[Dialogue] 3/25/10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XVII: The Birth of Mark, the First Gospel

Thu Mar 25 13:52:11 CDT 2010

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Thursday March 25, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part XVII: The Birth of Mark, the First Gospel

It is difficult to study the gospels accurately unless we step outside the Christian Church as we traditionally experience it today. That may sound like a strange statement, but increasingly I believe it is true. The gospels have been read in liturgical worship for two thousand years. They have provided the texts upon which sermons have been preached in churches under a variety of historical circumstances. Some of these churches were under persecution; some were so established that they participated in the persecution of others. Sermons preached on gospel texts have been heard in churches that lived through the breakup of the Middle Ages, in churches undergoing both the Protestant reformation and the Catholic counter reformation and in churches making their witness in the modern and even th e post-modern world. So deeply has the message of these gospels been captured in liturgy, translated through hymns and enshrined in buildings that most of us cannot separate gospel content from cultural artifacts. This deep familiarity must be removed before the original power of the gospels can be recovered. Familiarity does bring both contempt and misunderstanding. What has sometimes been called "gospel truth" sometimes turns out not to be true at all.
It is amazing, for example, how people use the Bible to justify their cultural prejudices, totally unaware of their own ignorance. These prejudices are then re-enforced by the assumption that their culturally blended knowledge is actually biblical. Of interest is the fact that most people learn the content of the Christmas story not from reading the Bible, but by watching Christmas pageants over the years. In these pageants, poetic or dramatic license is regularly practiced. People are therefore amazed to discover that only two of the gospels (Matthew and Luke) include birth stories and that these two contradict each other in many places. How many people know, for example, that in the texts of the Bible there are no camels in the story of the wise men, no donkey on which Mary rode to Bethlehem while she is "great with child," no stable in which Christ was born and no animals that populated that non-existent stable?
Moving deeper into the Christian story, there are no "seven last words" spoken by Jesus from the cross. Mark and Matthew record only one saying from the cross and that is what we call "the cry of dereliction:" "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Luke omits that saying as far too human to be spoken by "the Son of God," but then proceeds to add three of his own creation. John then omits all of these previously recorded sayings and creates three totally new ones never heard before. Finally, almost every detail of the Easter story in each of the four gospels is contradicted in the writings of another gospel. The most important thing to embrace, however, is that, in regard to the Bible, the ignorance is so profound that most people do not even know that they do not know. Part of what I am seeking to do in this series on the gospels is to penetrate this culturally imposed fog so that we today might hear the message of each of the four gospel writers in the way each wa s heard by the first listeners to their words.
In order to accomplish this task we first need to dismiss many of the assumptions that we bring to our hearing of these gospel narratives. The first and most important of these is that the gospels are not biographies of Jesus. They are not eyewitness accounts of what Jesus actually did, nor are they tape recordings of the things that Jesus literally said. I shall never forget being on a late night talk show some years ago when on a media tour with the publication of my book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. My host that evening was Tom Snyder, who was operating out of a studio in Burbank, California. As the interview progressed, I suggested that the four gospels in the New Testament were generally dated no earlier than the year 70 CE and no later that the year 100. Tom, a lapsed Roman Ca tholic, bestirred himself and said, "Now, wait a minute, Bishop! I just got out my short pencil and began to do some figuring. If the gospels were written that late then none of them could have been written by eyewitnesses." "That is correct, Tom," I responded. "None of them claims to have been written by an eyewitness except the Fourth Gospel, but no reputable scholar today thinks that John Zebedee actually wrote this book." John Zebedee was described in the book of Acts (4:13) as an "uneducated man," while the gospel that bears John's name is filled with long, complex theological discourses, which require enormous sophistication. Finally, this gospel was written in Greek, not in Aramaic, which was, so far as we know, the only language that John Zebedee could speak. Stunned, Tom Snyder said, "That is not what the nuns taught me in parochial school!" I enquired as to what they had taught him, and he replied "They said the disciples of Jesus followed him around, writing down everything he said and that this is how we got the gospels!" Amused at how unlearned a grown and rather worldly-wise man could nonetheless be, I asked, "Tom, did the nuns also tell you that the disciples used spiral bound notebooks and ballpoint pens?" At that moment, the dawn of a new realization swept across my host's face.
