John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: a Gentile Heresy (2016: HarperCollins paperback 2017)
ISBN 978-0-06-236231-5
I came upon this fascinating book in the Durham Cathedral bookshop last week. I was immediately struck by the feeling that Bishop Spong has something important to say to the Church. I was glad to read of his enthusiasm for J. A. T. Robinson, whom I also greatly admire, though not uncritically. The thesis of the book is ingenious; it is a gripping read. Yet gradually as I read on I came to feel, regretfully, that it made some doubtful assumptions, polarized the options too starkly, and let go of too much that really matters.
What is striking about this book.
Its theory that the various sections of Matthew’s Gospel, in sequence, can be directly related to the sequential observances of the Jewish liturgical calendar; that Mark’s Gospel can be related to half the Jewish year, but Matthew completes the coverage of the whole year.
That each Jewish liturgical season incorporates stories, personalities, and images from particular parts of the Hebrew Bible, and that these were incorporated into Matthew’s Gospel to form the nucleus of each of the stories associated with the life of Jesus.
That much of what has generally been assumed to be part of an eyewitness account of Jesus’s deeds and words is in fact haggadah—mythic narrative designed to teach truths about life centred on Jesus—derived from these passages of the Hebrew Bible.
That the early Church in which this process took place was still intensely Jewish, still observing the Jewish liturgical year, and fully cognizant of the haggadic nature of these liturgically motivated Gospel narratives.
That when the Church became fully Gentile, this understanding was lost; the haggada was taken to be literal eyewitness truth; the stories came to be understood as factual, with all their miraculous and supernatural elements, and the teaching came to be regarded as a word of mouth tradition stretching directly back to Jesus himself.
That thus arose the ‘heresy’ of ‘literalism’, the tendency to interpret the Bible literally, which has led to numerous evils such as antisemitism, racism, the persecution of dissent, the suppression of scientific understanding, and modern fundamentalism.
What is problematic about this book.
‘Literalism’ is a very broad brush. It is laudable that the author denounces the various inhumane evils which Christians have all too often promoted on the basis of their reading of Scripture. It is laudable in particular to denounce modern fundamentalism and to expose its shaky Biblical and ethical basis. But this is to polarize matters too far. Actually ‘literalism’ is an unhelpful way to view such Christian deviations. It is arguable that fundamentalism and its kindred abuses are actually not literalist enough. Fundamentalists and their ilk might be better labelled ‘selectivists’, because they all tend to select certain aspects, or passages, or verbal interpretations of the Bible as their declared basis while ignoring others that are not supportive. They tend to derive the conservative sociopolitical tenets which they favour from their prevailing culture and then seek a basis for them in the Bible; they do not (despite their protestations) simply let the Bible speak for itself. Spong himself gives us a very creditable demonstration of true ‘literalism’ when he makes a comprehensive survey of the resurrection stories one by one, letting each speak for itself without importing assumptions from any of the others or from Christian tradition. Modern scholarship, when it examines the biblical text literally, in terms of the known meanings of words and the known cultural background, is true literalism. So it would be better to label this misreading of Gospel haggada, which John Spong posits, as ‘historification’, i.e. taking mythical teaching stories as history: the fundamental difference being not the giving to each word a literal understanding, but the attribution of actual occurrence in the past to a story which is in reality a literary production.
There is a problem with the idea that the shift from haggadic to historical understanding occurred when the Church became fully Gentile. The theory is that the Jewish Christians fully understood the true haggadic, i.e. mythic, nature of the Gospel pericopes, because this was a natural and normal Jewish mode of thought. We know that Jewish ways of thinking have traditionally been passed on by the intensive teaching of the younger generation. Such training would presumably have continued as Gentiles began to join the Church. We know that Gentiles underwent rigorous catechesis before they became full members of the Church, so presumably they would have been inculcated with this traditional Jewish teaching regarding the haggadic/mythic understanding of the Gospels. In any case it would have been natural for them to adopt such an understanding, since Gentile religion was essentially mythical. The major difficulty for the Jewish Christians would surely have been the opposite: convincing Gentile converts that there was a historical element in Christianity and that Jesus wasn’t merely another mythical figure. And then these Gentile Christians, not knowing of any alternative practice, would surely have passed this mode of interpretation on to their successors. Why should they suddenly have switched to a ‘historifying’ approach to the Gospels just because the originally Jewish members of the Church had died out?
Another problem about this hypothetical change in outlook is that it seems to require that the Gentile Christians lost their understanding of the direct links between ‘events’ in the Gospel story and ‘events’ in the Hebrew Scriptures. It needs them to have become unaware that a given item in a Gospel story was actually a symbol derived from a Hebrew forerunner. But surely the documentary record shows us, even in the very earliest exegesis, an exaggerated keenness on the part of theologians to interpret the ‘New’ Testament in the light of the ‘Old’? From early on, items in the Hebrew Scriptures were linked up (as ‘types’) to items in the New Testament (as ‘antitypes’). But both seem to have always been seen, not as mythical or symbolic, but as historical and factual. Rightly or wrongly, they thought from very early times that God had caused certain things to happen in Hebrew history in order to act as pointers forward to the Christian dispensation. It doesn’t look as if these links were ever forgotten, as haggada, and then rediscovered, as factual, but it does look as if both ends of the link were always understood historically, i.e., in the opposite way to that suggested in this book.
