Part Two
Introducing
the New Testament
to the 21st Century Reader
Chapter
Eight
Introduction to the
New Testament
An ABC Documentary showed the film: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During Hitler’s regime in
John Macquarrie writes
about Bonhoeffer:
"As Bonhoeffer sees it, the world has come of age. In the modern secularized era, we can no
longer say that 'God will fix it somehow'
It is also useless to look for God in the gaps, for God is not to be
found at the boundary of life, but at its centre. ... The Christian faith must
be communicated in a non-religious or worldly way; and this would be done
primarily by living for others, which again means conforming to Christ. Since
the church has usually been concerned to preserve itself, it too must lose
itself for others, and learn the cost of discipleship. Christians, as they live in the world and
give themselves for the world, will have their secret discipline in which to
look beyond the world to the transcendent and the ultimate for the nourishment
of this life. (Macquarrie
p.332)
I think, Spong has also
taken up Bonhoeffer's challenge in his works, a
theology for people who 'have come of age', for mature Christians. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church:
"I
could not talk to you as I talk to people who have the Spirit; I had to talk to
you as though you belonged to this world, as children in the Christian
faith. I had to feed you milk, not solid
food, because you were not ready for it." (1 Cor.3:1-2)
Were these Corinthians
bogged down in their faith by merely seeing things in a literal sense, rather
than looking beyond and seeing the spiritual side of life? Why were they immature? And what was the milk Paul fed them with? I
believe that Spong offers us a type of solid
food, a theology for the 21st century.
In his understanding there is no conflict between science and religion,
and the latest discovery in whatever discipline can throw new light on the New
Testament. I am particularly indebted to
his comments on the Synoptic Gospels.
A new approach to Interpreting the N.T.
Bonhoeffer already suggested in
1944 to read the New Testament on the basis of the Old. He wrote:
"The
Church stands not where human powers give out, on the borders, but in the
centre of the village. That is the way
it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament
far too little on the basis of the Old.
The outward aspect of this religionless Christianity, the form it takes,
is something to which I am giving much thought." (Letters p.93)
With this in mind, Spong
thinks that the old division into two opposites of conservative versus liberal,
fundamentalist versus the 'Western scientific world view' is no longer valid or
meaningful. Christianity was not born as
a Western religion, but as an off-shoot of Judaism. A Western mentality has been imposed on this
Middle Eastern understanding or revelation of God. The whole Bible is a Jewish book: "It was written by people who thought as
Jews, embraced the world as Jews, and understood reality as Jews." (Lib.p.18)
In
the first part we said that the Old Testament Law or Torah formed the basis of all other writings. If this is to become also the basis for the
New Testament, we need to see the Law as Paul saw it, when he wrote to the
Corinthians: "Where the Spirit of
the Lord is present, there is freedom."
(2 Cor.3:17)
Chris
Budden, the General Secretary of the
"When our obedience
to God is shaped by books and codes of law we are unwilling followers, but when
the Spirit enters our lives, our deepest desire is to serve God, and it is love
alone that binds us and we are free."
I would urge you to
approach the New Testament with that freedom that is bound by love only. For far too long we have been influenced by a
Western mentality that emphasises an external world view, which can be interpreted
in time, space and objectivity (on that which is there and can be measured, too
often with a Dollar sign!). It tries to
answer: is it true, did it really happen? when in fact
the biblical writers tried to express meaning or a spiritual aspect of
life. Western mentality can no longer
cope with miracles, magic, demons, and angels in the Bible. If we are disturbed by these, we are asking
the wrong questions.
If
we, however, step out of our Western mentality and try to understand the New
Testament with Jewish thinking, we will be asking, ‘what does it mean'? and 'why was this story chosen and what new insight does it
convey'? Spong comments:
"When they
confronted what they believed was the presence of God in a contemporary moment,
they interpreted this moment by applying to it similar moments in their sacred
stories of the Old Testament." (Lib.p.19)
"So the Gospels were not descriptions of what happened
or what Jesus said or did; they were interpretations of who Jesus was, based on
their ancient and sacred heritage." (Lib.p.20)
Spong writes his book Liberating the Gospels from this
perspective, convinced that the God met in Jesus is real. It will require that we surrender our
religious security system of the past.
He offers instead an "exhilarating insecurity of a journey without
boundaries or goals" towards a life-giving and real God he found in Jesus
of Nazareth. (Lib.p.21) I am presenting
this view here without any critique, not because I believe that it is
faultless, but as an example of a creative mind to make the gospels come alive
for us in the 21st century. I
firmly believe in Gamaliel’s words: “If it is of God, it will survive, if it is
not, it will disappear” (Acts
The Foundation of the
Christian faith
It is generally agreed
that the foundation of the Christian faith goes back to what we know as the
resurrection experiences of the early disciples. But what was the resurrection, or what does it mean?
Some
doctrines of resurrections can be found in Egyptian and Babylonian mythology,
which celebrated each year at spring the return of nature from death to life. We also find an early concept of resurrection
in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones (37:11-14); in Isaiah 26:19 a coming back to
life, whereas Daniel (12:2,13) is the first to write
about a rising to life at the end of time.
In Jesus’ days the Pharisees and most other Jews believed in a
resurrection, only the Sadducees did not (see Mark
As
mentioned earlier, the followers of Jesus had an experience after Jesus died, "a mystery so rich that they had
to use a variety if images in their attempts to express it." (Charpentier p.33) - a religious
experience no word could express fully.
The image they borrowed from the Old Testament is resurrection.
When Paul says: "Christ was raised to life three
days later, as written in the Scriptures", (1 Cor.15:4) this was "the
original invitation to seek the truth of Jesus in symbol and story. We seek it there still today. For it is not the
description of the experience of Easter, but the experience itself that beckons us." (Lib.p.309) The symbol is the story of the resurrection,
as we find it in the Gospels.
But there are other ways the disciples expressed
their experience:
"Jesus
is Lord" (Rom.10:9). or:
"God
has exalted him" (Phil.2:9);
"Christ
the first-born of the dead" (Col.1:18);
"Put
to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit" (1 Pet.3:18).
All these different ways
of describing their experiences prompted the disciples to claim that Jesus is
the long-expected Messiah. As long as
they stayed in
But Christianity didn’t remain a small sect within
Judaism in
The Formation of the New
Testament
In recent times
theologians have come up with several explanations as to how the New Testament
was formed, or why it developed or evolved.
In theology this is called Christology,
the definition of the nature of Jesus or why his followers came to see him as
the Christ, the Messiah.
The
first is Reginald Fuller. In 1965 he wrote Foundations of N.T. Christology, which offers three distinct
environments in which Christology had developed (from (1) to (3):
(1)
Palestinian Judaism, mainly in
(2) Hellenistic
Judaism, in places where people worshipped in Synagogues using the Greek
version of the Old Testament. They gave Jesus
titles like: Christos
(in an eschatological [end-time] sense); Son of God (in a Messianic
sense); Son of David; Son of Man, who would come “on the clouds of
heaven, one like a son of man” (Dan.7:13 [Jerusalem Bible] and in an
eschatological sense in Acts 1:9); kyrios or adhonai (Lord,
the authority of a superior over an inferior, which was used in the Septuagint
for Yahweh, but no divinity intended yet);
Son of God; Wisdom (sofia;) Logos;
High Priest. These
titles applied to the resurrected Jesus who is now reigning as Christ.
(3)
Hellenistic Gentile environment,
consisting of Gentiles who had converted to Christianity. Here the divine aspect of Jesus was fully
developed. The titles from Hellenistic
Judaism were given divine honour, in the same way as emperors were addressed as
kyrios for
instance, which meant that they were divine.
These titles were then applied also to Jesus saying that he was a divine
being. The concept of his pre-existence
(Jn.1:1) was also added, together with the “incarnation” (coming down from
heaven, becoming man etc.).
Jewish opposition to
Christianity began when some Hellenists (Greek speaking Jews) questioned some
of the Jewish practices, like circumcision, food laws and others around the
early 70s ce.
By that time this sect had already spread to most Jewish Synagogues
scattered all over the
The second theologian is
Charpentier,
who wrote How to Read the New Testament
in 1981.
He suggests that there are also three stages in the formation of the
New Testament, but a more simplified version of Fuller. (p.10-11):
(1) Jesus of
(2)
The early Christian Communities (not
really a church yet, as they remained at first part of Judaism) (30 - 70 ce.
including all of Paul's writings and Mark's Gospel).
(3)
The writings of the rest of the New
Testament material post 70 ce. from
the destruction of the
The third theologian is Geering, who
offers nine layers of belief in his Is
Christianity going anywhere?,
in 2004. He begins with the top layer,
like an archaeologist, in the reverse order how it would have accumulated:
“I shall take you on a
journey backwards in time. We shall
remove, layer by layer, the growing beliefs that gradually turned Jesus into
the Christ figure worshipped in the churches.” (p.22-25)
(9)
The Dogmatic Layer, citing the
Nicene Creed of 381 ce. where
Jesus is described as: “the only begotten Son of God, very God of very God, by
whom all things were made, who came down from heaven and was made man”.
(8) found in John’s Gospel, written about 100 ce. which says about Jesus:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God. All things were made through
him. In him was life …And the Word
became flesh and dwelt among us.”
(7)
Luke’s genealogy (
(6) Matthew’s
genealogy (1:1-17) goes back only to Abraham, the father of the Jews.
(5) Mark’s
story of Jesus’ baptism (1:9-13) “the spirit descended on Jesus like a dove
and a voice came from heaven, ‘you are my beloved son; with you I am well
pleased”. Jesus’ divinity came by
adoption.
(4) Mark’s
teaching mission of Jesus after which Peter
declares: ‘You are the Messiah’. (
(3) Mark’s
story of Jesus’ death, after which the centurion (a gentile) declared Jesus
as: ‘This man was really the Son of God’. (
(2) Acts
preserved an after the Resurrection
story in
(1) Paul’s
teaching, reflected in his writings between 48-55 ce. Geering comments:
“The man who has had most influence in shaping Christianity and in determining
the framework of all Christian dogma never met the historical Jesus”.
(p.25) Paul himself writes: “All I want
to know is Christ and the power of his resurrection” (Phil.3:10
(0) Rock bottom, as it were, is represented by
the Christians in Jerusalem. “They included the original disciples, and
also James the blood brother of Jesus.” (Geering
p.22) Most recent studies have found
that in this period some earlier Gospels were circulating, such as the
“Q”-document (later incorporated in Matthew and Luke), and the Gospel of
Thomas. These are a collection of the
sayings of Jesus. They do not mention
anything about his life and resurrection.
“This suggests that after his death, the chief focal point of attention
was not on his life but on his teaching… It was only some time after his death,
and chiefly under the influence of Paul, that the initial emphasis on Jesus as
teacher was displaced by increasing interest in Jesus as the crucified Messiah,
the Lord and the divine Son of God.” (Geering p.26)
Introduction
to the Gospels
When we turn to the Gospels in general, Spong
believes that the God we meet in Jesus is real, and that by approaching the
Scriptures through a Jewish lens, saving reality can be illumined and can still
be entered. (Lib.p.20) And so he invites
us to "place on your eyes a Jewish lens and open your mind and heart to
Jewish understandings of that which is real, and come with me as I seek to
enter anew that Jewish book that the world has traditionally called the New Testament."
(Lib.p.21)
It
is important to realise that Jesus never wrote any book or letter or parable,
and that the first Gospel did not come to be written down much before the year
70 ce. When I went to college in 1966, we still learnt
that the Gospels tell us something about the life of Jesus, though they were
not considered to be biographies. We
learnt that there were different sources which the Gospel writers used. The first three Gospels were known as the Synoptics, taking a common view.
Mark's
came first, writing for, or perhaps in the Church of Rome. It was said to be associated with the Apostle
Peter. Mark put together remembered
sayings of Jesus, or drew on written material that had been circulating among
the churches.
Matthew came second, writing
probably to the church at
Luke,
the third to be written, and Acts, were by a Gentile Christian, who was most
likely associated with Paul. He wrote to
a church, whose members were Gentiles, probably in
We
then learnt about Form Criticism,
which had developed early in the 20th century. Theologians had thought that
many sayings and parables of Jesus had been circulating in the churches in
separate units (forms) before they were eventually collected by the three
Gospel writers and written down into the books we know today.
Forty
years later, scholarship had evolved further.
It moved away from the idea that there were any biographical details or
a history of Jesus in the first three Gospels.
