[Dialogue] 10/29/09, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part IV: The Oral Period

Thu Oct 29 16:43:12 CDT 2009

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Eternal Life: A New Vision Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell
By John Shelby Spong

Thursday October 29, 2009 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part IV: The Oral Period

Where did the story of Jesus reside in that dark tunnel of time where no records exist? That tunnel began with the crucifixion in 30 CE and lasted until Paul wrote his first epistle to the Thessalonians in about 51 CE. From those silent years we have nothing that has survived in writing. From the years 51 to 64, we have available to us Paul alone, but he relates very little about what Jesus said or did. It is not until we get to the gospels that were written between 70 and 100 CE, or 40 to 70 years after the end of Jesus' life, that we receive a consistent story, but little of that can be looked at as history. Today we can line up the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written (Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John) and see quite easily how the Jesus story grows and develops. For example, Mark adds miracles, Matthew adds the virgin birth, Luke adds the cosmic ascension and John adds the farewell discourses. From the years 30 to 50, however, there is absolutely nothing that remains, and these years present a huge challenge to Christian scholars. When we can see and date from gospel sources the expansions of the Jesus story from 70 to 100, we cannot help but wonder how the story might have grown during this oral tunnel of silence. In this column, I will seek to throw some light on this darkness. 
Where does one go to look for clues? I know of only one possible place. If a subject is filtered through any vehicle for a significant number of years, that vehicle ought to leave an imprint. So we study the gospels looking for signs that identify how the material was preserved. Such signs are not hard to find in the early gospels.
The first clue comes when we examine how often the word synagogue appears in the gospels. One finds a reference to the synagogue or synagogues eleven times in Mark, nine times in Matthew, sixteen times in Luke and five times in John. Historically we know that the Christian movement was expelled from the synagogue in 88 CE and that John's gospel is the only one of the four that reflects that expulsion, which is perhaps why synagogue references drop in John. The fact remains that deep into the fabric of the Jesus story, as we have that story in the gospels, is written a very deep connection between people's memory of Jesus and the synagogues of the Jews.
The second clue is to see how it was that by the time the gospels came to be written, Jesus had been interpreted through, presented as the fulfillment of, and his story had been wrapped inside the scriptures of the Jewish people. There are constant references to these scriptures in almost every line of the gospels, especially Mark, Matthew and Luke. Indeed the gospel writers assume that their readers or listeners will have a deep familiarity with these scriptures. In the very first verse of Mark, the first gospel, the author writes, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ; as it is written in the prophets." And he proceeds to quote both Isaiah and Malachi. Mark moves on to tell the story of Jesus' baptism by presenting John the Baptist as the new Elijah. Mark clothes John with camel's hair and a leather girdle, the clothing that Elijah wore, according to the Old Testament. He suggests that John's diet consisted of "locusts and wild honey," the food that the Old Testament tells us Elijah ate. Mark locates John the Baptist in the desert or wilderness, which is where the Old Testament suggested that Elijah lived. Only those familiar with the Jewish Scriptures would understand the level of communication that was going on here.
The feeding of the multitude by Jesus with five loaves and two fish in Mark is reminiscent of the story in the Hebrew Scriptures of Moses providing bread to feed the multitude in the book of Exodus. The miracles that Mark ties to the story of Jesus are closely identified with the miracles attributed to Old Testament heroes Moses, Elijah and Elisha, or with the miraculous cures that Isaiah says will accompany the coming of the messiah. Once again only an audience familiar with these sources would know their original form and what it was that Mark was trying to communicate.
When one turns to the second gospel, Matthew, who adds the account of Jesus' miraculous birth to the developing tradition, we discover that Matthew suggests in those opening chapters that everything that happened to the infant Jesus was a fulfillment of the prophets. Why was he born of a virgin? To fulfill words from Isaiah that Matthew immediately quotes, or in this instance actually misquotes. Why was Jesus born in Bethlehem? To fulfill the expectations of the prophet Micah, who once again Matthew quotes. Why did the wicked King Herod come to Bethlehem and slaughter the male children two years old and under? To fulfill the prophecy of Jeremiah that Rachel, one of the "mothers" of the Jewish nation, would weep for her children who were not. Why did Joseph flee to Egypt with Mary and her baby? To fulfill the prophecy of Hosea, Matthew said, who wrote that God would call his son out of Egypt. Even the later move from Bethlehem to Nazareth occurred, said Matthew, to fulfill the prophets.
When we turn to Luke, this pattern continues. Luke simply copies much of his narrative from Mark, but when he adds material, it is also out of the Hebrew Scriptures. Only Luke tells the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers, one of whom is a foreigner, a Samaritan, which is deeply reminiscent of the story of Elisha healing the leprosy of a foreigner, Naaman the Syrian, from the book of II Kings. Only Luke tells the story of Jesus raising from the dead the only son of a widow in the village of Nain. This story is clearly patterned to conform to a story of Elijah raising the only son of a widow from the dead in I Kings. 
There are countless other illustrations of the fact that the memory of Jesus had, by the time the gospels were written, become deeply wrapped inside the Jewish Scriptures. The question is where could this coalescing of the memory of the life of Jesus with the scriptures of the Jewish people have happened? The answer is only in the synagogue! Why? Because only in the synagogue did people hear the scriptures read, taught, discussed or expounded. Only in the synagogue was there any familiarity with the Hebrew Sacred Scriptures, which would enable the readers of the gospels to understand how these Jewish stories had been applied to and retold about Jesus.
The next step in this discovery process is to place ourselves inside the experience of the people who lived in the first century world, and then the picture becomes very clear. The printing press had not yet been invented. Books were rare because they were expensive. Every book had to be hand copied. Therefore, individuals did not own personal bibles. There were no Gideons to place the Hebrew Scriptures in your motel or hotel room. The only place in which first century people could possibly have become familiar with the Jewish sacred story was by attending the synagogue and hearing those scriptures read. For these scriptures to have been used to interpret Jesus' life was an activity that could only have happened in the synagogue. For this reason, we can be fairly certain that in the silent period we call "the oral period" the memory of Jesus, including the things he said, the things he did and the narratives told about him could only have been recalled, restated and passed on in the synagogue.
We add to this knowledge the tradition attested in the gospels that suggests that the life of Jesus was lived inside and interpreted through the great events of the Jewish liturgy. When that connection is made, we have another major clue. All of the gospels, for example, tell the story of Jesus' crucifixion against the background of the Jewish observance of Passover. In the story of the transfiguration there are echoes of the Jewish observance of the Festival of Dedication, or Hanukkah. In the narrative of John the Baptist with which Mark opens his gospel, there are numerous notes of the Jewish observance of Rosh Hashanah.
The memory of Jesus was not transmitted individually. It reflects rather the corporate presence of the synagogue gathered in worship. In the first century synagogue's liturgy there would be just a long reading from the Torah, the books of Moses; then a reading from what the Jews called the former prophets (Joshua through Kings); and finally a reading from what they called the latter prophets (Isaiah through Malachi). At that point, the synagogue leader would ask if anyone wanted to bring the message. Followers of Jesus would stand and relate their memories of Jesus to the reading of that Sabbath. In this moment the story of Jesus was recalled, Sabbath by Sabbath, year by year, until the gospels appeared 40 to 70 years after the end of Jesus' life.
Thus we shine the light of the synagogue onto the dark, mysterious oral period of Christian history, and suddenly the darkness of the unknown fades and we begin to see that the gospels are the product of the synagogue. That clue will open a rich interpretive vein, which we will discover as this series on the New Testament unfolds.
Paul was the first person to break that silence with his letters that we still possess. So we begin our study of the content of the New Testament with the person of Paul. When he wrote, the followers of Jesus were still participants in the synagogue. The church as a separate institution had not yet been born. These "followers of the way," as the Christians were then called, represented a challenge to the traditions of the Jews. Paul began his life as a rabid opponent of that challenge. We turn to Paul next week. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Mary Heins of Indianapolis, Indiana, writes: 
As I read your description of the conference held in Porthmadog ("Wales: Where Visions of a Christian Future Are Being Born," June 25, 2009), I wondered if any mention was made of prayer. Do post-Christians, agnostics or even atheists pray? Is there acknowledgement of a higher being, perhaps a creator, a mind or consciousness? Prayer seems like such an important part of your life as well as many traditional Christians. The God I pray to these days is Spirit, the Spirit within which we live, move and have our being. This Spirit permeates all created life; it births life but also allows death, which is the passageway to the pure Spirit. Spirit is not all powerful, but is rather a guide, a way leading us. Spirit does not control natural forces of wind and water, etc., but I do not know Spirit's relationship to these elements. Clearly, this "image" is of my own conjuring, drawing from various sources, but for the purpose of directing, focusing and attaching my spiritual longings to "Another." What or who is the object of my prayer, if any, for such as those you describe in the Wales conference?

