[Oe List ...] 4/08/10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XIX: How the Synagogue Shaped the Gospel of Mark

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Bishop Spong's Lecture Series
During the month of April, Bishop Spong will be traveling to Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio and Illinois as part of his regular speaking schedule. Keep checking his updated calendar of appearances to see when he is scheduled to be in your area.




Thursday April 08, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part XIX: How the Synagogue Shaped the Gospel of Mark

Has it ever occurred to you that Mark, the first gospel to be written, was in fact a Jewish book created in the synagogue and organized according to the liturgical pattern of synagogue worship? Such an idea sounds very strange to modern Christian people for it carries our imaginations far beyond the boundaries inside which we Christians are comfortable. I would like, however, in this column to show you that this claim is in fact accurate.
The first thing we need to embrace in order to study the gospels properly is the history of anti-Semitism in the Christian Church. I learned most of my anti-Semitism in my Sunday school as a child. In my printed Sunday school material I was never introduced to a good Jew! All of the Jews in the Jesus story appeared to me to be sinister and hostile; the bad guys in the drama, always out to get Jesus. They had names that I was taught to disrespect like Judas Iscariot, Annas, Caiaphas, Sadducees, Pharisees and scribes. No one in my Sunday school ever told me that Jesus was a Jew. When I saw pictures of him, he looked rather Nordic, with blond hair, blue eyes and a fair skin. I thought he must have been a Swede! I was also never told that the twelve disciples were Jews, that Paul and Mary Magdalene were Jews, that all of the writers of the books in the Bible were Jews, with the only possible exception being Luke, who appears to have been born a Gentile, but to have conv erted to Judaism.
Our cultural anti-Semitism has actually served to blind us to the deep roots in Judaism that the Christian story possesses. All Christians are "spiritual Semites." Judaism is the womb in which we were conceived and the faith tradition in which Christianity was nurtured until the church and the synagogue parted company in a rather unpleasant manner around the year 88 CE. Embrace that date if you will. The Christian movement did not separate itself from Judaism until some 58 years after the crucifixion of Jesus! This means that, at the very least, the gospel of Mark and the gospel of Matthew were written before the Christians separated from the synagogue. While Luke's gospel may have come after the split, it is based so deeply on Mark that it too bears the stamp of the time when Christians and Jews both worshiped together Sabbath by Sabbath in the synagogue. The disciples of Jesus at this time were not called "Christians" but "The Followers of the Way," and they were reg arded by the Orthodox power center of Judaism as a group of Jewish Revisionists who were dedicated to incorporating Jesus into the ongoing Jewish story as prophets like Isaiah, Amos and Micah had themselves once been incorporated. All of this means that the primary place the stories of Jesus were remembered and recalled during the "oral period" of Christian history was in the synagogue at a Sabbath day service. In that liturgy, first the Torah and then the prophets would be read, interspersed with Psalms. Next, the assembled worshipers would be solicited for their comments on the scripture readings. In this manner, the disciples of Jesus recalled events and teachings in Jesus' life and related these to the lessons just read. Soon the scriptures began to be understood by these disciples as pointing to Je sus and even to being fulfilled in Jesus. Inevitably, these Jesus stories were also incorporated into the annual cycle of feasts and fasts regularly observed in the synagogue. Ultimately, forming a consistent and set body of material, these stories were gathered together in the order of the Jewish liturgical year. It was this custom that ultimately shaped the gospel of Mark.
With this order in place in Mark, when Matthew and Luke used Mark as the basis of their volumes they inevitably adopted the same liturgical frame of reference. Even with Mark in common, Matthew and Luke differed since they reflected two very different Jewish world views, Matthew being traditional and Luke reflecting the world of dispersed Jews into whose life gentiles were constantly coming. Still the first three gospels had so many similarities that the three of them came to be known as the "synoptic gospels," the reflections of those who had seen (optic) with (syn) their own eyes. While that eyewitness claim is now dismissed as factually accurate, the essential unity and internal dependency of these three gospels is still widely asserted. Matthew has in fact included about 90% of Mark in his narrative and most of it almost verbatim. Luke, a bit less dependent on Mark, has still included about 50% of Mark's content in his narrative. Both of these later gospels also adopt Mark's outline, which was the telling of the Jesus story against the background of a one-year cycle of synagogue liturgical observances. That is why each of these gospels presents Jesus' public ministry as a one year phenomenon — not because that ministry was one year long, but because the story of his public life, from his baptism to his crucifixion, was told against the background of a one year synagogue cycle. Unfortunately, this background material is not seen unless and until a reader is knowledgeable about that liturgical pattern. Let me try to lift it to the awareness of my readers.
