[Dialogue] 5/26/11, Spong: Examining the Meaning of the Resurrection Part I: Setting the Stage

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Examining the Meaning of the Resurrection Part I: Setting the Stage
Through this column during the weeks before Good Friday, I did a series on the story of the cross and its meaning, seeking to call you, my readers, into a more interpretive way of reading the passion narrative.  I focused on the developing nature of that narrative and sought to show that when the first narrative account of the crucifixion was actually written in Mark around the year 72 CE, it was filled not with references to eye-witness reporting, but with quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures, especially from Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.  It was, I concluded, never intended to be literal history or something based on first-hand data.  The original purpose was thus not to tell us what actually happened, but to interpret the meaning of what happened. Once we stopped seeing these words as literal history, the door was opened to plunge into a radically new understanding.  So we noticed that the account of Judas Iscariot was an 8th decade addition to the Jesus story, one about which Paul, who wrote between 51 and 64, knew nothing.  We examined the placement of the crucifixion story into the celebration of the Passover and suggested that this was a contrived interpretative technique, rather than a literal memory.  We saw that the character we call Barabbas, whose name literally means “Son (bar) of God (Abba),” now paired with Jesus, also the son of God, was suggestive of the two animals in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, one of which was slaughtered while the other was set free and thus we saw how Yom Kippur had been used to interpret the death of Jesus liturgically.
These insights, while surprising no one in the academies of Christian scholarship, are always surprising and sometimes even troubling to those who have generally assumed that in the story of Jesus’ death as written in the gospels, they were actually reading history.  They were not, nor was that ever the intention. The gospels are written 40-70 years, or between two and three generations, after the time of the crucifixion and they reflect a long interpretive process in which the memories people had of Jesus were wrapped inside Jewish messianic expectations that then became the way the Jesus story was understood and interpreted.  As Paul noted in I Corinthians 15, Jesus died “in accordance with the scriptures.”
Now in this post-Easter time of the Christian year, I would like to subject the resurrection stories of the New Testament to the same sort of critical biblical analysis, recalling that St. Paul also said that Jesus was raised “in accordance with the scriptures.”  Perhaps in the process of this series, we will learn that in freeing theological truth from the biblical text, something does not have to be literal to be understood as true and that the experience of the resurrection has little to do with a body being resuscitated from death back into life.  Indeed, the resurrection of Jesus means something far different and far more significant than that.  So I plan five, maybe even six columns that will run periodically over the next ten weeks or so.  I am aware that this column is used in Adult Education classes in a number of churches across this nation and around the world.  I hope this series will prove to be fruitful to those readers in particular.
Once again, we begin this biblical probe by examining the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written, which means we study the New Testament in this order:  First, we read Paul (51-64), then Mark (70-72), Matthew (82-85), Luke (88-93) and John (95-100).  Only in this way can we watch the story grow and gain insight into its original meaning.
Paul, primarily in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, written ca. 54-56, is very spare in giving us any Easter details.  Quite literally the only thing Paul says is that Jesus “was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”  Note there is no reference in Paul to a tomb, to a stone being rolled away, to the women coming at dawn on the first day of the week, to a messenger who makes the resurrection announcement and finally no hint of the appearance of Jesus physically at the tomb to anyone.  All of these details will be added only in the later gospels.  Paul does, however, give us a list of those who, he says, had the raised Christ “manifested” to them, or the list of those to whom the resurrected Jesus “appeared.”  The word that we translate “appeared” or was “made manifest” is very loose.  Does it mean a physical sighting or a transforming experience?  Does it mean a seeing with human eyes or the birth of a new awareness?  Is its primary meaning physical sight, second sight or insight?  Is it different from the account of Moses “seeing” God in the burning bush?  Paul gives us no details. The list of witnesses, however, might provide some clues.  So might other texts in the Pauline corpus that cannot possibly be read as physical bodily resuscitation stories.
In Paul’s list, there are six separate manifestations.  First Paul says, he appeared to Cephas (Peter), then to “the Twelve” and then to the 500 brethren at once.  That seems to be the first list.  Then a parallel list is recorded in which he appears to James then to “the apostles” and finally to Paul himself.  Both sets of witnesses beg more questions than they answer.  Cephas is no surprise, he is always listed first among the twelve, and perhaps that position is a direct result of being the first one to “see” the raised Christ.  I will examine that possibility later.  “The Twelve” is a surprise, but only because Judas is clearly still among them.  Paul seems not to know the tradition that one of the twelve was a “traitor.”  Judas is first introduced in Mark (70-72) and when Matthew (82-85) gives the first written narrative of the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples, the Judas story has been factored in, so in that gospel Jesus appears only to the eleven!  No corroborating data anywhere identifies the “500 brethren” to whom Paul says he appeared “at once” so they continue to be shrouded in mystery.  Then in his parallel list he starts with James.  Who is he?  There are three James’ in the New Testament: James, the son of Zebedee, James, the son of Alphaeus, and James, the brother of Jesus.  Which James does Paul mean?   The only James that Paul ever mentions elsewhere in his writing is James the brother of Jesus so he becomes our best guess.  Then Paul says he appeared to “the apostles.”  Who are they?  They are clearly not “the Twelve,” who have already been listed.  So they have to be a different group, but who?  By the time the gospels are written, “the Twelve” are called “the apostles,” but not so with Paul.  Finally, please note that Paul claims that he himself was one who also “saw” the raised Christ.  