Part VII Matthew: The Shady Ladies of Matthew's Genealogy

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 14 November 2013 1 Comments
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Question

With so much modern information embedded in your views, I find it odd that you would still believe in prophecy. Do you? Or do you call Jesus of Nazareth “Christ” out of habit and not because he did or will fulfill the messianic prophesies of Jewish lore? Do you actually believe that anyone can know the distant future in great detail? Or, do you believe that the stories of Jesus of Nazareth were made up from an inaccurate Greek translation of those prophecies long after the events transpired and by ghost writers and not the sources cited?

 

Answer

Dear David,

Your letter makes so many strange assumptions and then on the basis of those assumptions engages in hostile charges that it is almost unanswerable, but I shall try to make sense out of it for you and for my readers.

Biblical prophecy had little to do with predicting future events. Prophets in the Old Testament served primarily to articulate the yearnings of the Jewish people for vindication as they suffered the slings and arrows of their rather violent history. The word “messiah” in the Jewish scriptures literally meant “the Anointed One” and was originally no more than a title for the King of the Jews, who was inducted into his office by being anointed with oil. If you were to read the two books of Samuel you would discover that Samuel, the prophet, anointed both Saul and David to be kings of the Hebrew nation. When the Jewish monarchy was destroyed, following the defeat of the Jews at the hands of the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE, the Jewish concept of the “anointed one,” departed from their history and entered into their dreams and their mythology. Messianic images then began to appear in Jewish thinking in many forms ranging from a messiah who would be a conquering military leader riding to victory in order to restore the Jewish nation, to the suffering servant who would drain the world of its hostility by absorbing it and returning it as love.

Between the death of Jesus about 30 CE and the writing of the gospels from 70-100 CE, it is clear that the followers of Jesus searched the Jewish Scriptures to find what they came to believe were hidden references to what they had experienced in Jesus of Nazareth and then they wrote their stories of Jesus to conform to those prophetic expectations. The idea that people years before predicted events in Jesus’ life is patent nonsense. The fact is that it was exactly the opposite; the memory of Jesus was twisted so that he could be seen to conform to messianic expectations in the Bible. I treated this subject in much greater detail than I can do in this question and answer format in my book: Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World where I have a whole section on the prophets.

No, I do not think that anyone can know the future in any way: I include in this would be fortune tellers, those quacks who regularly predict the end of the world and certainly those who predict political events by reading the book of Revelation!

In regard to the stories of Jesus, there is clearly an historical memory of a powerful person and personality imprinted on the lives of Jesus’ followers that the gospel writers drew on when they wrote their books. By the time those books were written, however, some 40-70 years after Jesus’ death had passed. One translation from Aramaic to Greek had also taken place for Greek was a language that neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke. The gospels are not therefore either history or biography. They are interpretive portraits painted by Jewish artists trying to give expression to an experience of transcendence that they had experienced in the life of Jesus. One cannot literalize that which was never meant to be literalized. Since you seem to be aware of none of this, I do not find the categories you mention to be helpful in getting to the truth.

My best,

John Shelby Spong

 

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