[Oe List ...] 5-14-2009, Spong: Jerusalem: Where Scholarship Ends and the Tourist Trade Begins

[elliestock at aol.com]

May 14, 2009


Jerusalem: Where Scholarship Ends and the Tourist Trade Begins




It is not easy to be a biblical scholar when visiting the Holy Land. I spent Easter Monday of this year in the city of Jerusalem walking the Via Dolorosa, the way of the cross. My guide was a religiously oriented, delightful Jewish man who was, as he said, the child of radical Zionists who were both anti-religious and extreme left wing politicians. He had matured with his country of Israel and was able to reflect a deep appreciation of the value of the competing faith traditions that vie for the loyalty of this city. He repeated some of the familiar tourist legends, but with the kind of sparkle that indicated that he did not take them very seriously. He showed us, for example, the place in the wall where Jesus had placed his hand when he stumbled carrying his cross. His imprint was still in the rock and tourists placed their hands on that sacred rock as if to feel the handprint of Jesus himself. The Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa were adaptations not of the Bible, but of a medieval Catholic practice that does not bear close scrutiny if one is biblically literate. The mother of Jesus, for example, does not appear at the cross in the New Testament until the Fourth Gospel was written in the tenth decade. Mel Gibson could never have embraced that fact! The earlier gospel writers, especially Mark and Matthew, treated the mother of Jesus with little respect. In both gospels she assumes tha
t Jesus is out of his mind and proposes that he be taken away. The name Mary, as the mother of Jesus, appears only once in Mark's gospel and that on the lips of a negative member of the crowd who, when trying to understand the power that Jesus had demonstrated in a sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth, shouted, "Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary?" By the time Matthew wrote, a decade or so later, this line was edited to read, "Is this not the carpenter's son, whose mother Mary is here with us?" Matthew had added the birth narrative that Mark had never heard of to the developing tradition and so Matthew took cognizance of that when he incorporated this Marcan line into his story. Most people today still think of Joseph as a carpenter, unaware that the earliest reference in Mark, before Joseph was known in the tradition at all, portrayed Jesus alone as the carpenter, identifying him as the "son of a woman." To call a Jewish man "the son of a woman" in the first century was a deliberate slur intended to raise questions about his paternity. These details are generally unknown by tour guides for they do not serve well the tourist trade. 
Our guided tour finally ended at the "Tomb of Jesus" over which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been erected. Tourists can now go into the tomb itself and they do so daily by the thousands. Some were moved to tears by the experience and they demonstrated acts of enormous devotion. Is that really the tomb of Jesus? Hardly, since no o
ne has any idea where his burial was or even if there was a tomb. That too is part of a developing legend. 
The earliest data we have on the burial of Jesus in the Bible is in Paul's writing. The authentic epistles of Paul, which do not include all those attributed to him, appear to have been written between 51 and 64 CE, or 21 to 34 years after the crucifixion. When writing to the Corinthians about the year 55, Paul gives his most systematic account of the final events in Jesus' life, the details of which are scanty indeed. What Paul does not include is probably more significant than what he does include. About the crucifixion Paul says only, "He died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." In Paul there is no story of a betrayal, no arrest, no trial, no Pilate, no Barabbas, no thieves crucified with him, no words from the cross and no darkness at noon. About the burial of Jesus, Paul writes only three words: "He was buried." Paul knows of no tomb, no Joseph of Arimathea, no stone to be rolled away, no temple guard around the tomb and no women who came to the tomb bearing spices. About the resurrection, Paul writes simply, "He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures." There were no angels and no empty tomb. Paul does give a list of "sightings" by those who were "witnesses" to his risen presence. On that list Paul includes himself despite the fact that Paul's conversion is normally dated one to six years after the crucifixion. With that inclusi
on those sightings could hardly refer to a physically resuscitated body. Paul gives no details about any "sightings," even his own. The Damascus road story was not written until some thirty years after Paul's death. Without concrete specificity, however, the two-thousand-year-old, fully established tourist trade dies, but in that process biblical scholarship suffers badly. 
What are the facts? Most Christians, including many clergy, do not seem to realize how thin they are. The earliest narrative of the final day in Jesus' life did not enter the Christian tradition until the 8th decade, some two generations after the crucifixion. Mark, who created this narrative, did not refer once to an eyewitness as the source of his story. Instead he wrote the familiar narrative of the death of Jesus in the form of a 24-hour vigil, divided into eight three-hour segments that carry the reader from 6:00 p.m. on what we now call Maundy Thursday to 6:00 p.m. on what we now call Good Friday. The end of each three-hour segment is clearly marked. It reflects not history but a liturgical pattern with which his readers were familiar. Mark clearly has written this story in order to portray Jesus as the expected Jewish messiah drawing his material from the Jewish scriptures, primarily Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. Mark draws from Psalm 22 the only words Jesus supposedly spoke from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He also derived from that source the quotations attributed to the mocking crowd and spoken to Jesus, the 
notion that the soldiers divided his clothing and cast lots for them and the notes about Jesus "knowing all of his bones" and feeling thirst. These things are not history, but a dramatic and liturgical interpretation of the death of Jesus for which there were no witnesses. Recall that Mark had said earlier that when Jesus was arrested, all — not some, but all — of his disciples had forsaken him and fled. The reality, which Christians have such difficulty embracing, is that Jesus died alone and thus no one recorded for posterity how it happened. So Mark fills in the blanks with details drawn not from history, but from sources, like Psalm 22. 
>From Isaiah 53, in which the prophet has painted the portrait of a figure known as "the servant" or the "suffering servant," Mark develops his story of Jesus, like "the servant," being identified with transgressors in his death. That is how the two nameless and voiceless thieves, who were supposed to have been crucified with Jesus, came into the tradition. Mark created them "to fulfill the prophet." Matthew later adds to this story by giving the thieves voice and having them both rail against Jesus. Luke, writing still later, turns one of them into being penitent and has Jesus promise him "paradise." Another detail drawn from Isaiah 53 is the account of Jesus being associated with a rich man in his death. This is the seed from which blossomed the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man and a ruler of the Jews, enabling him to become the st
ar in the drama of Jesus' burial. It is quite clear historically that this Joseph never existed and that Jesus in all probability had no proper burial in any kind of tomb. He died, we need to recall, as a convicted felon, who had been abandoned by all of his disciples. As such, the odds are that he was thrown into a common grave with the other victims of that day, covered up and quickly forgotten. Scholars today suspect that this was too harsh a fate for the disciples to tolerate and so to ease their pain the legend of proper burial by a kindly man was developed to offset the memory of apostolic abandonment. This means that there never was a tomb in a garden in which Jesus was buried and to which the women came at dawn on the first day of the week. That being so, no church called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre could ever be erected over that tomb for visitors to visit and around which traditions could develop and legends grow. 
How much history is there in the biblical details of the crucifixion narrative? Not much! We can demonstrate that Jesus was crucified by the Romans, who were the only ones with authority over life and death, but because these executions were such common occurrences, I suspect that no one watched. Whether some of the Sadducean high priestly set were pleased to see him go because he had upset their traditions and challenged their authority is a possibility, but one which history cannot confirm. It was anti-Semitism, not history, that created the picture of20Jewish duplicity in Jesus' death. The earliest resurrection experience appears to be associated not with Jerusalem, but with Galilee, which means that the story of the women going to the tomb with sweet-smelling spices to complete the work of embalmment is pure fiction, as are all of the Jerusalem resurrection appearance stories, which are found only in Luke and John, both of which are 9th and 10th decade works. We need to embrace the fact that resurrection, understood as the resuscitation back into the life of this world of the body of a three days dead Jesus, is a very late and very strange idea. It has been, however, so totally literalized and engrained in our minds that people are shocked to hear these things said even today. Resurrection originally was the faith affirmation that Jesus was so closely identified with God that death could not separate him from that source of life. It was the conviction of the disciples that somehow Jesus had entered into the eternity of God because he had become part of who God was. Was that a strange idea? No, it was deeply present in the Hebrew Scriptures in the story of Enoch, who "walked with God and was no more for God took him," and in the stories of the end of the lives of Moses and Elijah. 
These things are more than most tour guides in the Holy Land can manage but when embraced today, they open the way for us to escape a dying, supernatural literalism and to understand anew just how it was that Easter gave birth to a new understanding=2
0of God. We continue to walk today in the power of that new understanding. 