The climax of Mark is the story of the passion and crucifixion of Jesus. In Mark, almost 40% of his gospel deals with the last week in the life of Jesus. Of Mark's 16 chapters, chapters one to ten are dedicated to the life of Jesus from his baptism up to his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, five days prior to Good Friday and just seven days prior to the story of the resurrection. That last week becomes the context of chapters 11-16. To draw the contrast even more sharply, the story of the last twenty-four hours of Jesus' earthly life consumes 105 verses of Mark's text, while the Easter story is relegated to only eight verses.
The first and most obvious fact is that the crucifixion of Jesus is told against the background of the Jewish observance of the Passover celebration. Jesus had been identified as the new paschal lamb by Paul when he wrote some fifteen years before Mark that "Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed for us (I Cor. 5:7)." People have assumed for centuries that the crucifixion had occurred during the Passover season when the fact was that it was more probable that the Passover had been used by the followers of Jesus to interpret the death of Jesus and that this is what pulled the two observances together. There is a body of data in the gospels that suggests that the crucifixion occurred not in the spring, but rather in the fall of the year. (That data is beyond the scope of this column, but for those who might be interested I outlined it in my book: Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes) The death of the paschal lamb was believed by the Jews to have broken the power of death at the time of the Exodus. The death of Jesus was believed by his disciples to have broken the power of death at the time of his cross and resurrection. So, the story of the death of Jesus was purposefully designed to be observed during the Passover season. That was not history so much as it was liturgy.
Once we connect the Passover with the crucifixion, it is possible to see that, in the whole gospel of Mark, the story of Jesus is being retold against the events of the Jewish holy days. So place the crucifixion of Jesus at the time of the Passover and then roll Mark's gospel backward across the synagogue's liturgical year and it becomes obvious that this is how Mark organized his gospel. The Jewish celebration, about three months prior to Passover, is called Dedication or Hanukkah. This holy day recalls the time when the light of God was restored to the Temple during the period of the Maccabees. The story in Mark's gospel that occurs at exactly that time is the story of Jesus' Transfiguration in which the light of God falls not on the Temple as the Jews asserted, but on Jesus first and then Moses and Elijah, transfiguring them all. This story further suggests that Moses, a symbol for the Law, and Elijah, a symbol for the prophets, are subsumed into the meaning of Jesus , who is then interpreted as the new Temple. Presumably, the old Temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, was no more and the disciples of Jesus were interpreting him as the new meeting place between God and human life.
If one keeps rolling Mark backward, the next Jewish feast is Sukkoth or Tabernacles which was the eight-day celebration of the harvest. The Jesus story which Mark relates in chapter four comes exactly at that place where Sukkoth is being observed. It is the parable of the sower, who sowed the seed on four different kinds of soil, yielding four different types of harvest, and is then followed by Jesus' explanation of that parable. Indeed, this chapter with its clear harvest theme contains sufficient material to cover the eight days of the harvest festival.
Keep rolling Mark backward and one comes next to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, observed some five days before Sukkoth begins. Here one discovers in Mark's chapters two and three a series of healing, cleansing stories, including the call of Levi into discipleship from the unclean world of being a tax collector for the Gentile conqueror. These are perfect Jesus stories to carry the meaning of Yom Kippur. Once again, Mark's order fits the synagogue's liturgical year. Finally, Mark runs out with chapter one that occurs at the time when the Jews were celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The Jews observed that day by blowing the shofar, gathering the people, announcing that the Kingdom of God was at hand and urging them to prepare for it by repenting. Here, Mark's gospel opens with the story of John the Baptist, portrayed as the human shofar, gathering the people, announcing to them that the Kingdom of God is dawning in the life of Jesus and urging them to pre pare for his coming with repentance.
The unrecognized organizing principle in the first gospel to be written reveals that Mark has crafted Jesus stories for use in the synagogue from Rosh Hashanah to Passover, or for six and a half months of the Jewish liturgical year. Have you ever wondered why Mark is shorter than Matthew or Luke? Mark only covered six and a half months of the calendar year. Both Matthew and Luke would stretch Mark by providing stories for the other five and a half months. First, grasp the concept. Then we will fill in the details. 

