The Sins of Scripture (27 page)

A second voice of protest was one raised against that religious idea so dear to our tribal mentality that the love of God stops at the boundary of “my people.” God’s love hardly embraces gentiles like the people of Nineveh, said the common wisdom, but God’s prophet Jonah was called to preach to the Ninevites at the very time that the Jewish reform movement under Ezra was purging the land of mixed marriages and half-breed children. In Jonah the protest against limits being placed on God’s love was heard.

A similar theme is registered in the protest book of Ruth. The background to this story is that the super patriots of the post-exilic period were holding up King David as the quintessential Jew and expressing the national yearning to restore that throne so that Israel could once again dominate her enemies. There was also a not-so-well-hidden note of the racism present in Jewish life at that time, with David being cited as “exhibit A” of that Jewish racial superiority. The author of the little book of Ruth wrote in response a charming protest in which the purpose of the book is not exposed until the last verse. In this narrative, an exemplary young Moabite woman named Ruth was widowed when her Jewish husband died. Rather than return to her Moabite family, which would have been the social norm of that day, she chose to stay with Naomi, her Jewish mother-in-law, and to care for her with an incredible devotion that lived out the highest expectations of the Jewish law. She was rewarded for her faithfulness in this story by a marriage to Boaz. A child of this union between the Jewish Boaz and the Moabite Ruth was named Obed. He became the father of Jesse, who was the father of the revered King David. This meant that the greatest king of the Jews was one-eighth Moabite! Racial superiority was exposed for what it is: bigoted nonsense. This remarkable story was also incorporated into the epic of the Jews. The religious tradition of the Jews was capable of challenging the voices of the religious establishment of their day. Perhaps that was where the claim that these words were the “Word of God” began. The establishment resisted, but it did not, perhaps it
could
not, purge from its epic the challenge that was deep in the text.

The epic of the Jews also had places within its sacred tales where the invitation was heard that kept the boundaries of both their tribe and their religion flexible. People would find in its words the voice of God that would tell them that God welcomes all people—all races, ethnic backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations—to find their place at the table of the Lord. It was a voice of God that proclaimed that there are no restrictions on the love of God. This remarkable Bible evolved into being not a weapon to enforce prejudice, but an invitation to come as you are in order to become all that you can be.

Next in the biblical text of this thoroughly human but mysteriously expansive saga we call the Old Testament there are two minor liturgical books that were designed for special moments in Jewish history. The book of Esther was written to help the Jews celebrate the fourteenth day of Adar, the Feast of Purim, when the Jews recalled their deliverance from the Persians; and the book of Lamentations was written to be read on the ninth of Ab to recall the destruction of the temple by the army of Nebuchadnezzar in 596 BCE.

Then there are the so-called wisdom books of the Jews, the best known of which are the book of Proverbs, which dispenses practical, if culturally compromised, advice; and a philosophical book called Ecclesiastes, in which Qoheleth the preacher meditates on the apparent meaninglessness of life: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2).

Next there is the Jewish hymnal, called the book of Psalms, which includes songs of praise for both God and the king that range from the bloodthirsty to the profound.

Finally, there are books added to the epic of Jewish life very late in Jewish history. These include 1 and 2 Chronicles, basically a rewrite in a later age of the books of 1 and 2 Kings to make them fit the needs of a new time in history, and the document of the last prophet, called Daniel, written in the second century BCE but projected back into the Exile of the sixth century, in which various familiar images entered our vocabulary—images like the fiery furnace that did not consume Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (Dan. 3), the lions’ den into which Daniel was thrown (Dan. 6) and the “clay feet” that rendered all of the protective armament worthless (Dan. 2:34). The book of Daniel also transformed a mythical figure described as “like a son of man” (Dan. 7:13), which first appeared in Ezekiel as a synonym for probably Ezekiel himself, into a supernatural figure who would someday come riding on the clouds at the end of history to inaugurate the kingdom of God. It was yet another lens through which the memory of a man named Jesus would someday be interpreted.

When this epic, with its various layers, its grandeur and its pathos, its triumphalism and its minority voices, is put together, it represents a rich treasure trove, a national story like none other in human history. It was born in a dialogue between ongoing human experience and that pervading sense of the holy that calls us beyond human limits into the wonder of transcendence, the mystery of God. We read this epic. We mark it, learn it and inwardly digest it, not because God wrote it, dictated it or even inspired it, but because it is an intensely human book describing a human journey where neither the vision of tribal glory with all of its triumphant pain nor the yearning of those who see beyond the range of the sight of most people is left out. That is how our Bible came into being.

