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Jesus Seminar Challenging Biblical Fundamentalism by Seeking the Influence of the Synagogue in the Formation of the Synoptic Gospels1 J S Spong2 (University of South Africa) ABSTRACT Challenging Biblical Fundamentalism by Seeking the Influence of the Synagogue in the Formation of the Synoptic Gospels Taking cues from Michael Goulder’s book Midrash and Lection in Matthew the author argues a case for taking the context of the synagogue seriously as the place were the story about Jesus was recalled and passed on for a minimum of forty years. By using primarily the gospel Mark as frame of reference he illustrates how this context left its mark not only on the gospel of Mark but on the other two synoptic gospels as well. In the synagogue the Hebrew Scriptures were “wrapped around” the story of Jesus. Readers should therefore not read the gospels as historical accounts of his life but as interpretations of his life and acts. A historical-literal reading of the synoptic gospels distorts the message which the authors tried to convey about Jesus. 1 INTRODUCTION I am passionate about the necessity of reforming Christianity. I rejoice that I find a similar desire in South Africa. My passion for a new reformation comes out of two things: first, I am committed to Jesus Christ as the center of my faith tradition and second, I am disillusioned with what is currently happening in the world of institutional Christian religion. I look at the Roman Catholic Church, my sister communion, and find it marching headlong into yesterday. One cannot chart the 1 The author read this paper on Sunday 28 October 2007 at the University of South Africa. It was deliberately planned to coincide with Protestant churches celebration of the Reformation on the last Sunday of October. It was decided to keep to the wording of the paper as it was delivered on that day and not to adjust it to a more elevated style normally required for scholarly articles. 2 Research Associate, Department of Old Testament & Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Department of New Testament, University of South Africa. ISSN 1609-9982 = VERBUM ET ECCLESIA JRG 30(1)2009 243 path this church has taken in its journey during the last sixty years, from the great ecumenical Pope, John XXIII, in successive backward steps to Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II to Benedict XVI and not grieve for a church in full retreat from reality. This is a church that has effectively silenced its scholars3, that pretends that it possesses unchallengeable truth in propositional form and that reveals in a thousand ways that it no longer lives in this century4. I look at what is happening in Protestantism. Its evangelical side is becoming more and more fundamentalist, more and more strident and angry, and more and more disturbing about the way it uses the Bible to enforce its dated prejudices5. The moderate or progressive side of Protestantism is at the same time shrinking into non-existence as people drop out of all religious involvement because less and less of it sounds credible. They become citizens of the secular society. The broad, highly educated Protestant churches that we once called “mainline” are quite frankly withering on the vine. The more these traditionalists and evangelicals define Christianity, the more those who are not comfortable with that definition join the “Church Alumni Association”. They generally are not bold enough to challenge the traditionalists and the fundamentalists openly, nor are they generally informed enough to articulate new possibilities courageously. The days of hazy, weak commitment to a socially acceptable religious pattern are over. I look at my own Anglican Communion, torn as it is over the issue of homosexuality, about which its leaders seem to know almost 3 I refer to its removal of Hans Küng from his position as Catholic theologian in Tübingen; its harassment of the Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx; its removal from his tenured position with the Catholic University in Washington, D C of Charles Curran, and its silencing of Matthew Fox. 4 Benedict XVI recently reasserted that there is only one true religion, Christianity, and only one true expression of Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church. This same mentality also permeates his book Jesus of Nazareth. 