Bishop Spong's Articles March 2010

Then a new invitation came. It was connected with my work on the subject of life after death. I had long wondered how I could present this complex and challenging material in a single presentation or even in a packed weekend. It had taken me 250 pages to present it in my book Eternal Life: A New Vision. A major portion of that book was spent outlining why belief in life after death was fading. Only when this dead underbrush was cleared away could I begin to build a new approach to this vast subject. I had to get people to think beyond the dying concepts of reward and punishment, which invariably meant getting them beyond a God understood as the heavenly judge sitting on a throne somewhere above the sky, keeping record books up to date. My studies had led me to the realization that life a fter death had nothing to so with reward and punishment, or heaven and hell, to name their ecclesiastical counterparts. I could not, therefore, use the words "Eternal Life" without having people hear that title in terms of a setting or frame of reference with which I was in total disagreement. So on the lecture circuit, I needed the time to deconstruct the images of the past before I could begin to build in a new way the hope of eternal life — one that was, as the subtitle of my book proclaims, "Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell." My first opportunity to test this came at Sorrento, an Anglican Conference in British Columbia, while the book was still being written. In the summer of 2009, just prior to the book's publication in September, I responded to an invitation to lecture at the Highlands Institute of Philosophy and Religion in the mountains of western North Carolina. It was here, in lectures each Monday and Tuesday for four weeks, that I f irst placed this material into the public arena. Highlands, North Carolina is, however, a resort community, and even though these lectures averaged over 300 people a session, the number of new people who came each week and the numbers who returned home with only a piece of the total picture made any continuity difficult. A conference center where the people signed up for the duration seemed to me to be the better format. I looked forward to such settings with 2010 summer invitations from the Chautauqua Institute in Western New York and the Pacific School of Religion (formerly the Graduate Theological Union) in Berkeley, California. Still I wondered how I could use this material in a single congregation for one day or even a weekend event.

Then, from out of the blue, a new possibility emerged. A Congregational-United Church of Christ in Coral Gables, Florida, a place where I had lectured on two previous visits during the last four years, asked me to explore with them the possibility of becoming what they called a "Theologian in Residence." In this program I would live in their church for a month. It was an intriguing opportunity and we slowly fleshed out the details. This church had an incredible ministry team. The senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Laurinda Hafner, was a gifted leader, bright, competent and secure in herself and now in her third year at this church. The associate minister was the Rev. Guillermo Marquez-Sterling, an extremely able, bilingual Cuban pastor, who has been at this church for more than a decade. His easy pastoral style made him a great "people person." The director of Christian Education, Megan Korallis, who is now preparing for ordination by attending the Florida Center for Theolog ical Studies, saw community building as the focus of her ministry. She was also a visionary who could think outside the box of traditional church life. Finally, there was Pierce Withers, the youth minister, a former Roman Catholic who once pursued a vocation as a monastic, but who now saw youth work as "being with kids where they are" more than getting kids into church to be with him. This talented group had another hidden asset, the senior pastor's husband, Rick Walters, who was himself theologically trained and ordained in the Disciples of Christ. He was also a lawyer who worked at his Cleveland law firm's "Miami branch." He was one who was deeply involved and trusted, although not officially on the staff. He taught the adult class every Sunday morning at this church.

The first thing that was clear was that the job of the "Theologian in Residence" was to support this enormously competent staff and to open up new areas of theological inquiry into which these individuals and this congregation might move. So the shape of the role of the "Theologian in Residence" began to take form. Christine and I would live in a small but comfortable house across the street from the church. A member of the congregation put a car at our disposal so that we could get to the grocery store, or out to dinner when we did not want to cook. The world famous Biltmore Hotel, literally across the street from the Church, offered us memberships in their health club that we both used for an hour a day every day. I was to do eight lectures about the book, one every Monday and Wednesday night for four weeks. Each session was designed to last two hours, with the second hour given to questions and conversation. I was also to preach on two of the four Sundays of the mon th that I was "in residence," and both Christine and I were invited to involve ourselves as deeply as we could in the life of the congregation. The adult class on Sunday morning, led by Rick Walters, was dedicated to being a place of reflection on and response to the lectures — a time to challenge, debate, argue, discuss. With Rick as the leader nothing was out of bounds for them to discuss. Other things would inevitably grow out of our life together.

