[Dialogue] 3/30/17: Spong/Sandlin:“Hopey-Changey”; 3rd article: Spong revisited: Historicity of Judas, Part I

Thu Mar 30 07:54:54 PDT 2017

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“Hopey-Changey”
By Mark Sandlin

Churches are dying at an alarming rate. Every year more than 4000 churches close their doors for good and more than 2,765,000 people leave the church each year.
Yet we, the Church, insist on doing the same thing over and over again and somehow expecting different results. When confronted with change we tend to insist that “it has always been done that way,” as if history is an acceptable excuse for continuing down our path to demise.
Far too many congregations are denying the reality of the New Reformation in favor of the comfortable old religion of their grandparents who practiced a religion that last had true relevance in the 19th century.
As we ponder that difficult reality, I think it is helpful to turn to Dr. Paul Batalden. In looking at the dysfunction of our healthcare system Dr. Batalden, a Dartmouth Medical School Professor, is fond of saying, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
That brings me to the even more difficult reality that, if your church is dying, it is perfectly designed to die. Said differently, you can keep repeating the comfortable religion of your grandparents over and over again, and if you do, you can consistently expect to get the results of a dying church – for that matter, a dying theological perspective as well.
That’s exactly what most churches are doing.
For years and years churches have joined in with movement after movement, each designed to help the church change. Most of them don’t work – at least not in terms of change. They do tend to be very good at distracting from real, substantive change. They are very successful at taking away our guilt for having a church that can’t attract new members, because we think “at least we are doing something.”
The problem with why these programs fail more times than they work is also part of the problem with many churches themselves: our ability to accept cognitive dissonance. Talking the talk, but not walking the walk… and not really being bothered by it, more or less acknowledging it.
The world outside the church, in large part, sees most churches (and their members) as hypocritical. And we’ve given them every reason to see so. Churches profess love of neighbor yet either explicitly condemn people of certain lifestyles or implicitly condemn them by our silence when others claiming to be Christians do. We profess that we are all made equal and that we are equal in the eyes of God, yet we are astoundingly silent on issues of social justice.
The list could go on and on, and I’m not saying that some churches aren’t authentically living into these things (because some are). What I am saying is that the world outside the church just doesn’t see it much. What they do see leads them to deem us all as hypocritical.
That kind of existence allows us to work our way through programs on emerging\transforming\re-imagining church without ever really doing much more than the head work. We have learned the skill of cognitive dissonance well. It keeps us from having to do things that make us uncomfortable like spending time in low income housing areas, talking to the homeless, ministering with those in jail… you know all the things Jesus said we were doing to him when we do them.
Cognitive dissonance means we get to be ‘Christian’ without actually being very Christ-like.
Naturally our churches get to do the same. We can read all about the “hopey, changey” stuff, talk about it in positive tones, and ultimately back away from it when it leads us to do something as “drastic” as playing a guitar instead of an organ during worship – or worse yet, playing a guitar instead of an organ during worship and feeling like we have really stretched ourselves.
While we “study” the programs on changing, we get to feel like we are doing something. The problem is the companies who market them have to actually be able to market them, so the programs always have some kind of a release valve built in that allows those who don’t really want to commit to change to be able to do a little something different, feel better about having done something, without actually, really addressing any of the systemic problems. It leaves the core system intact and it continues to, perfectly, get the results it gets, but we feel better because, “Well, at least we tried.”