Particularly Spong saw them as interpretations of the Jesus event in a
very Jewish way. He said:
"They wrote in the
timelessness of valid religious experiences.
So the Gospels were not descriptions of what happened or what Jesus said
or did, they were interpretations of who Jesus was, based on their ancient and
sacred heritage. That was the only way
they could understand and process the God presence they found in Jesus that was
so powerful." (Lib. p.20)
Spong now questions
whether there was a common source "Q" which both Matthew and Luke
used, contrary to Geering. Spong believes that Matthew created
"Q". (Lib.p.107) This point may not be accepted by the more
conservative theologians, though. But
many people have wondered why there are so many stories in the Gospels that
remind us of similar ones in the Old Testament.
Spong asks: "Was it accidental, coincidental, or have we missed a
vital link?" In search for that
vital missing link, Spong followed Bacon, Farrer, and Goulder,
(Lib.p.89-92) who had seen earlier a block of teaching in Matthew, and came to
the conclusion that this Gospel was written with the purpose of providing the
early Christian communities with a lectionary reading for each Sunday of the
year.
Between
writing his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism and five
years later Liberating the Gospels, Spong
had changed his mind about the purpose of the Gospels. He now emphasises that all the Gospels are
Jewish books:
“Recognising this, we
begin to face the realisation that we will never understand the Gospels until
we learn how to read them as Jewish books.
They are written in the midrashic
style of the Jewish story teller, 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". For instance: “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 story in Josh.3. (compare with
Ex.14)”. (Lib.p.36)
Similarly, Elijah (2
Kings.2:8) and Elisha (2 Kings.2:14) parted the
waters of the
Another
example is the story of the
"Jews filtered every
new experience through the corporately remembered history of their people, as
that history had been recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures of the past."
(Lib.p.37)
This is the first key to understand the mystery
of the spiritual experience of the Gospel writers, claims Spong. He is convinced that we will never understand
the Gospels until we learn to read them as Jewish books, as the sub-title of
his book makes clear: Reading the Bible
with Jewish eyes.
"The Gospels are Jewish attempts to
interpret in a Jewish way the life of a Jewish man in whom the transcendence of
God was believed to have been experienced in a fresh and powerful
encounter." (Lib.p.20)
A second key is 'the one
year ministry of Jesus'. Former
commentators always said that Jesus' ministry lasted only one year, although
John has three years. Spong sees Matthew
as lectionary reading material, with a reading for each Sunday of the year, in
line with the Jewish lectionary of the Old Testament. This would explain quite persuasively why the
ministry of Jesus appears to have lasted only for one year, as we have it in
the Synoptics.
Thirdly,
why is there an ever increasing anti-Jewish bias evident in the Gospels,
particularly in John.
Between Marks Gospel and John’s, this very Jewish midrashic interpretation seems to be lost in the history of the
early church. Spong points out that this
is probably due to the gradual separation of Christians from the Jewish
Synagogues. This was accelerated after
the destruction of
Most New Testament commentators would agree that the
destruction of
We now turn to the
earliest writings in the New Testament, which are the letters or writings of
Paul.
Chapter Nine
Paul's Writings
Enter Saul (Jewish) or
Paul (Greek) of
Paul
wrote about himself in Gal.1:14: “I was ahead of most fellow Jews of my age in
my practice of the Jewish religion, and was much more devoted to the tradition
of our ancestors.”
He
must have met many people from The Way
in
Spong
has this to say about Jewish exclusivism:
"The Jews had
survived the traumas of their national history by developing a powerfully protective
shell that secured them against an alien and hostile world. In the service of that shell, they had
constructed layers of interpretation that justified their policy of isolation. Jews did not eat, intermarry, fraternize, or
worship with gentiles. Such practices as
circumcision, dietary regulations, and Sabbath observances set off the Jewish
people from the world as distinct, unique, and even odd. Thus separatism also served the Jews'
survival needs and kept them alive as a recognizable ethnic group. The binding
force on Jewish identity was the Torah.”
(Resc.p.92)
Paul then had a
conversion experience, which he describes in 1Cor.15:8-10):
"Last of all he
(Jesus) appeared also to me - even though I am like someone whose birth was
abnormal (or who was born at the wrong time.
The Greek word is ektroma, which means an abortion, premature
birth, or a puny birth). For I am the
least of all the apostles - I do not even deserve to be called an apostle,
because I persecuted God's church. But
by God's grace I am what I am, and the grace that he gave me was not without
effect."
Spong describes the
effect of this conversion in this way:
“So
it was that when, in the first century, a Jewish teacher named Paul of Tarsus moved
outside this defining religious system and began to question it in the light of
a different experience, he exposed the fear, anxiety, insecurity, national
pride, and immense hostility that ultimately cost him his life. Before he died, however, he had built a new
structure that possessed Jewish roots but that also opened his followers to the
startling possibility of a universal community." (Resc. p.92)
Paul, in defending
himself against the accusation that he was not an apostle like the others, said
in Gal.2:8. that he was no different than the other
apostles. So Spong considers that the
Easter appearance of Paul differed in no way from the Easter appearances of the
other disciples. (Resc.p.81)
If
this is so we need to ask ourselves seriously, how much the gospel message was
later altered by the writers to more reflect their own circumstances,
experiences or theology? keeping in mind that Paul
wrote all his letters between 51 ce. and about 61 ce.,
a long time before the Gospels/Acts were written.
For
Paul Jesus was:
"as
to his humanity, he was born a descendant of David; as to his divine holiness,
he was shown with great power to be the Son of God by being raised from
death". (Rom.1:3-4)
With reference to the
Resurrection, Paul always uses the passive verb: "was raised", so his
understanding must have been that the resurrection was an exaltation rather than a coming
back to life, as in the Gospels. (Resc.p.82)
Considering
the physical resurrection, Paul writes:
"When the body is buried, it is mortal,
when raised it will be immortal. When
buried, it is a physical body, when raised it will be a spiritual body." ( Rom.15:43-44) and
v.50: "what is made of flesh and blood cannot share in God's Kingdom, and
what is mortal cannot possess immortality."
Through Paul's
influence, the early Christian communities broke away gradually from the
strictness of Law, as interpreted by the Pharisees, to restore 'the true
Israel' to a covenant relation with God, based on faith, which sees the Law as
a sign of a grateful response to God's grace.
There
is general agreement that Mark, the first Gospel to be written, dates to
somewhere between 65 and 70 ce. Paul does not seem to know anything about the
life of Jesus. The gap of approximately
35 years between the death of Jesus and Mark's account may point towards a
different purpose of telling some part of the life of Jesus in the way he
did. This needs to be kept in mind when
we turn to the Gospels.
Regarding
Paul's profound sense of guilt Spong writes that Paul had a very low opinion of
himself. This low self-esteem may have
contributed to his zealousness, first as an almost fanatic persecutor of
Christians, then describing in 2 Cor.6:3-10 how he endured the most terrible hardships
in order not to be found slack with his work for Christ. For one who had always tried to be faultless
before the law, the realization that God's undeserved love was also for him,
must have seemed too good to be true. (Resc.p.109)
Yet
in spite of this, Paul felt that he could never do the right thing:
“I do not understand what
I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do, but instead I do what I hate.”
(Rom.7:15) and "Even
though the desire to do good is in me, I am not able to do it". (Rom7:18)
Spong then offers the theory,
that Paul may have been homosexual, hence the guilt complex, and also because
he was against women. (see Resc.p110-120)
Interpreting Paul's
writings
As we said earlier, none
of the Gospels had appeared during his life-time. During this oral period, the basic stories
and words of Jesus were passed on from mouth to mouth. Some communities may have held a treasured
collection of sayings of Jesus, like the “Q”-document (see p.73) or the Gospel
of Thomas. They may have been read
during the liturgy. They would have
circulated in other communities and used in their worship services, but there
cannot be any certainty about this. Spong thinks that the problem of
interpreting Paul is, that it is almost always done
with the Gospels in the back of our minds.
"To interpret Paul
accurately we need to put ourselves into that first-century pre-gospel frame of
reference and to hear Paul in fresh and authentic ways." (Resc.p.96)
We now turn to Paul’s writings, in the order they were written:
1 and 2 Thessalonians
These are Paul's first
letters, written around 48 or 49 ce. from
He
describes the 'coming of the Lord' as a 'parousia'
to happen at some future time. The
Greeks used this word for a ceremonial and triumphant entry of the emperor into
his city. According to Paul, God has a
loving purpose for his people. It is God
who is calling "The Church, (Greek ek-klesia the community of those who have responded to the
call [klesis]). It is not a group of like-minded people, but
a group of people who are chosen by God and who respond to his call." (Charpentier p.48)
In
Paul's theology, there is no room for achieving 'brownie points'. Right from the beginning he says that our
calling is God's grace, his free gift to us, and we can only respond to that
with thanksgiving and love. (2 Thes.2:13-14)
Corinthians
Paul spent three years
in
During
that time Paul was grappling within himself with the question: 'what does it
mean to say that we are saved by Jesus Christ?
He shows in these letters that "he has gained a deeper
understanding of the role of Christ in the history of salvation". (Charpentier p.49)
Christ
is present within the community of believers, through the Word, the sacraments,
and a sacrificial life. He deals with
disunity in the church in
He
wrote the earliest account of the Lord's Supper (1 Cor.11:17-34), and in 1
Cor.15 he deals with the 'resurrection of Christ'. He writes that he had 'received' this
teaching that Christ died for our sins, 'as written in the Scriptures' and that
he 'was raised to life according to the Scriptures' i.e. of course the Old
Testament. His thoughts
on our resurrection is mentioned in detail in 1Cor.15.
Galatians
Like Corinthians, this
letter was written most likely in
"Those
of you who try to be put right with God by obeying the
Law, have cut yourselves off from Christ.
You are outside of God's grace." (Gal.5:4)
After this comes a most
important sentence in Gal.5:5:
"As
for us, our hope is that God will put us right with him (that's faith); and
this is what we wait for by the power of God's Spirit working through our
faith."
It is worth noting that Paul probably arrived
at this new insight during his conflict with the Judaizers.
Christianity would have never developed without
this. Paul is rejoicing in the freedom
we have: "Christ has set us
free". (5:1) No
longer can anyone rely on 'being saved' by observing the Jewish Law. We are set free from the Law! If we could convince our Muslim brothers and
sisters of this, that nothing we can do will influence our salvation, we may
get peace in this world. I do not mean
to convert them to Christianity, but to show that God, whom they call
‘all-powerful, almighty’, etc. is also in charge of their salvation!. "For a
Christian there are no more commandments; only this inner law, 'the Spirit of
God', not yet called the Holy Spirit, which is in the heart of every
believer."(Charp.p.51)
This new idea of salvation by faith alone, has probably prompted Paul to write the next letter,
the most theological of all:
Romans
It is certainly the most
comprehensive statement of Paul’s theology that exists. It is not so much a personal letter, though
some personal greetings are appended to it, but a summary of his faith. Paul sees the Old Testament as paving the way
for his new understanding. Abraham is
considered righteous because of his faith. (chapter
4) As through the one man Adam sin came
into this world, so through the one man Christ a new humanity was born. The old Adam was judged by God guilty, the new Adam (Christ) is
declared by the grace of God not guilty.
(Rom.5:16) Life in the Spirit unifies
the believer again with God, it changes "God's enemies
into his friends". (Rom.11:15) This
can never be achieved by our own efforts, but is always a gift from God. So if we live a life that is in accordance
with God’s will, it is always as a thankful response to God's gift.
When he contemplates the never ending love of God,
his conviction becomes poetical, when he writes:
“For
I am certain that nothing can separate us from his love: neither death nor
life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present
nor the future, neither the world above nor the world below – there is nothing
in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God
which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord”. (Rom.8:38-39)
Paul is preaching a
universalism he found in the Old Testament, which few have seen before
him. He quotes from Isaiah 65:1 when he
lets God speak: “I was found by those who were not looking for me; I appeared
to those who were not asking for me”. (Rom.10:20)
Having finished all his arguments, and pointing out
that there is no difference between Jew and Gentile, Paul cannot escape his
very Jewish conviction: "For I tell you that Christ's life of service was
on behalf of the Jews, to show that God is faithful, to make his promises to
their ancestors come true, and to enable even the Gentiles to praise God for
his mercy." (Rom.15:8-9)
Philippians
The church in
Philemon, Colossians
Both were written in
His
last letter was probably Colossians, written about 62 ce. The Colossians had accepted a weird teaching
and they thought that Christ was among the various heavenly powers they thought
existed. Paul corrects this, putting
Christ right into the heart of the universe and of the church.
