On Apr 7, 2005, at 6:59 PM, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
> Not really. Virgin conception is impossible, though there's some wiggle
> room there -- IIRC the original text had it as "behold, a young woman
> shall conceive".
Bishop John Shelby Spong, "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism":
When I became aware that neither the word /virgin/ nor the
concept of virginity appears in the Hebrew text of Isaiah that
Matthew quoted to undergird his account of Jesus' virgin birth,
I became aware of the fragile nature of biblical fundamentalism.
The understanding of "virgin" is present only in the Greek word
/parthenos/, used to translate the Hebrew word /'almah/ in a
Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures. The Hebrew word for
virgin is /betulah/. /'Almah/ never means "virgin" in Hebrew. I
had to face early on in my priestly career the startling
possibility that the virgin tradition so deep in Christianity
may well rest upon something as fragile as the weak reed of a
mistranslation.
Once again, our resident atheologian is right on the mark (or the
Matthew, anyway).
> Lazarus was never dead. No one else was resurrected either.
It is clear from the earliest New Testament sources that Jesus was an
extraordinary healer. Perhaps he healed a man who appeared, in the
medical darkness of that time, dead. In any event, we are likely to get
more out of the stories of Jesus' healings and resurrections if we allow
them to have the metaphorical power that he apparently intended. It was
not just the parables of Jesus -- the "Just So Stories" that he made up
to illustrate his teachings -- that were intended to be taken
metaphorically. Much of what he (apparently) actually /did/ has a
metaphorical purpose.
His healings of the blind, if they happened as told, were certainly of
benefit to the individuals whose eyesight was restored, but their
greatest value is the message they sent about Israel's spiritual
blindness and the hope he offered to remove it.
Perhaps this is what the priest meant when he said "The Bible is true,
and some of it happened."
> And the epistles of Paul, while effective at establishing and
> maintaining the infant cult of Iasus, read like a lot of hard-right
> propaganda, which to me is more or less what they are.
Spong is definitely not one of those Christians under the spell of the
man from Tarsus. After reciting a full page of "Promise Keepers"
favorites ("Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the
Lord." "If anyone will not work, let him not eat." and so forth), the
Bishop of Newark begins his two-chapter investigation of the man from
Tarsus:
Is this the Word of the Lord? As such, these verses would
certinly present us in this age with problems. But these words
make no claim to be the words of God. They are rather the words
of Paul, a first-century Jewish convert to Christianity, lifted
verbatim out of his voluminous correspondence. There is no doubt
that this man Paul was a powerful shaping influence on
Christianity. There is also no doubt that he was passionate,
specific, complex, emotional, frail, controversial,
self-centered, and human. He was a pioneering missionary figure
who felt an intense vocationto be an apostle of Christ to the
gentiles. As such, he lived upon that edge of prejudice and
hostility that always accompanies the crossing of a boundary.
Spong doesn't hate Paul, but he knows that
Some Christians who treasure the Bible will feel that my
efforts in this enterprise will be only destructive.
He doesn't much like him, either. He recognizes that he was a thoroughly
weird guy whose words have been accorded the authority of God, and
Yet I believe [that] the message of Paul, freed from its literal
distortion, can still speak with power to the human experience.
I write to realize that potentiality.
> Revelation is also hooey.
Yup, and it's biblical literalism that makes it so in large part.
People who treat John as a kind of Christian Nostradamus do more harm
than good. The revelation might be plain hooey, and it might not be, but
my Christian brother and sister goof-balls who are constantly trying to
map world events onto it as signs of the end times are systematically
killing Christianity.
Visions look like hooey to me, too, but then, I'm not a spiritual
ecstatic. It would suck to be one. Nikos Kazantzakis' "The Last
Temptation of Christ" pictures the spirit's visits to the young Jesus as
a bird of prey sinking its talons into his scalp. No thanks.
The irony is that the movie version got so much abuse from
self-righteous Christians, even though Kazantzakis said that he wrote it
so that people might know Jesus better, appreciate his sacrifice more
and love him better. To that end, the book was many times more effective
than Mel Gibson's snuff film for me.
> As for the OT, the Decalogue contains some pretty sound ethics too.
Sure, but the rest of the OT is full of some pretty dodgy ethics.
Slavery, for example, was assumed, and was part of the process of
subjugating conquered nations. Then there's the whole business of
what we now call ethnic cleansing, which is presented as the will
of God.
