Why I Wrote "Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World"

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 27 October 2011 2 Comments
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Question

Thank you for your series on the origins of both the Old and New Testaments.  I find your explanations and interpretations very valuable.  My question is as follows:  I notice you refer to the authors of the gospels by the name of the person to whom the “book” is attributed.  Does the gospel “according to Mark” mean something like the gospel description that came from the community or communities that identified with the disciple named Mark or possibly some other Mark?  Most of my early education in fundamentalism held that the disciple named Mark wrote down all of his experiences into what is now called the Gospel of Mark and it was most accurately translated into the King James version of 1611.  My perception is now that some person or persons educated in the Greek language was/were the scribe(s) who recorded a collection of oral stories containing some accuracies and a lot of distorted memories all with an agenda (or agendas) of some kind.

Answer

Dear Richard,

Thank you for your letter and your comments.

The fact is that no one knows who the actual author of any of the four gospels was.  There is some truth in your assumption that they reflect community development.  Mark’s community was probably in Rome.  Matthew represents a more traditionally Jewish community.  Luke, a more dispersed universal community, and John, a later fairly developed theological community, probably in Ephesus.  Yet each gospel reveals a strong and consistent personality at its core that marks it as unique. In the case of the Fourth Gospel, scholars now identify at least three editorial versions that reflect at least three unique personalities.

Let me list in a bullet-point way some conclusions to which contemporary scholarship has tentatively arrived:

1. The gospels came into writing between 70 CE and 100 CE.  Or 40 to 70 years after the life of Jesus came to an end in the crucifixion.

2. The gospels were written originally in Greek a language neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke.

3. The earliest full copy we have of any gospel dates from the 6th century.  We do have fragments and quotations that are earlier than that.

4. None of the gospels is an eyewitness to the things being described.  The gospels are rather the product of the second and, perhaps in the case of John, the third generations of Christians.

5. Internal evidence reveals that during the oral period from 30-70, the story of Jesus was recalled primarily in the synagogues and, during those years, the life of Jesus was wrapped inside and interpreted through the Scriptures of the Hebrew people.

6. Finally, if we think of the gospels as interpretive portraits painted of Jesus by Jewish artists, we would be a bit closer to the truth than the suggestions you include in your letter that seem to go in a direct line from Jesus to Mark to the King James Bible.

I will develop these points and many more in my new book which will be out from HarperOne in early November of 2011. Its title is: Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World. It has taken me a lifetime to engage this task, but I find it a fascinating and illumining study and it delivered me from the fundamentalism in which I was raised.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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