The facts are that all four of the gospels were written by the second generation and, in the case of the Fourth Gospel, maybe even by the third generation of Christians. The gospels were written in Greek, a language in which neither Jesus nor the disciples were fluent. They were also written with no punctuation and without even being divided into chapters, paragraphs, verses or sentences. In the style of that day they did not even include a space between words, just line after line of letters. At the end of a line on whatever they used for a page there would be no dash to warn the reader that a word was being broken and it would continue on the next line. There were no capital letters. All punctuation, all separation of words, all divisions into verses, paragraphs and chapters would be imposed on these texts hundreds of years later.
How much of the Jesus story was known before each gospel was written is hard to determine, but the probability is that for most people the first time they heard a gospel being read was the first time they had heard most of the Jesus stories that they contain.
Prior to the writing of the earliest gospel of Mark, all that the people knew about Jesus was whatever had been conveyed in vignettes through preaching and the oral tradition, and the high probability is that the setting for this hearing was in the synagogue at Sabbath day worship. This means that the same story might be used on different occasions with new details added or old details deleted, making our attempt to find historical accuracy in them simply not possible. When one multiplies this fact by a period of 40 to 70 years, the dimension of the problem we face in creating hard history begins to come into view. Perhaps the best we can do is to demonstrate when the various stories about Jesus entered the written tradition.
In order to understand how the first gospel, Mark, was initially received, we need to embrace the fact that before Mark wrote, the written details about the crucifixion of Jesus were contained in one line in Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "He died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." That is all Paul said, and thus that is all Christians had before the early 70's. Mark thus introduced such narratives as the account of the last supper on the night before the crucifixion, the story of the Garden of Gethsemane, the account of Judas' betrayal at midnight, the role of the Sanhedrin in determining Jesus' guilt, the denial of Peter, the flight of the disciples, the trial before Pilate, the freeing of Barabbas, the torture with the crown of thorns and the story of the thieves crucified with him. None of these details were written prior to Mark.
Of the burial of Jesus all that was known in writing before Mark was, again, what Paul had written: "He was buried." That was it. Mark thus introduced the story of the tomb, the character of Joseph of Arimathea and the various details of his burial. In regard to the story of Easter all that the Christians had in writing before Mark was found, once again, in a brief Pauline narrative: "He rose again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures." Paul goes on to relate that Jesus "appeared" to Cephas, the twelve, 500 brethren at once, James, the apostles and finally to Paul. No detail of any of these appearances, however, was given and even the word "appeared" is open to a variety of meanings. Paul counts himself as one of those to whom the risen Christ "appeared." Since Paul's conversion was some one to six years after the crucifixion, an appearance to Paul could hardly have been physical. Please notice that before Mark wrote in the early 70's, there was also no a ccount of an empty tomb, no angels, no visit of the women and no messenger to announce the resurrection. Mark added these details as the tradition unfolded.
There were other things in the Jesus story that Mark appears to have introduced for the first time. Mark is the first person to tell us about the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist and the first person to associate the story of Jesus with miracles. The idea that Jesus was a teacher of note or that he taught in parables was still another Markan-introduced theme. When we embrace these things, we begin to understand something of how the Christian faith evolved and how dramatic an event it must have been to have the first gospel appear in the 8th decade of the Christian era.
Next week we will begin to put the message of Mark's gospel into the context of its first-century Jewish world. It looks quite different from the way we read it today, but even if it is a little-known story, I believe we will find it to be a beautiful one.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Ann Holtz from Knoxville, Tennessee, writes:
How does Panentheism differ from your vision of God beyond theism?
Ann Holtz from Knoxville, Tennessee, writes:
How does Panentheism differ from your vision of God beyond theism?

Dear Ann,
The two would be close, but I do not think that human beings should ever try to define God. Panentheism is one more human attempt at an explanation.
Panentheism suggests that God is experienced in and through all things, but tries to distinguish itself from the claims made by Pantheism that God is identical with all things. Panentheism was designed to assert "the beyond" nature of the transcendent.
My sense is that all human beings can do is to talk about how we believe we have experienced God, which is quite different from who or what God is. Horses cannot, because of the limits of their horse consciousness, describe what it means to be human. I wonder why any of us think that human beings, because of the limits of our human consciousness, can describe what it means to be God.
So I am not drawn to any words that purport to define God. I am deeply drawn to God but am content to experience that reality, not to define it. So Theism, Pantheism, Panentheism are of little value to me. Thanks for enquiring.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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