– John Shelby Spong




Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong



Dear Elmo, via the Internet, writes: writes:

I have read much of your work and met you once at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, at a pastor's conference. It was the same venue where I also met Marcus Borg. I am a retired civil trial lawyer and a late-life seminary graduate, now an ordained Disciples of Christ minister, although before seminary I was a lifelong Presbyterian (USA) from the same time frame and section of North Carolina as you. My question, which gives me a great deal of trouble, is: What is your basic understanding of petitionary prayer? I believe you have said, "A God who would save the life of one prayed-for cancer-stricken child and not another would be a monster." This makes sense but gives me a great deal of trouble in considering petitionary prayer. (I have read Honest Prayer ? I find no answer to this problem there).

Dear Elmo Hoffman, 

Thank you for your comments and for your question. Your question on petitionary prayer is almost always the first question that comes up wherever I go to lecture. People can talk about their understanding of God until the cows come home, but nothing really changes until they translate their understanding of God into their prayers. More than anything else, our prayers define our understanding of God. So to talk about prayer, we have to define who the God is to whom20we pray. To say it differently, "Who do we think is listening?" 
Most people, quite unconsciously, approach the subject of prayer with a very traditional concept of God quite operative in their minds. This God is a personal being, endowed with supernatural power, who lives somewhere outside this world, usually conceptualized as "above the sky." While that definition has had a long history among human beings, it is a definition of God that has been rendered meaningless by the advance of human knowledge. This means that for most of us the activity of prayer does not take seriously the fact that we live in a vast universe, and that we have not yet come to grips with the fact that there is no supernatural, parental deity above the sky, keeping the divine record books on human behavior up to date and ready at any moment to intervene in human history to answer prayers. When we do embrace this fact then prayer, as normally understood, becomes an increasingly impossible idea and inevitably a declining practice. To get people to embrace this point clearly, I have suggested that the popular prayers of most people is little more than adult letters written to a Santa Claus God. 
There are then two choices. One says that the God in whom I always believed is no more, so I will become an atheist. People make this decision daily. It is an easy way out. 
The other says that the way I have always thought of God has become inoperative, so there must be something wrong with my definition. This stance ser
ves to plunge us deeply into a new way of thinking about God, and that is when prayer itself begins to be redefined. Can God, for example, be conceived of not as supernatural person, but as a force present in me and flowing through me? Then perhaps prayer can be transformed into meditation and petitionary prayer becomes a call to action. The spiritual life is then transformed from the activity of a child seeking the approval of a supernatural being to being a simultaneous journey into self-discovery and into the mystery of God. It also feeds my sense of growing into oneness with the source of all life and love and with what my mentor, Paul Tillich, called the Ground of All Being. It would take a book to fill in the blank places in this quick analysis, but these are the things that today feed my ever deepening discovery of the meaning of prayer.

– John Shelby Spong







 

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