On the second night of our residency there was a funeral for one of their very active young people, a 20-year-old, just engaged member of the congregation. This young man, Mason Keller, killed in an automobile accident, was clearly loved by his church family and by his numerous friends. We went to that service and embraced the rather amazing level of caring that we found in this congregation. We saw the sensitivity of the clergy to this painful trauma, the witness of both his grieving mother and his fiancée's family. We observed the shock of grief present in his young adult friends, who were embracing mortality, perhaps for the first time in their own history.

The next day we went to a church supper, held regularly every Wednesday night, and prepared by the multitalented Rick Walters. We discovered that a number of people in this congregation who lived alone came to these weekly dinners as the highlight of their social life. On one Friday we attended an Hispanic dinner dance, part of this church's outreach to the Hispanic majority in the Miami area, and we immediately noticed how deeply these people felt and saw themselves not as visitors in someone else's church but as part of this rather special church, completely at home in a place where they deeply belonged. At that dance, we noticed a young woman of Greek heritage dance with more energy that any of the Hispanics. She was also at home. We visited the evening music program, which was started by this Church with the help of the Coral Gables public schools to encourage and to train children and teenagers to play instruments and to participate in both classical ensembles and jazz bands. We were taken by members of this congregation to see the beautiful scenery of the greater Miami area, including the tropical botanic garden, local museums and local sculpture. We rode with another couple in an air boat deep into the Everglades, embracing its wonder as never before. We went to see the Miami Heat play the Indiana Pacers. They won! We went to Little Havana for lunch and enjoyed Cuban cooking. We went to dinner with other couples to a Thai restaurant, a Cuban restaurant and a Miami Irish pub where we ate "corned beef and cabbage," no less.

The lectures were well attended and the audience was maximally consistent. The church was also full on Sunday mornings. The music was fantastic. Some of the choristers were also members of the Miami Gay Men's Chorus. We participated in and celebrated this congregation's ability to raise ten tons of food in one weekend for the homeless of Miami. We saw them organize and carry out effective assistance programs in Haiti. Perhaps most fulfilling of all, we watched this staff and its responsive lay people engage the issues of the day, wrestle with new theological concepts and embrace us first as friends and then even as guides as they began to move into the new territory. Spending a month in this single congregation turned out to be one of the great experiences of our lives. I hope it was for them, also. What had been a new idea became something I yearned to do again. It has now been a month since we left Coral Gables and the fact is that, even now, we still miss our frien ds there.

Anyone interested in learning how the congregation experienced the Theologian in Residence program is invited to contact either Megan Korallis, who coordinated it, or The Rev. Dr. Laurinda Hafner, senior pastor. 

Once you get outside of Sydney's grasp the second group of Anglicans becomes visible. They are made up of enlightened leaders who are held in enormous respect, including Philip Aspinall, the Primate of Australia and the Archbishop of Brisbane, and Roger Herft, a Sri Lankan by birth and now the gifted Archbishop of Perth. Between these two wings of Anglicanism in Australia that are engaged in a tug of war there is the third group, consisting of less courageous bishops and clergy who seek not to offend either side in the perceived hope that they will someday be the compromise candidate in the next primate election. They stand for little and impress few.

Australian Catholics appear to have moved into the pre-Vatican II camp. They have squelched their ablest modern leaders, including Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, whose thorough investigation of and honest response to the clergy abuse scandal in that land caused him to be marginalized until he offered his resignation and went into retirement. He was neither willing nor able to work under the leadership of the current Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell. This Church also fails to appreciate its own questioning priests, treating them with discipline and fear.

