[Dialogue] 11/08/12, Spong: The Birth of Jesus, Part I: Introduction

Thu Nov 8 12:42:30 PST 2012

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	The Birth of Jesus, Part I: Introduction
	Most of the portraits of the mother of Jesus that hang in the great museums of the world are dependent first on the biblical stories of Jesus’ birth and second on the presumed appearances of his mother at the foot of the cross.  Take those two traditions away from the New Testament and the mother of Jesus almost totally disappears.  Indeed, what remains is mostly negative.  She is portrayed in Mark (chapters 3 and 6) as thinking that Jesus was “beside himself,” that is “out of his mind” and she, along with his brothers, moves to “put him away.”  He had, this story implies, become an embarrassment to the family.  In the Fourth Gospel, in the narrative of the water being changed into wine, the mother of Jesus is portrayed as inappropriately pushing Jesus to act and she receives from him the rebuke, “Woman, what have you to do with me, my hour has not yet come?”  She is also not present at the cross in the writings of Paul or in any of the earlier gospels of Mark, Matthew or Luke. Only with the appearance of the Fourth Gospel at the end of the first century did anyone think to portray her at the foot of the cross.
	These biblical facts force us to recognize that most of the ideas we have about the mother of Jesus are late developing myths that make assumptions the Bible does not make.  The birth stories are found first in Matthew, the dating of which is generally between 82 and 85, and second in Luke, which is generally thought to have been written about a decade after Matthew.  This means that the New Testament’s accounts of Jesus’ birth are both products of a time 52-65 years after the life of Jesus came to its earthly end and some 82-95 years after the time of his birth.  This is not eye witness reporting. Clearly the tradition that was built around the mother of Jesus is both late developing and continues to grow with the passing of years.
	Once the time of the writing of the New Testament has passed, however, the mythology that developed around the mother of Jesus apparently knew no bounds.  The virgin mother of the birth narratives became in successive generations, first, the permanent virgin, thus redefining Jesus’ siblings, referred to by name in both Galatians and in Mark, and referred to in John simply as “his brothers,” as half brothers or cousins. Next she was declared to have been a “post-partum” virgin, which suggested that even the birth of Jesus did not disturb her virginal hymen.  In the service of that idea the “Fathers” of the church even searched the scriptures for biblical texts that would support this growing conviction.  They settled on two.  First, they looked at the writings of a sixth century BCE prophet named Ezekiel, who in the first verse of the 44th chapter wrote these words: “This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened and no one shall enter by it, for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut.”  Without either apology or embarrassment, they leaped on these words to claim that the “post partum virginity” of the “Blessed Virgin Mary” had actually been predicted by the prophets! The second text was found in the resurrection story according to the Fourth Gospel.  In that narrative the disciples were in hiding in an upper room with the doors and the windows closed and locked and Jesus came and stood in their midst.  If the risen Christ could pass through walls guarded by locked doors, they argued, it was no great stretch to imagine the infant Christ passing through the birth canal of his mother without breaking the hymen.  Mythology always does strange things to facts and to reality.
	By the 19th century, devotion to the mother of Jesus became so strong that the Roman Catholic Church, in which this devotion was most encouraged, declared that she, unlike all other human beings, had been “immaculately conceived.”  That is, her mother had been miraculously cleansed of the sin of Adam, which was believed to have infected all human beings and to have been passed on from generation to generation.  For Jesus to have been born without sin, his mother would have to have been especially prepared for this birth.   This necessity also reflected the fact that in the early years of the 18th century, the discovery had been made that women have an egg cell and therefore that the woman literally contributes half of the genetic makeup of every person who has ever been born.  Prior to this the assumption was that the woman simply provided the womb that nurtured the male seed to maturity.  Like “Mother Earth” into which the farmer planted the seed, the woman’s role had been seen as simply to bring to birth the life that came from the male.  When the egg cell was discovered, the realization dawned on the leadership of the church that the mother of Jesus was, like all women and indeed like all people, a child of Adam and so the sinlessness of Jesus was compromised through his mother’s line. That had not been a problem in the old view of reproduction. The Immaculate Conception addressed that theological problem demonstrating once and for all that even “infallible” doctrines are forced to adjust to new discoveries.
	The final chapter in the mythological development of the mother of Jesus came in the 20th century when Mary was declared to have been bodily assumed into heaven.  Since she was born without sin, she was not required to go through the passage of death, since death, according to the story of the Garden of Eden, was punishment for sin.
	Carl Jung rejoiced in the Vatican’s declaration of the bodily assumption of the mother of Jesus into heaven because in his world of symbols this meant that the feminine had finally been lifted into God and the patriarchal tyranny of a God conceived of in only masculine terms and always addressed as “Father” had finally been tempered.
	In this new series of columns over the next few months, I want, first, to get underneath the mythology of the ages and second, the development found in the New Testament itself, so that we can look at Jesus, the mother of Jesus and the entire Christian story with a set of eyes honed by scholarship and tempered by the facts of history as we can demonstrate them.  I trust it will be an illuminating and worthwhile story for my readers.
	If the familiar biblical images of the mother of Jesus are late developing, what do we have that is original and perhaps trustworthy?  That is the question we will address as this series unfolds.  I begin with some statements of fact that I will pursue in detail going into each of them deeply before any conclusions are reached, probably some time in February.  For now, I simply file them as bullet points for your consideration. As the Book of Common Prayer in my church states these bullet points are designed to be “read, marked, learned and inwardly digested.” This series will provide the time to do just that.

