[Dialogue] 7/21/10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXX: The Epistle to The Hebrews

Thu Jul 22 10:10:44 CDT 2010

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Thursday July 22, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXX
The Epistle to The Hebrews

We do not know who wrote it. We do not know the date of its composition. We do not know to whom this book in the Bible was actually written. We are clear that it was not authored by Paul. It was certainly not written as a letter or an epistle. Its format is much more that of an address, a lecture or a sermon. The "Hebrews" to whom this work is addressed do not even appear to be Hebrews, at least not in a religious sense. They were, rather, Jewish Christians — that is, people of Jewish background who had become followers of Jesus. They had roamed far from the strict orthodoxy of traditional Judaism, but they were still deeply familiar with and committed to Jewish liturgical practices. They were Hellenized and breathed deeply of the Greek culture that had spread over the known world from the time of the conquest by Macedonia in the forth century BCE under the leadership, first, of King Philip II and later of his son, Alexander the Great. This letter to the Hebrews was written in Greek, not Aramaic, the language of traditional Judaism. It nonetheless reveals a deep and significant connection to the Hebrew Scriptures, but it is noteworthy that, whenever the Epistle to the Hebrews quotes these scriptures, it does so from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament done about 250 years before the birth of Jesus. Where these Greek-speaking, dispersed Hebrews lived when they received this book cannot be determined. The guesses as to the time of its writing range from the late 60's CE at the earliest to about 140 CE at the latest. The weight of opinion, however, would fix its date no earlier than the late 80's and no later than 100 CE. The Epistle of Clement, a well-known piece of early Christian writing which is generally dated in the middl e years of the tenth decade, does in fact quote the book of Hebrews. This should provide us with an outer limit, but the proposed date of Clement is itself also widely debated, though most would gravitate to around 96 CE. All we can really do is to peruse the text of this book and learn whatever we can from its content about both its author and its audience.
The atmosphere reflected in the Epistle to the Hebrews is tense. It speaks of those who are in danger of drifting away (2:1). It mentions those who have fled for refuge (6:18). It urges its hearers to hold fast to their confession of hope without wavering (10:23). It refers to those who have the need of endurance (10:36). It urges perseverance in the race or task set before them (12:1). Finally, it assures its readers that since Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, their hearts should be strengthened by grace (13:8-9).
Many scholars suggest that this level of tension in the Christian community reflects the persecution under the Emperor Diocletian, which ravaged the Church between 81and 96, making the latter years of this reign our best guess for the date of the composition of Hebrews.
The recipients of this treatise seem to reflect one constituency in the evolving Christian Church. While Christianity was born in a Jewish womb as a Jewish movement within the synagogue, it turned, primarily under the influence of Paul and of Paul's followers like Luke, Timothy and Titus, into being more and more a gentile religion. This fact served to make it harder and harder for some of the earliest disciples of Jesus, who were traditional Jews, to continue to live and worship inside the Christian movement. That is a reality that has been replicated again and again in religious history. Growth always marginalizes the original members who feel left behind, and thus not part of the present consensus. They no longer felt that they fitted into what Christianity was becoming. They were tempted to pull away from their Christian convictions and were tempted to return to the Judaism of their childhood. The author of this book sought to dissuade them from this step by demons trating the superiority of Christianity to traditional Judaism. The way this author chose to do that is quite telling.
A significant holy day in the life of the synagogue was Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement. It came in the fall of the year and was observed with a 24-hour vigil of solemn penitence and somber mood. The liturgy focused on two animals that were brought to the high priest. Both animals had to reflect what the Jewish people yearned to be, physically perfect in body and morally perfect in mind and spirit. These two animals could be lambs or goats, or one of each, and they were gone over scrupulously by the high priest until he was assured first that they were perfect physical specimens; they could have no scratches, blemishes, scars or broken bones. Secondly, they were deemed to be morally perfect since they lived below the level of human freedom and were thus incapable of choosing to do evil. One of these animals, normally a lamb, was then slaughtered in a sacrificial, liturgical manner and its blood was smeared on the mercy seat of God in the Temple's Holy of Holies. This blood was believed to possess cleansing power. Through the blood of this perfect lamb of God, the people believed they could now stand before God on this one day despite their sinfulness. They came to God "through the blood of the lamb" that washed their sins away.