Today, religious people read this part of the sacred story that is shared by both Jews and Christians, but more often than not we read it all wrong. The inspiration of the Bible is not found in its tales of supernatural occurrences and transforming miracles, narratives that speak of divine intervention or fulfilled prophecy. Its inspiration lies rather in those parts of this epic that probe the inner recesses of the human heart and tell us something about who we are, what our values are and what it means to touch the holy. In its pages we listen to the wisdom of the ages even in its dated forms, in search of meaning, transcendence, and ultimately God. This book, which in time came to be called the Holy Bible, is not the ultimate court of appeal on all human questions, nor does it contain the final answer in the attempt to discern God’s will. It is rather a call to walk in the faith tradition it reflects, to be part of this ongoing story and even to write the next chapter in this ever-expanding epic so that you and I can also see ourselves as the people of God, always in an exodus from that which binds us, always in exile from the faith of yesterday, always listening for the voice of the holy both in the life of the world and in the depths of our own being. That is what the Bible is, the epic of our life. To try to make it more than that, the source of religious authority or the ultimate definer of truth, is to turn it into being demonic. It is from those who have claimed too much for this literalized Bible that the sins of scripture embedded in its “terrible texts” have emerged. They are texts wrenched out of this epic tale and used to enhance violence, to destroy the holiness of God’s world, and to hurt, maim or kill certain of the children of God. The day of using the Bible to claim for your prejudice that it has “the authority of the Word of God” is quite frankly over, and we should give thanks for that fact. The churches of the world must learn that truth or they will die. There is no alternative.

We turn next to see how the story of Jesus was grafted onto this epic, and with it the call to a new universal consciousness.

T
o our knowledge Jesus left no written records. There is only one occasion in the entire gospel tradition where we are told of Jesus writing anything, anywhere, at any time. That single note is found in a disputed narrative about Jesus and the woman who was taken in the act of adultery (John 8:1–11). In that account the text says that Jesus, facing the woman’s accusers, “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” No attempt was made in this text to say what it was that he wrote, leaving it to screenplay writers and preachers to translate that writing for each generation. Whatever else the gospels are, they are certainly not the writings of Jesus.

It is equally clear that the gospels are not the result of Jesus’ dictation found in the written notes from his disciples. They are not like the table-talk collections that were to be gathered by the fervent sycophants of later Christian heroes like Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, for fear that a single gem might fall from the lips of the hero and not be recorded.

Some years ago while on a book tour, I was the primary guest on a nationwide late-night talk show that originated in Burbank, California. The host was Tom Snyder, a radio and television figure well known in the 1990s. The book that we were to discuss, first between the two of us and then with listeners who would call in with questions and comments, was
Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism
. As the dialogue progressed, I went into some of the dating consensus around the books of the New Testament. There was for Tom Snyder no problem with my dating of the Pauline corpus between 50 and 64 CE. When we turned to the gospels, however, and I began to suggest dates between the early 70s CE for Mark, the first gospel to be written, and 100 CE for John, the last, my host became apprehensive.

“Wait a minute, Bishop,” Tom Snyder said. “I’ve just gotten out my short pencil, and those dates suggest to me that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses since they would have been too old.”

“That is correct, Tom,” I replied. “Only the gospel of John actually claims to be an eyewitness account, and I know of no reputable New Testament scholar who believes that John, the son of Zebedee, was actually the author of the Fourth Gospel. He would have been approaching one hundred years of age, and almost no one lived to that age in the first century. Even if they had, writing a book is not what they would do at that age. The other gospel writers do not even suggest such a claim. Luke goes so far as to outline the sources of his research in Luke 1:1–4.”

“But Bishop,” Tom continued, “when I was in parochial school as a kid, the nuns told me that the disciples followed Jesus around and wrote down everything he said, and that was the source from which the gospels have emerged. It never occurred to me before to question that!”

“Tom,” I responded, “did the nuns tell you that they wrote Jesus’ words down in spiral notebooks using ballpoint pens?”

It was a consciousness-raising “aha” kind of moment for my genial host. In the first century very few people possessed the skill of writing. That is why we discover a group of people in the New Testament who are called “scribes.” So few people could write that a trained professional subgroup was required to handle the writing needs of the whole community. Writing parchment was incredibly expensive, ink and quills were quite difficult to come by and books were transcribed on scrolls, making it all but impossible to do anything except read a book from beginning to ending. Scrolls do not lend themselves to skipping around.