Ephesians
is similar in content and was probably written by one of his disciples. It will
be dealt with later.
Conclusion
Spong reminds us that
when Paul died (around 64 ce.) "not a single Gospel had yet been written, and at the time of
Paul's death none of his letters were regarded as anything more than what they
were - treasured letters from a revered Christian leader." (Resc.p.80)
The next book to be
written in the New Testament is the Gospel of Mark.
Chapter Ten
Mark’s Gospel
During the time when Christians were still
accepted in Jewish congregations, we can imagine that they worshipped through
the Jewish Liturgy. Apart from their
belief that "Jesus is Lord", or that Jesus was the long expected
Messiah, one would hardly have noticed a difference then between Jews and
Christians. The latter would have had
their separate meetings on the "First Day of the Week", to
"break bread" and to remember the Easter event and what had led to
it, but otherwise they kept their Jewish tradition. Gradually these "people of the Way"
collected sayings and stories from Jesus, which were
circulating around. These were shared
perhaps, at these separate meetings, and given as illustrations at the Sabbath
service, and so gradually incorporated into the Jewish liturgy. Eventually a need would have emerged for an additional,
more “Christian” liturgy for these communities, who began to group together as
"churches", separated from the Synagogues. This took place most likely after 70 ce. This new liturgy
was seen to grow naturally out of the old Jewish liturgy, recalling on an
annual basis their history as remembered on certain days of the year.
To
be able to follow this development, a chart is attached at the end of this
book. It will help to give the reader an
overview of the Jewish year, with its festivals and some readings for a
particular Sabbath in the days of Jesus and after. However, it is only a rough guestimate based
on Spong and other commentators.
We
have said that the early church wanted to give their worship services a more
Christian content even before 70 ce. As by then it probably had become established
practice to introduce events and sayings of Jesus into the Jewish liturgy, the
need may have come up for a second Lectionary on the pattern of the old Jewish
one. Spong believes that it may have started
with the celebration of the Passover, the event that led to the execution of
Jesus on the cross.
And
so Mark may have been commissioned by the Church in
So
the Gospel had not been intended to be
a literary book, or a description of Jesus' life and words, but a liturgical
book, explaining the Old Testament with illustrations from the Jesus
event. Goulder
before Spong had argued, that the "gospels were designed to be lectionary
books. They were developed to be read in
public worship week by week." (as quoted in
Lib.p.91) For Goulder
it was the "study of Matthew's gospel that was the critical break-through
in developing his lectionary theory of gospel development, and only later did
he apply it to Mark." (Lib.p.91/2).
We will hear more about it in the next chapter, when we deal with
Matthew. It needs to be said, though,
that this theory is not accepted by most New Testament theologians. My comment would be that it need not
invalidate all other explanations, but for me it seems a plausible explanation
and it certainly throws new light on the text.
By
the time Mark wrote his gospel about 35 years had passed since that first Good
Friday.
Spong
divides the gospel into three units or sections:
1.
"It
begins with the story of Jesus' baptism and then describes the initial impact
and the rising conflict that marked his life in
2.
The
second is Jesus' journey from
3.
The
last unit is "The Passion Narrative", (14:1 - 16:8) which includes
Mark's story of the Resurrection.
Most scholars would
agree that "The Passion Narrative" was the first to achieve written
form. It has even been said that Mark’s
gospel is a “passion story introduced with a long preamble”. (Lib.p.73) Spong believes that the "dramatic
account of Jesus' last days was likely the core of the original Christian
message, and hence the part to be written first." (Lib.p.70) For this reason he begins to develop his
lectionary theory with the third unit, the Passion Narrative, then, working
backwards, ending with the first unit:
Spong's Lectionary Theory
"The Jews observed the most holy night of
their Passover by liturgically bringing to memory the story of their origins.”
(Lib.p.73) It
seems likely that Christians also were motivated to hold a 24 hour vigil from
Maundy Thursday to Good Friday evening.
We know that this became a tradition in the Byzantine church. The passion story developed into a Christian
Passover story, where Jesus was the new paschal lamb.
Unit three: The Passion Narrative (14:1-16:8). It contains an interior schedule with 8 parts
for 24 hours, from
1.
2.
3.
12
to 3 am, betrayal and arrest.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
So the reason for writing this first gospel was
not, as it was thought, the death of Peter and Paul, the chief disciples, who
both died around 64 ce., nor was it the realisation that the ‘second coming’
did not take place in their life time, i.e. the delay of the Parousia, but the need for a Christian
version of the Jewish observance of Passover. (Lib.p.73)
Unit two - the Journey from
Then the question arose: “How did the rest of
Mark’s gospel come to be written?” The
key to the understanding of Spong’s theory is, that he
thinks the gospel writer worked backwards from his passion narrative. This may also be the reason why for so long,
this theory has not been proposed earlier.
In the lectionary of the Jewish liturgical year before Passover, the
book of Deuteronomy was read. Spong
likens Deuteronomy to a teaching catechism.
New converts to Judaism were instructed so that they could become full
members before Passover.
For
Christians, membership meant that they were baptized. At first the church baptized new members
spontaneously, but gradually the custom developed to baptize them on Easter
eve, so that they could participate in the meal that recalled the events of
Maundy Thursday and Easter – the Eucharist.
So a teaching catechism had to be written for Christians, to instruct
new converts prior to baptism. The
season of Lent had its origin in this custom.
However, there is no obvious parallel between Deuteronomy and Mark
9:2-13:37, except that Mark’s unit contains also teaching material. According to the Codex Alexandrinus,
one of the earliest texts of Mark, the gospel is divided into 49 separate
sections, to be read at worship.
Following these sections backward from Maundy Thursday's section, Jesus'
journey from
The
section for the Sunday before Easter, when Jews read about the theme of the end
of the world and the promise of things to come, Mark has the "little
Apocalypse" in Chapter 13 where Jesus speaks about the end of the world.
When
we come to the feast of Dedication (Hanukkah), which is commemorating the
return of the light of God to the temple in 164 bce, the Christian lectionary
had the story of the transfiguration (9:2-13).
As the light (shekinah of God) shone on the face of Moses when he
returned from
Unit one - Jesus' and his life in
The Gospel begins with the purpose for writing
it: “The Good News (or Gospel) of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”. (1:1) We then hear the
story of Jesus' baptism, temptation, and then the initial impact and the rising
conflict that marked his life in
It
is generally accepted that Jesus came from
Spong thinks that Jesus' life and
work in
The
Jewish year began with the celebration of New Year or Rosh Hashanah. This is
described in Lv.23:23-24, also in Nm.29:1-6.
It is a call to repentance, ushered in by the sound of a ram's horn (shofar). This horn was believed to announce the coming
reign of God, a time of judgment. The
Jewish tradition said that "eyes were opened, ears were unstopped, and a
highway was prepared on which God might travel.
This highway began in the desert" where unclean animals were
thought to live, like camels, scapegoats, and demons. (Lib.p.84)
We
see that Mark opens his gospel with John the Baptist, a voice crying in the
wilderness (like the shofar),
to prepare a highway for the Lord. (1:2-3)
"Turn away from your sins and be baptised, God will forgive your
sins". (v.4) "John wore
clothes made from camel's hair". (v.6)
After Jesus' baptism, a heavenly voice affirmed him as God's son and
sent him into the desert to battle the demons (satan). This
passage in Mark fits in well with the set reading for the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah or New Year.
Next
comes the day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, which is described in Lv.12-16. God was teaching Moses and Aaron "to
distinguish between the common and the holy", (Lib.p.85) between clean and
unclean foods, woman's uncleanness in conception, uncleanness of leprosy, and
through sexual discharge. Aaron (the
Priest) was to make atonement (or forgiveness) for all uncleanness of the
people of
Then
comes the festival of Tabernacles or Sukkot, a Harvest
festival described in Lv.23-24. It
commemorated the years in the wilderness where the Jews had to dwell in
temporary shelters or booths. This
celebration also "featured the note of the coming of God's messiah and it
spoke of the gathering of the nations of the world in
From
chapter 5:1 to 9:1 Mark tells stories of healings, Jesus’ rejection in Nazareth,
teachings, the death of John the Baptist, Feeding of the five thousand, about
his power, and he finishes with the story of Peter’s declaration of who he
thought Jesus was and what this would mean to him. It is not possible to relate each story to a
similar passage in the Old Testament and from that angle the theory of Spong
fails. But even to link it with the
major festivals as mentioned, is very persuasive.
Conclusion
Back-tracking the gospel of Mark from the Jewish
festivals of Passover to the New Year celebration, we can see that the
lectionary readings for each of the major festivals fit in well and in the
right order to match the themes of the Jewish calendar. (Lib.p.84) Spong says that
"the biblical
analysis reveals quite clearly to me that the gospel tradition, in addition to
being a midrashic retelling of the
Jesus story based on the Hebrew scriptures, was also organised around the
liturgical year of the Jews under whose influence the Christian story was
born….This means that Mark's gospel is neither biography nor history so much as
it is a corporate memory, informed and affected by the Hebrew scriptures and
organised according to Jewish worship practices." (Lib.p.86)
Once we can see that, a new interpretation
becomes possible and the passages will have a deeper meaning for the readers of
the 21st century.
Chapter
Eleven
Matthew’s Gospel
Introduction to Matthew
His overall aim is to
answer the frequently asked question: "Who is this Jesus?"
(Resc.p.156) Spong writes:
"Many preachers, it
is said, first have a sermon to deliver and only then, as a matter of second
importance, do they seek a text to give that sermon biblical authenticity. In many ways the author of Matthew follows
this procedure. Both the anonymous
preacher and the author of Matthew, sometimes stretch the biblical text beyond
its original meaning and not infrequently even beyond recognition." (Resc.p147)
Who
was Matthew?
He
lived most probably in
The
fact that he blunts criticism of the scribes by Mark,
is a fair certainty that he himself was a scribe:
There
are 21 references of criticising scribes in Mark. Matthew dropped 7 of them and 6 were glossed
over e.g. ‘differentiating with "their" scribes and "our"
(Christian) scribes’. (Liber.p.102)
Matthew knew Mark's gospel, 606 verses of a total of 664 are included in
his gospel.
He
wrote after the fall of
Comparing Matthew with Mark
Mark's gospel provided
lectionary material from Rosh Hashanah
(New Year) to Easter (see previous chapter). There was obviously a need to
expand this for the full year. So
Matthew added elaborate parables to his gospel.
Spong writes:
"We need to be aware
that parables were in the rabbinic style of teaching and they were means
whereby one rabbi would keep current the teaching of a former rabbi. A rabbi with a story-telling gift would take
a point in the teaching of a well-known rabbi of the past and develop it into a
parable, which would then be attributed to that revered rabbi of the past. That was not, for the Jews, a dishonest
practice but a way of honouring gifts found in their heritage."
(Liber.p.108)
This is an interesting
theory, and it could have been the way Matthew constructed his gospel. On the other hand, it is equally possible
that Matthew found some additional material containing the parables which he
used for his gospel.
Matthew
expanded Mark. The scribe's midrashic ability shows when he took a single
verse in Mark (
There
is more emphasis on the miraculous in Matthew.
He added more 'miracles' to his gospel, and he also answered questions
or situations left open by Mark:
When
Mark stated that the disciples were so afraid at the Mount of Transfiguration
that they didn't know what to say, (Mk.9:6) Matthew altered it to "they
were so terrified that they threw themselves face downward on the ground. Jesus came to them and touched them. ‘Get up’, he said, ‘Don't be afraid!’ So they looked up and saw no one there but Jesus".
(Mt.17:6-8)
Mark
simply stated that the stone at the tomb had been rolled away. (16:4) Matthew explains,
first that a guard had been placed at the tomb by the Romans, (27:62-68) then
there was an earthquake, and an angel rolled the stone away. (28:2-8) When the two women
left the tomb, they ran "afraid and yet filled with joy", to tell the
disciples. The promise to meet Jesus in
In
regard to kosher food (prepared according to Jewish Law), Mark had taken up
Paul's teaching in Rom.14:14: "no food is of itself ritually unclean"
when in
There
are two important omissions in Matthew.
One is Mk.2:27 "The Sabbath was made for the good of man; man was
not made for the Sabbath"; and as we have just seen Mk.7:19
"Jesus declared that all food is good for eating". Matthew, the scribe, could just not bring
himself to write that the Sabbath and the food laws have been abolished.