The Uniting Church has some incredibly able leaders — Dorothy McMahon, Rex Hunt and Ian Pearson are prime examples — but it also faces the undertow of its Neanderthal wing.

I go into this brief and surely neither exhaustive nor profound summary in order to set the religious scene against which a new phenomenon is growing throughout this "Land of Oz." A group of Christian leaders, drawn from all of these religious bodies but also transcending each of them, has come together to form a progressive Christian network. In 2007 they put on an international conference in Sydney that attracted over 1500 people who, although predominantly Australian, came from many lands. This Conference was called "Common Dreams." I keynoted this initial gathering, much to the discomfort of the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, who by attacking it and me so vigorously provided this conference with maximum publicity. (See my 2007 column on the conference.) He awakened in the people across that land the possibility that there might be far more to Christianity than they had ever imagined. Other outside leaders at that first conference included Brandon Scott, a leading member of the Jesus Seminar in America; David Felten, one of the two Methodist ministers from Arizona who co-created the series "Living the Questions," an enormously popular progressive Christian study initiative modeled on the evangelical Alpha program but based on contemporary and competent biblical scholarship; Fred Plumer, the head of the Center for Progressive Christianity in the United States; along with many others. The echoes of this conference played throughout Australia and raised a banner for a new way to look at Christianity. The killing options that seemed to be publicly available to religiously inclined Australians, namely to embrace a mindless fundamentalism or to give up all religious thought as irrelevant, now saw a third possibility arising. Indeed, the success, the e xcitement and new hope were so strong that the local leaders of this conference immediately began to plan for "Common Dreams II," to be held in Melbourne in 2010. That conference will convene next month, from April 15 to 18.

The theme of Common Dreams II is "Living the Progressive Religion Dream." The international keynoter this year will be the Rev. Gretta Vosper, the pastor of a United Church of Canada congregation in a suburb of Toronto. She is also the head of the Progressive Christian Network of Canada as well as the author of a best-selling book, With or Without God, which broke all records in Canada for a first-time religious writer. Gretta and that book were featured in the cover story in Canada's best-known weekly newsmagazine, Maclean's, the Newsweek of Canada. She has become a lightning rod for fundamentalist/traditionalist anger across Canada. She is a brilliant, articulate, well-read, passionate and caring theologian. In Gretta Vosper, progressive Christianity has entered a new generation.

The next exciting thing that this second Conference has done is to recognize the importance of their own Australian leaders, who are now featured as major presenters. Among them are Rev. Dr. Gregory Jenks, who is today a professor of theology in Queensland, the head of an organization called "Faith Futures Forward" and who is now completing his first major book on the Bible. (Several years ago he broke on to the world scene when he was elected vice-director of the Jesus Seminar in America.) Dr. Val Webb, who lives in New South Wales, is both a biologist and a theologian as well as the wife of a Mayo Clinic doctor in the United States. Her most recent book is entitled Catching Water in a Net: Reimaging the Divine. Another is Rev. Dr. Francis Macnab, the outstanding and longtime senior pastor at the downtown Uniting Church of Melbourne. Dr. Macnab, along with recently retired Uniting Church pastor Rex Hunt of Canberra, has long carried the banner of progressive Chris tianity in Australia. His stature near the end of his creative career has never been higher and his reputation has now traveled far beyond the boundaries of his native Australia.

Also quite visible in this movement are Roman Catholics. One of them is a former Catholic priest named Michael Morwood. He was present at Common Dreams I. Several years ago Michael resigned from the priesthood under pressure from the conservative Catholic hierarchy and is now an author and public lecturer of some note. Featured this year will be the Reverend Peter Kennedy, who is now engaged in a titanic struggle with that same hierarchy. He has been removed from his former parish for not being "traditional," but overwhelmingly the members of his large Catholic congregation have decided to follow him into exile rather than return to the deadly and dying form of orthodoxy from which Father Kennedy had delivered them. These two and other Catholic priests, at once both heroic and lonely in their struggles for theological integrity, now see themselves as leaders in a growing movement and a rising consciousness. Both enhance the leadership and reputation of this progressi ve thrust.

