[Dialogue] 2/27/14, Spong: Part XV- Matthew: Understanding the Sermon on the Mount: Conclusion

Thu Feb 27 07:17:21 PST 2014

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Part XV- Matthew
Understanding the Sermon on the Mount: Conclusion
Jesus never preached the Sermon on the Mount! That needs to be said again and again until it is embraced as a fact. The Sermon on the Mount was composed by the author of Matthew’s gospel in order to fill out his interpretive portrait of Jesus, not only as the messiah, but also as the expected prophet of whom Moses spoke and even one who was thought to have relived the life of Moses. This suggestion will be startling to some, which is why I have been so deliberate in developing the background material. Biblical ignorance is not a virtue, especially when the background material that I have cited has been known in the world of biblical scholarship for at least the last 200 years.
The facts supporting these ideas are plentiful. Nowhere else in the New Testament was Jesus ever said to have preached the Sermon on the Mount. If, as Matthew suggests, it was such a climactic moment in Jesus’ life, does it not seem strange that this event did not make an indelible impression on anyone else in the developing Christian tradition? Paul, Mark, Luke and John never mention it. In fairness, let me say that some of the material included in Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount is also included in Luke as part of Jesus’ preaching on the plains, but it is not nearly so beautifully set forth or dramatic. Luke’s Beatitudes, for example, are shortened to four and are accompanied by a series of four woes, portraying neither the grandeur nor the depth of Matthew’s sermon. Indeed, it appears to be derivative.
Some scholars adhere to what is known as “the Q hypothesis.” They believe that both Luke and Matthew had an additional, now lost, common source other than Mark, which they have called “Quella,” the German word for “source,” which was quickly abbreviated to Q. Q, they argue, contained a number of the sayings of Jesus and is used to explain the similarities between Matthew and Luke that are not derived from Mark. Other scholars who deny the Q hypothesis, and I am increasingly one of them, argue that what has been called “the Q material” is really Matthew’s midrashic adaptations written on the text of Mark, and that Luke had both Mark and Matthew before him when he wrote his gospel. Thus Luke incorporated into his gospel some of Matthew’s adaptations and additions to Mark. This, rather than a speculative, now lost document, would account for the sometimes almost identical non-Marcan passages found in both Matthew and Luke. This would mean that Q is nothing but Matthew’s adaptations to Mark, which were then incorporated into Luke.
The Q hypothesis has been a standard assumption of New Testament scholars for at least the last 150 years, but I find a theory based on a lost document to be a rather weak argument and I am delighted to see confidence in the Q hypothesis begin to wane, although that waning is more obvious among scholars in the United Kingdom than it is among scholars in the United States. In the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly think tank made up primarily of American scripture scholars, the Q hypothesis has achieved the status of an almost unchallenged dogma. In that body I was a lonely voice of one, who was never convinced of the accuracy of the Q hypothesis despite the complete confidence of the Seminar’s other fellows in it.
My reasons for this skepticism are located in the Jewishness of the gospels in general and the Jewishness of Matthew’s gospel in particular. The Sermon on the Mount is the cornerstone of my dismissal of the Q hypothesis The more one understands that the organizing principle behind each of the three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) is not the remembered life of Jesus, but the pattern of synagogue worship in which the Jesus story was told and retold during the first two to three generations of Christianity’s life, the less need one has for the existence of a lost source called Q. As we look at the Sermon on the Mount from a Jewish perspective, the more this Jewish liturgical background becomes both apparent and appealing. Indeed the relationship between the Sermon on the Mount and the festival observance of Shavuot is only the first of these connections, which I will set opposite one another as we walk through the rest of Matthew’s gospel. It is on these connections that in my mind the necessity for the Q hypothesis disappears. What the Sermon on the Mount is to Shavuot the crucifixion will be to Passover, and between those two great celebrations Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkoth, and Dedication will all be related to significant and appropriate Jesus stories. In this analysis, literalism as a viable way of reading the gospels will quite simply die and we will begin to see new dimensions in the Christ portrayal, which will enable us to lay a new claim on our faith story. To begin this process we must make sure that the connection between the Sermon on the Mount and the celebration of Shavuot is clear. If you notice that I am repeating some ideas from the column last week, be assured that it is on purpose. New ideas have to be repeated until they find permanent lodging in our minds.
Shavuot, as noted previously, is a festival coming 50 days after Passover and observed in the synagogue with a 24 hour vigil. For this vigil Psalm 119, the longest Psalm in the Psalter was specifically written. Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is modeled on that psalm. Psalm 119 provides a psalm reading for the eight segments of the 24 hour vigil. Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount reflects this psalm in many ways. It too is divided into eight segments. In Matthew’s introduction to the Sermon on the Mount he frames eight verses in such a way that each begins with the word “Blessed,” causing these verses to be named “the Beatitudes.” In the introduction to Psalm 119 two of the eight verses begin with the word “Blessed.” Matthew’s sermon is then made up of eight commentaries on each of the eight Beatitudes, but he will do these commentaries in reverse order; that is, his first commentary is on the eighth Beatitude and his last commentary is on the first Beatitude. Psalm 119 in its entirety is a hymn to the beauty and wonder of the Law, the Torah. Among its words are these: “Blessed are those who walk in the law (the Torah) of the Lord.” “Let me not wander from your commandments (your Torah).” “Blessed are thou, O Lord; teach me your statutes (your Torah).” “I am a sojourner on earth; hide not your commandments (your Torah) from me.” “I will run in the way of your commandments (Torah) when you enlarge my understanding.” We could continue this kind of quotation with many, many references out of that Psalm’s text.
Psalm 119 was clearly created to serve the liturgical needs of the synagogue during Shavuot’s 24 hour vigil. Both Matthew and his readers would know this and would recognize that the Sermon on the Mount was patterned after Psalm 119, the psalm of Shavuot.
It was not a foreign practice for the Jews at the great celebrations of their liturgical life to read the biblical passages that tell the story behind the celebration each year. Liturgy is, after all, the act of recalling the historical moments in a nation’s sacred history. The book of Esther had been written to be read at the Feast of Purim, to celebrate the deliverance of the Jews from genocide in the days of the Persians. The book of Lamentations had been written for the Ninth of Ab, the day when the Jews recalled the destruction of the Temple at the hands of the Babylonians. The basis of the celebration of Shavuot would be the Sinai story from the book of Exodus in which the Torah was given to Moses, so this was the Torah lesson that was always read at this celebration.
Before we can understand the Sermon on the Mount we must understand its Jewish antecedents. The Torah began with the Ten Commandments and Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount touches on each of the Ten, some quite overtly, but not missing any of them. Matthew’s readers would also recognize how the Sermon on the Mount was modeled on Psalm 119, the Psalm of Shavuot. That was how they understood Matthew’s gospel. From about 150 CE on, however, the Christian Church became a Gentile movement, so the Jewish background to the gospel’s Jesus stories was unknown. More than that there was an active and virulent anti-Jewish prejudice that was operating in this Gentile Church. So it was that the Jewish meaning behind the gospel stories was lost. That meant that for the next 2000 or so years of Christian history the only people who read, studied, taught or wrote commentaries on the gospels were Gentiles who were ignorant of and prejudiced against their original Jewish frame of reference.