Matthew
corrects Mark, when his gospel ends with the words: "So they (the women)
went out and ran from the tomb, distressed and terrified. They said nothing to anyone, because they
were afraid". (Mk.16:8) Matthew
writes that the women hear the resurrection message and then go at once to tell
the disciples. (Mt.28:8)
Theological development
in Matthew
Rather than having the
food laws and the law about the Sabbath abolished, Matthew sees it more as an
internalisation of the Law, that Jesus came "not to do away with them but
to make their real teaching come
true. (
In
Mark the relationship between Jesus and God was not worked out very well. He
did not openly identify Jesus as the Son of Man. He rather used the device of the ‘messianic
secret’, that his true divinity would only be revealed at the
Resurrection. So Mark's Jesus was able
to say: "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone".
(Mk.10:17-18) Whereas Matthew's said:
"Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good", (
In
the birth narrative Jesus is announced to be "Emmanuel, God with us".
(1.23) At the
great commission (28:18-20) Jesus said "I will be with you always, to the
end of the age." Lastly, Matthew
changes passages where Mark has the disciples call "teacher or
master" to "Lord" as in
Matthew
searched the Old Testament for more clues for his gospel, like for instance in
the following passages: The virgin birth: "This took place
to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet" (Mat.1:22-23) when
Is.7:14 is fulfilled; the birthplace as Bethlehem to fulfil
Micah 5:2; Jesus' flight to Egypt to
fulfil Hos.11:1; the killing of children by Herod fulfils Jer.31:15; John the Baptist comes from Is.40:3; his
clothes are mentioned in 2 Kings 1:8 and Zech.3:4, Psalm 22:1 became the words
of Jesus from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me”.
(Mat.27:46)
There
is also new teaching or a new interpretation in Matthew. We read in the Sermon on the Mount, for
instance, "You have heard that people were told in the past ... But now I
tell you ..." (Mat.5:21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43).
The
Suffering Servant songs in Is.40-55 and Zech.ch.9 were the patterns for
Matthew’s passion story. His conviction,
that Jesus was the promised messiah was so strong that it overruled all caution
in using the Old Testament. We find that
he stretched his proof-texting beyond reason.
(Resc.p.149) Spong calls him a disaster in that respect. He thinks, for instance, that Is.11:1 was the
text Matthew used to describe Jesus as coming from
"The servant passage
of Isaiah, the son of man passages of Ezekiel and Daniel, the triumphant
passage from Zechariah, the shepherd and
As about ten years had
passed between Mark’s writing and Matthew’s gospel, we find that Matthew had to
face a different situation.
The
relationship with the Christian sect in the synagogues became more and more
strained, until in the end they had to be completely severed. Historically, Jewish Christians had it more
difficult than the Jews. If they
separated, they would become an illegal religion. This could mean persecution
by the state and possible death, like it happened with Peter and Paul under
Nero. In addition, the Jews became
hostile to them, as they did not observe the Law, like when they had
table-fellowship with non-Jews, for instance. A hint of what may have happened
can be found in
Matthew
had to face the dilemma: being a deeply
devout Jew, he did not wish to abandon his Jewish heritage, but he also wanted
to stretch it towards a more inclusive faith, as Jesus had taught. So his gospel ends with the great commission,
for his disciples to go out into all the world.
(28:19-20) As
the messiah, "Jesus had fulfilled the Jewish tradition - and Jesus had
opened that to a radical inclusiveness." (Resc.p.162)
Jesus
re-interpreted the covenant with
The disciples' task was
"to build the inclusive community so that through this Christ the promise
of Abraham could be fulfilled that in and through the father of the Jewish
people, all the nations of the earth would be blessed." (Resc.p.163)
The final separation
between Christians and Jews at worship would have reached every congregation by
around 88 ce, so the dating of Matthew's gospel is
approximately between 80 and 82 ce.
Another
feature of Matthew’s gospel is that for him Jesus was greater than Moses. As
Moses went up a mountain top to get the Ten Commandments, so did Jesus, the new
and greater Moses, to give us the Beatitudes;
(Resc.p.158) Moses fed the
multitudes with manna, Jesus fed 5000 with bread and fishes, which obtained a
liturgical and eucharistic meaning: 'Jesus 'took,
blessed, broke and gave it’. The blood
of the paschal lamb was to be painted on the door posts to ‘save the Israelites
from the angel of death’. Through the
liturgy, Jesus became that paschal lamb and it is in this sense that we say
that "his blood cleanses us from all our sin". The angel of death became satan, whose power was broken by the cross.
(Lib.p.96) The resurrection became the
triumph of victory, which the Jews had experienced during the exodus, and again
under Joshua/Jesus in the promised land. The new promised land
became the realm of heaven, open to all disciples. (Lib.p.96)
Writing the Gospel as
Lectionary material
In the previous chapter
it was mentioned that Goulder was the first
theologian to offer the theory that the gospels were written as liturgical
material, not a literary biography.
Spong is convinced of this theory and has expanded it. Explaining how this lectionary developed, he
writes:
"The various
episodes in the Gospels were first sermons preached in the synagogues on the
text of the Jewish lections for that Sabbath.
Would this not be an exquisite way in which to validate the conclusion
so popular among the earliest Christians that everything written about Jesus in
the Hebrew scriptures had been fulfilled? Under the homiletic genius of the early
Christian preachers, Paul's words that "Christ died for our sins in
accordance with the scriptures" and that he "was raised on the third
day in accordance with the scriptures", came to be given very specific
content. In time these sermons, relating
the story of Jesus to the Jewish lections, came to be put together by gifted
members of specific worshiping communities in serial form to create gospels and
to provide a Christian reading to accompany the regular Sabbath synagogue
readings from the Torah and the other sacred writings of the Jews. By adding a lection from the gospel to their
synagogue tradition, some Jewish communities moved in the early decades of
Christian history to incorporate Jesus specifically into the worship life of
the Jewish people." (Lib.p.94)
Matthew used this
"rabbinic and midrashic
method", a teaching development of a narrative to emphasise religious
truth or new theological insights. He
adapted his material that he found in Mark, Paul, the Hebrew scriptures, and it
could be assumed, in other sayings of Jesus, circulating among Christians at
that time. Then he put it in the place
where his liturgical purposes required it. (see
Lib.p.110)
The
rest of this chapter is a journey of discovery.
This is fully based on Spong’s Liberating
the Gospels, and is a completely novel approach of interpreting the
gospels. It was already mentioned
briefly in the last chapter, but here it is more fully developed. As it is rather technical and involved, the
chart at the end of the book should be consulted.
Remembering
that Spong thought Mark had worked backwards from the feast of Passover/Easter
until the festival of Rosh Hashanah
or New Year, the Christian community would have had lectionary material until
Easter, but none for the period between Easter and Rosh Hashanah. Matthew would
begin working forward, with the first Sunday or Sabbath after Easter and
provide material until Rosh Hashanah,
and as we shall see beyond until Easter.
Christians celebrated Easter on the third Nisan, later on the 4th. (see chart)
Placing
the Gospel side by side with the Jewish liturgical year, Spong claims one can
see connections. (Lib.p.110) Codex Alexandrinus
divides Matthew into 69 units: If we
line up Easter with Passover, and place the 69 units alongside, we will see
even more connections. On the first
Sunday after Easter, the reading will be Matthew 1:1-21; second
Pentecost
was both a Canaanite festival, the first wheat harvest, and a Jewish festival,
celebrating the giving of the Torah.
The
Jewish feast of Pentecost was observed with a 24 hour vigil, divided into 8
parts, designed "to remember Moses at Sinai and to extol the wonders and
virtues of the law". (Lib.p.113)
Psalm 119 was written for Pentecost, a hymn of praise to the Torah, divided into one introduction and
seven segments made up of three stanzas each.
Each stanza begins with a letter of the Hebrew Alphabet (acrostic), i.e.
aleph, beth, ghimel etc.
(see the Jerusalem Bible). (Lib. p.113)
In addition to those readings, the portion of the law that recalled
Moses on Mt.Sinai and the giving of the Torah to
According
to Spong, the whole Sermon on the Mount was a "midrashic attempt to reveal Jesus as the new Moses presiding at the
new Sinai, the giver of the new law or the new covenant." (Lib.p.115) He thinks that Matthew patterned the contents
of Jesus' teaching on the whole Pentecost celebration or liturgy of the Jews,
leaving the question open whether Matthew created the material or whether it
formed part of the collected sayings of Jesus, moulded on the themes and
readings of the Jewish liturgy for Pentecost.
It is important to remember that according to Matthew the law and the prophets
had been fulfilled in Jesus. (see p.122)
Bacon
found five teaching blocks in Matthew, which he called a "kind of
Christian Torah". (Lib.p.89) Spong
follows Goulder’s example by placing these five major
teaching blocks into the five major Jewish festivals. These are:
(see Lib.p.115/6)
1) Mt.5-7 (see above) -
Pentecost
2) Mt.10:5-11:1 -
for Rosh Hashanah
3) Mt.13:1-53 - Tabernacles
4) Mt.18:1-19:30 -
after Hanukkah or
Dedication
5) Mt.24:3-26:2 -
for Passover/Easter
For Rosh Hashanah, the New Year festival, John the Baptist in prison
asks Jesus: "are you the one we expected?" (11:2-15) The answer is given in the acts of
Jesus, who ushers in the
Tabernacles
or the Harvest Festival, is celebrated in the month of
Tishri. It was to remember the wandering years in the
wilderness, when the Israelites lived in shelters, and had no permanent
dwellings. From here on Matthew follows
closely Mark's gospel: the story of the
sower and its explanation, mustard seed and the use of parables. In addition some of Matthew's original
parables: the weeds, the yeast and its explanation, hidden treasure, pearl,
net, and the explanation of them all: new and old truths.
Festival
of Dedication or Hanukkah is celebrating the light of God coming
into the
The
last teaching block serves as a catechism, again like in Mark, to instruct new
converts before their baptism just before Easter. (Mt.24:3-26:2). Matthew follows exactly Mark, with only two
additions, the death of Judas, (27:3-10) and the guard at the tomb. (27:62-66) Here we end our
journey of discovery.
Conclusion
Spong concludes his
chapter on Matthew, saying that Jesus was preached in the synagogues before
this and the other gospels were written.
This preaching was linked to the lectionary and to the traditional
Jewish festivals. (Lib.p.117) We have seen in this gospel that Matthew was convinced that
Jesus is God. This God prompted him to
shed every barrier, and to re-interpret the Old Testament in the light of this
Jesus, who encouraged him to leave behind the old values and journey on this
new road of faith. The old prejudices
had to go, his religious tradition of exclusivism had to change, a new community had to be built which was to be based on
Christ’s values. That is what God in
Christ had meant to him. (see Resc.p.165) Spong goes on:
"The
voice of God can still be heard calling to us all to discover the One in whom
Jew and gentile can reside as one. If
Jew and gentile can reside as one, then white and black, Asian and Caucasian,
Protestant and Catholic, male and female, gay and straight, rich and poor,
Moslem, Buddhist, and Hindu can also meet in the body of Christ. Then and only then will
that body be "one holy catholic and apostolic."(Resc.p.165)
This must have been also
Matthew's vision. No literal
understanding could ever bring out this meaning, and so his hope becomes our
“hope, our dream, and our promise that some day through Christ we will all
dwell in the Shalom of God." (Resc.p.166)
Chapter
Twelve
Luke-Acts
About the Author
Since the second century
Luke has been identified as the physician who accompanied Paul from
Luke’s Purpose
Luke wanted to tell the
story of Jesus from the perspective of his experience. Having been converted to Christianity,
probably by Paul, he wanted to show that Christianity had spread ‘from
"All ties with
Judaism had not been abandoned. Luke's community originally worshiped on the Sabbath of each week. At this service of worship, there was still a
regular and ordered reading from the Jewish scriptures, which meant primarily
from the Torah, but without ignoring either the Former or the Latter
Prophets." (Lib.p.120)
He knew Mark's gospel,
as about half of it is included in his gospel, but Mark was no longer adequate
for his community. Between Mark's gospel
and Luke, as in Matthew, stood the Jewish rebellion of 70ce, with the
destruction of
In
the preamble (v.1-4), Luke said he intended to write the ‘full truth’ about
which he had ‘been instructed’, (Lk.1:4) (the Greek word κατηχήθησ
which means ‘catechised’). Spong thinks
that this might be the clue to understand how that instruction or catechesis
was to take place. (Lib.p.126) He offers
the following scenario: We read in v.3:
"... to write an orderly account for you ...” (TEV translation). But the original Greek text reads θ, which according to the Greek dictionary means: "in a
continual order or series, successively, consecutively", nothing about
"orderly". Luke mentions the
same word again in 8:1, which the TEV translates "some time later"
and in Acts 3:24 which the TEV translates: "who came after (him)." This seems a more accurate translation,
meaning sequence rather than “orderly”. (Lib.p.340)
On
this, Spong thinks that “during the years when the memory and story of Jesus
were transmitted orally, it had been preached primarily in isolated sermons with
no great sense of a connected time frame.” (Lib.p..125) As mentioned before,
Mark’s journey section could possibly have been used as such ‘preaching
material’. So if ‘Theophilus’, which
means ‘God lover’, could stand for the whole people who have been instructed in
the faith recently, (using Mark’s relative brief material for instruction),
Luke could have been addressing himself in this gospel to them with a fuller
curriculum, as it were. So Luke would
not have set out to ‘correct’ the order of Mark or Matthew. Luke had said that he had received his
material from previous sources. So when
he mentioned θ ‘order’, he meant
‘the liturgical sequence’. As the Old
Testament was read in Luke's community each Sabbath service, Luke may have been
'commissioned' to write equivalent and appropriate material for the Christian
year. He writes in Lk.24:44-45: that
“everything written about me (Jesus) in the Law of Moses, the writings of the
prophets and the Psalms had to come true (or must be fulfilled)”. Then he (Jesus) opened their minds to
understand the Scriptures." This is
why Luke sat down and wrote this new material to “open their minds and to
understand the Scriptures”.