Another problematic aspect of the book is that it appears to strip the historical element of Christianity down to a very meagre core. It’s not entirely clear what that core is, but it seems to be roughly commensurate with the few facts that we can glean from the genuine letters of Paul. That may be enough to survive on, but it would be interesting to see how the quite elaborate picture of Jesus, albeit entirely mythical and haggadic according to this book, came into being, if that was all there was to start with; it makes one think of the story of the person who claimed he could make soup with just a stone and boiling water. The essence of Christianity, stripped of its literalized haggada, that we glimpse in this book, seems etiolated, reminiscent of Higher Thought, and without even the transformative power of Buddhism—but that may be a false impression, since it is not fully set forth.
Another problem in the book is that it seems to attribute most of what is significant and original in the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, or whoever actually penned the books named after them. On this book’s thesis, the spiritual genius that has forcibly impressed itself on generations of readers has been mistakenly attributed to the historical Jesus and is now shown to belong to these unknown writers. If we accepted this thesis, but still wished to reverence and obey Gospel teachings as having a divine origin, we would have to attribute their inspiration to three isolated anonymous writers who, decades after the events they were mythically portraying, somehow came to be possessed of ‘the mind of Christ’. We would have to postulate that the historical Jesus said and did very little that we can know, while a few followers of his, half a century or so later, stumbled upon a set of doctrines that God wanted believers to receive as having Jesus’s seal of approval. I would say that this would actually be quite a step of faith for the modern sceptic whom John Spong is keen to win over.
One of the doctrines that John Spong very laudably wants to banish is that of Penal Substitutionary Atonement. But I don’t think that his hypothesized ‘historification’ of the haggadic Gospel stories has much to do with the development of that doctrine. The trouble is that Spong is so incensed at inhumane doctrines of this kind that, as I’ve already said, he polarizes things. He offers only one alternative to PSA, what seems a rather watery humanistic understanding of the meaning of the Cross. But there are other alternatives. As I read it, the New Testament writers say that Christ’s death has a transformative effect on human lives, tangible and measurable. If we take a ‘literalist’ approach in the sense defined above, and engage in close reading of the New Testament passages about the Messiah’s death, we encounter a consistently structured and expressed pattern, albeit one that is difficult to interpret fully. Importantly, it is a pattern totally unlike the doctrine of PSA. The scenario of the latter envisages God as angry and prepared to condemn humankind to destruction, Humanity as in a state of sinfulness and guilt, and Christ as the Mediator who takes the punishment in their place so as to enable God to forgive them. It is a courtroom metaphor with a judge, a condemned criminal, and an uneffaceable guilty verdict; though courts don’t usually direct someone else to be punished in the place of the real criminal. The picture that I encounter in the New Testament is quite unlike this. Its scenario depicts a merciful God who has no difficulty in forgiving human beings or in being at peace with them. His problem lies in getting them out of their state of alienation and slavery to evil, getting them to be reconciled to him. Christ by his death and resurrection somehow rescues (redeems or ransoms) humankind out of this state of sin and enmity towards God. The adversary to be dealt with is entirely different in each scenario. In PSA it is, ultimately, God’s antipathy, which Christ takes on himself. In the New Testament it is our subjection to sin and antipathy to the goodness of God, which Christ by his death somehow carries away. I do not profess to know how Christ does this, but I do know that his essential ministry is to reconcile us to God, not God to us; because we, not God, are the implacable party. And unlike PSA, which posits a state of forensic guiltiness in us that we cannot existentially experience, the New Testament doctrine presents a state of subjection to inner evil with which even the most hardened sceptic should be able to identify.
The polarizing tendency emerges again in John Spong’s discussion of the resurrection. As has already been said, he does a great job of what I would call ‘literalist’ exposition on the various treatments of the resurrection. But in his desire to make the Gospels less incredible, Spong goes for extremes. He represents the ‘literalist’ position as a form of resuscitation: the body that had died and decayed being restored to life. But it is plain for all to see who read the New Testament literally that Jesus’s resurrection is not presented as a mere reversal of his death. He is obviously not imagined as returning to a quotidian terrestrial life. He does not reside in a back street of Jerusalem during the forty-day period of his appearances. When he ‘appears’, he is presented as ‘coming’ from some quite different plane of existence about which we know very little, a plane ‘occupied’ also by those who attain the resurrection, both past saints like Moses and Elijah and present and future ones. It seems as if John Spong’s desire to make the Gospels less incredible is based on a rather nineteenth-century concept of the scientific. For him, matter seems to be very real and ‘hard’; spirit is diaphanous and insubstantial. The resurrection appearances get described by New Testament writers in progressively more ‘solid’ and therefore, he thinks, more far-fetched terms. But it’s not as if the problem of understanding these appearances is a new one. John Spong seems relatively happy with Paul’s idea of the resurrection body as something completely Other. But if it is totally Other, why should it not be both able to pass through walls and digest fish? We ourselves are constantly but unconsciously penetrated by showers of particles from outer space and they are matter as much as we are.
