An excerpt from Spong on the Gospels.

[sophiaserpentia]

In 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

Comments

history+ York and Robinson

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

Hi..back and so on... hello!
how did Austin work out as to future eetc?
I missed some posts...

this will be a reactive response but as always
not to the poster, the post is interesting indeed,
but with a little exasperation at the fellow
who is subject and that too less personally
than as exemplar of a type.

My problem with Bishop Spong and there
are in the Anglican Churches rather many
of this sort, no doubt in others as well
but it is a particular style...a little that
of the university lecturer who wishes to hold
the attention of his students by making broad
statments, seemingly a bit iconoclastic, which
will hold the attention of his students... well
my problem with him is that he is therefore
always writing as an ideologue, reducing complex
questions to simple answers on the side he wishes
to stress to get a rise out of other faculty members
and appreciation from a set of students who will
cheer him on...
or so it seems to me. Here the whole thrust is to
say that the Gospels are Jewish books(Im not sure
actually it is quite certain that there may not
be Greek language originals, though this would be
not so undermining of his point) and so Midrashic
and so not historically accurate and so the
students do not need to think much of what is there
actually happened...However turned around another
way the Jews would seem to be, in a sense more
than the Greeks, the originators of history(see
Oscar Cullman's Christ and Time for the small point
I am making here), and the Gospels at rather many
points appear circumstantial and clear and direct
in a remarkably, at moments almost anachronistcally
modern way, historical dont they? It is not really
a choice of historical or not is it? every historic event
has multiple levels of meaning...
well this slight aniamadversion but the post is
interesting and I should think repreesentative of a
way of doing talk about relgion down to the attention
getting "God Presence" substituted for the English
"Presence of God" or "Divine Presence".

the most interesting red sea parallel is perhaps in
John , chapter 6 or 7 slips mind, where the crossing
of lake seems to be center of the chiastic(ie 1=7,2=6,
3=5 and 4 at center) structure of seven
signs as parallel to Red Sea...

Of this type I am imagining, earlier examples showed
another side to the thing...that it is really partly
show like patches on a sports jacket in university lecutrers
.... J Robinson of Honest to God later wrote a learned
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...
so here he turns the iconoclatic impulse against the
dominant academic tendency and alines with Biblical conservatives...

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...

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.
+Seraphim.

[robertstheology.livejournal.com]

I am almost certain that Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, was not Jewish. I also believe that Christ and his 12 Apostles all spoke at least two languages, Greek and Aramaic. Only the religious leaders, and the well educated were still fluent in classical Hebrew by this time in the history of Israel. Jesus Christ obviously read Hebrew, as he stood in the Synagogue and read the scrolls. The degree to which this culture had become Helenized is interesting.

yay spong

[halfempty.livejournal.com]

he's my hero... i'm only on Why Christianity... right now though...