New Zealand is far better represented at Common Dreams II than it was at Common Dreams I. Three "Kiwis" will take leading roles. One is Dr. Lloyd Geering, former professor of Old Testament at Knox Theological College of Otago University in Dunedin and the grandfather of progressive religious thinking in that land. Dr. Geering was put on trial for heresy in the 1960's by the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand in a case covered widely in the press. He was exonerated, but in the process his church began its inevitable slide into obsolescence. Professor James Veitch is the second. He is also a member of the Jesus Seminar and for years was the editor of The Fourth R, the magazine of the Seminar. The new New Zealand leader is the Rev. Glynn Cardy, the rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church in the city of Auckland, which may well be the most exciting Christian church in that country, standing as it does at the center of that major multi-ethnic city and where radical new theological insights are blended with familiar liturgical forms to produce an amazing congregation doing amazing things.

Hopefully, this year's Australian international gathering of religious progressives will once again send shock waves throughout the Christian world, offer hope to millions who see themselves as "believers in exile," and break that strange bottleneck by which modern Christian scholarship is regularly prohibited from being heard in the pews of our churches by fearful hierarchies and local ordained leaders. This conference offers hope that the choice between the closed minds of the fundamentalists and the rejection of all religion by the secular humanists will not be the only choices available to Australians and the rest of us in order for us to be Christians in the 21st century.

Thank you so much for your clear, informative, exciting, liberating insights into the meaning of Christ for Christians living in the twenty-first century. I first heard of you and your ministry in a Charlotte Observer article when you were lecturing in Charlotte last fall. I missed your presentation but was intrigued by the article and have since read five or six of your books. Thank you.

I also wish to express my condolences to you concerning the recent death of your friend Michael Goulder. I have gained much from your treatment of his work in Liberating the Gospels. I have been trying to find copies of his out-of-print books but have not, as yet, been successful.

Will you be speaking in the North Carolina area in the near future? Do you have a schedule of your upcoming speaking engagements?

Dear Professor Ligo,

Thank you for your letter. When I was growing up in Charlotte, N. C., Davidson College was the crown jewel of nearby educational opportunities. I always admired its commitment to academic excellence. What was then a very small town had a mayor named Tom Griffith, who was a dairy farmer and in fact my mother's brother and thus my uncle. Your letter brought back many memories to me.

Thank you also for your condolences on the death of one of my three major mentors in life, Michael Goulder. I will write about his death and his influence on me in a future column. His books are indeed hard to find. I suggest looking at a major theological library.

A schedule of my speaking schedule is available on my column's Web site at all times (view the calendar here). My next venues in North Carolina will be in Hendersonville at a UCC-Congregational Church in late May and early June, and in Highlands on the Monday and Tuesday nights of the first three weeks of August, sponsored there by the Highlands Institute of Theology and Religion. Both are about a three-hour drive from Davidson, but I would love to see you.

In 1991 I spent some time as a scholar-in-residence at Magdalen College of Oxford University while I was working on a book on the birth narratives of Jesus in the New Testament. That book would later be published (1992) under the rather provocative title Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth and the Role of Women in a Male-Dominated Church. At that time the Dean of Magdalen College was the Rev. Dr. Jeffrey John, an able New Testament scholar, who later was appointed Bishop of Reading in the Diocese of Oxford. He was subsequently forced by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to decline the appointment when evangelicals went into apoplexy about the fact that Jeffrey was a gay man. He was later appointed Dean of St. Alban's Cathedral in what surely looked like a guilt offering. The Chaplain at Magdalen College assisting Dr. John was the Reverend Peter Eaton, who is today the Dean of St. John's Episcopal Cathedral in Denver, Colorado. It is a s mall world and a deeply interdependent church.