Sit Boy, Sit. Good Dogma.
In order to understand a little better what we need to do as spiritual communities in the face of the New Reformation, I think we first need to understand a little about how we, the Church, arrived at our current location as well as what that location is.
There was a time, frequently referred to as “the good ol’ days,” when the church was the center of society. A large percentage of a community’s life centered around the church. It was not only the moral compass and center for their lives, but it was the social and philanthropic center of their lives as well.
This afforded the church the ability to define for its community what was acceptable and what was not.
It was really unlikely that people would challenge the status quo that was being established (one that was, not so surprisingly, heavily weighted down with dogma of centuries upon centuries.) Challenging the thing that defined your community and was the center piece of many people’s daily lives and activities would have probably been a really good way to make sure you were not accepted by those who had power in the establishment and ultimately you would probably be pushed out to the margins of the circle of society, if included in it at all. So, the status quo that’s being established goes unchallenged and ever-unchanging.
As you could probably guess, this kind of influence (and let’s just be honest, power) was somewhat intoxicating. The Church, particularly its leaders, began to believe the myth that they had established.
The myth wasn’t that they were at the center of community, because in many ways they really were. The myth that they had begun to believe was that they deserved to be there, that it was by some divine right that they had so much influence (and power.)
That was the beginning of getting left behind. Over time, society began changing. The Church, in its perceived place of godly instituted influence and power, did not change even though it has a history of changing and, at times, doing so dynamically. The more society changed with the times, the more the Church did not. With each passing year, the Church became less and less relevant for a quickly changing society.
Now we’ve arrived at a place where society has moved on well past where the Church stayed stuck and, much to the surprise of the Church, society has done just fine without us.
Much as our scriptures should remind us, people are responsive and quite dynamic and are able to find other social centers, other ways to express their philanthropic needs and other ways to fulfill their spiritual desires.
These difficult realities are not the reason why the Church needs to change. They are, however, the results of the Church not changing when it needed to. Our dogma and theological foundations are outdated and deny advancements in science as well as in literary criticism. Our churches are built around male dominated, hierarchical systems of governance that are perfectly designed to “maintain” the system, to bend but not break, ultimately insuring that those who have power remain in power. Said differently, they are perfectly designed to get the results they get. And that’s not a good thing.
At this point, we are so far behind the need to change, that the only way forward is going to be intense change, sometimes painful change.
That’s why people like Bishop Spong, and the work they have done, are vitally important to the Church as well as believers outside the Church. It’s why resources like this New Reformation newsletter are so important.
We have to start learning new ways to look at our Christianity. We have to learn to use every modern advancement available to us in order to get back to what appears to be a truer understanding of our history and religious texts than what they have evolved into.
As we do, I suspect that we will find a fuller and more satisfying spiritual journey. Also, I suspect we will find fewer and fewer folks seeing hypocrisy within our belief system. And with that, I believe we will find some of the folks who have walked away from Christianity will see new hope within it and may once again not only find personal value in it, but their communities will as well.
~ Mark Sandlin

