HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Part II Introducing The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic When writing the opening chapter of my soon-to-be released book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, I felt the need to issue a warning to my readers. This warning needed to go in two quite different directions. There will certainly be those who think of themselves as “traditionally religious people,” who may well be scandalized by the content of this book. It will present them with ideas about the Bible about which they have never heard. There will also, however, be others, who are what I describe as members of the “Church Alumni Association,” those who have long ago given up on organized or institutional religion, who might actually be intrigued to hear a gospel being talked about in a different way. They might be fascinated to learn of the actual origins of the Fourth Gospel. This gospel was certainly not thought of as “the literal word of God” by its primary authors. I say “authors and editors” because this gospel was not ever a single volume that dropped from heaven in a completed form and divided into chapters and verses, as most church teaching has suggested over the centuries. Scholars now believe the Fourth Gospel was written in layers over a period of close to 30 years and by more than one primary person. The academic debate is not about whether there were multiple authors, that is assumed, but about how many there were. In this volume, I will identify only three Johannine layers or primary editorial revisions. If there were more than three, and no less a person than Raymond Brown argues for five, then some of them would have had to have been in the oral period rather than additional written sources and, as such, are much more difficult to isolate. Allow me to sketch the three layers I can identify briefly. The earliest written layer of this gospel appears to date from the mid 70’s, which makes it a near contemporary to Mark. It reflects the shaping influence of the life of the synagogue on the community’s memory of Jesus. It recognizes that the Christian faith was born as a movement within the synagogue and thus is deeply and consistently Jewish in its frame of reference. In this strand of John’s text, we can see, feel and experience in its background, the high holy days of the Jewish liturgical year. Here we touch what might be called “primitive Christianity” as the disciples of Jesus, all of whom were Jews, sought to incorporate Jesus of Nazareth into the faith of their fathers and mothers. That was a process that had happened many times in the past as Judaism grew and developed. The fact is that in the Jewish experience, one prophet after another from Isaiah and Micah to Amos and Zechariah had been added into the Canon of the Jewish Sacred Scriptures. Judaism was an expanding not a static religious system. Jesus’ followers believed that he had brought to Judaism something new and fresh, but nonetheless, something consistent with their ongoing faith story. That incorporation of Jesus into Judaism is seen in this layer of the Fourth Gospel primarily in the way that they sought to show him as the fulfillment of the expectations of the “law and the prophets,” or indeed, as “that prophet of whom Moses spoke.” At its earliest level, the Fourth Gospel was and is a profoundly Jewish book. The second editorial layer that has been discovered in this book seems to date from the mid to late 80’s of the Common Era. This was a time in the history of the Christian movement of exacerbating tensions between the followers of Jesus, who came to be called “Revisionists” and the leaders of the synagogue, who called themselves the “Orthodox” or right-thinking party. This growing negativity ultimately resulted in a fracture when the orthodox leaders excommunicated the followers of Jesus from the synagogue. This occurred around the year 88 of the Common Era. In a major revision of this gospel that occurred at this time, we see rising hostility and elements of what we now call anti-Semitism clearly creep into the text. Hostile words pass between the two groups. The Johannine text begins to call the enemies of Jesus simply “the Jews.” Those using this term pejoratively were, interestingly enough, also Jews. They meant the “Orthodox” party, whom they perceived as the enemies of those who follow Jesus. Before the split, the two groups had been engaged in what each thought was a battle to determine the true direction that Judaism was being called to travel. They were struggling with each other, as it were, for the “soul” and the future of Judaism.” The third major editorial revision that is clearly visible in this gospel comes after the reality of this excommunication began to set in. This would place it in the mid 90’s. Up until this time, the whole thrust of those Jews, who were followers of Jesus, was to portray him as the fulfillment of the hopes of the Jews, based on the messianic scriptural images. He was a new and expanded version of such Jewish heroes as Moses, Samuel, Elijah and the Servant figure of II Isaiah. Now, however, they had been cast out of that Jewish context and they had to rethink their understanding of Jesus, for loyalty to Jesus had carried them beyond the boundaries of Judaism. This freed them to look at him in a new context, perhaps a post-Jewish context; the boundaries of Judaism no longer restrained them This was the time when, as I shall seek to demonstrate, they began to define Jesus according to the thinking of the 1st century school of thought known as “Merkabah or Jewish throne mysticism.” This mystical approach was still related to the faith of the fathers and mothers, but it was free of all “limits and all boundaries.” Mysticism always transcends the barriers that religion creates and presses its adherents toward a universalistic understanding. This was the time when, under the guidance of this form of Jewish mysticism, the next major editor of the Johannine text began to speak of Jesus’ “oneness with God.” I am now convinced that this editor never intended the words he chose to use in this revision would ever to be read or understood in terms of the language of “incarnation.” That was a fourth century idea that would later be imposed on this gospel by the likes of Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. He certainly was not writing an apologia for Jesus as the “second person of the Holy Trinity.” His words, however, did open this gospel to these possible interpretations and, following the development of the creeds at Nicaea and beyond, this theology was attached to the Fourth Gospel so firmly that it is still the primary lens through which the gospel of John is read today. So the oneness with God, found in Jewish mysticism in the first century, came to be understood as the external deity invading the flesh of human life. It was in this final editorial revision I am now convinced that we begin to get the language in the Fourth Gospel that has Jesus say: “I and the Father are one” or “if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” This is also when the holy name of God, “I AM,” began to be placed on to the lips of Jesus and the “I AM” statements became part of the gospel: “I am the bread of life;” I am the “living water,” I am “the gate,” the “vine,” the “good shepherd,” the “way,” the “resurrection” and the “life.” This is also, I now believe, when the prologue identifying Jesus with the “word of God” spoken in creation, was added to the text of John. In that prologue the suggestion was made that the “word of