In that process symbolic Jewish stories were read as if they were literal history. Biblical literalism is at its heart a Gentile heresy, born in the ignorance of the Jewish background to the gospels. To recover the essential meaning of our own gospels we must learn to read them through a Jewish lens or with Jewish eyes. We must understand the Jewish context in which and for which the various segments of the synoptic gospels were written. We must be able to identify what I call the “Gentile Captivity of the Christian Story.” It was in the service of Gentile ignorance that Christians were taught first that the Bible must be understood literally; later it was the 4th century Christians were taught that the creeds had to be believed literally, and finally in the 13th century Christians were taught that worship forms were handed down from on high and were, therefore, not subject to change. The future of Christianity depends on breaking this stranglehold of imposed literalism, based on Gentile ignorance of Christianity’s Jewish roots and origins. I seek to counter the ignorance of literalism week by week in this study of Matthew’s Gospel. It is the celebration of Shavuot that makes the Sermon on the Mount what it is– deeply true, but not literal history.
Stay tuned! The narrative becomes more and more exciting as its organizing secret is revealed.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Carla Wehler from Spicer, Arizona, writes:
Question:
I consider myself to be a supportive follower of Progressive Christianity (PC), whose own spiritual beliefs closely parallel what is being espoused by leaders such as you in the movement to interpret the Bible in a way that is rational, scientific, contemporary, and not given to so much blind-sighted literalism. My exposure to PC includes having read all of your Question and Answer weeklies since you started them some years ago, frequently reading the contents of the Progressive Christianity.org web site and having started to read some of your welcomed books.