Read the essay online here.
About the Author
Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, The God Article, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on “The Huffington Post,” “Sojourners,” “Time,” “Church World Services,” and even the “Richard Dawkins Foundation.” He’s been featured on PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and NPR’s “The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin

Question & Answer

Robert J. Freer from Cincinnati, Ohio writes:

Question:
Why do we assign a gender to God? I feel that it started with the Lord's Prayer (Our Father who art in Heaven. . . . .) That paternalism was objected to by the feminists who started calling God she. If God is not human, how can there be a gender assigned? I am still trying to rid myself of the image of a man up in the sky somewhere, wearing flowing white robes, keeping track of my good deeds and misdeeds!!

Answer: By Fred Plumer

Dear Robert,

You ask an interesting question and unfortunately a complete answer would take several pages. But let me try and answer your excellent and timely question the best I can.
Actually, we would have to go back roughly 10,000 years ago to even begin to understand what really happened. As the Hunters and Gatherers began to settle in the Mesopotamia Valley, they moved away from what anthropologist have suggested was a balanced responsibility when men and women had equal job responsibilities. Every single person had a “job,” a responsibility, including children, and there was no hierarchy because each person’s job might impact the survival of the tribe.
Up until this time in history most of the most powerful gods were female. It was frankly a more matriarchically society as you might guess. But when the Hunters and Gatherers realized they could build fences, raise animals and crops, protecting the boundaries became paramount. It was the men who began to take on the warrior mentality. To raise their crops, they needed workers, so the women stayed home to raise children to work in the fields. It was during that time that these societies moved from a matriarchically to a patriarchic society. The most powerful gods had become males. Keep in mind there were still many gods, but the most powerful were pictured as men at some point in this development.
When we get to the beginning of what we know as the Jewish tradition, roughly 5,000 years ago, there was still many gods, but the most powerful came to be known as YHWH, a word that was intended to never be spoken by practicing Jews. However, as centuries passed, different groups, in different eras, had their own name for god, i.e. Yahweh, Adonai, Elohim, and El. Scholars generally propose that the Torah, the Christian Old Testament, was compiled from various original sources, two of which (the Jahwist and the Elohist) are named for their usual names for God (YHWH and Elohim respectively). Many modern Jews today, do not necessarily see their “God” as male or female. However, the more conservative Jews are still extremely patriarchal. They are still protecting their turf.
We really have no idea when the Jewish people decided there was one God, but it is clear from passages in the Torah that it was not the case in their earlier years. From Exodus 20:3…you shall have no other gods before me. This is repeated in the same citing in Deuteronomy 5:6.
However, I have used the term “God” here several times to explain how we became more patriarchal. But the truth be told, no one has been able to decide where the word God came from or how long ago. The word God is a relatively new European invention, which was never used in any of the ancient Judeo-Christian scripture manuscripts that were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek or Latin. Scholars tend to agree that is was sometime in the 6th century, probably in the Germanic culture and a derivation of the word, gudan.
So Robert, here is my point. It is the current society that decides who and what we call God, or god or Adonai or “Max.” And it is the society that decides what kind of attributes we assign to this thing we currently call God. Yes, it takes a long time, many lifetimes to make these changes. But our society is changing very rapidly right now and frankly our young people, the millennials, are not buying our ancient idea of God or the power we have given this figure, whether male, female or transgender. We now know it is not “a man up in the sky somewhere, wearing flowing white robes, keeping track of good deeds and misdeeds.” Many of us now have agreed it is not a male or female. The more scientists study our animal kingdom, the closer we humans seem to be. Are animals judged? Should we be judged? We all come into this world with different gifts, and wounds, opportunities and failures. How would a judging god decide how to weigh those factors?
Personally, I have found the String Theory encouraging. The idea that we are all inner-connected (by “string” or “god”) sits well with me, although I am not certain how to put that idea into a theology. However, this means when a “butterfly waves it wings, the entire universe is changed. That means what you do or what I do matters to the entire universe. Can you imagine what kind of world it would be if we people started acting as if this were true? Can you imagine the entire universe dependent on your actions?
And so you ask, what does Progressive Christianity have to say about this? It is about the very human Jesus, who in spite of, or because of, a troubled beginning, overcame the natural inclination to strike out or punish others. He became a mystic who showed us a way to live that transcends all of the things that have been piled onto Christianity that have little to do with living a full and joyful life. Rather than focusing on sin, he taught us to find the joy. Rather than focusing on the bad things in life, he taught us to look for the positive. He taught us to recognize the interconnectedness of all life and the power of love over hate. And he taught us not to fear death.
That is why I still am a follower of him. And these are some of the reasons, Progressive Christianity is still growing.
Thank you for your question. I hope I have answered it.
~Fred Plumer, President
ProgressiveChristianity.org