God” met in Jesus was preexistent and had been part of God since the foundation of the world. The Jews felt the same way about the “wisdom” of God and the prologue to John is based on a hymn to wisdom found in the book of Proverbs. Under the skillful quill of this third major editor, the mysterious presence of God in the life of Jesus was given a new form. This mystical oneness also signaled for its Jewish readers that this book was never intended by its author to be read or understood literally and, indeed, would never lend itself to a literal understanding. The clear idea that this gospel was never to be read as if it were literally true will be the source of the scandal that traditionally religious people will feel as they read these pages. That will, however, also be the source of the “intrigue” that those who have stepped outside all formal religious structures might feel as they realize that the Christianity that they have rejected is not at all what Christianity was intended to be. So, in my opening chapter, I outlined some of the things that would produce these dual responses, of both scandal and intrigue. Readers who might be in either of these groups will discover in this book such sentence as these: “In all probability, none of the sayings attributed to Jesus in this gospel were ever spoken by him,” that “none of the miracles called “signs” and attributed to Jesus in this gospel, ever actually happened,” that “most of the characters who populate the pages of this gospel are literary or fictionalized creations of the author and were never real people who actually lived,” and “that the language of an external deity entering into the flesh of our physical existence, which shapes the way most people still inform both their understanding of Christianity and the way they read this gospel is not even close to what the writers of this gospel intended.” So reading this book will be for some people an adventure leading to a radically new understanding of Christianity, while for others it will be a blasphemous book that constitutes an absolute attempt to destroy what they mistakenly believe to be “biblical truth.” I will live with both responses. For me it is the result of years of study and it represents an honest attempt to discover the essential Christian understanding, which has for centuries been smothered under the presumed authority of creeds, which are in turn under-girded by either the unbelievable claims of an inerrant Bible or the distorted infallibility claims of an inflexible church hierarchy. While surely some will call this book an attack on Christianity itself, I call it an attempt to rescue the Christ experience from the increasingly dated and unbelievable explanations that through the ages we have wrapped around Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, I see this book as an essential building block in the development of what I have called “A New Christianity for a New World.” ~JSS Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Hector Timourian, from Livermore, California, writes: Question: I’ve read many of your books. The two books that have helped me most understand Jesus have been Liberating the Gospels and Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World. However, I don’t see a clear explanation of Jesus’ parables, for example, The Prodigal Son. To me these parables reveal a teaching method that’s not highlighted in your writings. Did Jesus tell these parables? Answer: Dear Hector, Thank you for your question. Parables are certainly part of the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Paul never suggested that Jesus used parables in his teaching and the Fourth Gospel does not include any parables or references to parables. I suppose that someone writing solely of Mark, Matthew or Luke would have to deal with the subject of parables. My current study is on the gospel of Matthew and I will do exactly that before that study is complete. In a book dealing with the Bible as a whole, the probability is that the author will not get down to the level of discussing the parables in a single book. You are correct in that they reveal a teaching method that was attributed to Jesus. They are memorable, concise and appealing. Yet the three most powerful parables, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and Lazarus and the Rich Man (sometimes called Dives) are found only in the writings of Luke, whom I would date in the late 9th or early 10th decade, or 58-63 years after the crucifixion. Once that date is embraced, one is forced to wonder why no earlier gospel mentioned these three parables or where these parables were hiding until Luke included them in his gospel. Were they originally given by Jesus? Or did a later teacher develop them as a way to make his understanding of Jesus more memorable. Those parables are certainly consistent with what we know of Jesus’ teaching. The parable of the Good Samaritan attacks the boundaries of prejudice; the parable of the Prodigal Son describes the infinite capacity of the “Father” to forgive, and the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man affirms the value of a life sensitively lived. May I recommend the best book I have ever read on the parables? It is an old book but still should be available in public libraries. It was written in the 1950's I believe by a German Lutheran scholar whose name was Helmut Thielicke and is entitled simply, The Parables. I remember being excited by this book when I first read it and the parables of Jesus have never been the same to me since. I hope you will find it equally exciting. ~John Shelby Spong Announcements Find out who really wrote John's gospel and why... Pre-Order The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic Today! John Shelby Spong, bestselling author and popular proponent of a modern, scholarly and authentic Christianity, argues that this last gospel to be written was misinterpreted by the framers of the fourth-century creeds to be a literal account of the life of Jesus when in fact it is a literary, interpretive retelling of the events in Jesus’ life through the medium of fictional characters, from Nicodemus and Lazarus to the “Beloved Disciple.” The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic was designed first to place Jesus into the context of the Jewish scriptures, then to place him into the worship patterns of the synagogue and finally to allow him to be viewed through the lens of a popular form of first-century Jewish mysticism. The result of this intriguing study is not only to recapture the original message of this gospel, but also to provide us today with a radical new dimension to the claim that in the humanity of Jesus the reality of God has been met and engaged. Click here to read the: Preface of The Fourth Gospel- by Bishop Spong “We now approach our scriptures with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. This new and imaginative book by John Shelby Spong will liberate many people from this unnecessary complication of the religious life.” — Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam “No one has done more to articulate a vibrant, post-mythic vision of Christianity than John Shelby Spong. Bishop Spong’s masterful interpretation is destined to become a classic.” — Michael Dowd, Author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World “Spong is always readable and informative, but this book reads like a cross between a detective story and an adventure saga that is founded on excellent scholarship. I could not put it down.” — Fred C. 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