In my studies on Matthew 1 and 2 and Luke 1 and 2, which are the only places in the New Testament where the virgin birth of Jesus is ever mentioned, I began to probe the incompatible conflicts in the two stories. Matthew has Jesus born in a house in Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph presumably lived, and then he had to develop a story to get Jesus back to Galilee to grow up, since Matthew knew that Jesus was called a Galilean and that he hailed from the village of Nazareth. Luke, however, appears to be quite sure that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth, so he had to develop a story to explain just how it happened in a day when travel was very rare that Jesus was actually born ninety-four miles away in Bethlehem, the city of David, where Jewish tradition assumed that the messiah had to be born. The taxation ordered when Quirinius was governor of Syria, which according to Luke required people to return to their ancestral home, was thus Luke's literary gimmick. The fact that Q uirinius did not become Governor of Syria until 6 or 7 CE, by which time Jesus would have been eleven years old, did not appear to pose a problem for Luke, who was not a careful historian.

There were other strange differences. Matthew gives us a guiding star and wise men; Luke gives us angels in a heavenly host and the shepherds. The stories do not fit, though we force a unified narrative form on them in our Christmas pageants and it is primarily from that source that most people get their rather confusing impressions of Jesus' nativity.

In that study process I met with Jeffrey John early in my stay to ask him to direct me to some resources to further my work. He startled me with his rather matter of fact statement that the birth stories were nothing but "haggadic midrash." I wondered why this subject should be so settled for him when it was not for me. He then said, "Have you never read Michael Goulder?" I had not only not read him, I had never heard of him, but got the sense that I should have done both. That day I went to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and began to read Midrash and Lection in Matthew and The Evangelists' Calendar, both by Michael Goulder. There I learned that "haggadic midrash" meant that these were Jewish stories once told about other people in the Hebrew Scriptures now being retold about Jesus of Nazareth. The story of the wise men, for example, was a play on Isaiah 60. The manger in Luke comes out of Isaiah 1. The swaddling clothes were borrowed from the Wisdom of Solomon. The story of Zechariah and Elizabeth having John the Baptist in their old age was the Abraham and Sarah story being recycled. On and on the insights exploded in my brain like 200-watt light bulbs popping. Michael led me to see that the Jesus of history had been so thoroughly wrapped inside the Jewish scriptures that one could never really understand the gospels until one began to read them through Jewish eyes. He suggested that these gospels had been preached before they had been written and they reflected the presence of synagogue life at the center of the Christian movement during the first forty or so years of Christian history. The startling realization finally emerged that Mark, the first gospel to be written, and both Matthew and Luke, which were based on Mark, were all basically liturgical documents designed to portray Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish Scripture and expectations. It was the liturgical life of the synagogue, not remembered history, which organized the Christian gospel writing tradition, which means that we misread the Jesus story completely when we pretend that these stores are literal. That was my first learning from this man. Michael Goulder's amazing insight had literally given me a new doorway into the gospels. I began to follow this lead into a deeper and deeper understanding of the origins of the Christian story. In time I read everything that Michael had written and still believe that his two-volume, heavily footnoted and academic commentary on Luke, entitled Luke: A New Paradigm, is the best work on Luke that I have ever read. In my study of the New Testament and its origins in this present series on the origins of the Bible my readers will be introduced to things I learned first from Michael Goulder. I am deep in his debt.

Michael Goulder started me down a path that I have walked now for almost twenty years. His great teacher was Austin Farrer and Michael in turn became my great teacher. No, I did not agree with him on everything. No student ever does that, no matter how great the teacher is. The fact remains, however, that three of my books, Born of a Woman, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? and Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes, were all written directly under the influence of Michael Goulder's scholarship. In the preface to Liberating the Gospels I acknowledged his influence on my life with a public tribute.

