analysis gives us a sense of how the Jesus story grew as the New Testament developed. We will return to look at this in more detail later. For now, however, I simply want my readers to be aware of how dramatically the story grows between 70
 and100 as the gospels are written. Then I ask you to wonder with me about how the story might have grown from 30 to 70, where we have little or no data for comparison. That will prepare us to enter that dark oral only tunnel where no written data exists when this series continues.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Robert Fujimura of Omaha, Nebraska, writes:

A book I read on acupuncture claimed Taoism has five gods, which were translated into English as five spirits. I was surprised and asked some Chinese and Japanese people about this and found out that in their worldview gods are spirits. I am interested in making Christianity into a national religion by having only the New Testament in the Bible with the Old Testament being relegated to being an appendix. The emphasis should be on the love and grace of Jesus. What do you think?
Robert Fujimura of Omaha, Nebraska, writes:

A book I read on acupuncture claimed Taoism has five gods, which were translated into English as five spirits. I was surprised and asked some Chinese and Japanese people about this and found out that in their worldview gods are spirits. I am interested in making Christianity into a national religion by having only the New Testament in the Bible with the Old Testament being relegated to being an appendix. The emphasis should be on the love and grace of Jesus. What do you think?

Dear Robert,

I could not disagree with you more, 
and feel that you profoundly misunderstand the Jewish Scriptures. I also do not understand why anyone would want to develop a "national religion." I think the worship of God should lead people to transcend all boundaries, including our tribal or national boundaries. That seems to me to be what the story of Pentecost was saying when it suggested that in the power of the spirit people could communicate in the language of their hearers. Your point of view is also not new. It was offered and defended by a man named Marcion around 140 CE. His views were later condemned as heresy.

The problem with the Old and New Testaments is that they are both dated pieces of literature that reflect the values and mores of those who wrote them between 1000 BCE and 135 CE. Many passages in the Old Testament reflect a tribal mentality that portrays God as hating everyone the people of Israel hated. It also portrays God as killing the firstborn male in every household in Egypt on the night of the Passover; justifies the institution of slavery (except for fellow Jews) and defines women as the property of men. Note that even the Ten Commandments exhort us "not covet our neighbor's house, his wife, his slaves, his ox, his ass, etc." The neighbor is clearly a male, and the things that we are forbidden to covet are all male possessions. These Hebrew Scriptures, however, also define God as love, justice and as a universal being. In the portrait of the "Servant" in Isaiah 40-55 the Hebrew Scriptures portray human life a
s capable of giving itself away and even of acting in such a way as to draw the pain out of others, absorb it and return it as love.

The New Testament portrays Paul as believing that slavery is good if it is kind. Paul also reveals attitudes toward women that are today deeply embarrassing: "I forbid a woman to have authority over a man." "Women should keep quiet in church." No, I want both Testaments always to be available to the Christian community, I want no part of the Bible to be treated literally and used as a weapon to enforce someone's will and I want no part of a national religion.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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