[Dialogue] 6/5/10: Spong, The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXV: Concluding Luke and the Synoptic Gospels

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Thursday June 03, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXV
Concluding Luke and the Synoptic Gospels

In this final segment on the third gospel we call Luke, I want to summarize and to establish firmly in the minds of my readers the major thesis that I have sought to develop in my comments on the synoptic gospels: Mark, Matthew and Luke. My thesis is that each of these gospels is organized on the basis of the annual liturgical cycle of the synagogue where Christianity lived in its first generations as a movement within Judaism, and so these gospels must be read through a Jewish lens. The later Greek thinking period, which shaped the creeds in the 4th century and informs Christian doctrine to this day, has actually distorted the gospel message in a radical way. We have already observed that Mark was the original gospel to be written and that both Matthew and Luke incorporated Mark into their w ork, expanding Mark in a way appropriate for the community for which each wrote. Matthew's community was traditionally Jewish. Luke's community was made up of dispersed Jews living far from home and interacting increasingly with their Gentile neighbors. Clearly Gentiles were beginning to come into Luke's community, drawn by the ethical monotheism of Judaism, as they faced the demise of the gods of the Olympus. That was why, as we have seen, that the gigantic figure of Moses, the inward-looking father of the law became the popular symbol against which the Jewish Matthew told his Jesus story, and the gigantic figure of Elijah, the outward-looking father of the Jewish prophetic movement, became the symbol against which the more universally-minded Luke told his story of Jesus. It was also this one year liturgical cycle of the synagogue that caused each of these writers to portray the public ministry of Jesus as one year in duration. This time sequence, I am now convinced, has nothing to do with the actual time of Jesus' ministry, but rather it had everything to do with the fact that Jesus' ministry in these synoptic gospels was being recalled and retold against the liturgical year observed in the synagogue.
The first holy day in the liturgical year of the Jews was, according to the book of Leviticus (23:24), the Passover, which was observed on the 14th and 15th days of the first month of the year known as Nissan. The Christians obviously told the story of Jesus' crucifixion against the background of this Passover celebration and then adjusted the Jewish calendar by concluding their Jesus story on the Sabbath and first day of the week following Passover on which they celebrated the Resurrection. So the beginning of the Christian liturgical year was always at least a week and sometimes two weeks after Passover. Once we can embrace this crucial time disparity, the synoptic gospels go in a very orderly way through the other feasts and fasts of the Jewish year. With that preamble, I seek to focus our final consideration of Luke's Gospel on how this particular gospel writer followed the liturgical pattern of the synagogue. That will put Luke's gospel into a very different contex t from the literal pattern that traditional Christians assume to have been the case.
Fifty days or seven Sabbaths after Passover the Jews observed the festival of Shavuot or Pentecost (which means 50 days). On that day they recalled God's gift of the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Law was assumed by the Jews to have been God's greatest gift to them. Luke, however, probably under the influence of Paul, had come to believe that the Holy Spirit, rather than the Law, was God's greatest gift to the Christians. When he actually tells the story of Pentecost in chapter two of Acts, the second volume of his gospel, this becomes his focus. So in his gospel he wants to make sure that he presents the Pentecost theme with a suitable Jesus story that would thus be appropriate to Shavuot. Watch how cleverly he does it.
First Luke needs to supply Jesus material for each of the seven Sabbaths between Passover and Shavuot. He does this by expanding the birth narratives with elaborate details about the nativities of both John the Baptist and Jesus. Next he relates some substantive content from the preaching of John the Baptist. Then when he arrives at the Shavuot lesson he has John the Baptist point to and interpret Pentecost exactly as Luke will later describe it in Acts 2, by saying "I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I,…will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire." In effect, he has John say exactly what will happen when Pentecost rolls around. Then he adds an even longer genealogy than that of Matthew, and expands the temptation story and the forty days Jesus supposedly spent in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. Then he proceeds to add enough Jesus material to complete the entire Galilean phase of Jesus' ministry, using much of the content that Ma tthew had placed into the Sermon on the Mount. Finally, having produced a sufficiently long narrative to carry us through five and a half months into the year, he finds himself confronted by the celebration of the New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, where Mark had opened his gospel by having John the Baptist convey his Rosh Hashanah themes. Luke, however, like Matthew before him, has obviously used that story much earlier in his narrative so he needs to find a new way to convey the Rosh Hashanah message. Exactly as Matthew had done earlier, he reintroduces the Baptist with the story of John, now in prison, sending a messenger to ask Jesus, "Are you the one that should come?" To this question Jesus responds by quoting the favorite synagogue Rosh Hashanah lesson from Isaiah 35 in which the prophet announces that the signs of the Kingdom, when it comes, will be that "the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing." When Luke gets to chapter 7:18-23, he is back in syn ch with Mark and both now have stories that allow the liturgical year to be introduced by John the Baptist. The shaping of the Jesus message by the life of the synagogue is in full view.
Rosh Hashanah was the first of three major Jewish observances that occurred in the month of Tishri, the seventh month in the Jewish calendar. Rosh Hashanah was on the first day of Tishri, Yom Kippur on the tenth and Sukkoth (the Harvest Festival) filled the eight days between Tishri 15-22. Since John the Baptist has been reintroduced, and Rosh Hashanah has been observed, we need to be on the lookout for Yom Kippur and Sukkoth stories. They come right on cue. There is a series of verses (7:24-35) that are available for use on any Sabbath that falls between Tishri 1 and Tishri 10, and then, in 7:36-50, the Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, message comes front and center. It is the story of the woman coming into the house while Jesus is at dinner and anointing his feet. Focus with me now on this story.
The first thing we notice is that it is out of place, at least according to Mark and Matthew. In both of those gospels the anointing of Jesus by the woman was an event just prior to the crucifixion (see Mark 14:3-9 and Matthew 26:6-13). "She has anointed me beforehand for burial" (Mark 14:8 and Matthew 26:12), is how Jesus explains this action. Luke, however, has moved this story and placed it early in the Galilean phase of his ministry. In neither Mark nor Matthew is there even a hint of scandal, no suggestion that this woman is evil, no intimate fondling of Jesus' feet and no drying of them with her hair. So Luke has not only moved this story to a new place, but he has also greatly heightened the sensuous quality of this act and made the woman evil. Luke has the woman identified as "a woman of the street," that is, a prostitute who kisses and rubs his feet. She is by definition unclean and, by touching Jesus, has presumably made him unclean. Jesus is even judged by his Pharisaic host not to be a prophet, for a prophet would know what kind of woman this is and would not allow her behavior!
When we place this story in Luke on the grid of the liturgical year of the synagogue, we discover that it falls exactly where Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, falls and he has clearly chosen, moved and adapted this story to fit this observance. At Yom Kippur, the people are cleansed of their sins and made pure. Jesus is thus portrayed as entering the world of ritual uncleanness and, instead of being corrupted by it, actually transforms it and purifies the evil. That is what atonement is all about. He concludes this story by having Jesus banish the demons from Mary Magdalene and other women, once again a Yom Kippur theme. When Yom Kippur is over, Luke connects again with Mark and uses Mark's parable of the Sower for his harvest story to celebrate Sukkoth. That account begins in chapter eight, but, as we might expect, it is considerably shortened. Luke's Gentile leaning community does not do eight day festivals or twenty-four hour vigils. When Luke's story moves on he comes to the winter festival called Dedication, or Hanukkah, and once again, like Mark, he relates the story of the Transfiguration, where the light of God is not restored to the Temple, but falls on Jesus, the new Temple.
Then Luke has Jesus begin his journey to Jerusalem. Luke uses this journey sequence to be the hook on which he hangs the concentrated material that constitutes the teaching of Jesus. So here we have a series of teaching episodes until he has entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Luke completes the cycle now by having Jesus observe the Passover on Thursday, be crucified on Friday and be raised on Sunday. The journey from the Sabbath after Passover through the Jewish observances of Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkoth, and Dedication back to Passover is now complete. This was the cycle of remembering the story of Jesus and it is tied in every detail to the liturgical year of the synagogue. Here the form of the gospels — at least Mark, Matthew and Luke — was born. That is why I entitled one of my books Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes. 