After I was introduced to his work by Jeffrey John, my wife and I contacted Michael and went to visit him at the University of Birmingham, where he was a Professor of New Testament. Over the course of years, we saw him many times. His story was an unusual one. He was both a priest and a scholar in the early years of his career. So distinguished was he as a priest that he was actually given serious consideration for appointment as the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong. His life, however, turned more and more away from the parish church and into the world of academia, where he was invited to do significant lectureships in a number of the world's most prestigious universities. In 1981, to the surprise of many who knew him, Michael renounced his ordination vows and declared himself to be "a non-aggressive atheist." Yet he continued to teach New Testament, becoming the only atheist New Testament professor that I know of in the world. He also continued to publish his work. The church hierarchy, not knowing what to do with his newly minted atheism, simply marginalized him and then ignored him. I, however, found him a doorway into the gospels more profound than I had known then or have discovered since.

The last time I saw him was when he came to America to lead a seminar on his work in the late 1990's conducted at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The event was moderated by Krister Stendahl of Harvard. Some of his severest critics had been invited to challenge him at that seminar, including John Kloppenburg of Canada, probably the premier "Q" document scholar in the world. The "Q" document, for those not familiar with that term, is made up of the parts of Matthew and Luke that are identical or nearly identical and that thus appear to have a common source, but which do not come from Mark. Supporters of the "Q" hypothesis postulate that this source was an early collection of Jesus sayings that not only antedated Matthew and Luke, since they both appear to have used it, but some even suggest that it may have even antedated Mark. The "Q" hypothesis holds the allegiance of the majority of American New Testament scholars and it has played a significant role in the work o f the Jesus Seminar. Michael, whose work challenges the "Q" hypothesis deeply by suggesting that Matthew had expanded Mark in what people think are the "Q" passages and that Luke had access to both Mark and Matthew, thus accounting for the non-Marcan similarities without postulating another lost document. The debate was vigorous, but Michael handled his critics with grace and ease. He presented his theories cogently and well. That seminar had another positive effect, namely it introduced Michael's work to another generation of American New Testament scholars and thus reinvigorated the current debate. When we parted from that gathering I had a chance to thank him for what his work has meant to me. I am not sure that Michael was ever comfortable with praise. He certainly did not want disciples, but I did learn from him and I have tried to take his insights and see if they can help me go to places that Michael never imagined.

I salute Michael Goulder today as one who taught me much about how to study the scriptures. In the integrity of his own personal value system his scholarship led him to proclaim himself an atheist and yet I, as a Christian, can honestly attest to the fact that his work illumined the gospels for me and called me ever deeper into my Christian commitment.

Rest in Peace Michael Douglas Goulder. I am glad I knew you.

I have read everything I have come across from you since the late 80's and am grateful for your insights. I remain a faithful member of the Uniting Church in Sydney. I was speaking with a friend the other day who has left the Uniting Church to join a church that specializes in communicating with dead people. I know his wife lost a son (from a previous marriage) to a drug overdose and it seems to give her comfort. But really so sad. Others seem to base their faith on convincing themselves that they are speaking a special language. I remember a visiting evangelist when I was living in Finland saying that his "tongue" had been translated as being an Ethiopian priestly dialect. Strange that God would choose that rather than, say, French — or, if God really wanted a challenge, Finnish. Am I being too cynical? I have not read anything I can recall by you about such "holy gifts" as communing with the dead and speaking in tongues. Do you have a comment?

Dear Andrew,

No doctor should diagnose without seeing the patient and no columnist should pontificate on a personal situation about which he or she has no firsthand knowledge. So let me speak not to your example, but to the issues you raise in general.

First, there is a fine line sometimes between religious expressions and mental illness. Sometimes religion provides the setting that makes symptoms of mental illness seem acceptable.

Second, religion does not escape the activity that we call manipulation. The claim that one is actually speaking in an "Ethiopian priestly dialect" sounds really screwy to me. Is there a source to which anyone could go to check out that claim? I doubt it. So I think you call it what it is — a manipulative lie.