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

My Suspicions about the Historicity of Judas Iscariot, Part I

One of the primary personalities of the Easter story is Judas Iscariot, the anti-hero of the Christian Gospel. Judas has traditionally been painted in dark and sinister colors. His act of betrayal has been described as the worst villainy in human history. The name Judas, once popular as a name for boys in the Jewish tradition, has all but disappeared from history, a fate not suffered by such biblical names as Peter, Simon, John or James. As the story of the crucifixion is recounted this week in churches throughout the world, the tale of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus will be related once again, and “the Jews” will be said to have been responsible for the death of Jesus. That has happened annually for two thousand years and through this familiar narrative we Christians have poured a steady stream of virulent anti-Semitism into the life of the world. Perhaps the time has come for us to look at this story with a different set of eyes.
I am suspicious of Judas. Everything about him raises questions in my mind. My suspicion is that he is not a person of history at all but a totally fictitious character created in the second generation of Christian history. I suspect that the purpose for which the story of Judas Iscariot was developed was to shift the blame for the death of Jesus away from the Romans, who were surely responsible, and to place it on the Jews, who were destined to be scapegoated for that death through all of western history. When this suspicion is voiced, however, people argue that the historicity of Judas Iscariot has been assumed for so long and that it is so integral to the Christian story, that this revisionist idea would reorient all of Christianity in a radical way. They demand to know the data for my suspicions. Since I believe that Christianity must be reoriented if it is to continue to live, I am glad to offer these data.
First, my suspicion that Judas is a mythological character is aroused by his name. Iscariot seems to be derived from the word “sicarius,” which means ‘political assassin’ and is attached to his name to identify his act of treachery. The name Judas, however, is nothing but the Greek spelling of the word ‘Judah,’ sometimes written ‘Judea,’ and is the name of the Jewish homeland. Judah is also the word from which the English word “Jew” is derived. Jewish prisoners of the Nazis at the time of the Holocaust had to wear a sign on their clothing that said “Jude,” the German word for a Jew. When the name of the traitor is identical with the name of the nation of people from whom the Christians were trying to separate themselves when the Gospels were being written some 40 – 70 years after the life of Jesus came to an end, it causes me to wonder about the authenticity of the story.
My second reason for being suspicious is in the dramatic detail found in the passion story of the gospels that locates the act of betrayal at the precise stroke of midnight that separated the first Maundy Thursday night from the first Good Friday morning. To place that which the gospel writers thought was the darkest deed in human history at a time thought to be the darkest moment of the night, serves well to provide a dramatic touch to the story but it does not strike me as serving well the truth of history.
Thirdly, my suspicion is aroused when I recognize the fact that the word ‘betrayed’ enters the Christian story, not in the Gospels, but in Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians written about 15 years before the first gospel saw the light of the day. Paul, in the 11th chapter of that Epistle, recounts the inauguration of what came to be called “The Lord’s Supper.” He dates this narrative with the words, “On the night in which he was betrayed.” Two things about this text are significant. One is that the word we translate “betrayed” is more accurately rendered “was handed over.” It is the same word used in the Joseph story in the Book of Genesis, when Joseph’s brothers handed him over to the Ishmaelites or the Midianites, depending on which version in Genesis one is reading (see Genesis 37:25 and 28). While in some sense to hand Jesus over to his enemies might be understood as an act of betrayal, the connotations are not quite the same.
The next thing about this Pauline text that is unique is that Paul does not associate this ‘handing over’ with anybody in general and certainly not with one of the twelve. This suggests to me that the Judas story was not known by Paul. This point is solidified in Chapter 15 of that same Epistle when Paul says, “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” The twelve certainly included Judas! After the crucifixion Judas was, in the mind of Paul, still one of the twelve. That would hardly be so if Judas had been the traitor who brought about that crucifixion. I think it is fair to say that Paul seems to know nothing of the tradition that one of the twelve was a traitor. The Judas story had simply not yet entered the Christian consciousness.