– John Shelby Spong
 



Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Barbara Palmer, via the Internet, writes:
I am interested in your theology of love when speaking about God loving creation, humans loving God, and even loving the neighbor. Understanding that love transcends human emotion, how does love manifest in these areas? If God, as you say, is not a being, how does God love the world, the universe? If God is not an entity, what does it mean to love God? Doesn't one need an object to express love? And if one doesn't know or is interested in the neighbor, whoever that might be, how does one love the neighbor? We religious people throw words around so carelessly, therefore I would appreciate your being as specific as possible.
Barbara Palmer, via the Internet, writes:
I am interested in your theology of love when speaking about God loving creation, humans loving God, and even loving the neighbor. Understanding that love transcends human emotion, how does love manifest in these areas? If God, as you say, is not a being, how does God love the world, the universe? If God is not an entity, what does it mean to love God? Doesn't one need an object to express love? And if one doesn't know or is interested in the neighbor, whoever that might be, how does one love the neighbor? We religious people throw words around so carelessly, therefore I would appreciate your being as specific as possible.



Dear Barbara,
I am not sure that the problem is that people throw around words so carelessly, but that the only words we humans have to use are human words, bound by time, space and human experience. Whatever God is, God is surely beyond the boundaries of human life. So the more specific we are about God, the less accurate we probably are. Let me repeat my favorite analogy. Horses cannot escape the boundaries of what it means to be a horse, nor can a horse view life from any other lens or perspective save that of a horse. Therefore a horse could never describe what it means to be human. In a similar manner, a human being cannot escape the boundaries or perspective of what it means to be human and therefore can never define or describe what it means to be God. I wonder why it is that we not only continue to try to do the impossible, but even continue to persecute those who disagree with our definition or description.
So what are our realistic possibilities? We can describe just how it is that we experience God. We can always describe a human experience since that is within the realm of our competence. We do need to face the fact, in the name of honesty and to escape the most destructive elements of religion, that some human experiences are delusional.
By the word God I mean that which calls me beyond the limits of humanity, that which empowers me to live to love and to be. When someone asked the author of the First Epistle of John to define God, he did so by saying that "God is love." I think that what he meant by that was that it is the unanimous human experience that love expands life. Love is not something any human being can create. We must receive love before we can give it. We cannot hoard love once we have received it. Love that is not shared always dies. So love is a power that appears to relate us to something beyond ourselves. Love is thus a power that enables us to journey beyond the boundaries of the human and to embrace that which is transcendent. Love always manifests itself in enhanced life. Perhaps we should stop talking about God loving us or our loving God, since that kind of language turns God into a being. The proper language would be to relate the experience of love to the experience of God. We would then recognize that the word "God" is a human construction that seeks to define the experience of transcendence, which calls us more deeply into what it means to be human.
If one has identified God with the love that enhances life then the way we love our neighbor, both known and unknown, is to act toward them in such a way as to enhance their humanity. Once we break this language barrier and begin to think through the dimensions of speaking not about God, but about our experience of God, then I believe we could reconstruct the Jesus story on this basis and be within the context of Jesus' purpose as St. John defines it, "That they may have life and have it abundantly."
Thank you for your question and for forcing me to put new words into this equation. 

– John Shelby Spong






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