Re-Living Holy Week and Easter as Part of a Community of Faith

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 4 April 2013 4 Comments
Please login with your account to read this essay.
 

Question

I wanted to thank you for your column some time ago on the raising of Lazarus. This clarified for me one of the most troubling parts of the Bible. About twenty years ago I bought a study Bible, which I was determined to read from cover to cover. While I thought the New Testament was beautiful and profound, I had numerous "Hey, wait a minute moments." If for instance I had attended a funeral and someone I hardly knew raised him from the dead, I'm sure the whole room would be hysterical. This person would be on every front page in the entire world and I’m sure having an audience with almost every world and religious leader. The fact that Jesus died alone on a cross made no sense to me. My question is - are there any study Bibles you can recommend?

 

Answer

Dear Sam,

I gather Dr Seuss inspired your e-mail title and I’m glad my column on Lazarus inspired your comments.

Most volumes that call themselves a “study Bible” will inevitably be shallow and only skim the surface of the great issues of Bible study. In the Bible, not counting the Apocrypha, there are 66 separate books written by a wide variety of authors over a period of about 1,000 years and concluded about 2,000 years ago. No one study Bible can do justice to that huge scope of biblical material.

In the series of columns that I wrote a couple of years ago on the origins of the various books of the Bible and which Harper/Collins published in 2011 under the title: Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, I had to deal with that reality again and again. I chose in that book to give my readers a substantial but not an exhaustive analysis. Some books in the Old Testament I chose to treat minimally because I regard their message to be of little consequence. Among these books were Nahum, Haggai, Obadiah, Zephaniah, Joel and Habakkuk. When I got to the New Testament I grouped those books we call the Pastoral Epistles (I & II Timothy and Titus) and the General Epistles (I & II Peter, James and Jude) together and did one chapter on them all. Then I did the three epistles of John and the Book of Revelation in a single chapter. That way I managed to keep the length of the book at a manageable level. Even so it was over three hundred pages. I have a close friend (Elaine Pagels) who has written a learned study on the Book of Revelation. It will be I am sure, the definitive work on that enigmatic last book of the Bible. My book will introduce them to the complexity of that book while hers will take them deeply into it. They represent very different agendas, not contradictory, but complementary.

I work regularly in the library of Drew University. On any book in the Bible, I have access to numerous volumes written over the centuries on each book. I can read Origen in the third century on John; Luther in the16th century on John; Rudolf Bultmann and Raymond Brown in the last half of the 20th century on John. All are insightful. None is exhaustive. No study Bible can do more than introduce you to a particular book. That does not mean a study Bible is evil; it does mean that it is limited.

Use it all you wish, but don’t think that when you finish that study Bible you now know the Bible. It doesn’t work that way.

~John Shelby Spong

 

Comments

 

4 thoughts on “Re-Living Holy Week and Easter as Part of a Community of Faith

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.