My fourth reason for being suspicious about the historicity of the Judas story is rooted in a theoretical document that scholars have named Q which is short for quella, a German word which means source. Q was discovered, according to this theory, when scholars recognized that both Matthew and Luke had sufficient common material, other than Mark, that could not be explained by suggesting that one knew the other. The conclusion was that they both must have had a second source in common upon which they drew when they composed their gospels. So everywhere that Matthew and Luke were identical or nearly identical and where that material is not derived from Mark, it is assumed to be Q material. Further study of this material seemed to indicate that the Q document was basically a collection of the sayings of Jesus and was earlier than any written gospel. If this is so then Q is a primary source of Christian material that predates the canonical Gospels.
One passage found in that Q material has Jesus speaking to the disciples during his earthly life and promising them that they will sit on ‘thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’ Judas was, on this occasion, clearly one of the twelve. But neither Matthew nor Luke thought to edit this passage in the light of the betrayal story. This material appears to reflect a period in the development of the Christian history before a story of a betrayal by Judas was known. That assumption is further enforced when one notes that when Matthew tells the story of the Resurrection, he says that the Risen Christ appeared only to ‘the eleven.’ Matthew has, by the time he composed his gospel, edited his narrative to conform to the Judas story, which had entered the tradition in Mark, some ten years earlier and which Matthew was not just copying but also expanding.
Finally my suspicions are aroused about the historicity of Judas when I look at the way the Judas story appears in the gospel tradition. It is, first inconsistent, and second the story grows as each new Gospel is written. All four Gospels, for example, have a story about identifying the traitor as one who broke bread with Jesus at the last supper. But what it was that Judas actually betrayed is hard to isolate.
Starting with Mark, the first Gospel to be written (70-75 c.e.), we discover that this author says that it was the chief priests who initiated the suggestion that Judas would receive money, but no amount is mentioned. Judas next appears in Mark’s story at midnight to identify Jesus with a kiss. It is hard to imagine why identifying Jesus was important since he was publicly teaching in Jerusalem and had by this time, the narrative says, driven the moneychangers out of the temple. Surely these authorities knew who Jesus was. Judas then disappears from Mark’s Gospel.
Matthew (80-85 c.e.) enhances Mark’s story by having Judas request money for the act of betrayal. The price is set at 30 pieces of silver. The betrayal in Matthew also takes place at midnight but this gospel writer has added dialogue between Jesus and Judas. Matthew goes on to give us additional details. Judas repented, said Matthew, and tried to return the money. The chief priests and elders refused. Judas then hurled the money back into the temple and went and hanged himself. The chief priests and elders, Matthew says, then took the silver and bought a potter’s field with it in which to bury strangers.
Luke (88-92 c.e.) further embellishes the story. The traitor did this, said Luke, because, “Satan entered into Judas.” Finally, in Luke, we are told what Judas actually did for the authorities. He betrayed Jesus to them “in the absence of the multitude.” It is a weak answer to a perplexing question. Could the authorities not have tracked him to a place where he was alone? That should not have been a problem, since people in the first century certainly knew how to tail a suspect. Once again in Luke the act of betrayal took place at midnight. The dialogue is increased. The disciples are said to have fought back. One of them, who is unnamed, cut off the ear of the slave of the high priest. Jesus healed him. That is all we hear of Judas in Luke. In the books of Acts, however, which Luke also wrote, we are told that Judas himself bought a field with “the reward of his wickedness” and “falling down headlong, he burst open and all his bowels gushed out.” That is clearly not the same as hanging though the effect is quite the same.
In John’s Gospel (95 – 100 c.e.), Judas becomes more sinister. He was a thief, said John. When Judas leaves the Last Supper, John notes, “it was night.” Judas leads the authorities to the place where Jesus could be found in Gethsemane. Here the dialogue is enhanced, but the kiss of the traitor has disappeared. Judas’ act is said to fulfill the expectations of the prophets. Both the disciple who cut off the ear of the high priest’s slave and the slave himself are identified in John’s Gospel. Their names are Simon Peter and Malchus. Then Judas disappears from John’s Gospel and is not seen again.
The story grows. The details are enlarged. The narrative is enhanced. But when those details that constitute the Judas story are studied every one of them appears to have been lifted out of other accounts of betrayals known in Hebrew history. The Judas tradition seems to have been crafted out of the whole cloth of the Jewish Scriptures. Is that not enough to make one suspicious?
I will return to this theme next week and fill in the details. I will also look at what was happening in that region during this period of history when the Gospels were written, to see if we can discover anything which might provide a motive for encouraging the second generation of Christians to create a traitor whose name was Judas. I believe we can, so stay tuned!
~ John Shelby Spong
(Originally Published April 2, 2003)

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