– John Shelby Spong
 



Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Richard from Albuquerque, New Mexico, writes:
I read with great enthusiasm, Eternal Life: A New Vision. It moved me deeply and I found that our lives have some similarities. My mother passed on when I was nine and my father when I was thirteen. I sang in a church choir for over five years and I became a confirmed Episcopalian. I wasn't much into sports. I attended church regularly and found security and warmth in the sermons and the hymns that came my way. However, as I grew, I became, as you so well state, a member of the Church Alumni Association. I have read the Bible in its entirety as well as anyone without training can. I came away disheartened and confused. Our paths then went different ways. You pursued a good education while I took mundane, repetitive jobs that consisted of doing mostly what one was told and little thinking. It was through your lectures and later book on The Sins of the Scripture that I began to think and reason. I am now a very avid reader on things about Science, Religion, History and Human Secularism. Currently, I am into Alex Fillipenko's outstanding course on "Understanding the Universe." Why I waited until I had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel to start learning, I will never know. Some say it's better late than never. I strongly believe in evolution and I do have that wonderful feeling of being one with the universe. I do hope you have more books forthcoming. Perhaps with the help of your wife and others you might attempt some children's books. They are much more impressionable at their young ages. Thank you for your honest, open thought and keep your weekly newsletters coming.
Richard from Albuquerque, New Mexico, writes:
I read with great enthusiasm, Eternal Life: A New Vision. It moved me deeply and I found that our lives have some similarities. My mother passed on when I was nine and my father when I was thirteen. I sang in a church choir for over five years and I became a confirmed Episcopalian. I wasn't much into sports. I attended church regularly and found security and warmth in the sermons and the hymns that came my way. However, as I grew, I became, as you so well state, a member of the Church Alumni Association. I have read the Bible in its entirety as well as anyone without training can. I came away disheartened and confused. Our paths then went different ways. You pursued a good education while I took mundane, repetitive jobs that consisted of doing mostly what one was told and little thinking. It was through your lectures and later book on The Sins of the Scripture that I began to think and reason. I am now a very avid reader on things about Science, Religion, History and Human Secularism. Currently, I am into Alex Fillipenko's outstanding course on "Understanding the Universe." Why I waited until I had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel to start learning, I will never know. Some say it's better late than never. I strongly believe in evolution and I do have that wonderful feeling of being one with the universe. I do hope you have more books forthcoming. Perhaps with the help of your wife and others you might attempt some children's books. They are much more impressionable at their young ages. Thank you for your honest, open thought and keep your weekly newsletters coming.



Dear Richard,
Thank you for your letter and for the way in which you shared your life story. One of the justifications for writing a "spiritual autobiography," which is what my most recent book really is, is that I can chronicle the journey of many people other than myself. Your letter is a justification of that hope.
Thank you for the suggestion that Christine and I try our hand at children's books. I wish we had the talent to do that. Many people do and I hope others with that skill will respond to your invitation. There is a great need for this, but it's not in the scope of my expertise. I have a hard enough time responding to the religious questions of my 7 year old grandchildren who actually debate whether there is a God.
– John Shelby Spong






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