		We can now date the life of Jesus with some degree of accuracy. Recent discoveries have made it possible to fix the life of Jesus between the years of 4 BCE and 30 CE.  We get to these dates first by the discovery in ancient Roman records that King Herod died in 4 BCE and since the clear New Testament tradition is that Jesus was born when Herod was the king so we fix the date of Jesus birth at 4 BCE.  Second, we learn, once more from secular records, that Pilate was the procurator of Judea for the Roman Empire between the years 26-36 CE.  If, as each of the gospels asserts, the crucifixion occurred under the authority of Pilate, then the crucifixion has to happen some time between those dates.  Roman records also provide us with some other facts in the life of Pilate that have to do with the reasons for his removal from office.  Since they appear to have happened well after the crucifixion we can squeeze those dates a bit closer to perhaps 28-32 as the time of the crucifixion.  We then split the difference and settle on 30, with the knowledge that we might be off two years in either direction.  So for our working purposes, we set the life of Jesus between 4 BC and 30 CE.

		We have nothing preserved in writing anywhere of anything concerning the life of Jesus before the year 51 CE. That is a silent and dark historical tunnel, which can be illumined only by speculation.  It is filled in only by what we call “the oral tradition” that we have almost no way of recreating, entering or capturing.

		Paul the first writer, whose work was destined to be included in the New Testament, did all of his writing between the years 51 and 64.  Not all of the epistles attributed to Paul are authentically from his hand.  The ones about whom a consensus of the certainty of Pauline authorship exists are I Thessalonians, Galatians, I and II Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians.  This means that II Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, I and II Timothy, Titus and Hebrews are not considered to be from the hand of Paul.

		Nowhere in any part of the authentic Pauline corpus is there a reference of any kind to the birth of Jesus, nor is there any mention of the mother or father of Jesus. There are in Paul, however, several references, mostly in Galatians, to James, the brother of the Lord.

	Our study of the birth of Jesus will therefore start with Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament. That means that we will start our investigation in the sixth and seventh decades of the Christian era.
	I hope that whets your appetite.  We will continue the drama in subsequent columns.
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

	Question & Answer
	Ed Branthaver, via the Internet, writes:
	Question:
	You have been a long time favorite author of mine ever since I read Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. I have every one of your books in my personal library.  I grew up in the tradition of a liberal Church of the Brethren to which I still hold some loyalty.  However, in all my years, I was never able to understand much of the biblical language or teachings.  I was in my 60th year before I discovered you and your writings.  Let me say you are the first person who has helped me understand what for a long time has confused me.  Recently, I came across a small book by Anthony Freeman, God in Us.  He claims that his use of the term God (instead of referring to a supernatural being) refers to the sum of all values and ideals in life: Positive values like goodness, love, knowledge, wisdom, power (used rightly), etc. and negative values like freedom for the fear and tyranny of death, of suffering, etc.  He says, “Do you believe in God? is like asking “How long is a piece of string? Just tell me what sort of God you have in mind and I will tell you whether I believe in him (her, it.)”  He labels his philosophy, Christian Humanism, and his call to “radical insecurity” which carries an element of uncertainty, sure sounds a lot like your recent call to “Think Different, Accept Uncertainty.”  Could you call the New Christianity for a New World Christian Humanism?
	Answer:
	Dear Ed,
	I have known and admired Anthony Freeman for a long time.  He was an Anglican priest until the Anglican hierarchy decided that his view of God was not sufficient for him to represent that church as one of its ordained servants.  I would never have made such a judgment.  No person’s view of God is the same as God!  I’m not at all sure that the view of God reflected in those Anglican hierarchical figures is a view of God that is sufficient for them to remain in their respective positions of authority either.  They simply validate tradition while Anthony has challenged the adequacy of that tradition.  Only time will tell which attitude is closer to the truth and history has consistently shown that those who stand outside the traditional theological lines are harbingers of the future majority.
	Does this mean that I believe that Anthony’s view of God is complete?  No, but neither is the view of his hierarchical theological judges or my view of God.  What ecclesiastical heresy hunters never understand is no human mind and no religious tradition can ever fully embrace or express the truth of God in any human words or in any established doctrines and dogmas of any church.  Churches are always pretending that they possess the ultimate truth of God.  I think that is nothing short of idolatry. I believe I experience God and I can talk about my experience.  I do not believe I can define God, nor do I believe anyone else can.
	I find the phrase Christian Humanism to be an appealing one.  The opposite of humanism is not the lack of or the inability to embrace the reality of a supernatural deity.  The opposite of humanism is to be inhumane!  I think Jesus is about expanded life and expanded consciousness; about calling us into the fullness of lour humanity.  Humanism shares that goal, but would probably not embrace my definition. Humanism is thus not my enemy, but my ally. I think of myself as a Christian Humanist, but I want both of these words to carry equal weight.
	I hope this helps.
	~John Shelby Spong

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