The Wedding of Charles and Robert

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 23 January 2014 1 Comments
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Question

I was wondering how you would respond to the work done by N. T. Wright on the resurrection; from what I have read, you have argued that there is no notion of a bodily resurrection in the earliest traditions of the church (the Gospel of Mark and Pauline work), but this belief gradually emerged and is reflected in later traditions (e.g. the Johannine corpus). From what Wright says, the belief in a physical resurrection was not alien to the belief system of the second Temple period and so could plausibly stem from the earliest traditions. So I am just wondering what your counter argument is to Wright.

 

Answer

Dear Richard,

N. T. (Tom) Wright is a prolific writer and I have read much that he has written. He has obviously read much that I have written because he attacks it so regularly. I am honored to be the one who threatens him so deeply that he does his attacking by trying to use ridicule.

Tom was the Dean of the Cathedral in Litchfield in the U.K. He is a student of the Bible rather than a biblical scholar. The distinction I mean here is that Tom assumes an understanding of the Bible that is basically evangelical and fundamentalist and he studies the Bible in order to sustain his already-reached conclusions. That makes him in my mind a propagandist rather than a scholar. A biblical scholar studies the Bible and allows his discoveries of new truth to challenge and to change his or her present convictions about the Bible.

Tom was appointed Bishop of Durham in the U. K., which turned out to be something of a travesty since previous bishops of Durham like Ian Ramsey and David Jenkins had been genuine scholars. That tradition of scholarship, however, was broken with the appointment to Canterbury by Margaret Thatcher of George Carey, an old line evangelical, who had no great appreciation for the role of scholarship. Tom Wright was the second person appointed to Durham, who violated that classical scholarly tradition, though his appointment was by Rowan Williams who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Tony Blair.

Tom Wright co-authored a book on the gospels with Marcus Borg, a genuine scholar and one of the leaders of the Jesus Seminar, in which they set out their points of view on various gospel issues like the Virgin Birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I thought it was a fantastic book because it showed how deep the chasm was between Tom Wright’s fundamentalist mentality and Marcus Borg’s grasp of the critical biblical scholarship of the last 200 years. Tom either ignores or dismisses that scholarship, but he speaks in ways that perfume his knowledge of the Bible with intellectual respectability, which I do not believe he accomplishes. So I do not think his conclusions on the empty tomb are anything more than the attempted apologetic of a threatened fundamentalist. I do not see the genuine biblical scholars saluting his perspective.

I hope this helps,

John Shelby Spong

 

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