Spong:
[T]here are concepts in the Bible that are repugnant to the
modern consciousness. There is a vicious tribal code of ethics
that prohibits behavior internally that is actually encouraged
in dealing with outsiders. Moses was a murderer, but this was
not a character flaw because his victim was an Egyptian. ...
Adultery was said to be evil, but both Abraham and Isaac tried
to pass their wives off as their sisters, even though this meant
having them sexually used by Abimelech, king of Gerar.
And captive women were used for sexual sport by their Hebrew conquerors.
The Hebrews of the thirteenth century before this common era
were, from the Canaanite perspective, a marauding band of
looters, killers, and destroyers, but they saw themselves as a
people of destiny, as those whose national vested interest was,
in fact, the will of God.
Spong does a fine -- if abbreviated -- job of peeling back the layers of
writing and editing that resulted in the Hebrew scriptures, revealing
how the needs of each successive period in Jewish history shaped the
books that are widely considered by Christians and Jews to be the work
of the Egyptian-Killing Moses.
I'll summarize his twelve-page history in four paragraphs:
The /Yahwist/ writer, some 950 BCE, chronicled the history of the Hebrew
people from their roots in slavery to the establishment of a powerful
nation. His narrative -- and scholars agree that it is almost certainly
the work of a single great writer -- asserts that Yahweh was the only
divine power at work in the universe, who chose to intervene on their
behalf to keep promises made to them. The Yahwist's God was very human,
walking in His garden and having to call out to the hiding Adam. Hardly
an all-seeing, all-powerful universe-maker.
A hundred years later or so, after the nation divided into the Northern
kingdom of Israel and the Southern kingdom of Judah, the /Elohist/
writer gave Israel's history another spin. His narrative reflects the
breakaway Northerners' anti-dynastic values, and suggests that God --
Elohim -- had not made his promises to Moses or the royal family
that now ruled the Southern Kingdom from Jerusalem, but with the people.
>From the Elohist came the stories of Jacob and Joseph and the version of
the decalogue with which we are most familiar. In time, the Elohist and
Yahwist narratives were joined, though incompletely, leading to many of
the contradictions that remain.
Two hundred years passed before the next major revision of the sacred
story. A scroll attributed to Moses was "discovered" and delivered to
King Josiah, who used it to call the people to a thoroughgoing religious
reform. This "second (deutero) giving of the Law (nomas) gave this
version of the story its name. The deuteronomist writers' view of God
was of the "who art in heaven" strain, though still fiercely
nationalistic. Contrary to the Elohist's Northern focus, the
deuteronomists centered worship in Jerusalem. The deuteronomists
substantially revised the existing Yahwist-Elohist narrative in line
with their form of legalistic spiritual monotheism.
Finally, with Israel in exile, the prophet-priests reworked the
scriptures to help the nation maintain its identity and cohesiveness
while in captivity. Circumcision and Sabbath observance helped set them
apart from their captors. To affirm the significance of the Sabbath, the
seven-day creation story was prepended to the existing creation story
from the Yahwist thread (Genesis 2:4ff). Curiously, the creation story
that appears "in the beginning" was actually one of the last parts of
the Hebrew scriptures to be written. Most of Exodus, Leviticus and
Numbers -- including the myriad rules for worship and the construction
of the mobile temple -- were the work of the priestly writers.
Spong:
[It is] a narrative written by a variety of persons over more than
half a millennium. It is filled with geographical misinformation
and the biological, geological, and astrophysical information only
of this ancient time. It reflects cultural traditions long since
abandoned as unworthy of civilized people -- polygamy, child
sacrifice, and slavery, for example.
To suggest that this text is in any sense the "literal Word of
God" is to place extreme limits on both its truth and its power.
Out of our sincere religious need to possess in some written form
an infallible source of truth, we run the risk of reducing our
treasured book to irrelevance.
There is plenty to rail against in the fundamentalist literalist view of
scripture, yet I have hope that fearless scholars like Spong and Borg and
John Dominic Crossan will influence the ongoing conversation about the
relevance of scripture.
That said, Marcus Borg closed his presentation last week by saying that
while he had hope, he still believed that mankind could blow it, and
he wasn't expecting a divine bail-out.
Thanks,
Dave
Here Endeth the Lesson Maru
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