[Oe List ...] 9/17/09, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part I: Introduction

Thu Sep 17 11:42:11 CDT 2009

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Eternal Life: A New Vision Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell
By John Shelby Spong
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Thursday September 17, 2009 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part I: Introduction

I launch today a series of columns that will appear regularly over the next twelve to eighteen months. As I always do in this column, this series will augment the essays that are time sensitive and that seek to illumine contemporary issues through my theological lens. Last week's column on the health care debate is a case in point. 
The purpose of this unfolding series is to take you, my readers, deeply into those books that constitute the New Testament. There are twenty-seven in number and together they form the volume that arguably has been the most influential and shaping piece of narrative writing in the history of the world. The earliest book of the New Testament is probably I Thessalonians, generally dated around the year 51 CE, while th
e latest is probably II Peter, generally dated around the year 135 CE. The influence of this book, while always powerful, has been both positive and negative. On the positive side it is clear that the institution called the Christian Church, which grew out of these twenty-seven books, has inspired quite literally millions of people in many ways. Most of the great universities of the world were begun as part of the Christian Church's commitment to knowledge and, in particular, to impart to people the saving knowledge of the sacred scriptures. Most of our healing institutions, from hospitals to hospice, arose out of that Christian sense that every human life is of infinite worth, which carried with it the compelling need to alleviate suffering insofar as it is possible. Most of the great art of the ages, at least up until the 17th century, has as its content scenes from these twenty-seven books. These art treasures are of such immense value today that for the most part they are stored in the world's greatest museums as a constant source of enrichment for the people. Most of the great music of the ages, at least up until the dawn of modernity, was an attempt to put the primary themes of the New Testament into the indelible sounds that we today still recognize and sing. One thinks of the St. Matthew Passion and the St. John Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach and of the Christmas Oratorio, "Messiah" by George Frederick Handel as familiar and much loved cultural treasures. One cannot understand the history o
f the Western world or explore these cultural artifacts without becoming deeply aware of the i mpact the New Testament has had on the life of our civilization. 

There is, however, also a dark side of the New Testament that must be faced and lifted beyond the stained glass accents of antiquity into full consciousness. The New Testament has had victims whose lives have been diminished at best and destroyed at worst by the direct impact of reading from this "sacred" source. I think of the Jewish people who have suffered throughout Christian history because of this book. The words attributed to the Jewish crowd by Matthew in his narrative of the crucifixion, "his blood be upon us and upon our children," have caused much Jewish blood to flow in everything from the Crusades to the Holocaust. The Fourth Gospel's use of the phrase "The Jews," spoken so often through clenched teeth, has not infrequently been used to legitimize anti-Semitism. The portrayal of a man called Judas, a name that is nothing but the Greek spelling of the name for the entire Jewish nation, as the anti-hero of the Jesus story, served to give permission to Christians through the ages to justify their feeling of revenge against this ethnic group of people. Lost in this hostile passion is the truth that Jesus was a Jew, the disciples were all Jews and the writers of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament were also Jews. The only possible exception to this statement is Luke, thought to be the author of both the gospel that be
ars his name and the book of Acts, who is believed to have been born a Gentile, but to have converted to Judaism and thus to have come through the Synagogue into the Church. This means that when we read the New Testament, we are reading only the words of Jewish writers, interpreting the experience and impact of the Jewish Jesus primarily in the light of the Jewish Scriptures and under the ongoing influence of the Synagogue traditions of the Jews. Yet these books have fueled over the centuries a killing frenzy of anti-Semitism. The single greatest carrier of this hostility has been nothing less than our Sunday school curricula and materials. Jewish people thus have a hard t ime seeing these twenty-seven books as "sacred scriptures." 

The institution of slavery was affirmed throughout history from words in the New Testament. Slavery was practiced in the west by God-fearing, Bible-reading Christians. The popes at various times owned slaves. The section of the United States that fought fiercely to preserve this evil institution was also known as the Bible Belt. It was the Bible-reading people of the South who made lynching legal, who replaced slavery with segregation and who resisted every effort to keep racial justice from being achieved. Much of their justification for this behavior came from quoting St. Paul, who in his letter to Philemon urged the runaway slave Onesimus to return to his master, while simultaneously urging Philemon, his master, to be forgiving to his slave. In the Epistle to the Colossians, Pa
ul, or one of his disciples, instructed slaves to be obedient and masters to be kind. Perhaps it could be said that a kinder and gentler slavery is better than a cruel and harsh one, but it is to be noted that Paul clearly accepted the legitimacy of this cruel institution, making no effort to abolish it and thus legitimizing it in the minds of others for centuries. One wonders how those who were enslaved and their descendents might view the New Testament from which texts were cited to justify both slavery and second-class citizenship. These scriptures were not sources of life to these victims of our prejudice. 

Women have also not fared well at the hands of these male written, male read and male interpreted books of the New Testament. They have rather fed the deep-seated cultural misogyny of the ages with such admonitions as those found in Ephesians for wives to obey their husbands, or in Corinthians for women to keep quiet in church, or in Timothy where women are forbidden to exercise authority over men. Under the influence of the New Testament women in the Christian world were denied higher education for centuries. As a result they were denied entrance into the professions, denied the right to vote, denied the ability to own property in their own name and denied leadership roles in the Christian world until well into the 20th century. When progress did come for women it was driven by the secular spirit while organized religion as expressed in the Christian Church resisted these changes with sc
ripture-quoting vehemence. In major sections of the world this anti-feminist Bible-laced rhetoric continues to be articulated both officially through ecclesiastical bodies and by individual believers. One wonders how women would ever be drawn to the texts of this book. 

