[Dialogue] 11/17/11, Spong: Studying Christian Art in Florence Italy

Thu Nov 17 19:54:16 EST 2011

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	Studying Christian Art in Florence Italy
	The Florence Museum, known in Italy as the Musei Firenze, is best known for the massive marble statue of the youthful King David sculpted by Michelangelo.  Housed in the section of the museum known as the Galleria dell’Accademia, this magnificent work of rare genius was accomplished with meticulous detail designed to reveal the beauty and splendor of the human body.  The David statue draws thousands to the Galleria daily.  This museum, however, also houses some of the world’s best known religious paintings.  My wife Christine and I spent a day there in early October and I could not fail to note, as I have done before, that these masterpieces of religious art have played a significant role in the literalizing way that most people read the gospel narratives.  Most of these well known paintings were commissioned originally to hang in churches during the time we call the early middle ages up to the 18th century.  Since most people in that era could neither read nor write they gained much of their knowledge of the biblical story by looking at art.  It never occurred to them to think that art was an interpretive idiom and not a literal one.  They thus tended to see these paintings more like photographs that supposedly captured reality rather than as pieces of art that interpreted reality.
	That is also why what we call the “Stations of the Cross” were developed and became an almost universal mark of pre-reformation Christian churches.  People could literally follow the final events of Jesus’ life as they walked past the scenes depicted in the paintings or wood carvings on the church walls.  There was no such thing as critical biblical scholarship in those days.  God was assumed to be the ultimate author of the scriptures.  The people were not allowed to embrace the differences or the contradictions found in the various gospel accounts of the life of Jesus.  So Christian art portrayed the mother of Jesus, frequently dressed in the garb of a nun, as present at the foot of the cross, even cradling the deceased body of her son. When Mel Gibson made his blockbuster movie, The Passion of Christ in 2004, this late developing image (and non-biblical without a gargantuan stretch) formed a central theme in his story.
	A search of the four gospels, however, will reveal that the mother of Jesus was nowhere near the cross in the earlier writings of Mark, Matthew or Luke, which were the first three gospels to appear.  She makes her first appearance at the cross only in the Fourth Gospel, which is generally dated between the years 95-100.  Her purpose in this appearance was so that Jesus could commend her to a figure who also is unknown outside the Gospel of John, the enigmatic figure referred to as “the Beloved Disciple.” He then, we are told takes the mother of Jesus to “his own home,” so she is not at the cross when Jesus dies.  For those who study the Fourth Gospel seriously there is debate about whether this author intended to suggest in this episode that the mother of Jesus was to be understood as a literal person of history or as a symbol for Judaism, the mother of Christianity, and consequently, whether the Beloved Disciple was himself a person of history or a literary creation to represent the move of Christianity beyond the boundaries of Judaism into being a new entity.  By commending his mother to the Beloved Disciple, Jesus was saying that the movement he was starting had to carry Judaism faithfully into a universal vocation.  To support this symbolic conclusion, with which Rudolf Bultmann, who is probably the leading New Testament scholar of the 20th century, is identified, we note that only in this gospel is Jesus made to say, “Other sheep have I that are not of this fold.  Them also I must bring until there is one flock and one shepherd.”  None of those interpretative nuances, however, appeared in any of the art work that I saw in the Florence Museum.  Literalism was the only visible or viable interpretation, the only way to “read” the painting.
	I also saw three paintings, all dated in the first ten years of the 16th century that depicted not only Mary and the infant or youthful Jesus, but also, and always slightly larger, the youthful John the Baptist.   These boys are portrayed in these paintings as closely associated in childhood, even growing up together.  One of these paintings was by Bogliadini, one by Francesco Foschi and the third by Francesco de Ros.  They had all painted the common myth that asserted a physical kinship between Jesus and John the Baptist.  This kinship was defined by John Wycliffe in the early 14th century to be that of first cousins, his assumption being that Mary, Jesus’ mother, and Elizabeth, John’s mother, were sisters. There is only a tiny fragment in the Bible that will support such a conclusion and this single word does not appear in the tradition until the late 9th or early 10th decades. It is found in Luke alone, who is also the only writer to give us an account of the birth of John the Baptist. Typically, however, Luke compares John’s birth to the birth of Jesus, with John the Baptist always coming in less fantastic and less supernatural.  It was as if Luke were saying that anything John could do, Jesus could do better.  John was born to post-menopausal parents says Luke.  That is pretty impressive, even though we now believe that this story was based on the Old Testament story of the birth of Isaac to his post-menopausal parents, Abraham and Sarah.  Most scholars even doubt the historicity of the names attributed to John’s parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, finding Old Testament antecedents for both.  When John was born, said Luke, the neighbors all gathered to rejoice and his father Zechariah’s inability to speak was broken as he sings: “Blessed be the Lord God of our Fathers for he has visited and redeemed his people.” Jesus, however, was said to have been born of a virgin, setting him apart from every other human life and, when he was born, it was not the neighbors who gathered to rejoice, but a host of angels who invaded the midnight sky to sing to shepherds.
	Luke’s tales of the biological origins of both John and Jesus were designed to bring the story of these two infants into proximity.  He then embellishes this conclusion by having Mary, expectant with Jesus, go to visit Elizabeth, described as her “kinswoman,” (that is the single word) who was expectant with John. This visit, we are told, took place “in the hill country of Judea.”  Even in this episode the purpose of the story is still to affirm Jesus’ superiority to John, for we are told the fetus of John the Baptist in the womb of Elizabeth leaps to salute the fetus of Jesus in Mary’s womb and that Elizabeth acknowledges the superiority of Mary’s child to her own.  That is, I might add, a quite unusual thing for a Jewish mother to do!
	No one that I know of regards this episode as literal history.  It is based to some degree on the story of Esau and Jacob contending together in the womb of Rebekah in the book of Genesis.  The facts are historically that at first the Jesus movement and the John movement were related in that Jesus was originally a disciple of John and was baptized by John.  Jesus’ first disciples were formerly disciples of John.  Second, there is much evidence in the book of Acts and in the Fourth Gospel that there was a deep competition between the two movements with the followers of Jesus hard put to explain why Jesus had been baptized by John.  By the time we get to the Fourth Gospel, written near the turn of the century, John does not baptize Jesus at all, but simply becomes a witness to him as messiah.  Surely revisionist history is at work here.
	No hint of anything but objective history, however, is present in these famous paintings. They show Jesus and John as infants and as small children playing under the care of Jesus’ mother who was supposedly John’s Aunt Mary.  Biblical scholarship was simply unavailable to the artists and was considered unnecessary by the people for whom they painted.
	Finally, there were many generic portraits of the crucifixion. I noted that every one of them portrayed Jesus bleeding from his side as well as from the nail prints in his hands and feet. The wound in his side was once more, however, a late addition to the crucifixion story, not making its appearance until the Fourth Gospel, written somewhere between 95 to100.  In this gospel alone John says that a soldier went to hasten Jesus’ death by breaking his legs, but, finding him already dead, he hurled a lance or a spear into his side as a kind of coup de grace.
	The first three gospels know nothing of this spear wound.  John adds it, he says, to show that it was the fulfillment of a text found in Zechariah (12:10): “They looked upon him whom they pierced and mourned for him as one mourns for an only son.”  To portray Jesus as the fulfillment of the scriptures was a major theme in the early Christian movement and the memory of Jesus was frequently bent to portray that fulfillment.  Indeed biblical scholars now even see the first description of the crucifixion, written by Mark in the early 70’s, not as the account of an eye witness at all, but as an interpretive piece of writing designed to portray the death of Jesus as the fulfillment of the scriptures.  Mark’s account, we now recognize is not based on an eye witness, but primarily on Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.
	So what we have in the great works of medieval art is not scholarship, but an uninformed biblical ignorance designed to undergird the traditional version of the Christ story.  Those images imprinted on our minds by this art have helped to squelch biblical scholarship through the ages and to teach us that any deviation from literalism is actually a deviation from “the true faith.”  So in the life of the church scholarship was undermined as an act of unfaithfulness and even of heresy and those who dared to think outside the box were destined in that earlier era to be burned at the stake.  In our day they are only destined to be marginalized as “trouble makers.”
	If one wonders why institutional Christianity is declining, perhaps even dying, in the modern world, one has only to look at how the art of the ages was used to support the literalism that turned the Bible itself into an idol.  In the battle for the soul of Christianity and for the soul of the Christian Church in the 21st century, we must rescue the Bible from fundamentalism.  A visit to any great museum to view the Christian art of the past makes this abundantly clear.
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