In
Acts 28:23-24 he writes: ”From morning till night he
(Paul) explained to them his message about the
“the order for the life
of Jesus that Luke promised to lay out was not the chronological order of
Jesus’ life, nor was it the attempt on the part of Luke to harmonise existing
gospels, but the order was primarily the liturgical order of seeing Jesus
emerge as the 'fulfilment of the Law of Moses,' as the law was read week by
week in the synagogue/church of the hellenised Jews
of the Mediterranean world. That order
was supplemented for sure, as even Luke suggested by reference to the Prophets
and Psalms. It was affected, we also
know, by the liturgical year of the Jews.” (Lib.p.127)
So, according to Spong,
that was the purpose of writing Luke. In
the next section we are going to examine how Luke ordered his gospel against the order of the Torah. As with the other
gospels, this new approach will throw new light on this gospel, not seen
before.
The story of Jesus in Luke as told against the
Order of the Torah (Lib.p.131)
Genesis: To start his gospel,
Luke could not begin with the Jewish New Year, which was reserved for the
Easter story, the final event for Christians.
Spong thinks therefore, that Luke’s year starts on the fourth Sabbath of
Nisan, i.e. on the Sunday after Easter/Passover. (see
chart)
According
to the Jewish liturgy, the Genesis readings will have moved to the story of Abraham and Sarah and their
off-spring. Spong finds that there is a
certain similarity or parallels to be found in Genesis and Luke. For instance:
Compare Abraham and Sarah with Zechariah and Elizabeth:
Both parents are
righteous (Gen.26:5 -
Lk.1:6);
Sarah and Elizabeth were
barren (Gen.11:30 - Lk.1:7);
advanced in age, (Gen.18:11 -
Lk.1:7);
angelic annunciation came to a
disbelieving father; nothing was
impossible with God (Gen.18:14 - Lk.1:37);
Spong comments:
"The account of the birth of John the Baptist was clearly based on the
Genesis story." (Lib.p.132). Then again:
Isaac and Rebecca may have led to the story of Joseph and Mary:
both children leap in the
womb (Gen.25:22 - Lk.1:44);
John the Baptist and
Jesus became the new Esau and Jacob (Lib.p.133) (although not twins, but
cousins, the older would serve the younger).
Barrenness is overcome in
Rachel, and her words are placed into
Leah proclaims that God had seen her lowliness (Gen.29:30) and
that she would be called “blessed” (Gen.30:13) – Mary’s Magnificat reflects these same words Lk.1:48).
Similarity in the birth stories of Benjamin and Jesus:
both were born in
Jacob said: "I have
seen God face-to-face, and I am still alive", so he named the place Penuel (Gen.32:30); Luke writes: “There was a very old
prophetess, a widow named Anna, daughter of Phanuel"
(Spong thinks that Penuel and Phanuel
are just different spellings of the same word). (Lk.22:36-37)
Joseph and Jesus:
Joseph is lost to Jacob (Gen.37:11-36), Jesus is lost to his parents Lk.2:41-51, and Jacob “kept thinking
about the whole matter” (Gen.37:11) – “Mary remembered all these things and
thought deeply about them” (Lk.1:19). (Lib.p.134)
For
Spong these parallels are a strong indication that Luke wrote the Genesis
stories of the founding fathers and mothers of
Pentecost interlude
The Jewish festival of
Pentecost interrupts the readings from Genesis. (see
chart) Luke had a different agenda from
Matthew. In Acts he will suggest that for
Christians, Pentecost was the time to celebrate the giving of the Holy
Spirit. The Jews celebrated Pentecost as
the giving of the Law or Torah, but Paul said in
Rom.2:29: "The real Jew is the person who is a Jew on the inside, that is,
whose heart has been circumcised, and this is the work of God's Spirit, not the
written Law." Luke took up Paul’s
teaching and so replaced the giving of the Torah
with the giving of the Holy Spirit. This
was to be elaborated in Luke’s second volume or lectionary. For his gospel, however, he placed the story
of John the Baptist to be read at Pentecost, announcing that:
"Someone is coming
who is much greater than I am. I am not
good enough even to untie his sandals. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit
and fire." (Lk.3:16)
For the Baptism of Jesus
(
Return to Genesis
With Pentecost over, the
attention is turned back to the last chapters of Genesis: Against the background of the famine in
Spong
finds the final link with Genesis in the Emmaus story, which leans on Gen.18,
where God is making himself known to Abraham during the meal. Luke, in his Emmaus story, (Lk.24:13-35) has
Jesus make himself known by breaking bread with Clopas
and presumably his wife. (Lib.p.137)
Whilst
in Matthew’s genealogy Jesus’ grandfather is Jacob, (Mat.1:16) Luke says that
Joseph’s father was Heli (Hebrew Eli), in Lk.3:23 and
not Jacob. (Lib.p.215) Spong thinks that
Luke drew his story from a different source in the Old Testament than
Matthew. Not from Genesis, but from the
story of Hannah and Samuel (1 Samuel 1-3).
There are also some parallels in Luke with the
beginning of 1 Samuel:
1. God, through a priest, announced to Hannah
that she would have a child; (1Sam.1:17), Hannah replied: “May your maidservant
find favour in your sight”. (v.18 J.B.) in Luke God, through
an angel, had announced to Mary that she would have a child. Mary responded: “I am the handmaid of the
Lord.” (Lk.1:38 J.B.) (Lib.p.216)
2. Hannah follows
with a song of praise: “My soul exalts in the Lord and my strength is exalted
in the Lord” (1Sam.2:1ff); Mary follows
with the ‘Magnificat’: “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices
(exalts) in God my saviour”. (Lk.1:46ff)
3. Hannah and her
husband took Samuel to the temple in
4. The priest at the
temple in Hannah’s days was Eli (or Heli in
Greek). Luke saw Eli as a grandfather to
Samuel, hence Jesus’ grandfather was ‘(H)eli’.
These examples, in
Spong’s opinion, are again a “midrashic
use of ancient sources by the gospel writers and signal rather loudly that we
are not dealing with history in these gospel narratives. We are, in fact, dealing with midrashic interpretations by Jewish
people seeking to process their experience of God in Jesus of Nazareth in a
traditional Jewish way.” (Lib.p.216)
Exodus
Luke used his source of
Mark and Matthew, and perhaps the other material before him, to shape his
gospel following the Lectionary reading from Exodus also. He began with the story of Jesus being
rejected in
1. Ex.2:11-15 Moses is rejected by his own
people (v.14: "Who made you our ruler and judge?").
2. Luke took Dt.18:15,18
(where Moses says: “God will send a prophet just like me, and he will be one of
your own people.") and referred it to Jesus (see Stephen’s speech in
Acts:7:23-29).
3. In Act.7:52 Luke identifies Jesus as God's
agent: "They killed God's messengers, who long ago announced the coming of
his righteous Servant. And now you have
betrayed and murdered him."
4. The calling of the first disciples in
Lk.5:1-11 comes as a result of a miraculous catch of fish. This may be paralleled with the Exodus story
of Moses' call (from the burning bush) (Ex.3:1-22).
5. Next comes a big
chunk out of Mark's gospel to the end of the Exodus readings.
Spong describes the Exodus readings as less
relevant to his gentile readers.
"With some slight editorial adjustments and an expansion of the
story from time to time, he provided gospel lections for the remaining Sabbaths
when the Book of Exodus was being read in the synagogues."
(Lib.p.143) Luke selected those stories
for this section to show that Jesus was greater than Moses: he rebuked evil
spirits, (Lk.4:35/6) he healed many people of all kinds of diseases (Lk.5:12-26
and others).
Leviticus
Spong wrote: "As
the Book of Leviticus was being read over the following eight Sabbaths/Sundays,
Luke's ingenuity was tested, for in his community, the rules and prohibitions
of Leviticus were simply not relevant.
They made little or no contact with the people's lives. So it is quite interesting to see how
Leviticus shaped Luke's gospel." (Lib.p146)
Luke
introduces his sermon on the plain in
1. Lev.19:18 says: "Do not take revenge on anyone, or continue to
hate him, but love your neighbour as you love yourself". Luke shows that Jesus had moved further when
he changed this to loving your enemies in Lk.6:27-36;
2. Lev.19:2 says:
"Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy." Luke changed Matthew's "perfect" in
this parallel story to: "Be merciful just as your Father is merciful"
(Lk.6:36). He rejected ‘holiness’ as
"the ultimate mark of the Christian life.
Those qualities were and are the goals of self-righteous religion that
in Luke's time and throughout the centuries has produced enormous amounts of
conflict, persecution and even religious warfare." ..."For Luke the
virtue of God that he had seen in Jesus was mercy, the mercy of an inclusive
and a suffering love." (Lib.p.146)
3. The Jewish New
Year celebrations are mentioned in Lev.23:23-25. Lk.7:18-35 has a vision of the breaking in of
God's kingdom, when he quotes from Is.35 "The blind see, the lame walk,
the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor are
evangelised".
4. The Day of
Atonement in Lev.23:26-32, is paralleled in Luke with the story of the woman in
the Pharisee's home who anointed Jesus with perfume, to whom Jesus said:
"her many sins have been forgiven" (Lk.7:36-50).
5. For the
Festival of Shelters (harvest festival) in Lev.23:33-44 Luke puts the parable
of the Sower. (Lk.8:4-15)
And so Spong goes
through Numbers in a similar way (see Lib.p.153/156).
Deuteronomy (Lib.p.156)
For the readings of this
book Spong says Luke puts his Journey Section. (Lk.9:51-19:27)
Spong
thinks that this Journey Section is quite unusual. It was "cleverly written against the
background of Deuteronomy". He
observed that it was three times longer than the sections before; that there were about three lections
available for every Sabbath during the Deuteronomy readings, and that the
material used is by and large neither Marcan nor Matthean.
So
he thinks that this material was 'created' by Luke, as his aim was to “retell
the story of Deuteronomy in the light of the teaching of Jesus."
(Lib.p.157) He arranged it in the order
we have now. Even the introduction to
this section reveals the Deuteronomic connection:
"As the time drew
near when Jesus would be taken up to heaven, he made up his mind and set out on
his way to
Evans, a New Testament
scholar, published in 1955 a book where he suggested that the Greek forms of
the verbs used in this opening sentence "were unique even to the rest of
Luke....They were characteristic of the narrative style of the Septuagint"
(the Greek version of the Old Testament).
So
Luke will have modelled Jesus here after Moses at the edge of the Promised Land.(Lib.p.157/8) The
similarities are:
1. Moses chose 12 men to search the land, and
they came back with fruit (Deut.1:23-25); Jesus sent out 72 with the message:
"There is a large harvest, but few workers to gather in his (the Lord's)
harvest." (Lk.10:2)
2. Moses sent his messengers with words of
peace, but the king refused to let them go through his land, and so everyone,
including women and children, were killed. (Deut.2:26-37) Jesus sent his messengers out also with words
of peace and if they were received, they should accept what was set before
them, if rejected the fate of
3. Moses was refused to enter the Promised
Land (Deut.3:23-28); Jesus said to his disciples: "How fortunate you are
to see the things you see! I tell you
that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see, but they could not,
and to hear what you hear, but they did not." (Lk.10:21-24)
4. Moses repeats the Ten Commandments
(Deut.5:1-22); Jesus answers to the question which is the greatest commandment
with his summary (Lk.10:25-27).
