[Oe List ...] 6/5/14, Spong: Part XX Matthew - Introducing Yom Kippur and the Jewish Concept of Atonement

Thu Jun 5 08:29:49 PDT 2014

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Part XX Matthew -
Introducing Yom Kippur and the Jewish Concept of Atonement
We return this week to our ongoing study of the gospel of Matthew after a six week hiatus in which we examined, first the use of the concept of a “lamb” in Hebrew worship, after which I wrote on such diverse figures as Barbara Walters, Professor James H. Cone and Pope John XXIII. Since I never know when people enter or exit from the community that this column creates, I hope all will forgive the necessary repetition that will serve both to get newcomers on board and to refresh the memories of long time subscribers.
In this study of Matthew I have sought to demonstrate that this gospel is not organized on the basis of the remembered life of Jesus, as most people have traditionally assumed. It is rather written using the template of the liturgical year of the synagogue. That means that we must read this gospel, not as a biography, but as a liturgical document. The reason Matthew portrays the public ministry of Jesus as lasting only one year, for example, has nothing to do with the length of that ministry; it has to do with the fact that Matthew is relating his story of Jesus on the basis of the Sabbaths of a single year of synagogue worship. He was leaning overtly on the work of Mark, the first gospel writer, upon whom Matthew depended significantly.
Mark began his gospel with a Jesus story appropriate to Rosh Hashanah, a festival celebrating the Jewish New Year, which comes in the early fall. It was the story of John the Baptist announcing the dawn of the Kingdom of God and calling people to repentance, prior to his baptizing Jesus, who, John was proclaiming, embodied that Kingdom. Then Mark ended his gospel with a Jesus story appropriate to the synagogue celebration that we call Passover, which comes in the early spring. This was his narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus, who was now identified with the paschal lamb of Passover. So Mark’s gospel begins and ends with these two Jewish holidays. The time between Rosh Hashanah and Passover, however, is only six and a half month of the annual calendar. The reason Matthew felt the need to expand Mark and the reason that Matthew’s gospel is 40% longer than Mark’s, is that Matthew wanted to create a book of Jesus stories that would carry the Jews, who were the original followers of Jesus, through the entire annual cycle of the synagogue worshipping year. Consequently, Matthew’s gospel then proceeds to relate the life and message of Jesus to each of the major holy days in the annual Jewish liturgical year. He also followed those holidays in their exact and correct order. This fact would have been very clear to the original Jewish audience for which Matthew’s gospel was so obviously written. The Christian faith, however, was destined to become a Gentile movement, and so by 150 CE, there was hardly a Jew left in Christianity. That was the moment when Matthew’s deeply Jewish gospel began to be read, studied and to have commentaries written on it almost exclusively by Gentile people. These Gentiles were not only ignorant of the Jewish symbols and meanings that permeated this book, but they were also deeply prejudiced against all things Jewish and thus they never sought to understand the Jewish liturgical year that organized Matthew’s gospel. Instead, they began to read this gospel as if it were a literal story about a person of history named Jesus of Nazareth. Biblical fundamentalism, I contend, was born in Gentile ignorance and Gentile misunderstanding of the gospels, which were essentially Jewish scriptures. Our hope in this study is to recapture the original Jewish meaning in Matthew’s portrait of Jesus, a meaning that is stunningly different, I would argue, from the naive fundamentalism that still dominates much of Christian thinking today.
It is almost impossible for anyone to see how the holy days of the Jewish liturgical year shaped Matthew’s telling of the Jesus story so long as they are unfamiliar with the Jewish calendar. That is why we have spent so much time in this series pulling the background of the liturgical year of the Jews out of the content of Matthew’s gospel. So let me once again review that calendar.
This Jewish liturgical calendar, at least as it is reflected in the book of Leviticus, began with the month of Nisan. Passover was celebrated on the 14th and 15th days of Nisan, or between the second and third Sabbaths of that month, and was thus the first major holy day of the Jewish year. Nisan came roughly in late March of our year, just as life and light were breaking forth after the darkness and death of winter. It thus suited the message of Easter, which the Christians saw as the culminating reality of the crucifixion. Matthew, still following the lead of Mark, has placed the crucifixion, the climax of his story of the life of Jesus, into the season of Passover, a liturgical, not a historical placement. Then Matthew proceeded to tell two Easter stories, one about the women coming to the tomb in Jerusalem on Easter morning, and the other about the disciples meeting Jesus on a mountain in Galilee. These stories served to fill the third and fourth Sabbaths of Nisan. So Matthew was destined to begin his Jesus story on the fifth Sabbath of the Jewish year. The gospel lesson in Matthew for that fifth Sabbath would be the genealogy of Jesus, which would link Jesus to his Jewish past by showing him as the descendant of Abraham, David and the time of the Exile. For centuries this lagging of the start of the Jewish calendar by five Sabbaths served to hide the connection between Matthew’s story and the liturgical year of the synagogue.