Could this possibly mean that the resurrection was conceived of by Paul as a resuscitation of a deceased person?  Hardly!  Paul’s conversion, according to the best reconstruction that we can put together was no earlier than one year and no later than six years after the crucifixion.  The gospel writers collectively assert that no resurrection appearances in any physical sense took place that long after the crucifixion.  Mark tells us of no appearance of Jesus at all, not even to the women in the garden, but he does hint that the disciples will see him in Galilee, which is a 7-10 days’ journey from Jerusalem.  Matthew contradicts Mark and says the women did see Jesus in the garden at dawn on Easter day and then he relates a story of Jesus appearing to the disciples in Galilee that appears to come much later and in which Jesus comes out of the sky as one who has been both transformed and glorified. He is clearly not a resuscitated body who has returned to life in this world.  Luke says appearances of the raised Christ continued for as long as forty days after Easter and then terminated with the ascension.  John says the ascension took place on Easter evening after the tomb was found to be empty by Mary Magdalene that morning, and that the Jesus who appeared to the disciples was an already transformed and ascended Jesus, who was not bound by time and space.  Indeed he could walk through walls.  So what kind of seeing was Paul talking about when he included himself in his list of witnesses?  How are we to understand this suddenly, rather complicated Easter story?
Easter is obviously not quite as simple as literalists suggest, when they demand that belief in the resurrection must mean belief in the physically raised, resuscitated body of Jesus from the dead.  It is clear to me that this is not what the Easter experience was about at all.  What is not so clear is what it was about.  So that is what I shall seek to explore in this series of columns.
I will take the entire New Testament and search it for clues, remembering that all of the books that constitute the Christian Scriptures were written only in the light of the Easter experience.  Not one verse of the New Testament was written prior to Easter and not one verse was written except inside the meaning of Easter.  Every word of the New Testament was created 30 to 70 years after the fact of Easter.
I will present my data in response to four very elemental questions that I will ask of my biblical sources.  They are: Who?  Where? When? and “How?  Whatever the Resurrection was, who stood at the center of this life-changing experience?  Who was the first to understand?  Who opened the eyes of others so that they could understand?  Is there evidence throughout the New Testament that points in a single direction?
Where was the crucial person to whom the reality of Easter dawned in the mind of this critical observer?  The gospels are divided between Galilee and Jerusalem.  Are there other narratives in the New Testament that make it clear that it was one and not the other?
When did this “appearance” occur?  Easter may be timeless, but the Easter experience occurs in a human mind at a particular moment of time?  Is “three days” a measure of physical time or is it a symbol?
Finally, in what context did Easter dawn?  How did this context frame the experience?  Can we enter that interpretive context today and see Easter’s meaning with new eyes?  That is the outline of where I hope to go over the next few weeks.  I hope you will want to journey with me for this is the only website I know, which seeks to open the minds of people to a non-literal, but profoundly real way to hear the Christian story.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Bill & Helen Hale from Athens, Georgia, write:
Question:
It has been our privilege to hear your lectures at Highlands, and they are always exciting and provocative. We feel your message to the world is “Copernican” in scope and potential.  We have read all your books through the years, but I don’t recall you ever addressing the idea of the concept of the “Origin of God” in humanity’s time.  Do you have a hunch or idea or knowledge of when this concept entered the human drama?
Answer:
Dear Helen and Bill,
Thank you for your letter.  I have addressed that subject in my book Eternal Life: A New Vision but perhaps not in the way you might expect.
I do not believe the human brain can speak to the origin of God.  We can speak to the origin of the human concept of God, but that is something quite different.  That idea I believe is born in the moment that self-consciousness breaks through consciousness in human development.  That human idea almost always portrays God as external to this world, invisible or located beyond the limits of our sight, which is what “above the sky” means.  This deity is then endowed with supernatural power and is said to be ready to come to our aid if we worship properly, obey God’s rules and pray sufficiently hard.  It is what I have called a “theistic” concept of God.  Theism is a definition of God from the childhood of our humanity and ultimately it needs to be abandoned.  Most of us cling to it tenaciously because we do not know any other way to envision the holy.
I think that we must ultimately move beyond theism into a mystical experience.  Atheism does not mean the belief that there is no God; it means that theism is simply a dead and meaningless concept.  In Eternal Life, I tried to point my audience in that new direction.
~John Shelby Spong





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Bishop Spong to be honored!
Breaking through confined and narrow theological structures has been John Shelby Spong’s life work.  He has brought thousands of grateful people on the journey with him; people of faith, people who doubt, but all people with serious religious and intellectual inclinations.
Since his retirement as Bishop of the Diocese of Newark in 2000, Jack Spong has continued articulating his point of view all over the world.  In his writing, his lectures, his preaching, he asks his listeners to open their minds to scientific reality, their hearts to compassion for one another and their souls to the love of a God not bound by narrow interpretation.  Bishop Spong’s themes have not been without controversy.  The slings and arrows of religious dogmatism have been plentiful.  With the unfailing support of his wife, Christine, however, as a pair they have been unafraid to keep educating.
To honor their efforts and to perpetuate progressive religious scholarship and experience, family, friends and admirers of Jack and Christine want to establish a lecture series, to be named the John Shelby Spong Lectureship, to be housed at St. Peter’s Church in Morristown, NJ, the home parish for the Spongs.
For more information, contact:  Marie-Charlotte Patterson, Parish Administrator at St. Peter’s Church, Morristown. 973 538 0555 Ext. 10

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