So in the gospels we do not have the eyewitness recorded recollections of the disciples. The question therefore arises, what do we have? That is the story we need to unravel.

The gospels were written forty to seventy years after the earthly life of Jesus had come to an end. They were written in Greek, a language Jesus did not speak except in a most casual way. Internally at least, Mark and the two gospels that copied Mark, Matthew and Luke, reveal evidence of having been shaped by the liturgical life of the synagogue.
⁴
They are interpretive portraits, not eyewitness accounts. All of that must be embraced before we can begin to see just what the Jesus story adds to the Jewish epic, for that is exactly what happened when the Christian faith was born. That was no small accomplishment, for the addition of the Jesus story to the epic of the Jews transformed the Jewish story into the
human
story, with the potential that is still present to make that story the
universal
human story.

That powerful truth is not always easy to see, because most of the readers and interpreters of the gospels throughout Christian history did not know they were reading a human epic. They interpreted the gospels wrongly as either biography or history. In the process they assumed that the entire Jewish epic had to be either
true
biography or
accurate
history. But no epic is ever that.

There is no doubt that the gospels are in touch with a powerful God experience that their writers believed that they and the faith communities for whom they wrote had had with the man Jesus. One cannot
write
an experience, however. All one can write is an attempt at explaining that experience. That is what the gospels are: first-century, primarily Jewish explanations of the Jesus experience. About experiences one can only offer ecstatic utterances: “In Christ God was reconciling” (2 Cor. 5:19), or “God was in Christ” (Gal. 2:20). Those are unexplained attempts to articulate an experience. Ecstatic utterances cannot be passed on to another, so explanations that can be passed on become inevitable. How did the early Christians explain their primal experience that somehow, in some way, through some means God had been met in the life of this Jesus? Basically the New Testament is the story of those explanations.

How did God get into Jesus so that we could have that experience? That was the question the New Testament writers sought to answer. Their answers are both fascinating and contradictory, but later Christians hammered these contradictions into precise doctrines. God simply declared Jesus to be the Son of God at the time of the resurrection by the action of the Spirit, said Paul, when he wrote his epistle to the Romans (1:1–4). We miss the power of this verse because the later gospels have confused us so deeply about what the resurrection actually was. For Paul the resurrection had nothing to do with the physical resuscitation of a deceased body; it had to do with raising Jesus into the eternal life of God.
⁵
There was no split between resurrection and ascension in Paul. That would be introduced primarily by Luke, who more than anyone else transformed Easter into a physical emergence from a tomb and was required thereby to develop the ascension story in order to remove the resurrected physical body from this world to the realm of God.

When Mark, writing in the early 70s, faced the question of how it was that God could be experienced in the life of this Jesus, he explained it with his baptism story. God declared Jesus to be the Son of God by the action of the Spirit, said Mark, in perfect agreement with Paul (Mark 1:1–11). The difference was in the timing and in the graphic illustration. It happened, said Mark, not at the time of the resurrection, as Paul had suggested, but at the time of the baptism. Then Mark proceeded to tell the story of the heavens opening, the Spirit descending on Jesus, and the heavenly voice off-stage saying: “Thou art my beloved son!”

Matthew, writing in the early to mid-80s, also faced this same question, but he too changed the timing and his description of the experience in which God declared Jesus to be the Son of God. This declaration for Matthew came from an unnamed angel in a dream to Joseph. It was still mediated by the action of the Holy Spirit, but it now took place at the moment of conception. Jesus for Matthew was Emmanuel, God with us, and he was “conceived…of the Holy Spirit.” “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 1:20). That is when the story of the virgin birth was born (Matt. 1:18–25).

Luke, writing in the late 80s or even the early 90s, repeated the miraculous birth story, but he both made it more specific and changed the details. In Luke, the announcing angel is not nameless but is Gabriel, who communicates not to Joseph in a dream as the unnamed angel did in Matthew, but to Mary in real time. The child you will bear, says Gabriel, when “the power of the Most High will overshadow you[,]…will be holy; he will be called Son of God” (Luke 1:35, NRSV).

When John wrote the Fourth Gospel in the late 90s he decided that there never was a time when God was not in Christ, so he told the story of Jesus as the enfleshment of the Word of God that had been spoken at the dawn of creation. This became the place where the preexistence of Jesus, so essential to later doctrines of the incarnation, the atonement and the Trinity, first entered the Christian story.