Third, there is a deep human need, experienced acutely in severe grief situations, that comfort is found in convincing yourself that the object of your grief is not really deceased, but available for you for continual conversations. Psychiatrists deal with this frequently.

As a pastor one seeks to walk with a bereaved person, but when the grief turns into a severe mental psychosis, it is time to seek professional help.

I am not saying that this is true in the case of your friend. I am saying that the symptoms you describe are filled with psycho-pathology.

It is amazing, for example, how people use the Bible to justify their cultural prejudices, totally unaware of their own ignorance. These prejudices are then re-enforced by the assumption that their culturally blended knowledge is actually biblical. Of interest is the fact that most people learn the content of the Christmas story not from reading the Bible, but by watching Christmas pageants over the years. In these pageants, poetic or dramatic license is regularly practiced. People are therefore amazed to discover that only two of the gospels (Matthew and Luke) include birth stories and that these two contradict each other in many places. How many people know, for example, that in the texts of the Bible there are no camels in the story of the wise men, no donkey on which Mary rode to Bethlehem while she is "great with child," no stable in which Christ was born and no animals that populated that non-existent stable?

Moving deeper into the Christian story, there are no "seven last words" spoken by Jesus from the cross. Mark and Matthew record only one saying from the cross and that is what we call "the cry of dereliction:" "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Luke omits that saying as far too human to be spoken by "the Son of God," but then proceeds to add three of his own creation. John then omits all of these previously recorded sayings and creates three totally new ones never heard before. Finally, almost every detail of the Easter story in each of the four gospels is contradicted in the writings of another gospel. The most important thing to embrace, however, is that, in regard to the Bible, the ignorance is so profound that most people do not even know that they do not know. Part of what I am seeking to do in this series on the gospels is to penetrate this culturally imposed fog so that we today might hear the message of each of the four gospel writers in the way each wa s heard by the first listeners to their words.

In order to accomplish this task we first need to dismiss many of the assumptions that we bring to our hearing of these gospel narratives. The first and most important of these is that the gospels are not biographies of Jesus. They are not eyewitness accounts of what Jesus actually did, nor are they tape recordings of the things that Jesus literally said. I shall never forget being on a late night talk show some years ago when on a media tour with the publication of my book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. My host that evening was Tom Snyder, who was operating out of a studio in Burbank, California. As the interview progressed, I suggested that the four gospels in the New Testament were generally dated no earlier than the year 70 CE and no later that the year 100. Tom, a lapsed Ro man Catholic, bestirred himself and said, "Now, wait a minute, Bishop! I just got out my short pencil and began to do some figuring. If the gospels were written that late then none of them could have been written by eyewitnesses." "That is correct, Tom," I responded. "None of them claims to have been written by an eyewitness except the Fourth Gospel, but no reputable scholar today thinks that John Zebedee actually wrote this book." John Zebedee was described in the book of Acts (4:13) as an "uneducated man," while the gospel that bears John's name is filled with long, complex theological discourses, which require enormous sophistication. Finally, this gospel was written in Greek, not in Aramaic, which was, so far as we know, the only language that John Zebedee could speak. Stunned, Tom Snyder said, "That is not what the nuns taught me in parochial school!" I enquired as to what they had taught him, and he replied "They said the disciples of Jesus followed him around, w riting down everything he said and that this is how we got the gospels!" Amused at how unlearned a grown and rather worldly-wise man could nonetheless be, I asked, "Tom, did the nuns also tell you that the disciples used spiral bound notebooks and ballpoint pens?" At that moment, the dawn of a new realization swept across my host's face.

The facts are that all four of the gospels were written by the second generation and, in the case of the Fourth Gospel, maybe even by the third generation of Christians. The gospels were written in Greek, a language in which neither Jesus nor the disciples were fluent. They were also written with no punctuation and without even being divided into chapters, paragraphs, verses or sentences. In the style of that day they did not even include a space between words, just line after line of letters. At the end of a line on whatever they used for a page there would be no dash to warn the reader that a word was being broken and it would continue on the next line. There were no capital letters. All punctuation, all separation of words, all divisions into verses, paragraphs and chapters would be imposed on these texts hundreds of years later.

