Part XI Matthew: Proof Texting the Birth Narratives

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 16 January 2014 3 Comments
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Question

I stumbled upon your website via YouTube, where several of your lectures and interviews are shown. How I got there, who knows? let's call it providence. I'm part of the church alumni as you put it. But listening to your thoughts, I started to ask myself, if you take away the literal crucifixion, which I was taught as a little Catholic boy, and thereby take away what I always understood was the divinity of Christ, can you still say that Christianity is a religion or has it become a humanistic philosophy? Can it be both?

 

Answer

Dear Mark,

The last thing one wants to do or be able to do is to take away the crucifixion. That, it seems to me, is a well documented fact of history. What you might need to look at anew is how the crucifixion was interpreted and whether or not the details of that interpretation are literally true or a part of the developing mythology.

The first narrative we have of the details of the crucifixion was not written until some 40-45 years after the event of the first Good Friday. That means that two generations passed before this story was written. In that first narrative (the gospel of Mark), the Hebrew Scriptures have already been wrapped liturgically around the memory of Jesus of Nazareth. The only words that Mark attributes to him on the cross are a direct quotation from Psalm 22:1. The story of the people taunting him is also lifted from Psalm 22: 7. The story of his garments being divided among his tormentors is in Psalm 22: 18. The thieves crucified on each side of him are designed to fulfill Isaiah 53: 12 where we are told he was “numbered with the transgressors.” The story of his burial by Joseph of Arimathea, a ruler of the Jews, is designed to give substance to the words - he was associated in death with a rich man, again from Isaiah 53: 9. We also need to remember that tins first account of the crucifixion was written in the Greek language that neither Jesus or any of his disciples spoke, so there is no way this could be a first hand, eyewitness account of what actually happened.

The Christian affirmation that God was encountered in the person of Jesus, which is the substance of the claim of divinity, is not related to any one event in Jesus’ life, but to the whole Jesus experience. When I wrote my book Jesus for the Non-Religious, I spelled this out in detail. I suspect the story of the “divine” experienced in the “human” is far more profound than that which you learned, as you say, when you were “a little Catholic boy.” It is also far more profound than what I learned as “a little evangelical Protestant boy.” In my life of study, however, I have found no reason to deny the affirmation first spoken by Paul in the mid 50’s that “God was in Christ reconciling.”

I hope you will continue to probe the interior meaning of the forms you learned as a child. The results may surprise you.

My best,

John Shelby Spong

 

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