From Paul suggesting that God entered Jesus in the resurrection when God raised him into God’s life, to John suggesting that Jesus was the enfleshed Word of God and part of who God is (since God spoke in creation and said, “Let there be light”), is quite a range of human explanations. Paul and John and all the other New Testament writers were attempting, each in his own way, to make sense out of an experience that proclaimed, in ecstatic language, “We have met God in this life of Jesus.”

I am not interested in debating the details of these competing biblical explanations. I am interested rather in what it was that created the experience that God had been met in Jesus. I regard all explanations as time-bound and time-warped. When they become supernatural tales that purport to hear the voice of God speaking from the sky or see the Holy Spirit descending on a particular life, or suggest a miraculous birth that occurred without benefit of human father, I recognize that I am reading mythology. I do not dismiss mythology as untrue. I ask, What was there about this life that required this elaborate mythology to develop? Of course God speaking in a voice that human ears can hear and presumably record, the Holy Spirit descending from the sky and virgins giving birth do not actually happen except in great epic stories, but something occurs to make these mythologies seem appropriate.
⁶

How was it that people became convinced that death could not contain Jesus? What was the experience that lay behind the various biblical explanations of resurrection? Of course the resurrection narratives are mythological. Dead bodies do not walk out of tombs three days after execution. Angels do not descend out of the sky, earthquakes do not announce earthly events, soldiers are not reduced to a state of stupor by angelic power, stones are not rolled away from tombs to let the dead out or to allow the gaze of witnesses to come in, bodies do not materialize on the road to Emmaus or dematerialize after the breaking of bread (Luke 24:13–27), nor do they walk through walls to enter a room where the windows are shut and the doors are locked in order to have Thomas explore the divine wounds (John 20:19–29). These are mythological details involved in human attempts to explain an experience. My interest is in raising the question about how it is that people believe they have met in this human being a power of life that the grave cannot contain and that death cannot extinguish. That is a very different question from the one Christians usually ask about the accuracy of the resurrection stories. Of course they are not accurate; they are explanations. Is the experience, however, behind them real and what was it? That is my concern.

Of course stories of cosmic ascensions are mythological. One does not get to heaven by rising off the ground and heading into the sky. One might end up in orbit instead. That would present an interesting portrait: Jesus circling the earth in eternal orbit! Failing that, one might rise into the infinity of space. It would be a long journey. If the ascension of Jesus could occur at the speed of light, approximately one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, it would still take Jesus more than one hundred thousand years just to escape our single galaxy, to say nothing of the other two hundred billion or so galaxies in the visible universe. So I have no desire to debate whether or not this story is literally true. What I am interested in is seeking to determine what the experience was that caused people to say his life and the life of God must somehow be in touch with one another. Jesus must be where God is. That is not often said about human beings. Some compelling experience demands that our language be stretched beyond the human limits to capture undoubted reality. What was it? That is the question that requires our attention.

There is no doubt that stories were told about Jesus doing miraculous things like giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, mobility to the crippled and speech to the mute. That was the expectation present among the Jews, that such signs would accompany the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. Isaiah had spelled that out in his thirty-fifth chapter: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy” (vv. 5–6, NRSV).

The question I seek to answer is not whether these miracles actually happened. I do not live in a world of miracles, like the world in which the biblical stories were created. My question is a deeper one. What was it about the Jesus experience that caused people to say that in his life the signs of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God had been seen? That is a very different concern.

No, I do not believe that Jesus stilled the storm, walked on water, or took five loaves and two fish and with them fed the multitude. But I do want to understand what the experience was with Jesus that caused people to apply the God language of the Hebrew scriptures to him. It was Isaiah who said that God provides a shelter from the storm (Isa. 4:6, 25:4). What was there about Jesus that made it appropriate to apply that language to him? What caused a first-century Jew to apply to Jesus the words of Isaiah that God can make “a path in the mighty waters” (43:16) or of the Psalmist that “thy way was through the sea, thy path through the great waters; yet thy footprints were unseen” (Ps. 77:19)? What was there about Jesus that prompted people to write stories about him claiming that, like Moses (Exod. 16:31ff.), he could feed the multitude in the wilderness with heavenly bread? For that is what the feeding of the five thousand tries to say (Mark 6:30ff., Matt. 14:13ff., Luke 9:12ff., John 6:1–13).