You have made reference to many church congregations today not being exposed by their seminary-educated pastors to current and recent (the past 100 years or more) biblical knowledge that is based on scholarly agreement or consensus. I have heard and read of you mentioning a child-like, Sunday school level of understanding of the Bible on the part of many adult churchgoers who often do not see underneath or beyond the literal word. To borrow a now somewhat dated set of words, I assert that you are “right on.”

I had a brother-in-law who was an ELCA seminary graduate and pastor and I know that seminaries could be placed on a continuum or range scale from conservative to liberal or some other defining set of words. It troubles me that certain conservative/fundamental/evangelical seminaries continue to promote belief and thinking going back to the third or fourth century CE. Does the problem of withholding more revealing scholarship to congregants lie primarily with the seminaries, the graduates of the seminaries, or both?

Answer:
Dear Carla,

The issue is, I believe, more complex than you suggest. It has to do with our human security needs, with economic realities, with the audience to which the seminaries are responsible and with the quality of the candidates for ordination themselves.

First, let me suggest that rethinking ancient religious symbols, scriptures and creeds in the light of contemporary knowledge raises human anxiety levels significantly. Most people wrap their security needs inside their religious convictions. When the truth that is claimed in our religious convictions is questioned, the anxiety that was born in the moment of our achieving human self-consciousness takes over. It is also the fact of self-consciousness that forces us human beings to raise questions of meaning and mortality that no other living creature has ever had to face. No dog or cat lives with the knowledge of its own death, but human beings do. No dog or cat raises questions about whether life has meaning, but human beings do. To face the possibility of mortality and meaninglessness throws us into the trauma that always accompanies self-consciousness. One of the driving forces behind the creation of human religion was the need to speak to this anxiety. That is why there is a desire in all religious systems to claim certainty for its religious convictions. Religious uncertainty does not alleviate anxiety so religious systems always have to postulate that what its followers believe is “changeless truth.” That is why the Catholic Church has declared its pope to be infallible. That is why for fundamentalistic Protestant Christians the Bible has to be “inerrant.” That is why every church seems bound to claim that it is the “one true church,” or that no one could possibly achieve salvation in a faith system other than “my own.” Part of religion’s power is found in the claim that it can and must provide the “answer.”

In the history of Christianity, when new thought challenges religious convictions, one sees the religious organizations respond to destroy or deny that thought. Galileo was put on trial for heresy and barely escaped being burned at the stake. “Inquisitions” were formed by religious hierarchies to counter doubt. To this day in the Bible Belt of the South in the United States politicians still run against Darwin when they seek public office. In times of change, religion always moves to the right, becoming both loud and negative.

No one escapes these unconscious religious motivators. So we discover that church executives do not want seminaries raising questions that might later disturb the security of the faithful. Congregations use the threat of withholding their financial support to keep “questioning clergy” in line. Reformations are always destructive to the religious status quo. The fact that the world always changes and that knowledge is always growing exponentially inevitably means that what religious people like to refer to as “eternal truth” is in fact always under challenge from new insights. That is the reality with which churches must always be dealing. The way to deal with this deep-seated human fear is to help people to grow up to a new level of maturity, but normally religious institutions and religious hierarchical people tend to respond by trying to suppress truth that is religiously “uncomfortable” or “inconvenient.” The quest for security is ultimately not an emotional way of life that allows growth to take place. Religion in general and Christianity in many of its forms seems designed to keep people child-like, docile and trusting.

My conviction, however, is that real Christianity was born not to make us secure, but to enable us to live with insecurity; its goal was to enable us to achieve not childlike faith, but human maturity. I believe this is what Paul meant when he wrote that we are to grow into the full stature of Christ Jesus that is within us.

Christianity points to God, to truth, to meaning, but it does not capture these entities. We learn as Christians to walk by faith, not by certainty. That kind of Christianity, however, will always be a minority movement for, far from giving people either the security they need or the “promised land” for which they yearn, it offers them only a journey into the ultimate mystery and wonder of God, which is beyond all forms and all known truths. Perhaps that is why Jesus is portrayed biblically as using only minority images to describe his movement. The gospels record Jesus as saying to his followers that they are to be the “leaven in the dough,” the “salt in the soup” and the “light in the darkness.” This sense of being a minority presence in the midst of life is not enough for most religious institutions or leaders who crave certainty. It is, however, enough for me, and perhaps it can be enough for you and even for that minority that wants to combine the search for God and meaning with the search for truth. No one can possess ultimate truth; all any of us can do is to walk toward it.

Christianity is thus a journey that never ends. For Christianity it is the walk that is the reality. Do it then with integrity.

John Shelby Spong

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