5. Moses told the people "that they were
to destroy the foreigners with no mercy"; (Deut.7:1-2) Jesus tells the
parable of the Good Samaritan, where the foreigner is saved. (Lk.10:25-37).
6. Moses said to his people that God gave them
manna in the desert to "teach you that man must not depend on bread alone,
but on everything that the Lord says" (Deut.8:3); Jesus talks to Martha (preparing food)
and Mary (sitting at his feet and "listened to his teaching". Jesus:
“Mary has chosen the right thing”. (Lk.10:38-42)
7. Spong cites another 8 parallels in
Deuteronomy and Luke to prove his point.
8. This section ends with Deut.26:16-19 where
Moses instructs his people to obey all his laws; Lk.18:14 finishes his with the parable
of the Pharisee and the Tax collector, who was justified not by observing the
law, but because he had a humble heart.
At this point Luke uses
again a chunk of Mark’s material, with a few exceptions, leading into his
passion narrative.
Spong looked to other writings in the early
Christian era, like the book of Didache
from the second century (based mainly on Deuteronomy) and Hippolytus from the third century which "bear
witness to the fact that such catechetical instruction was customary.” Cyril
of Jerusalem in the fourth century suggested that these instructions were
given at the rate of three a week, hence the three readings for every
Sabbath/Sunday.
Conclusion
It may appear that Spong
is very radical in his assessment of the gospel material. However, considering that his theory throws
so much light on aspects that had hitherto been unknown, it makes his theory
very plausible. The debate on this
theory has not even started in theological circles, so it is going to be
interesting to see what remains of it, and what will need to be changed. But let Spong have the last word in this
chapter:
“With Deuteronomy as his guide, but with the
practice of providing three preparation sessions per week for converts as his
model, Luke wrote this catechetical material for his church, to use three times
a week as the candidates were prepared for baptism. In the process he portrayed Jesus as the one
who not only replaced Moses but called the teaching of Moses found in
Deuteronomy to a new and higher level.
He also had used the text of Deuteronomy again and again as the basis on
which to demonstrate that everything written about this Jesus in the Law of
Moses had been fulfilled." (Lib.p.163)
Chapter
Thirteen
The Book of Acts
Authorship: As we
said previously, Luke is also the author of Acts, a second volume to the
gospel. This is not disputed,
the only difficulty has always been the inconsistencies between Acts and Paul’s
letters. But if we follow Spong’s
theory, who sees that Acts was written again not as
history, but also as lectionary material for a second year, this difficulty is
removed.
Date: The theory that
Acts was written actually before Luke, had been suggested before, but most
supporters base it on the fact that Acts does not mention the death of Paul in
Acts as
Lectionary: There is enough evidence also in Acts to
support this theory. It has about the
same length as Luke. (Lib.p.173) Again,
the early manuscripts divide it into fifty-two sections i.e. a section per week
for the Jewish calendar. (Lib.p.173) It is Luke’s vision that after Jesus, the Law was replaced
by the Holy Spirit, or to put it in other words, what the Law had been to the
Jews, the Holy Spirit was to Christians.
So when the Jews celebrated the giving of the Law at
Spong
explains to us that Luke is writing Acts with his eye on his own Gospel. When in Lk.1:31 the angel Gabriel announced
the conception of Jesus to Mary, this was portrayed as his entry into the world
where he would work as ‘Saviour’, the meaning of the names Jesus and
Joshua. In Acts, Luke portrayed Jesus’
Ascension as his entry into a new realm in which he would bring his purpose to
a new fulfilment, breaking the limitations of space and time and thus making
the Spirit and Salvation available to all.
Spong asks, was it coincidental that at both
events Mary was present? (Lk.1:31; Acts 1:14) (Lib.p.174)
Parallels between Jesus and Peter in Acts
Following the theory that Acts was written as a
second lectionary for Luke’s church, we can observe certain parallels between
the Gospel and Acts. Spong thinks that
in Acts Peter represents Jesus while he was in
1. In Gal.2:11-14 we read that Peter had to
change his attitude towards Christians who came from Gentile background; In Acts 10:1-33 the
story of Cornelius describes Peter’s conversion as coming from God
(angels).
2. In Luke Jesus stopped a possible negative
attitude of the crowds by feeding 5,000; (Lk.9:10-17) in Acts Peter stopped an
outbreak of disagreement by the ‘hellenists’ by
seeing to it that the widows are fed. (Acts 6:1-6)
3. Jesus appointed 70 to assist him (Lk.10:1-12);
Peter 7 (Acts 6:5-6).
4. Jesus is driven out of
5. The failure of
6. Jesus made reference to Jonah in Lk.11:30
(who had been sent from Joppa to convert the people of
Spong
comments (Lib.p.175):
“One can hardly conclude that these points of
contact are coincidental. Acts was
written to be read in worship alongside the gospel. The gospel described the Jesus who was the
fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures. The
Book of Acts described the way in which the Christ experience was shared
throughout the world”.
Parallels between Jesus and Paul in Acts
We said before that Spong believes Acts was
designed as a lectionary reading to be read in tandem with Luke. In the second part of Acts (chs.13-28) Paul
is representing Jesus when he was on his way and in
“Both
Jesus and Paul made a long journey to
1.
they
both delivered farewell speeches (Lk.22:14-23 at the Last supper, and Acts
20:17-38 at
2. Prophesies of their death were recorded in
Lk.18:32 and in Acts
3. Both were portrayed as obedient to God’s
will (Lk.22:42 and Acts 21:14);
Both had the crowd call
for their death (Lk.23:2 and Acts
4. Both endured false accusations (Lk.23:2
and Acts 21:28);
5. Both were deemed to be innocent by
representatives of the State (Lk. 23:4 and Acts 26:31);
6. Both endured the same number of trials:
Jesus Paul
Lk.22:66
(Sanhedrin) ch.23
(Sanhedrin)
23:1 (before Pilot) ch.24 (Felix, Gov. of
Caesarea)
23:8
(Herod) ch.25
(Festus, after 2 ys. Felix's successor)
7. Both had a final supper (Lk.22:14-17; Acts
27:35);
8. Both experienced death, though for Jesus
it was crucifixion (Lk.23). whilst for Paul it was the
symbolic death of shipwreck in the deep (Acts 27:39-44);
9. Both finally arrived at the Promised Land,
Jesus by ascending into heaven (Lk.24:50-53), Paul by reaching his destination
in
Midrashic text
As with the other gospels, some stories in Acts
were written midrashically
from texts in the Old Testament:
1. Annanias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11) go back to Hannaniah
in Jer.28:15-17;
2. The Ethiopian eunuch (Acts
3. The story of Paul’s conversion (Acts
9:1-19) is probably another midrashic
interpretation, as this is never mentioned by Paul himself in his letters. He says in 1Cor.12:2-4:
“I know a certain Christian man who 14 years
ago was snatched up to the highest heaven (or Paradise) ...... and there he
heard things which cannot be put into words, things that human lips may not
speak.”
And in Gal.1:13-17 Paul
writes:
“You have been told how I used to live when I
was devoted to the Jewish religion, how I persecuted without mercy the
In this story there is
no mention of Ananias, of Paul’s blindness and the
other details.
These and other reasons support the lectionary
theory of Spong and others. Acts was
designed to complement and parallel the readings of the gospel for a given day
in the annual lectionary.
The
strange ending of Acts had caused much debate in the church. If we see it as a parallel lectionary reading
to Luke, however, there is an explanation.
Remembering that it was written at least 30 years after Paul’s death,
the author must have known about it. So
Spong believes:
“If Paul’s arrival in his promised land of
Rome was designed to parallel the final events of Jesus’ life, including his
arrival via the ascension into his promised land of heaven, then the closing of
the Book of Acts at that point is both logical and consistent.” (Lib.p.176)
In other words, the life of the church goes on
in Christ’s spirit.
Conclusion
The argument that Acts
was written to be read in worship alongside the gospel of Luke is very
persuasive. The gospel described Jesus who was the fulfilment of the Jewish
scriptures; Acts describes the way the church has become the fulfilment of the
life of Jesus. Thus the Jesus event is
carried on in the life of the church, wherever Christians carry on his work in
the world. So, according to Spong:
“The lectionary theory solves many of the
mysteries that commentators of the past confronted when they looked at Acts as
if it were a volume in Church history.” (Lib.p.178)
Chapter
Fourteen
John’s Gospel
Difference with the Synoptics
For very long New
Testament scholars have considered John so different to the synoptics,
that they have come up with various solutions. C.K.Barrett, in his
book The Gospel according to St.John, published in 1955, suggested that John
probably wrote both history and theology, or as he says "theological
history" (Barrett p.5). He finds
the authority of this gospel to lie in the church rather than in an individual
apostle. In
Among the differences are:
1. The language of John’s discourses of Jesus
is completely different from that of the synoptic Jesus;
2. The divinity of Christ, whilst in the
Synoptics is somewhat ‘hidden’ or ‘veiled’, in John it is “all but shouted from
the rooftops”. (Lib.p.186)
3. The Synoptics suggest a public ministry
for Jesus that “lasted but one year, and in their narratives Jesus came to
4. The cleansing of the temple in John
appears in chapter 2:13-22, at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, in the
Synoptics at the end. John wants to
stress that Jesus is the fulfilment of the religion of the Jews. Straight after having called his disciples,
Jesus cleanses the temple from traders and bankers, to make it, what it should
be, a house of prayer.
His authority is based on his resurrection. (Jn.2:22) And it is in this sense that John’s whole
gospel is to be understood, i.e. from the point of the resurrection.
Background
John's community lived
probably at
By
the time John was written, Christian congregations had separated completely
from the Jewish synagogues. This gospel
speaks four times of excommunication from the synagogues (Jn.9:22 and v.34;
Authorship
Spong is of the opinion,
that the author behind this gospel could very well be John, son of Zebedee, a disciple of Jesus. But to think of it in our Western way would
be problematic, as it refers to the death of John in
Purpose
In Jn.20:31 the purpose is stated: “These signs,
(sometimes called ‘miracles’), are written here that you may believe that Jesus
is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through your faith in him you may have
life”. It is also likely, that this
gospel was designed to "be part of a seven-week liturgical observance
designed to instruct and prepare, with fasting and prayer, converts to Christianity
in anticipation of their baptism." (Lib.p.180) Is there a link
between seven weeks of instructions and seven signs/miracles mentioned in the
gospel? The signs are:
1) Wedding at
2) Healing of an official’s son (
3) Healing at the pool Bethzatha
(5:1-18)
4) Feeding of 5,000 (6:1-15)
5) Walking on water (
6) Healing of a blind man (9:1-41)
7) Raising of Lazarus (11:1-44)
It appears that the church at
But
Spong doesn't think that the key to unlock the original purpose of John's
gospel has been found yet. He is
intrigued "by the hints that perhaps there is some connection between the
seven-day creation story in Genesis and the constructed order of John's
gospel. At least John's gospel appears
to be written between 'In the beginning' (1.1 + Gen.1:1) and 'it is finished'
(Jn.19:30 + Gen.1:21). Spong notes “the
similarity between the God who completed his work on the sixth day and rested
on the seventh with Jesus who completed his work on the sixth day, rested in
the tomb on the seventh day, and then emerged on the first day of the second
week to inaugurate the new creation." (Lib.p.179)
Themes in John
Signs/miracles: John
calls his miracles: σημείων
– sign, token, a remarkable event, an extraordinary phenomenon. If we remember that this gospel was written
by a Jew, with Jewish understanding, we would never make the mistake of
considering it as anything else than a work about ‘an extraordinary
phenomenon’, i.e. the spiritual experience of someone who can only explain it
by telling a story with symbolism. With
our Western mind, our language and concepts are valid only for a particular
time, after which they become unintelligible.
After new discoveries, this soon becomes obsolete and new words or
explanations need to be found. Whereas
with a Jewish frame of mind, writing something in this story form or symbolic
way, it remains valid for all times.