How much of the Jesus story was known before each gospel was written is hard to determine, but the probability is that for most people the first time they heard a gospel being read was the first time they had heard most of the Jesus stories that they contain.

Prior to the writing of the earliest gospel of Mark, all that the people knew about Jesus was whatever had been conveyed in vignettes through preaching and the oral tradition, and the high probability is that the setting for this hearing was in the synagogue at Sabbath day worship. This means that the same story might be used on different occasions with new details added or old details deleted, making our attempt to find historical accuracy in them simply not possible. When one multiplies this fact by a period of 40 to 70 years, the dimension of the problem we face in creating hard history begins to come into view. Perhaps the best we can do is to demonstrate when the various stories about Jesus entered the written tradition.

In order to understand how the first gospel, Mark, was initially received, we need to embrace the fact that before Mark wrote, the written details about the crucifixion of Jesus were contained in one line in Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "He died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." That is all Paul said, and thus that is all Christians had before the early 70's. Mark thus introduced such narratives as the account of the last supper on the night before the crucifixion, the story of the Garden of Gethsemane, the account of Judas' betrayal at midnight, the role of the Sanhedrin in determining Jesus' guilt, the denial of Peter, the flight of the disciples, the trial before Pilate, the freeing of Barabbas, the torture with the crown of thorns and the story of the thieves crucified with him. None of these details were written prior to Mark.

Of the burial of Jesus all that was known in writing before Mark was, again, what Paul had written: "He was buried." That was it. Mark thus introduced the story of the tomb, the character of Joseph of Arimathea and the various details of his burial. In regard to the story of Easter all that the Christians had in writing before Mark was found, once again, in a brief Pauline narrative: "He rose again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures." Paul goes on to relate that Jesus "appeared" to Cephas, the twelve, 500 brethren at once, James, the apostles and finally to Paul. No detail of any of these appearances, however, was given and even the word "appeared" is open to a variety of meanings. Paul counts himself as one of those to whom the risen Christ "appeared." Since Paul's conversion was some one to six years after the crucifixion, an appearance to Paul could hardly have been physical. Please notice that before Mark wrote in the early 70's, there was also no a ccount of an empty tomb, no angels, no visit of the women and no messenger to announce the resurrection. Mark added these details as the tradition unfolded.

There were other things in the Jesus story that Mark appears to have introduced for the first time. Mark is the first person to tell us about the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist and the first person to associate the story of Jesus with miracles. The idea that Jesus was a teacher of note or that he taught in parables was still another Markan-introduced theme. When we embrace these things, we begin to understand something of how the Christian faith evolved and how dramatic an event it must have been to have the first gospel appear in the 8th decade of the Christian era.

Next week we will begin to put the message of Mark's gospel into the context of its first-century Jewish world. It looks quite different from the way we read it today, but even if it is a little-known story, I believe we will find it to be a beautiful one.

Dear Ann,

The two would be close, but I do not think that human beings should ever try to define God. Panentheism is one more human attempt at an explanation.

Panentheism suggests that God is experienced in and through all things, but tries to distinguish itself from the claims made by Pantheism that God is identical with all things. Panentheism was designed to assert "the beyond" nature of the transcendent.

My sense is that all human beings can do is to talk about how we believe we have experienced God, which is quite different from who or what God is. Horses cannot, because of the limits of their horse consciousness, describe what it means to be human. I wonder why any of us think that human beings, because of the limits of our human consciousness, can describe what it means to be God.

So I am not drawn to any words that purport to define God. I am deeply drawn to God but am content to experience that reality, not to define it. So Theism, Pantheism, Panentheism are of little value to me. Thanks for enquiring.