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On Launching a Book in Paris
There is nothing quite like Paris in the springtime. The flowers of the season are in full bloom. The sidewalk cafes are filled with people drinking wine, sipping café au lait and eating croissants. The “Left Bank” is populated with painters standing before their easels and politicians in full debate. The population in this city, like all of the great cities of the world, reflects the ethnical variety of the world’s people. France’s long and historical relationship with North Africa is particularly obvious. A Muslim headdress is a feature so common as to be unnoticed. Romance is always a feature in French life and not just in the spring. France’s history has never developed a puritanical streak or a Queen Victoria. Couples of all ages, sizes, shapes and colors are everywhere holding hands, embracing and kissing each other. It is a romantic world, but no where is this more in evidence than in Paris in the springtime.
Paris was quite obviously the place to be in June of 2014. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom was there. So were President Obama of the United States, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Prime Minister David Cameron of Great Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. They had gathered in Paris to mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day, when allied armies, made up primarily of troops from the United States, Great Britain, Canada and the Free French, stormed the beaches of Normandy to begin the phase of World War II that assured the defeat of the Nazi government in Germany. To commemorate this anniversary, flags of the allied nations flew along the Champs-Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe, through which Hitler’s legions had goose stepped in victory in 1940, was once again a monument to France and her history. It was now a symbol of peace.
My journey to Paris in June was for a purpose not nearly so grand as the D-Day celebrations. I recalled that day only as a 12 year old child, who understood at that time very little about world politics, but who had a distinct impression of Hitler as someone very evil. Instead I went to Paris at the time of the D-Day celebration only as an author whose books were just beginning to be made available to a French-speaking audience. I was there to launch the first French translation of one of my books and to deliver two major addresses, one to a predominantly Protestant audience, the other to a predominantly Roman Catholic audience. Both of these audiences, however, were in a nation that is today primarily secular, no longer claiming any religious identity for itself. I went to make my case to the French that the Christianity they have rejected is not the Christianity that I represent. My first book to be translated into French was thus appropriately titled, Jesus for the Non-Religious. It had been published first in the United States in 2008. Its French title was Jesus pour le XXIe Siècle (Jesus for the 21st Century.) The story of how it came to enter the French-speaking world is fascinating.
The translator was a man named Ray Rakower, a retired scholar and businessman, who lives today in Geneva. He is fluent in French, German and English. He became aware of my work by reading this column and had corresponded with me. His ethnic heritage was Jewish. He was a survivor, with his mother, of the Holocaust in which both his father and his brother perished. It seems that a German soldier agreed to look the other way while this little boy and his mother escaped to Switzerland in the late1930’s. In 2011, when he learned that Christine and I were going to be in Germany with Gerhard Klein, the Lutheran pastor, who had translated four of my books into German, he contacted Gerhard and came to Germany to meet with both of us. I found him a remarkable man, successful in the oil business and brilliantly educated with a mind that seemed to me to range over a vast sweep of human knowledge. He was drawn to my portrait of Jesus, which not only emphasized his Jewishness, but also tried to break him out of Greek thought in which he had been captured since the 4th century. That was the century in which the Council of Nicaea began to force Christianity into creeds, doctrines and dogmas. Most people today do not seem to understand that creedal theology is not original to Christianity, but was, rather, a part of a Gentile movement to incorporate Jesus into the language and concepts of a Greek thinking world. The first creed of the Christian church was just three words: “Jesus is messiah!” When the word “messiah (“mashiach” in Hebrew) was rendered by the Greek word “kupios,” which was translated “Lord,” the nature of Christianity was forever changed. It was in this Greek context that what we call “traditional Christianity,” based on doctrines like the Incarnation, the Holy Trinity and the Atonement, was born. The original Jesus movement was so deeply Jewish that it would not have recognized any of these concepts.
In Jesus for the Non-Religious, which Ray Rakower read in English, he was introduced to this non-traditional Jewish Jesus in a way so dramatically different from what he had ever known before, that he was enabled to appreciate Jesus for the first time. When Gerhard Klein translated Jesus for the Non-Religious into German, Ray decided that he would like to do the same book in French. It took him a little over a year to complete his translation. Then, he set about the task of finding a French publisher. That was not easy. There was no great interest in this officially non-religious country in a book about Jesus, by an unknown American bishop. He was turned down by publisher after publisher.