The same could also be said for the victimization of the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender segments of our population. They too have lived throughout history with Bible-fueled hostility that manifested itself in gay bashing and in actual murder. Texts were quoted from Romans that called homosexuality "unnatural" and condemned it, to references in other epistles that mistranslated the Greek word arcenokoitus, which refers to a passive male, as deviant, sodomite or pervert, even though its original meaning appears to have been male prostitutes. There is no doubt that the center of homophobia in the western world today remains the Christian Church, now ghettoized from the mainstream of society, and is regularly articulated by Christian voices from the Pope to Pat Robertson. One wonders how homosexual people could ever appreciate the message of the New Testament. 

In my experience, I do not find it possible to overestimate the levels of biblical ignorance present today inside the Christian population. Most of these just-cited abuses rise out of that ignorance. Much preaching that emanates from both Catholic and Protestant pulpits not only reflects that ignorance, but also continues to spread it. 

In this series of columns I will, therefore, attempt to counter t
his biblical ignorance and to break the grip that it has on much of our population. While seeking to avoid the technicalities of biblical scholarship that seem to amuse so many in the academy, I will try to state clearly how these books came to be written and so endeavor to oppose the rampant literal misunderstanding that embraces so much of our culture today in regard to the Bible. I will go into both the meaning and the key points of each book in the New Testament, as I have done in past years with the books of the Old Testament. I will try to show the differences among the four gospels that reveal more contradictions than most people believe to be possible. I hope you will enjoy the journey. I know I will.

One final note. A number of small churches across the English-speaking world now use this column for their Sunday morning adult education classes. These essays are subscribed to by the members of the various classes with extra copies reproduced for visitors so that the class and the discussion can have a common basis for discussion. The leader of the class simply convenes the group and introduces the topic. That leadership role can be constant or rotated so long as the purpose is accomplished to allow people to discuss issues openly, to raise any questions they wish and to engage in any debate that arises. When the group gets too large for discussion, it subdivides into two groups. I am gratified to learn this and rejoice that this column might be an instrument in the New Refo
rmation for which many of us yearn. At the very least I hope people find a richness in this book that small ecclesiastical minds have tried for centuries to hide from the average pew sitter. Have fun! 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Deb McCollister from Nebraska writes:

Militant fundamentalism in any family of faith seems to threaten our world. Readers of your newsletter are aware of Christian scholars who examine long-held assumptions. Can you tell us about penetrating scholarship in other faith walks, study that examines history while seeking meaning and deeper truths?
Deb McCollister from Nebraska writes:

Militant fundamentalism in any family of faith seems to threaten our world. Readers of your newsletter are aware of Christian scholars who examine long-held assumptions. Can you tell us about penetrating scholarship in other faith walks, study that examines history while seeking meaning and deeper truths?

Dear Deb,

A very good question. The intellectual revolution that started with Copernicus and traveled through Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and many others has had an enormous impact on the religious tradition of the west in both Judaism and Christianity. We have also in both traditions been dealing with critical biblical scholarship for about 200 years. That scholarship, while welcomed by many, has also served to create a fundamentalist backlash in parts of Christianity and Judaism. We have certainly seen evidence of thi
s in the political arena, where the religious right has been very vocal in America in the fight to restore prayer to the classrooms of public schools, to resist the teaching of evolution, to oppose sex education and to keep people like Terri Schiavo alive well after anything resembling real life had long departed. 

In the less developed and less well educated parts of the world, religion serves a variety of purposes. It gives hope to the hopelessness of the poor and downtrodden. It links people with their ancestral past. It helps them deal with the radical insecurity of human existence. When threatened by challenging insights into the origins of these faith traditions, many religious people who are unable to embrace or to process new religious ideas turn defensive and become both rejecting and fundamentalist. There is not as yet a tradition of radical religious scholarship in Islam that would call into question the way fundamentalist Muslims today use the Koran to justify violence. In the world of Buddhism and Hinduism I find today that the intellectually elite simply walk out of religion into secularism. Religion therefore becomes more and more the activity of the unlearned. It is therefore more and more likely to resist change, which makes modernizing that religious system all but impossible.

I am convinced that my religious heritage points me to truth that no religion in and of itself can envision. I do not believe that secular non-belief is the only alternative to being religious, but it takes hard work,
 deep understanding, rich dialogue and a willingness to embrace vast amounts of fear and insecurity to reach this conclusion. I can testify, however, that to me it has been well worthwhile. As a witness to this truth let me quote a retired bishop who said, "The older I get the more deeply I believe, but the fewer beliefs I have." I think that is where I am and I believe that is where all religious systems will have to go if they want to live in our 21st century world. 

Change must come, however, from within the religious system itself. It can never be imposed from outside. So you and I, Deb, must work within the faith of our fathers and mothers. I have found my journey into the depths of Christianity to be the most exciting adventure and the most affirming experience of my life. I invite others to journey with me into the unfathomable mystery of God and life and being. 

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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