[Oe List ...] Spong (11/20/08): MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, Deepak Chopra and Biblical Illiteracy

Thu Nov 20 11:49:44 EST 2008

Subject: MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, Deepak Chopra and Biblical Illiteracy

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Thursday November 20, 2008 

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, Deepak Chopra and Biblical Illiteracy

Joe Scarborough is the host of MSNBC's morning television program, a channel that I do not receive because of the recalcitrance of Verizon. He is an amiable and gracious person who brings a lot of experience to his post. He has served in the Congress of the United States as a moderate Republican, representing the 1st congressional district in the Panhandle of the state of Florida. Prior to that, he was an attorney. I have never met him, but I have spoken to him on the telephone as we were exploring my possible appearance on his program when he had an evening show. I found him gracious, willing to engage issues, non-ideological and receptive. He has no significant background that I know of in biblical studies. He attended a Roman Catholic high school, although he is not a Catholic and was introduced as most children are to Christianity. 
In early November, while I was doing a series of lectures in Columbus, Ohio, I saw his program when Deepak Chopra was his guest. The issue under discussion was Chopra's new book entitled Jesus. Chopra, who was raised in India, expresses a beautiful and well-formed Eastern spirituality. Interestingly,
 he too was educated in Roman Catholic parochial schools, so while not being a Christian he has a significant understanding of and appreciation for Christianity. He sees Jesus primarily as a great teacher whose highly developed consciousness served to make his life one of those through which the indefinable reality called God was experienced as present. To Chopra Jesus' life points to God but, as he said in this interview, when one discovers a hand with a finger pointing to God one does not worship the finger. He, therefore, finds Christian incarnational language to be without appeal. Chopra has written a number of bestselling books and is a popular favorite of the younger generation, who seem to be spiritually hungry but doctrinally alienated from their Christian upbringing. 

When Chopra explained to Scarborough his view of Jesus, which is one of honor, respect and praise, but not worship, it triggered something in his TV host. Out of Scarborough's naïve religious background and scant knowledge of the scriptures, he leaped to the defense of Jesus. Quoting from one of the "I am" sayings in John's Gospel, he asserted, "Jesus said, 'No one comes to the Father but by me.' That means he is either a divine being, the Son of God, or the biggest liar the world has ever known." It was an astonishing statement. 

First of all, Scarborough was using an old and thoroughly discredited argument developed originally by C. S. Lewis in the U.K. It is discredited because biblical scholars know that they cannot be=2
0certain what the Jesus of history actually said and which of the words attributed to him were actually put into his mouth by the early church as they wrestled with who he was and what he meant. I doubt if Joe Scarborough knew, first, that this quotation was from John's gospel or, second, that John's gospel was the last of the canonical gospels to be written. It is generally dated between 95-100 CE, or 65-70 years after the crucifixion. I also doubt if he knew that John's gospel was originally written in Greek, a language neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke. These things mean that the words attributed to Jesus in John's gospel traveled orally for more than three generations and underwent one translation before being written down. John does not quote from the earlier gospels. Jesus in John's gospel is portrayed as giving long theological treatises that hardly reflect the words of the man from Galilee. The "I am" sayings, occurring only in John, reflect the conflict between the followers of Jesus and the Orthodox party of the Jerusalem religious establishment that occurred when the disciples of Jesus were expelled from the Synagogue some 60 years after the crucifixion. The Orthodox party dismissed the Jewish disciples of Jesus as no longer part of the faith of their fathers and mothers and thus no longer attached to the God of Abraham and Moses. The name of God revealed to Moses in the Exodus story of the burning bush was "I am." These later disciples of Jesus had responded to their banishment from=2
0the Synagogue by claiming the name of God, "I am," for Jesus and placing it on his lips over and over again. Not only does John's Jesus say such things as, "I am the bread of life, I am the vine, I am the door, I am the good shepherd, and I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me" ( which is the text Scarborough is quoting), but John also has Jesus say such provocative things as, "Before Abraham was I am" and "When you see the son of man lifted up, then you will know I Am." All of these sayings reflected the polemics of the conflict that embraced the Christian community between the years 88-100 CE. They were not and could not have been the words of the Jesus of history. So for Joe Scarborough to use this text to assert that if Jesus said he was the only way to God and if Chopra suggested otherwise, then somebody was wrong. In other words, to Joe Scarborough Jesus was either the incarnation of the external God and what he said was absolutely true, or he was a deluded liar. This point of view resides somewhere between being uninformed and being absolutely ignorant. 