This also means that when this five Sabbath lag is finally grasped, the first Jewish holy day that Matthew would confront in his chronology would be Pentecost or Shavuot, which comes seven weeks and one day after Passover. Shavuot marked the time in Jewish history when Moses was said to have received the Torah from God on Mt. Sinai. Matthew filled the weeks between his Easter story and Shavuot with the genealogy, the story of Jesus’ birth, the baptism and the temptations, which were, as we have seen earlier, thinly veiled Moses stories. When Shavuot arrived, he was ready to portray Jesus as the New Moses on a new mountain giving not a new law, but a new interpretation of the Torah. It was a Shavuot story, but one clearly related to Jesus and not to Moses. Matthew, as we also noted earlier in this series, built the Sermon on the Mount on the form of Psalm 119, the psalm used in the synagogue observance of Shavuot, a twenty-four hour vigil. Matthew began the Sermon on the Mount with eight beatitudes, followed by eight commentaries on each of these eight beatitudes in reverse order. He is writing a Christian liturgy. This liturgy, which we call “The Sermon on the Mount,” consumes chapters 5, 6 and 7 of Matthew’s gospel.
Matthew then proceeded to fill the Sabbaths between Shavuot, in late May to early June, and Rosh Hashanah, in late September to early October, with narratives that prepared his readers for the message of the Jewish New Year. We have already noted how Matthew created a flashback to bring John the Baptist once more into his narrative in chapter 11, so that John could again be the Rosh Hashanah figure in his gospel as he had been in Mark. Mark made the appearance of John and his baptism of Jesus his Rosh Hashanah story. Matthew could not hold the baptism of Jesus for four and a half months until he caught up with Mark, so the flashback technique was used to re-introduce John when Matthew had finally arrived at the Festival of Rosh Hashanah.
Quoting Isaiah 35, the lesson from the latter prophets, normally read in the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, Matthew noted that Isaiah spoke of the signs that would accompany the arrival of the Kingdom of God into human history: “The blind will see and the deaf hear, the mute will sing and the lame leap,” said the prophet. On the Sabbaths that were covered in his chapters 8, 9 and 10, Matthew told about how Jesus had acted to fulfill Isaiah’s expectations. He had Jesus heal people in each of Isaiah’s categories so that in his flashback, when the messengers came from John, who was in prison, asking whether Jesus was in fact the messiah who would inaugurate the messianic Kingdom, Jesus could point to these messianic acts as evidence. This was, we suggested, how stories of Jesus as a miracle worker first entered the tradition. They were messianic stories being wrapped around Jesus, not supernatural acts that happened in time and space. Matthew’s Jewish readers would have understood that and would not have been tempted to think of these signs as literal events. Matthew had now provided Jesus stories appropriate to the celebration of Rosh Hashanah.
In the Jewish year, Rosh Hashanah was celebrated on the first day of Tishri, the seventh month of the year. Following Rosh Hashanah on Tishri 1, came Yom Kippur on Tishri 10 and then the Jewish festival of the harvest, called by several names, among them Sukkoth, Tabernacles and Booths, which began on Tishri 15 and lasted for eight days until Tishri 22. The first two of these celebrations, coming so closely together, came to be known as the “High Holy Days,” while Sukkoth was probably the most joyous celebration of the whole year. So, if Matthew’s gospel is to be understood as relating Jesus stories to the liturgical year of the synagogue, we should expect Yom Kippur stories to follow Rosh Hashanah stories and then for Sukkoth stories to follow shortly thereafter. So our study of Matthew’s gospel now continues and we will discover that his next stories are all appropriate to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In that study we will begin to understand how the concept of “atonement” not only entered Christianity, but also came to dominate it. In time “atonement theology” presented us with the appalling mantra “Jesus died for my sins,” which is still widely used today. It is one more striking example of a Gentile misunderstanding of the Jewish worship symbols, but it is probably the most important one, because nothing has distorted Christianity more than that concept of “atonement.” To that story we will return.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Edward R. Dick, via the Internet, writes:

Question:
Recently I had to renew my credit card, which I used to subscribe to your weekly Newsletter and thereby I lost my subscription to the Newsletter come bill-paying time. Fortunately, I received an email from the company that handles your Newsletter and was thereby able to provide the data on my new credit card and am now receiving your emails. The first thing I can remember reading from the newsletters when my service was restored was that you had completed your work on the book of John and your book entitled, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic so I bought it and have now finished reading it. I can remember from books of yours that I read several years ago that you were bemoaning the fact that you could find no defining books on the Gospel of John. Well, now we have one. Yours! Thank you, this book is a very good read and I am glad that you wrote it, but I am afraid that I missed something. It left me to question why the empty tomb was so important to the gospel writers, including John and how does one avoid reading the open tomb stories literally? Can you elaborate a bit on these questions?

Answer:
Dear Edward,
Thank you for your letter and your comments. Many people have the experience you had when their credit cards are renewed. Our company has developed a means of assisting when this arises. One other thing about our billing process that I think people should know is that all of the profits, after expenses from this column are paid, go to support the work of the non-profit organization and publishers of this newsletter- ProgressiveChristianity.org.
You ask about the empty tomb. First some facts:
1. There is no reference to an empty tomb in the writings of Paul.
2. The empty tomb makes its first appearance in Mark written about 72 CE, but Jesus does not appear to the women at the tomb, rather a messenger appears who directs the women to tell the disciples that they are to return to Galilee and that they will see Jesus there.
3. Matthew, written about the year 85 CE, changes Mark so that the women do see Jesus at the tomb that is located in or near Jerusalem. Then Matthew goes on to describe the Galilean appearance to which Mark had only alluded. It occurred, said Matthew on the top of a mountain. In it Jesus gave what we call the Great Commission: “Go into all the world.”
4. Luke, written around the years 89-93 CE says the women do not see the raised Christ at the tomb, thus agreeing with Mark and opposing Matthew. Luke, however, denies any Galilean resurrection experience to anyone at any time.
5. John reduces the number women who came to the tomb on Easter morning to one, Mary Magdalene, and she is the only one in this gospel to see Jesus before he ascends. All other Johannine appearances are of the already ascended and transformed Jesus.

Next we need to notice that the tomb stories are all located Jerusalem. It is thus part of the Jerusalem tradition. The Galilean tradition is more vague, more mystical and visionary. The Jerusalem tradition is more specific, physical and suggests historicity. Most scholars believe the Galilean tradition is the earliest and the most authentic, so all the stories about the empty tomb are regarded as a later development.
In my book, Resurrection: Myth or Reality - A Bishop Re-Thinks the Meaning of Easter, I covered the reasons for reaching this conclusion about both Galilee and Jerusalem. I suspect that whatever the resurrection was originally, it was simply proclaimed ecstatically. A proclamation always precedes an explanation. I suspect the original proclamation had two parts. First, the ecstatic cry, “He has risen! We have seen the Lord!” Second came the implicit realization: “Death could not contain him,” or in Paul’s words, “O Grave, where is your victory?” Explanations, however, come inevitably when one seeks to pass the experience on verbally. In time, “He has risen! We have seen the Lord” gave way to stories of visions and apparitions that people said they actually saw. The women at the tomb, the disciples on the mountain top in Galilee, Cleopas at the evening meal in the village of Emmaus and the disciples in the locked room in Jerusalem are a few of these narratives. In time, the ecstatic cries that “death cannot contain him” or “O Grave where is your victory?” were turned into narratives of a tomb that was empty, that is, a tomb that could not contain or capture his living reality. Resurrection then ceased to be a symbol of breaking the final limit on our humanity, but came to mean instead the return of a deceased body back into time, space and history. That is a rather crass literalization of the meaning of Easter, but it is the tendency of human beings always to literalize mysteries.
I think the truth of the resurrection is real. I don’t think it has anything to do with physical resuscitation. It is a tragedy that many people think that if there is no physical body, then there is no reality to the meaning of Easter. Those who shared in the original experience of Easter would, I believe, view that understanding of resurrection with incredulity.
I hope that helps.
John Shelby Spong

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