Then he came upon Karthala Publishing Company, a small Paris firm established in 1980 by a man named Robert Ageneau. This man had once been both a Roman Catholic priest and a missionary in Africa. As a young priest Ageneau had been exhilarated both by the work of the Second Vatican Council, created by the vision of Pope John XXIII, and the needs of Africa, his adopted home. When the papacy of John XXIII was cut short by his premature death after only four years and seven months in office, the hierarchy of the Roman Church under the leadership of the new Pope, Paul VI, began to repress the insights of the Second Vatican Council, Ageneau became so disillusioned that he resigned from the priesthood, returned to Paris and founded this small publishing company, which was designed, first, to bring Africa with all its needs and potential to the attention of the world and, second, to be a vehicle to keep alive the dream of Christian reform begun in Vatican II. Ray Rakower ultimately offered his translation of Jesus for the Non-Religious to the Kathala Publishing Company. They did not respond with any great enthusiasm. The people at Kathala knew neither him nor me, so this manuscript lay unread on an editor’s desk for over a year. Ray was so determined he badgered them until a threat to remove the manuscript from their consideration resulted in their agreeing for the first time to actually read it. In the meantime they had also learned that translations of my books were beginning to appear in Germany, Spain and Italy. When Robert Ageneau read the manuscript, I was told that he was both amazed and excited by it. He had a literary translator go over Ray’s work to lighten the tone to make it less academic and then he worked out an arrangement with my publisher, Harper-Collins to publish it in France. When the people at Karthala Press discovered that we would be in Europe in June, they decided to launch the book officially at the time of our visit. At their request we added two days to our previous schedule in Paris to be available for whatever media they could convince to look at the book. The launch was carefully orchestrated. Prior to our arrival a couple of lead stories appeared in French religious journals and magazines. An invitation was procured to have me speak at one of the best known Protestant churches in Paris. Its senior pastor, coincidentally, was the grandson of an American soldier who landed in France on D Day in 1944. He had later married a French woman and two generations later this man’s grandson was the pastor of this large French congregation. My translator at these lectures was a remarkable thirty year old woman whose proficiency in English had enabled her to read nine of my books and so she was thoroughly familiar with their content. She hopes someday to be ordained. She was assisted by a man who had heard me speak in England more than a decade ago. In the formal part of the evening, I introduced the content of the book briefly, but sufficiently to make it clear that this was not just one more pious book about Jesus. Then I participated in a lively question and answer session. The crowd exceeded expectations almost filling the church. The questions were refreshingly honest. The excitement was palpable and the session lasted well past the time the evening was scheduled to end. The next day I received an email from Jarmo Tarkii, a native of Finland, who lives now in Solvang, California, and who had served as my Finnish translator when I made a lecture tour of Finland, telling me that a colleague of his had attended the session and had given him a full and exciting account of the evening. I was amazed at how fast the news had traveled.
The next morning, the press conference was larger than anyone had anticipated, and included representatives from both the religious and secular media of France. A reporter from Le Monde, France’s largest newspaper, was present. The press conference lasted about three hours. Interest was intense. That evening a second lecture was held in a Roman Catholic setting. It also was surprisingly well attended. Robert Ageneau told us that he expected to sell over 1000 copies of this book by the end of this year. That may not sound like many, but for a book about Jesus by an unknown American author, to have that many purchases in secular France was astounding. We agreed to stay in Paris for a third day in order to record a one-hour, one on one radio interview that would play the week after we had departed.
A Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, a former Roman Catholic priest, a publishing house dedicated to Africa and the post-Vatican II reform of Christianity, all coalesced to introduce my work to France. It is a remarkable world.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Lawrence Balthasar of California Polytechnic Institute writes:
Question:
I read your Magi story with considerable interest, partly because of my family name. I do wonder how the Magi got their names but my main question is, how does your explanation of the Magi story help me? So "Matthew" made up a nice story. You have provided the context and motivation for the story, but the story is still just a story. Even if I know why he did it, it still undermines the credibility of his gospel. Maybe "Matthew" made up a lot of stories. How would I know? Some of the gospel has to be sort of true or else what good is it, i.e. wherein is the Good News?
Answer:
Dear Lawrence,
I have never met a person who bears one of the mythical names of one of the wise men. Thank you for writing.
In response to your question, let me say first that there is no common consensus as to how they got their names, but the best guess locates the naming in Alexandria around 500 CE.
I don’t think it quite right to say “Matthew made up a nice story.” That is not quite how it worked. The followers of Jesus when Matthew wrote were still members of the synagogue. At that time, worship in the synagogue involved a long lesson from the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). In the traditional synagogue the entire Torah had to be read at worship on the Sabbath for an entire year. This meant that the Torah lesson would be five to six of the chapters per Sabbath as we now have these first five books of the Bible. This was followed by a reading from the former prophets (Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel and I and II Kings). Finally a reading would come from what they called “the latter prophets,” i.e. (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Book of the Twelve as they called what we now call “the minor prophets.” All of these twelve (Hosea through Malachi) were on a single scroll. After these scripture readings, the synagogue leader would invite comments from the congregation on the lessons. It was then that the disciples of Jesus would relate the life of Jesus to these texts. It was the reading of Isaiah 60, I believe, that caused the story of the Magi to develop. It was a typical infancy story that by wrapping great signs around the birth of the hero would portend great things to come. In this narrative, the author of Matthew’s gospel could proclaim that the life of Jesus was so important that his birth was accompanied by cosmic signs - a star in the east. This cosmic sign had the power to draw Gentiles, “The Wise Men,” into the Jesus orbit. Before they could actually find the “King of the Jews,” they had to consult the Jewish prophets, Micah in this case, and affirm not only Jesus’ Jewishness but also his claim to the messianic role as the son and heir of David. Then in the gifts presented by the wise men, the author could make claims for the adult Jesus that he was a king (gold), a divine figure (frankincense) and one whose purpose would be fulfilled through suffering (myrrh). This is not just a nice story it is a powerful and provocative introduction to the adult Jesus.
Matthew did not just “make up the stories.” He searched the Jewish Scriptures to find hints and pointers to the life of Jesus so that he could, in the language and style with which the Jewish people were familiar, interpret to them the Jesus experience.
Recall that Matthew’s gospel would have been written some 55 years after the crucifixion. That would be two to three generations. He is not writing history or biography. He is a Jewish artist painting an interpretive portrait of the power and impact of Jesus of Nazareth on his life and on human history. There is clearly a person of history behind his narrative. but his narrative is not itself history.
What I am doing is trying to get into the mind of Matthew and there to determine his intentions in writing. It is quite different from what we have been taught in Christian history.
My best,
John Shelby Spong
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