5 American evangelicals like Albert Mohler, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell were steadfast in claiming inerrancy for every word of the Bible and then using those claims to justify an extremely right-wing political agenda, including being anti-woman, anti-homosexual, pro-corporal punishment, pro- capital punishment and even pro-war. 244 CHALLENGING BIBLICAL FUNDAMENTALISM nothing6. There is little to inspire anyone about a church battling to preserve its ill-informed homophobia. Somehow, the news has not gotten to Anglican leaders that no reputable person in the scientific or medical community believes that sexual orientation is something human beings choose, and so, in either profound ignorance or in weakness of character, various representatives of this church’s leadership tear apart this once broad and lively communion, using the literal Bible as their weapon of choice. What does one do then, when one is deeply drawn to Jesus and simultaneously deeply repelled by what is happening to religion in the organized Christian Church? My personal response to this dilemma was to take a page from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s haunting call for the development of a religionless Christianity that emanated from his Nazi prison cell in 1944 (Bonhoeffer 1971). Bonhoeffer was searching for a Christianity that could transcend and escape the boundaries of religion. He was the inspiration for my book Jesus for the Non-Religious (Spong 2007). It was and is my intention in that book to lift Jesus out of the religious patterns of the past and to project Him and his message beyond the confines of organized religion that threatens today to destroy Him. 2 A RADICAL CHANGE Traditional Christianity is dying primarily because it still pretends that it can ignore the thought revolution of the last 500 years. That revolution, I would argue, began with Copernicus in the 16th century and was carried on by Kepler and Galileo in the 17th century, who introduced us to the vastness of both time and space (Scholder 1990). It was successful in destroying the three-tiered universe on the basis of which the Bible was written. This new angle of vision made stories like the Tower of Babel in Genesis, the pouring out of the sky of heavenly bread called manna on the starving children of Israel during the wilderness years of the Exodus, the star in the heavens that first announced Jesus’ birth and then traveled so slowly that wise men could keep up with it and the story of Jesus’ cosmic ascension to return to the God above the sky, totally meaningless in any literal reading. 6 A recent report to the Church of England from the Royal College of Psychiatrists on Human Sexuality made this very clear. ISSN 1609-9982 = VERBUM ET ECCLESIA JRG 30(1)2009 245 That revolution in our thinking about the universe was followed by the work of Isaac Newton, especially in his masterpiece entitled The Principia, where, building on the work of Galileo, he rendered nonsensical many of the things the Bible called miracles (Olson 2004). Supernatural intervention does not fit well with natural law and so this thought challenged both the way Christians defined God and the way Christians understood prayer. Next Charles Darwin’s insights radically challenged the way Christians have told the Jesus story. Darwin suggested that we were not created instantaneously in God-like perfection, only to fall into sin by a willful act of disobedience, as the book of Genesis, read literally, seems to suggest. We were created as single cells and then evolved over billions of years into increasing complexity, into consciousness and even into self-consciousness. There was no fall, as Christians have maintained for centuries, not even metaphorically. There was no original perfection from which to sink into original sin and thus there is no need for an intervening divine rescue to restore us to that status which we have never possessed. We rather are creatures evolving toward a destiny we have never achieved, a new and whole humanity. This insight makes the Protestant “mantra”, “Jesus died for my sins” and the Catholic understanding of the Mass as the liturgical re-enactment of “the sacrifice of the cross” where the consequences of the fall were overcome meaningless and all but nonsensical. 3 THE BIBLE AND CHRISTIANITY IN THE TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY In this presentation I will focus on what I see as the crucial issue facing Christianity in the 21st century. My aim is to challenge, quite specifically, the way Christians continue to use the Bible in both public discourse and in church liturgies. Almost every part of the Christian Church claims that in some sense its theology and its ethics are “Bible based”. Many of those making this claim actually persist in referring to the Bible as “The Word of God”. They condemn anyone who is not willing to treat their literally understood Bible as the final authority in every debate. They even attack and seek to marginalize those biblical scholars who refuse to countenance their improper use of scripture. This has produced the strange anomaly where Christian scholars are called heretics by Christian people. Can anyone imagine such an attitude in the field of medicine or any other branch of human knowledge? Sadly, in these activities the literal- 246 CHALLENGING BIBLICAL FUNDAMENTALISM minded Christians assume that they are the ones who are defending the scriptures and, even more startling, that they are even reading the gospels in the way the gospel writers intended them to be read.
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