Behind the book there is evidently an urgent agenda of banishing the miraculous and supernatural elements from the Christian faith, which are felt to be incredible and a stumbling block to today’s person. But reinterpreting the miracle stories in the Gospels as mythical and haggadic will not be enough to achieve that end. The book of Acts, for a start, is full of miracles: those in the early chapters can perhaps be assigned to a mythic period in the Church’s infancy, way beyond the memory of anyone whom Luke might have been able to interview. But the miracles go on into the ‘we’ passages when Luke claims to have been travelling with Paul (think Eutychus, Agabus, and the seven sons of Sceva). We will have to turn the whole of Acts into haggada to purge out the miraculous. And then there are the reliably Pauline letters. In these too we encounter both references to, and expectation of, miraculous occurrences (‘Does God work miracles among you because you observe the Law?’). From the Apostolic Fathers, through the later documents of the church, and throughout Christian history, miracles have been constantly reported, right down to the present day. Perhaps the only church luminaries not associated with miracles are the gloomy, literal-minded Reformers. The Wesleyan movement saw signs and wonders, and we hardly need to mention the modern Charismatic movement. Padre Pio’s life is an unshakeable testimony to the occurrence of miracles in the last century. Even if we could disprove thousands of these stories as deception or delusion, thousands more would press forward supported by hosts of eyewitnesses. And, as Jesus himself is supposed to have pointed out, what about the first-century Jewish miracle workers? They had no axe to grind on Jesus’s behalf, but they wandered round Palestine healing just as he is supposed to have done. Therefore shall they, we might say, be your judges. We are stuck with a Judaeo-Christian tradition of miracles, and it would be strange if the Founder had neither performed nor envisaged them!
Finally, the thesis of the book is quite heavily dependent on a documentary theory of the Gospels. To my delight, the author rejects the hypothesis that a document Q existed and was used by Matthew and Luke to expand Mark. However, he thinks that there is a straight-line literary transmission, with Matthew expanding Mark and Luke adapting Matthew, and that the bits of evidence that make it appear that Luke was at least partly independent of Matthew can be otherwise explained. But despite the near consensus of modern scholarship on a documentary transmission, with Mark at the head of the tree, and with or without Q, it is thinkable that nothing like this happened at all. It is still possible that the Gospel pericopes began as eyewitness accounts and were repeated by older faithful witnesses to younger faithful disciples, who passed them on in turn; that there were numerous such oral channels of transmission; that Matthew, Mark, and Luke represent just three of these channels which happened to issue in independent written documents; and that once these three Gospels began to circulate in written form the other oral traditions came to an end. This is not a widely accepted view, but it ought to be argued for. When the pericopes that are shared between the three Gospels are compared, the differences are not necessarily best explained as Matthew and Luke making alterations to Mark. These pericopes could as well be regarded as instances of oral literature, transmitted very much as funny stories are nowadays: the general outline of the narrative can be and inevitably is altered as the story is passed around. But just as the punch line of a joke has to be kept almost word for word unchanged for it to make any sense, so the key lines within each pericope are, generally speaking, identical.
Such a non-documentary theory of the Gospel stories would be very much in line with what we know of the transmission of teaching in ancient times. And it offers hope to those who would like to see some historical content in the Gospels. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t exclude human agency and errancy. Just as the Pauline letters come from a fallible human being and have been subject to the changes and chances of time (so that, for example, 1 and 2 Corinthians were probably patched together from three or four letters), so we can allow for human beings retelling the Gospel stories according to familiar patterns and leaving out or adding minor details. It also leaves room for a degree of organizing and tidying at the end of each line of oral transmission. There’s no reason why the set of stories transmitted down the channel that issued in ‘Matthew’ shouldn’t have been organized according to the Jewish liturgical year. However I would suspect that such an activity is unlikely to have been conducted all at once by a single individual: I’d guess it was more likely a process carried out gradually by that particular church over a period of time. This of course still leaves unsettled the very important question of how much in the individual narratives was simply borrowed from parallel stories in the Hebrew Scriptures and never really happened in real time. There is no space to examine this question properly here. Suffice it to say that some of John Spong’s haggadic interpretations of stories in the Gospels are more convincing than others; the birth narratives, for example, are relatively promising candidates. To take just one instance: the idea that Joseph, the husband of Mary, is a haggadic Joseph derived from Genesis, directed by God in dreams to protect the infant Messiah by migrating to Egypt, as Joseph in Genesis protected the infant nation of Israel, is rather compelling. It doesn’t account for everything in the story, and I dare say that second-century exegetes would have drawn the same parallel in reverse, with the Hebrew Joseph interpreted as a type of the true Joseph to come.
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