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	Question & Answer
	Reuel from Kennesaw, Georgia, writes:
	Question:
	Please comment on war.  Probably we all hate war and no one hates it more than those who must fight in it, but what must we do when invaded by a Hitler or when Japan bombs a Pearl Harbor?
	Answer:
	Dear Reuel,
	The battle over whether war is ever just or right has raged in the Christian Church for hundreds of years.  War is always interpreted in terms of the world view of the nation affected.  Yes, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and our own survival forced us to take up arms to defend ourselves.  We know now, however, from data that was released later, that six months before Pearl Harbor, Churchill and Roosevelt cut off Japan’s oil lifeline so they responded out of their need to survive.  Hitler was himself the product of the humiliating and ill-advised treaty of Versailles, which kept the German people in poverty long after World War I, which in turn was exacerbated by a world wide depression.  That does not excuse Hitler’s behavior, but it does help us to understand it.  War is an instrument of foreign policy and in my opinion it always represents a failure on the part of a government, which believes it has no other option.
	Were the two Iraq wars justified?  How about Korea? Vietnam? Afghanistan? Grenada?  We could debate them all.  The driving desire in every human life is to survive.  When survival is threatened, war is inevitable.  In a world in which seven nations are known nuclear powers and one nation is probably a secret nuclear power, the price that war brings may prove to be too destructive to measure.  I think we Christians must be peace makers, but I doubt if we have the power to prevent war!
	~John Shelby Spong

					New Book Now Available!

					RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD

					John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible. 

					A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.

					Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.

					Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!

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