“I am…” The God revealed at the burning bush story in
Exodus 3:1-20, the "I am" (YHWH), the name for God (the Yahwist) was applied to Jesus by the early Christian
community. When John has Jesus say:
"I am the bread", "I am the living water", "I am the
door; the vine; the way; and the resurrection" he means that Jesus was for
him all of that, but not in a literal sense.
Spong thinks that the historical Jesus is only dimly present in this
gospel, but it "continues to feed my faith more deeply than any
other." (Lib.p.179)
Eternal
Life: John mentions this word seventeen times, and
the last time in 17:3 Jesus’ long prayer, he defines its meaning: “And eternal life means to know you [God
the Father], the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ, whom you sent.” It is never meant literally ‘for all times’,
but it stands for a life according to Jesus’ standards, a life which has
meaning and purpose, in other words a truly Christian life.
Theological Development in John
The words of Jesus in John are not likely to be
Jesus’ own words, not only because of the difference in language, as pointed
out earlier, but also as there is evidence of theological development since
Jesus’ days. In the above prayer, for
instance, (17:3) John has Jesus pray that he himself is the Messiah and equal with God.
This
Christology, (the divinity of Christ) had developed from such basic statements
of Paul who wrote of Jesus “as to his humanity, he was born a descendant of
David; as to his divine holiness he was shown with great power to be the Son of
God by being raised from death.” (Rom.1:4)
For Paul his divinity became apparent at his resurrection. Mark writing at least ten years later, declared that Jesus was designated as the divine Son
of God at the inauguration of his public ministry, i.e. at his baptism, when
the heavenly voice proclaimed him: “You are my own dear Son”. (Mk.1:11) Matthew and Luke, writing about 15 years
later again, said that his divinity started with his conception (Mat.1:20;
Lk.1:35). For John, writing another 10
years later, Jesus had been with God as the Word before creation (Jn.1:1). (see Lib.p.222-227)
When
we look at the story of Lazarus in Jn.11:1-44, it has rarely been seen as an
historic event. Commentators find a link
between this story and the parable in Luke 16:19-31, where a Lazarus dies and
is carried to heaven. It concludes:
"If someone were to rise from death, and go to them [the rich man's
brothers], then they would turn from their sins". Luke finishes his parable with: "If they
will not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if
someone were to rise from death" (Lk16:31). Alan Richardson in 1959 (p.139)
comments: "St.John
turns this saying into a story in which someone actually does return from the
dead - and the Jews do not repent.
Significantly the name of the person who has died is in each story
Lazarus". Spong would agree with
this comment. He thinks that John was a
"sophisticated symboliser, and Lazarus was one
of his primary symbols. So was water
being turned into wine (Jn.2:1-11), the concept of being born again (Jn.3:1-15)
and many, many others". (Lib.p.180)
John
has several people taking Jesus’ words literally, which subsequently is
corrected with the real meaning:
Nicodemus took Jesus’ words: “You must be born again” literally, and is
reprimanded for not thinking of the spiritual message. (Jn.3:1-21) The Samaritan woman thought Jesus was talking
about literal water, when he meant the “life-giving water” of eternal life.
(Jn.4:1-42) The feeding of the five
thousand (Jn.6:1-15) was also literalized by the people. John’s Jesus said that they did not
understand his sign: “Do not work for food that spoils; instead, work for the
food that lasts for eternal life.” (Jn.6:26-27)
When
the church built a theological edifice from John’s gospel, taking everything
literally, Spong makes the following comment:
“The literalized words of
the Johannine text joined forces with the Greek
thinking fathers of the
Summary
There needs to be done
much more work on John’s gospel, to see whether this too had
been written with a view to provide reading material for church services. But it may have been written also with a
different purpose in mind. For Spong,
this gospel is both, a great challenge and a spiritual depth which is not found
in the other three. Although he believes
that not one word in this gospel was actually said by Jesus, quite apart from
linguistic reasons, it contains a spiritual truth of his experience of God,
which no literal Interpretation could ever reflect. He writes:
"John's gospel is so
profound, so poetic, so skilfully crafted, so dependent on images and concepts
out of the Jewish past, that it is worthy of the study of a lifetime that so
many biblical scholars have given to it.
But it is distorted, trivialised, and made almost contemptible by those
who cannot escape their commitment to the shallowness of only literal
truth. I am convinced that there is an
ancient and primitive historic tradition that lies behind the Fourth
Gospel. I am all but certain that this
primitive tradition was traceable to and associated with John Zebedee, who was, I believe at least in his own mind,
"the disciple whom Jesus loved."
I also believe that this gospel captured better than any other the
essence of Jesus as the church had come to understand that essence, and
therefore its words and phrases must be taken seriously if not literally by
modern Christians." (Resc.p.189)
Chapter
Fifteen
Other Letters and Writings in the New Testament
Ephesians
This letter has been
problematical for most critical commentators since early days. Marcion, (about
160ce.) a son of a Bishop, claimed that this letter was written to the Laodiceans. The name
Ephesians is also missing from some ancient manuscripts. Many think that it was, in its original form,
a circular with an open space for the address to be inserted later. In support of this is the fact that there are
no personal references, as in most other letters. Kümmel thinks that
it was not even a circular, but a meditation on great Christian themes. (p.251)
It
claims to be from Paul, but many scholars doubt it, as there is good reason to believe
that it neither comes from Paul's hand nor written during his life time. Paul lived and worked in
Kümmel thinks that the language in Ephesians is similar to
that of the
It
also leans heavily on Paul's letter to the Colossians:
1. About one third of the words in
Colossians are found again in Ephesians, or of 155 verses of Ephesians, 73 have
verbal parallels with Colossians. This
is not Paul’s usual custom shown in any of his letters.
2. It follows the structure of Colossians but
is developed in a way not done by Paul in the past.
3. It also has concepts that are Pauline, but
these have been developed which reflect a time well after Paul’s life. For instance:
a) The oneness of Christ, emphasis on unity,
it reflects a time when the unity of the early church was already threatened by
several schisms.
b) ‘The heavenly world’, an expression lacking
in Paul.
c) ‘The Church’ seems more structured than in
Paul’s time.
The strongest argument
against Pauline authorship is its theology.
For instance Col.2:7
“Keep your roots deep in him (Christ), build your lives on him…”
whereas Ephesians says (
The
most likely outcome of this discussion is that it comes from the hand of a
disciple of Paul, but this is by no means unanimous. J.H. Houlden
suggests (p.235) "We know that in Ephesians we have the work of an
inspired and able Pauline disciple. We
can see how far he has maintained, how far developed, how far misunderstood,
the thought of his master."
Ephesians
can be divided into two parts: the first
three chapters are more doctrinal, the other three have more to do with
morals. One overall theme unites this
letter: "The unity which Christ has
brought about: between heaven and earth, Jew and Gentile, man and woman, and
above all, mankind and God, a unity made visible in Christ's union with the
Church.” (Houlden p.237/8). This structure would make it more unified
than Paul's other letters, but the debate about Pauline authorship is going
on.
Ephesians
has some very fine passages:
1. The majestic hymn on God’s plan of
bringing all things together in God’s son (1:3-14).
2. When Bishop Desmond Tutu came to
3. The reconciliation of all beings in
Christ (
4. A prayer that we should be rooted in the
love of Christ (
5. The unity of the church, the body of
Christ (4:1-32).
Other passages with some moral injunctions, belong to a time that is past. For instance the
famous passage on wives to submit to husbands (
1+2 Timothy and Titus
These letters are called
the Pastoral epistles, “they contain instructions and admonitions
for the conduct of the pastoral office in the Christian congregation”. (Kümmel p.259) They
are directed to a Hellenistic community, (no former Jews there), who live in a
pagan world. They are not private
letters, rather written for the regulation of church discipline. “They presuppose the same false teachers, the
same organisation, and quite similar conditions in the churches, and have the
same peculiarities in language and style.” (ibid.)
1
Tim.3:15 seems to summarised the purpose
of these letters: "This letter will let you know how we should conduct
ourselves in God's household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar
and support of truth".
Marcion in the middle of the second century,
did not accept these letters as coming from Paul. Since then most commentators reject Pauline
authorship of the Pastoral epistles. Reasons given are:
1. The church described in them has a
"highly developed ecclesiastical organisation" (Barclay p.5) There are bishops,
deacons, elders, the order of widows in 1 Tim.5:2-16. The church has already become an institution.
2. There are also hints of creeds emerging,
"faith" changed its meaning, in Paul it is faith in a person (Jesus),
here it is faith in a creed. (see
1 Tim.4:1) "faith and good doctrine" (v.6) - an early creed in 1
Tim.3:16): "He appeared in human form, was shown to be right by the
Spirit, and was seen by angels. He was
preached among the nations, was believed in throughout the world, and was taken
up to heaven." (Barc.p.6)
3. The heresies
against which these letters are written are most likely a form of Gnosticism
(not evident during Paul’s life).
Language is the most telling reason why these letters do not come from
Paul. The Greek uses more than one third
of words never mentioned by Paul.
Hebrews
This writing is again
not from Paul. Charp.p.53 writes that it
is a ‘sermon which a pupil of Paul’ writes (about 70ce.) to some disoriented
and perhaps disenchanted Christians, who once came from Judaism but who missed
the ceremonies of Judaism.
Kümmel on the other hand thinks that the author does not
know the contrast between Jews and Gentiles at all. These words do not appear in the text, so he
thinks that the author writes to Christians as Christians (p.280). According to Kümmel,
the date of its composition is between 80 and 90 ce.
Spong
thinks that it was written before Matthew’s gospel, (80-85 ce.) as it appears
to come out of an early and fairly Jewish period of church history:
“Some have suggested that Hebrews was originally
a homily based on Ps.110. It portrays
Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of the Day of Atonement. It had no specific concept of a resurrection,
but focused strongly on what can be called the exaltation (ascension). It suggested that Jesus had entered the
heavenly realm in much the same way that the sacrificial lamb went up to God on
the smoke of the burnt offering (Heb.4:14ff; 9:12; 9:24) Jesus, in Hebrews would have been carried on
the clouds into the heavenly realm as both the great high priest and the
perfect offering.” (Lib.229)
But as Jesus was not part of the regular priesthood of the
Jews, his ‘perfect sacrifice’ was offered in the same way like that of
Melchizedek. (Ps.110:4) (This goes back to Gen.14:18, where Abraham gave a
tenth to the king of
Nothing seems to be
known about the author.
The
order in which it is written can be paraphrased like this: Hear the Word of God in the Son, Jesus
Christ, who is higher than the angels and Moses. (1:1-4:13) Let us draw near to the High Priest of
the heavenly sanctuary and hold fast to our confession. (
James; 1 + 2 Peter; Jude;
1, 2 + 3 John
These letters are
generally known as Catholic epistles, as they seem to
be intended more to go to the wider church, rather than an individual church,
or that their content concerns all churches.
Authorship is generally unknown, and the date of composition is for all
in the late 90s.
Revelation
Some commentators call
this last writing in the New Testament ‘the happy hunting-ground for
millenarians’. Another one likened it
to a tunnel with light at the beginning and light at the end, and in the
middle, a long stretch of darkness through which lurid objects thunder past,
bewildering and stunning the reader.
(Hunter p.188) The early church took a long time to include it in the
New Testament Canon. It has mostly been
misunderstood, and it is, of course, very obscure for the 21st
century reader. However, when properly
interpreted, this book can give comfort and hope also to us today.
Revelation
and Daniel in the Old Testament are the only books in the Bible which we call Apocalyptic writings.
We need to remember that Apocalyptic writings
is “good news in bad times”, i.e. the church at the time of writing was going
through a crisis. Its members were
persecuted and a lot of those who remained faithful,
were martyred. There were others who may
have betrayed the faithful ones, and persecution and torture was a daily
occurrence for some. It was dangerous
then to write in an open way, that is why all is
“covered” by symbolic meaning, which the recipients would have understood. It is a kind of underground resistance
literature. (Hunter p.189) The writers
were pessimistic about this life, so God would create a new one.
In
some ways it is another human attempt to put into finite words the infinite
mystery of God, not so different to the other New Testament writers.