The second animal, referred to in Leviticus as a goat, was then brought into the assembly of the people and placed before the high priest who, taking the goat's horns began to confess the sins of the people. The sins of the people were thus said to come out of the people and to land on the head and back of this goat, making this goat the bearer of the people's sins. This animal was then banished from the assembly and run into the wilderness, leaving the people symbolically cleansed from their sins. This goat was called "the scapegoat" for he bore the sins of the people and vicariously endured the fate the people had earned for themselves.
There is no doubt that the liturgy of Yom Kippur was instrumental in interpreting the Jesus experience among the earliest Jewish Christians. Echoes of this connection are found throughout the New Testament. Paul uses this Yom Kippur formula when he wrote in I Corinthians 15 that "Jesus, (like the lamb of Yom Kippur) died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." Mark makes reference to this liturgical understanding when he wrote (10:45) that Jesus, like the lamb of Yom Kippur, gave his life as a "ransom" for many. When John the Baptist sees Jesus for the first time in the Fourth Gospel, he called him "the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world," a phrase lifted almost verbatim from the Yom Kippur liturgy.
It was this understanding that later got incorporated into substitutionary theories of the atonement, which found expression in the Protestant mantra, "Jesus died for my sins!" and is referenced when Catholics refer to the Eucharist as "the sacrifice of the Mass." The mass thus makes timeless the sacrifice of Jesus as the lamb of God, to take away the sins of the people.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews was thus writing to discouraged Jewish Christians, who no longer felt at home in predominately Gentile worshipping communities, hoping to prevent their return to the fold of Judaism. One cannot go back, he argues, to the ineffective sacrifice of the lamb at Yom Kippur, which has to be repeated annually because it affects nothing permanently. Yom Kippur, he contends, only expresses a yearning for change; it does not itself create change. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, he argues, did in fact break the power of sin that made sacrifices necessary in the first place. We can now enter the presence of God, the author of Hebrews argues, just as we are with all our warts and shortcomings visible, for in the cross of Calvary the love of God accepted the offering of the new lamb of God, embraced us in our sinfulness and transformed us by assuring us that nothing we can do and nothing we can be will finally separate us from the love of G od seen in Christ Jesus. This was the message Jesus lived because he reached out in accepting love even to those who betrayed him, denied him, forsook him, tortured him and killed him. In the death of Jesus on the cross, a once-and-for-all act was accomplished, which brought God and human kind together in a new creation. So, he concluded, if one leaves the Christian faith to return to Judaism, one is actually leaving the sacrifice that made all future sacrifices unnecessary in favor of a sacrifice that must be repeated annually. Jesus was the perfect offering for which God yearned, while the Yom Kippur animals were only a symbol of the eternal human yearning to be whole. Thus, this writer argued that in the sacrifice of Christ all sacrifices were brought to an end and all human beings can now become new creations in the oneness of God. It is to our ears a strange argument, but it resonated with the audience to whom it was first addressed.
The author of Hebrews also likens the priesthood of Jesus, not to the high priests of Jewish worship, but to the eternal priesthood of a figure named Melchizadek mentioned in the book of Genesis. His priesthood was without beginning or ending. Perhaps this is the place when the idea of pre-existence first entered the Christian story. In this paradigm, the Christ is at one and the same time both the new sacrifice and the sacrificing high priest. It was an argument based on ancient worship patterns, but it must have impressed some contemporary leaders since this book was quickly incorporated into the Canon of Christian scriptures. Yet, as the Church became more and more Gentile, the power of this argument faded. Today it sounds like another version of the old religious cliché: "My God is superior to your God!" In its day, however, it stated the essential Christian claim that all people can come into the presence of God "just as I am without one plea," which is, I be lieve, the one irreducible Christian claim. Yet, strange as it seems, some parts of the Christian Church still deny that the love of God is extended to all regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or even creed. The Epistle to the Hebrews ultimately proclaims that there are no boundaries on the love of God. That is a worthy message, even when couched in an archaic form. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