Dear Mary, 
As I try to recollect the Porthmadog, Wales, conference, I do not recall a focus on prayer, and yet the conference itself was held in the context of and surrounded by the liturgies of the Church, all of which had prayer as part of them. 
I do not think that prayer is the place to begin when trying to reform Christianity for the future. Prayer, at least as it is traditionally understood, is a byproduct of a particular theological understanding of God. The God to whom most people address their prayers is a being, supernatural in power, located somewhere outside this world and thus invoked to enter this world in some miraculous way to establish the divine will or to answer our prayers. If that definition of God dies then that understanding of prayer will die with it. So this conference was on the primary issue of how do we conceptualize God, not on the secondary issue of how do we pray to the God we have already defined.
What you have done in your letter is to recognize that the old God definition is no longer operative for you and so you have sought another definition. You try to enfold prayer into this new definition. I think you are on the right path and I encourage you to walk even more deeply into it.
I think "theism," which is the traditional definition of God as a supernatural, external being, who comes to our aid, is dying. I think this definition of God is the casualty of an expanded world view, but I do not think God is dying, so I seek to go beyond "theism" but not beyond God. Once the theistic God is no longer in view, a redefinition of prayer is mandatory. I have worked on this for many years. My first book published in 1973 was entitled Honest Prayer. In my book A New Christianity for a New World I devoted two chapters to this subject. One of my colleagues, Gretta Vosper, who heads the Progressive Christian Network of Canada, is working now on that subject in a book as yet untitled, which will be published by Harper/Collins, Toronto, sometime in the next two years. I have every reason to believe that Gretta's book will move the debate forward significantly.

– John Shelby Spong

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