Spong
thinks that this book will probably be quoted “quite frequently and with a
strange literalness by those who traffic in predicting the end of the world in
order to produce sufficient fear among people, for it is religiously tinged
fear that enables religious charlatans to manipulate their audiences for their
own benefit.” (Lib.p.170)
Date: It was
written approximately in 95ce. at the end of the reign
of Emperor Domitian, who demanded ‘emperor worship’
as the one unifying religion of his empire. (‘worshiping the beast and its
image’ in Rev.14:9-11)
Place:
The
Author: A
Jewish Christian named John, probably a church leader in
Purpose:
What follows is based on Charpentier’s
book. He said: “In its present form the
book appears as a meditation on the church:
The life of the church depends on God who is Lord of history, on Jesus
the faithful witness, and the Spirit who prays in it.” (p.106)
Numbers: Charpentier gives a clue as to the meaning of numbers in
Revelation: 3 – heaven; 4 – earth; 7 –
perfection; a fraction of 7 i.e.3½ stands for evil; 12 – Judaism or the
Christian Church.
Charpentier divides the book into
three parts:
1. The Incarnate church (chapters 1-3)
The fact that this is a
symbolic book is clearly stated at the beginning (
2. The committed church (4 – 20)
Chapters 4-11 deal with the church’s relationship with
Judaism. The elders (old men), the
leaders of the church;
the four living creatures (animals), the created world with its
four horizons (they come form God’s throne);
the seven lampstands, the Holy Spirit; the Book, the Old Testament, which remains
sealed (incomprehensible), until Jesus opens it. The people of God at the end of time will
consist of those who came from Judaism (7:1-8):
Their number is 144,000 (i.e.12 times 12 times 1000, 12 for
Chapters 12-20 deal with the church and totalitarian
political powers. The woman and the
dragon (12:1-6) means the church gives birth to the Messiah on
3. The transfigured church (21-22)
“After these chapters of fire and blood, the
finale, like the final chorus to a hymn to joy, introduces us to peace of
paradise, the paradise of Genesis. However,
John tells us that this is not nostalgia for a lost golden age, but hope set
before us. The church comes down from
heaven. That indicates that it both is
the early church in which we live and at the same time it has been remade
entirely by God. Taking up the great
vision with which the Bible begins, this church recreated by God really becomes
the
“This
new paradise, set before us as a task to be performed and a gift to be received
from God, is irrigated by the spring of living water flowing from the side of
the lamb who was slain, a spring which has a name: the
Holy Spirit.” (Charp.p.109) “However, this is still only a ‘vision’: it
is both that which is already dimly experienced in the church of today and that
towards which it journeys and which it must bring nearer. The Spirit, too, does not cease to inspire
its prayer: ‘Oh, yes! Come, Lord Jesus!’” (Charp. p.107).
Hunter
(p.197) points out that Revelation is the only book which clearly spells out
that at the end of this life there is a city – the City of
History of the New
Testament Canon
It is most likely, that
before any written documents were collected by different churches, the stories
of and about Jesus were passed from mouth to mouth (the oral tradition). Spong ponders about this period saying: “In
time many parts of this oral tradition were not repeated and therefore
forgotten. What jewels fell by the
wayside will never be recovered. When
Paul writes about the Lord’s Supper in 1 Cor.11:23 “For I received from the
Lord the teaching that I passed on to you”, it appears that the words of the
Lord’s Supper had already become the tradition of the church, written down in
some way for churches to use at Communion.
The
collection of primitive Christian writings had started very early in the life
of the church. Treasured sayings of
Jesus, some of his parables, sermon notes of prominent preachers and the like
will have been part of the collection of the early church. In addition, some letters of Paul may have
been added to the collection, but this was by no means universal. One church may have kept one letter, another two
or three stories etc. These would have
been read at their services, perhaps, to illustrate some points made by the Old
Testament reading, and so were kept together with the
scrolls of the Old Testament.
At
this point Spong’s theory, that the first three gospels were written to provide
lectionary material, would have taken place on behalf of certain churches. In time many more than our four gospels had
been written (Peter, James, Thomas, Mary, Judas, Hebrews, Gospel of the
Egyptians, Gospel of Truth, and many others).
“In the middle of the second century, a group of Christian leaders sat
down and decided what books would be included in the volume that would be known
as sacred Scriptures”. (Resc.p.89) But Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, still argues around 180ce,
that there are only four gospels. It
obviously took many years, almost a century, before it was more universally
accepted that the New Testament would include the four gospels and 13 Letters
of Paul. Between 170
and 220ce. these writings were put on the same
footing as the Old Testament. Athanasius in
369ce. is the first theologian to name exactly
our present Canon of Scripture. “The
Canon of Scripture thus came to be defined as the collection of inspired
writings made by the tradition and authority of the Church”. (ODCC.p.230)
Summary of
this Book
We have travelled a long way, from the dark
prehistoric times of cave dwellers, patriarchs, through
What
remains is our personal attitude towards Jesus and his way. No matter what others have said and written,
the question I would like to leave with you is this: Has this course helped you on your faith
journey, or has it done the opposite, to sow doubts into your mind?
If
doubts, will they lead you to a deeper understanding after some
reflection? This is my fervent prayer.
The
message I would like to leave with you is this:
Jesus has always tried to break down barriers between like and unlike,
between Jews and Samaritans (Lk.10:25-37), between Jews and Gentiles
(Lk7:1-10), between Male and Female (Lk.13:10-17 + Jn.4:1-26), between Slaves
and Free (Mk.9:35), and Spong would continue between blacks and whites, between
gays and straights, between Muslims and Christians.
The
love of Christ reaches out to all in the world.
An article by David Ransom, co-editor of a secular magazine, THE NEW
INTERNATIONALIST (No.375 of Jan/Feb 2005) deals with our global consciousness,
and a global democracy. He writes: “Most
religions do indeed lay claim to universal spiritual truths, but since these
can be translated into practice by one religion only at the expense of all the
others, their relevance here is strictly limited.” It is my conviction that unless the Christian
Church becomes truly “Catholic”, embracing all of humanity world-wide without
expecting others to ‘join’, and proclaiming the love of Christ to everyone
unconditionally, the Church will remain largely irrelevant. God, who is LOVE, breaks down all barriers and
brings us God’s Shalom.
The End
Bibliography
William
Barclay: Letters to Timothy Titus
Philemon, Saint Andrew Press 1956
C.K.
Barrett: The Gospel according to St.John, SPCK 1967
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer: Life
Together, SCM Press1954
Ethics,
The Cost of Discipleship, SCM 1959
Letters & Papers from Prison,
John Bowden: What about the
Old Testament, SCM Book Club No.3 published 1969.
John Bright: A History of
Etienne Charpentier: How to Read the Old Testament, Crossroad
Etienne
Charpentier:
How to Read the New Testament
SCM 1981
H. Cunliffe-Jones: Deuteronomy,
Torch Bible Commentaries, SCM 1951
Robert Davidson: The Old Testament, Hodder
& Stoughton 1964
R.H.
Fuller: The Foundations of New
Testament Christology, Lutterworth 1965
J.H. Gailey: Micah to Malachi, Layman's Bible Commentaries, SCM 1962
Lloyd Geering: “Is Christianity going anywhere?”, St.Andrew’s
Trust, Wellington 2004
J.H.Houlden:
Paul’s Letters from Prison, Penguin
1970
A.M.
Hunter: Introducing the New
Testament, SCM 1972
Veronica Ions: Egyptian
Mythology, Hamlin 1965
Werner Keller: The Bible as
History in Pictures, Hodder & Stoughton
1964
W.G.
Kümmel:
Introduction to the New Testament,
SCM 1966
John Marsh: Amos and Micah, Torch Bible Paperback, SCM 1959
John
Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought, SCM 1963
J.A.T. Robinson: But
that I can’t believe! Collins
J.N. Schofield: Introducing Old Testament Theology, SCM cheap edition 1964
John Shelby Spong and Denise G. Haines: Beyond Moralism, A
Contemporary view of the Ten Commandments, Harper & Row 1986
John Shelby Spong: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Harper
John Shelby Spong: Liberating the Gospels, Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes,
Harper
John Shelby Spong:
A new Christianity for a
Claus Westermann: A Thousand Years and a Day, SCM 1962
G. E. Wright: Isaiah, Layman's Bible Commentary, SCM 1964
With
Love to the World (WLW), 62 The Boulevarde, Strathfield 2135,
Vol. One 2004
Reference Books
F.L. Cross: The
The New Bible
Dictionary, Inter-Varsity Fellowship1962
The New Bible
Commentary, Inter-Varsity Fellowship 1953
The Analytical Greek
Lexicon, Samuel Bagster &
Sons,
Task Group on the Understanding and Use of
the Bible, Report 2000, established by the Uniting Church in
Australia, Assembly 1997
The Library of Christian Classics, Vol.X, SCM
1961, Anselm of Canterbury
p.73
(I Kaini Diathiki), The Greek New Testament issued by the
British and Foreign Bible Societ
(References in the
Appendix
The Chart at the back is based on Spong’s book Liberating the Gospels.
It is to be seen as an approximation only, as
some entries have been filled in by the author “to fill the gaps”. It is hoped that it will provide a more
comprehensive over-view particularly in reference to some of the Old Testament
readings.
An additional schedule may be useful for the
Easter Vigil (or rather the Good Friday vigil) in Mark’s Gospel, and the
Pentecost Vigil in Matthew’s.
Mark's Easter Vigil
The Easter Vigil was probably observed for
twenty four hours, beginning when Good Friday started in the Jewish calendar at
sunset (
1.
2. 9 to 12.00
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Matthew's Gospel
The Lectionary reading
for the Jewish Synagogue worship for Pentecost had Psalm 119, which had been
specially written for that purpose. As
in Mark’s Easter Vigil, it was divided into 8 equal parts to be read over a 24
hour period, ending at
Jewish Pentecost Vigil - Psalm 119
1.
After the Introduction,
the readings are in three segments each, i.e. to be read on an hourly basis:
2. 9pm -
3. 12
4. 3 am - 6 am: v57-64 Devotion (see v.62 "In the
middle of the night"); v65-72 Value of the Law ("; v73 -80 Justice of
the Law
5. 6 am-9 am: v81-88
Prayer for Deliverance; 89-96 Faith in the Law; 97-104 Love for the Law
("I think about it [law] all day long").
6. 9 am-12
7. 12 midday - 3 pm: 129-136 Desire to obey
the Law; 137-144 Justice of the Law; 145-152 Prayer for Deliverance
("Before sunrise I call to you for help" v.147 and "All night
long I lie awake" v.148);
8. 3 pm-6pm: 153-160 A Plea for Help; 161-168
Dedication to the Law (this includes "seven times a day will I praise
you" v.164); 169-175 Prayer for Help.
Matthew's Pentecost Vigil
It is Matthew’s
interpretation, that Jesus replaces the Law or Torah. Hence in his readings
for Pentecost we find the story of the Sermon on the Mount, divided also in
eight sections for a 24-hour reading.
1. v.1-10 Introduction, then, elaborating
on v.10, v.11-20. In other words,
Matthew is going backwards. The next
section elaborates on v.9 etc.
2. v.21-26 elaborates on 'the
peacemakers' as v.9;
3. v.27-37 elaborates on 'the pure in
heart' v.8;
4. v.38-6:4 elaborates on 'the merciful'
v.7;
5. 6:5 - 15 elaborates on those who do
God's will v.6;
6. v.16-21 elaborates on 'the
humble" v.5;
7. v.22-7:6 elaborates on 'those who
mourn' v.4;
8. v.7-27 elaborates on 'the spiritually
poor' v.3;
Comments on Jewish Feasts
1.
2. Pentecosrt
(Shavuot): The 50th day after Passover,
during the month of Sivan, observed with a 24-hour vigil to celebrate the
giving of the Law, the Torah, to
Moses at Mt.Sinai.
3. Ninth of Ab: A day of
mourning to recall the fall of
4. New Year (Rosh
Hashanah): First day of Tishri. In pre-Exile days, the start of the Jewish
year. It became the day on which to
proclaim the coming of the
5. Atonement (Yom Kippur): between 2nd + 3rd Sabbaths of Tishri. A day of penitence marked
by the offering of the perfect animal sacrifice and the loading of the sins of
the people onto the back of a scapegoat.
The Book of Lamentations is read.
6. Tabernacles (Sukkot): Between 3rd + 4th Sabbaths of Tishri. An 8-day celebration of the
harvest. Used
to recall the wilderness years of Jewish history.
7. Dedication (Hanukkah): Between 3rd + 4th Sabbaths of Kislev. An 8-day celebration of the return of God's
light to the
8. Purim:
Between 2nd + 3rd Sabbaths of Adar. Celebrated the
delivery of the Jews from peril during the reign of the Persians. The Book of Esther was written for this
celebration.
The Jewish
Calendar
and the
Christian
Liturgical Year