sleahead.kerry1, via the Internet, writes:
My husband was raised in Christian Science, but was an avowed atheist all his adult life, often denigrating the faith of others. In June of 2008, a friend gave us a copy of A New Christianity for a New World. After reading this and Why Christianity Must Change or Die, my husband announced, "If Bishop Spong can write this and still be a believer, I guess I am too." I was widowed that August (2008). I shall be forever grateful to you, Bishop Spong, and your message to those of us who have been in exile.

Dear sleahead.kerry1,
I write to your e-mail identification because your letter was unsigned, but I thank you for it. I send you my sympathy in regard to the death of your husband in August of 2008. Having lost my first wife in August of 1988, I have a deep awareness of what you have been through in the last two years. Be assured that the pain does lift, and when it does the memories will grow deeper and will provide consolation.
I am pleased that your husband found help in my writings. That makes my own struggle worth the effort. There is, I am completely convinced, a reality that we call God, but none of can finally capture that reality in our words, whether they be the words of scripture, creeds, doctrines or dogmas. The great pain of organized religion is that many people see religion not as the description of a journey into an ultimate mystery, but as a formula designed to keep human anxiety in check. That use of religion continues to repel me.
Last week, for example, I received a complimentary copy of a right-wing, Midwestern Episcopal publication. I no longer subscribe to this dreadful magazine, as I did when I was an active bishop, because I no longer have to be aware of or even engage its negative and uninformed mentality. Looking over this "complimentary" issue made me deeply glad that I no longer see it on a regular basis. It carried an article by two African Anglican bishops who complained that the American Church paid no attention to the well-being of the Anglican Communion by ordaining Mary Glasspool, an open lesbian priest who has lived with her partner for many years, to be a bishop in Los Angeles. I wanted to inform these two prelates that we in America also did not pay attention to our racist members when we, a number of years ago, chose great people like John Walker and John Burgess, both African-Americans, to be our bishops in Washington, D.C. and in Massachusetts respectively. We in America al so did not pay attention to our sexist members when we chose Barbara Harris to be or first female bishop in Massachusetts; Mary Adelia McLeod to be our first female diocesan bishop in Vermont and Katharine Jefferts-Schori to be our first female Presiding Bishop and Primate. If we were not willing to be bound by racism or sexism in those days, I wonder why these African bishops think we will be or should be bound today by their rampant homophobia.
This publication also told of an American bishop who declined to participate in Mary Glasspool's ordination so that she "could keep her relationship with some African bishops intact." It is hard for me to see such an abdication of leadership, which compromises principle in order to reduce conflict with those who wish to demonize homosexual people, as a quality deserving of anything but disgust. Yet this bishop was actually offering this behavior as virtuous. She was clearly worshiping at the altar of institutional unity on which the humanity of many has been sacrificed to gain institutional well-being as if that were a noble reason. That is the mindset of our current Archbishop of Canterbury, whose abdication of effective leadership has been breathtaking and incredibly disappointing.
Finally, this publication quoted a lay leader, who is a career foreign policy expert, to say that the Bible in both the Old and the New Testaments condemns homosexuality as evil. This tired argument reveals little more than a profound ignorance of both the Bible and homosexuality. This man should either know better or seek to keep his biblical illiteracy to himself.
These are just examples of the religious attitudes that have caused people like your husband to think he is an atheist. If this is Christianity, I don't know why any thinking person would be attracted to it.
If I lit a candle in the religious darkness that enveloped your husband, I am profoundly grateful and I thank you for writing. 

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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