Troy Davis and the Debate over Capital Punishment

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 29 September 2011 4 Comments
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Question

I read the account of Joseph in one of your recent columns.  I have also read previous opinions of yours in regard to the biblical character of St. Joseph and it seems you think he did not exist.  If so, who was Jesus’ father, assuming you also do not accept the myth of the virgin birth?  You also point out that Jesus has several siblings.  They must have had a father.  What is your opinion?

Answer

Dear Janet,

Yes, there must have been a father.  Mark’s gospel records Jesus as having four brothers, James, Judas, Simon and Joses and at least two sisters (see Mark 6).  James, the brother of Jesus, is also referred to by name in both the epistle to the Galatians and the book of Acts.  There was indeed a father, but who the father was is quite problematic.

John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, calls Jesus the son of Joseph on two occasions (chapters 1 and 6).  A Roman soldier was said to be Jesus’ father in early church history by some critics of the Jesus movement.  We do not have much better knowledge of the mother of Jesus either despite the strong “Mary” tradition in Christian history.  The fact is that before the birth tradition was introduced by Matthew in the 9th decade, we only had one reference to the name Mary being the name of Jesus’ mother and that was in Mark (chapter 6) and it was on the lips of a hostile critic from the crowd saying of Jesus, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”

The parents Mary and Joseph loom big in the tradition, but neither of them is big in scripture.  Take the birth stories of Matthew and Luke out and Joseph all but disappears and Mary is left in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) as a figure who was quite skeptical of Jesus and thought he was “beside himself” and tried to remove him from public life.  She is never portrayed as present at the cross in Mark, Matthew or Luke. That tradition comes into the tradition only in the Fourth Gospel, which is dated near the end of the first century.  That fact destroys the credibility of Mel Gibson’s motion picture “The Passion of the Christ.”

In the Fourth Gospel, where there is no birth narrative, Mary appears as one trying force Jesus’ hand at the wedding in Cana of Galilee  and finally appears at the cross not to cradle the dying Jesus as Catholic piety implies but to be commended to the care of the beloved disciple.  Rudolf Bultmann sees in this episode nothing but symbols.  Mary is the symbol of Judaism.  The beloved disciple is a symbol of the Christian Church that has transcended its Jewish origins.  The Church is to care for and to honor the womb that bore it is Bultmann’s read on that Johannine narrative.

I think it matters little who Jesus’ parents were.  It matters greatly who Jesus is.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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