There is obviously a massive lack of knowledge among the members of the Christian Church in the United States about the origins of the Bible, which expresses itself in the way texts are used in public debate on many issues from the treatment of women to the attitude toward homosexuals. The problem is that many people use the Bible in the same way that Joe Scarborough
 did, without any awareness of how little they know, how uninformed they are and how much they are spreading biblical ignorance. A "Sunday School" knowledge of the Bible does not equip one to speak on national television as if he or she is a pundit. I was embarrassed for Joe Scarborough, but the fact is that he probably knows too little about the Bible to be embarrassed for himself. That is what happens when one does not know how little it is that one knows. That is the most difficult ignorance with which the Christian Church has to deal. 

The Christian Church historically tried to define Jesus in two categories. First, they knew he was human and second, they believed that they had experienced, engaged and met God in him. The problem was how they would hold these two things together. In the first century, part of God's identity was that the Holy One inhabited the region above the sky in a three-tiered universe. So if God was experienced as present in the life of Jesus, some explanation was required to explain how the God from above the sky had been present in the human Jesus. The debate about how these two things had come together was all over the New Testament. The later in time the particular book of the New Testament was written, the more elaborate and even supernatural the explanation tended to be. At first, Paul was simply content to exclaim "God was in Christ." When he tried to explain it in his letter to the Romans (1: 1-4), he wound up saying that God had lifted Jesus
 into the meaning of God at the time of the resurrection. That was what Easter essentially meant to Paul. God had lifted Jesus into divinity as a reward for his holiness. In the Hebrew Scriptures something similar happened to Enoch (Gen, 5:2) and to Elijah (II Kings 1). That was as far as the interpretation of Jesus' divinity had developed by the 6th decade. 

More than a decade later, when Mark wrote the first gospel in the early 70s, Paul's explanation was dismissed as inadequate. It was not enough, Mark said, for God to have lifted Jesus into divinity following the crucifixion. Mark wanted to assert that the disciples had met God in Jesus before he died. So Mark explained the God presence in Jesus by saying that the Holy Spirit had been poured out on him and God made him the divine son not at the resurrection, but at his baptism. That was the stage to which Christology had arrived by the 8th decade. 

When Matthew wrote in the mid years of the ninth decade and when Luke wrote in the latter years of the ninth decade or perhaps even in the early years of the tenth decade, they decided that God must have entered Jesus prior to his baptism. This was when the virgin birth tradition entered the developing Christian story. In these narratives God was said to have entered Jesus at the moment of conception. Now Jesus was no longer an actual human being that God had lifted into divinity, Jesus himself was thought of as part of who God is. 

That divinizing trend reached its cli
max near the end of the tenth decade in the writings of John. Here Jesus' identification with God was located not from the moment of resurrection, baptism or conception, but in the moment of creation. Jesus was spoken of as the incarnation of the word of God who was with and of God from the beginning of time. He was now thought of as God in human form, or as God masquerading as a human being in much the same way that Superman masqueraded as Clark Kent. It is easy to recognize how later traditional doctrines like the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity were derived primarily from the writings of John. 

Did the Jesus of history then literally say the words attributed to him in the New Testament? That is a point of view held only in fundamentalist and conservative Catholic circles, but no reputable biblical scholar in the academic world today defends that proposition. The scholars of the Jesus Seminar, in their book The Five Gospels, asserted that no more than 16% of the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels are actually the authentic words of Jesus. This, of course, means that 84% of the words attributed to him in the gospels are not authentic. None of the sayings of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel were deemed to be authentic. It is thus quite impossible to quote John, as Joe Scarborough did, and say that since Jesus said this, he was either divine, deluded or a liar. 

It is too much to expect a television host to be a biblical scholar, but it is not too much to hope that he20might be aware that he is not a scholar and so he might refrain from offering his uninformed opinion as if he knew that about which he was speaking. Joe Scarborough did not do that and it showed, painfully! 

–John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Margaret Rolfe, from Australia, writes: 
I would like to add to your ideas about the Christmas story expressed in the November 13 question and answer feature in your column. Yes, as you say, tell it as a "once upon a time" story, but tell it as a story with meanings: A story about hope (because all babies are about hope for the future); a story for ordinary people (because the angels appeared to shepherds); a story about a star (a symbol of light in a dark world); a story about wise men (the search for wisdom); a story about love (Mary and Joseph's love for their baby born in dubious and uncomfortable circumstances); a story about angels (if God is love, then angels are messengers of love); and a story, above all, about peace and goodwill on Earth! We all need that story. We all suspend belief when it comes to turtles racing hares, but we all can get the message. 

Dear Margaret,

I like your ideas, so I will just pass them on to my readers. Maybe we will have some terrific Christmas pageants this year all around the world.

–John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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