An excerpt from Spong on the Gospels.
Aug. 19th, 2003 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaIn a deep and significant way, we are now able to see that all of the Gospels are Jewish books, profoundly Jewish books. Recognizing this, we begin to face the realization that we will never understand the Gospels until we learn how to read them as Jewish books. They are written, to a greater or lesser degree, in the midrashic style of the Jewish sacred storyteller, a style that most of us do not begin even now to comprehend. This style is not concerned with historic accuracy. It is concerned with meaning and understanding.
The Jewish writers of antiquity interpreted God's presence to be with Joshua after the death of Moses by repeating the parting of the waters (Josh. 3). At the Red Sea that was the sign that God was with Moses (Ex. 14). When Joshua was said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River, it was not recounted as a literal event of history; rather it was the midrashic attempt to related Joshua to Moses and thus demonstrate the presence of God with his successor. The same pattern operated later when both Elijah (2 Ki. 2:8) and Elisha (2 Kings 2:14) were said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River and to have walked across on dry land. When the story of Jesus' baptism was told, the gospel writers asserted that Jesus parted not the Jordan River, but the heavens. ... The heavens, according to the Jewish creation story, were nothing but the firmament that separated the waters above from the waters below (Gen. 1:6-8). To portray Jesus as spliting the heavenly waters was a Jewish way of suggesting that the holy God encountered in Jesus went even beyond the God presence that had been met in Moses, Joshua, Elijah, and Elisha. That is the way the midrashic principle worked.
Stories about heroes of the Jewish past were heightened and retold again and again about heroes of the present moment, not because those same events actually occurred, but because the reality of God revealed in those moments was like the reality of God known in the past.
We are not reading history when we read the Gospels. We are listening to the experience of the Jewish people, processing in a Jewish way what they believed was a new experience with the God of Israel. Jews filtered every new experience through the corporate remembered history of their people, as that history had been recorded in the Hebrew scriptures of the past.
If we are to recover the power present in the scriptures for our time, then this clue to their original meaning must be recovered and understood. Ascribing to the Gospels historic accuracy in the style of later historians, or demanding that the narratives of the Gospels be taken literally, or trying to recreate the historical context surrounding each specific event narrated in the Gospels -- these are the methods of people who do not realize that they are reading a Jewish book.
From Rev. John Shelby Spong, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes, pp. 36-37
The Jewish writers of antiquity interpreted God's presence to be with Joshua after the death of Moses by repeating the parting of the waters (Josh. 3). At the Red Sea that was the sign that God was with Moses (Ex. 14). When Joshua was said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River, it was not recounted as a literal event of history; rather it was the midrashic attempt to related Joshua to Moses and thus demonstrate the presence of God with his successor. The same pattern operated later when both Elijah (2 Ki. 2:8) and Elisha (2 Kings 2:14) were said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River and to have walked across on dry land. When the story of Jesus' baptism was told, the gospel writers asserted that Jesus parted not the Jordan River, but the heavens. ... The heavens, according to the Jewish creation story, were nothing but the firmament that separated the waters above from the waters below (Gen. 1:6-8). To portray Jesus as spliting the heavenly waters was a Jewish way of suggesting that the holy God encountered in Jesus went even beyond the God presence that had been met in Moses, Joshua, Elijah, and Elisha. That is the way the midrashic principle worked.
Stories about heroes of the Jewish past were heightened and retold again and again about heroes of the present moment, not because those same events actually occurred, but because the reality of God revealed in those moments was like the reality of God known in the past.
We are not reading history when we read the Gospels. We are listening to the experience of the Jewish people, processing in a Jewish way what they believed was a new experience with the God of Israel. Jews filtered every new experience through the corporate remembered history of their people, as that history had been recorded in the Hebrew scriptures of the past.
If we are to recover the power present in the scriptures for our time, then this clue to their original meaning must be recovered and understood. Ascribing to the Gospels historic accuracy in the style of later historians, or demanding that the narratives of the Gospels be taken literally, or trying to recreate the historical context surrounding each specific event narrated in the Gospels -- these are the methods of people who do not realize that they are reading a Jewish book.
From Rev. John Shelby Spong, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes, pp. 36-37
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Re: history+ York and Robinson
Date: 2003-08-19 08:12 am (UTC)book to the effect that John, the most metaphysical if you
will, was earler in date than the other three and was
by the son of Zebedee himself...
Hmm,
On that question I would think Dodd's "Fourth Gospel" to
have a sound mediating posiion, but Dodd did not have
the iconoclastic lecturer psychology you see...
Would you recommend Dodd's work? I am not familiar with it.
and then the Archbishop of York who years ago excitingly
questioned the bodily resurrection has a new book, read
reviews of in England, which conservatives find very
satisfying but I forget on what grounds... but as before
the contents are exciting and broad brush.
Would that be this one:
Journey to Jerusalem?
Jenkins
Date: 2003-08-19 10:32 am (UTC)and dcontraversial then archbishop of York
was a doctor Jenkins it comes back to me...
so no not this book.
afraid I havent read arisbe's posts
consistently either these last three weeks
the problem with mostly using internet cafes
and not having much time to do so is that
it is hard to do more than a minimum of things
so like the one you refer to here I missed
also your posts on austin(or the most of
them...sometimes did take shallow excursions
into friends page...shallow in that it tends ot
go 2 or 3 pages deep rather quickly and might
do 1...)
+S.