Charting a New Reformation

We have noted earlier that originally miracles did not appear to have been connected with the memory of Jesus. The first book to portray Jesus as a worker of miracles was the gospel of Mark, written in the early eighth decade or some forty-two years after the crucifixion.

Matthew, the second gospel writer, who copied almost ninety percent of Mark into his ninth decade gospel, repeated every miracle that Mark had included, while adding only one other.

Luke the third gospel writer heightens the note of the miraculous greatly in his late ninth to early tenth decade work. Luke’s story of the resurrection, for example, is far more supernatural than anything written prior to Luke. In Luke, the resurrected Jesus appears to be able to materialize into and to dematerialize out of thin air. In Luke, Jesus can also defy gravity and disappear into the sky as if propelled by an unseen rocket force.

In the later development of these twelve theses, I will explore these heightened stories in regard to the resurrection and the ascension more fully. Suffice it now to limit myself to some general observations in regard to the presence of seemingly supernatural events.

Once we recognize that miracle stories are a late-developing part of the Jesus tradition, we can look at them with greater objectivity. When we do, a number of things become obvious. First, we note that the miraculous elements in these stories grow as the stories are repeated in a later work. Second, we discover that frequently there are in the gospel miracle stories about Jesus, echoes of a narrative from the Hebrew Scriptures now being retold about Jesus. Third, each miracle story appears to have the interpretive purpose of relating Jesus to the expected messiah. These observations carry us deeper into the gospel texts and give us another way to view miracles other than to relate to them as the deeds being done by God in human disguise, which is the Christological lens through which so many traditional Christians view them today.

The development of this kind of Christology, that is the study of the divine nature of Jesus, has grown rapidly over the centuries. In the Epistle to the Philippians, Paul spoke of God emptying the divine self into Jesus, but no one can seriously argue that Paul was talking about what later came to be called “incarnation.” Paul was not saying that the divine entered into and took over the human in the life of Jesus. This is made clear in other places in the Pauline corpus when Paul talks about God “designating” Jesus as “the Son of God by the action of the Holy Spirit” by raising Jesus from the dead (Romans 1:1-4). For Paul Jesus did not in and of himself “rise” from the dead. God raised him! If God can designate and “raise” Jesus, then clearly this is not a description of co-equality. Paul was too deeply Jewish to entertain Trinitarian thinking.

Mark also appears not to be a Trinitarian. At the beginning of his gospel Mark describes Jesus as a fully human, adult male who comes to be baptized by John in the River Jordan. It is in that baptismal act, we are told, that God’s spirit infuses the human Jesus. Incarnational and Trinitarian thinking, this is not!

In the later gospels of Matthew and Luke major steps are taken toward “incarnational and Trinitarian” thinking. Both added a virgin birth story to the memory of Jesus. God now enters Jesus at conception not at resurrection, as Paul had implied, or at his baptism, which Mark seemed to suggest. As the years go by the gospel miracles became less and less God acting through Jesus and more and more descriptive of Jesus acting on behalf of God. The creator of the world in human form could certainly make the winds and waves obey him. The divine Jesus could surely banish illness, which was thought of in the first century as God’s punishment of human beings for the sinfulness of their lives. The world in which this “divine Jesus” lived had not yet heard of germs, viruses, tumors, cholesterol, or of human cells expanding in a reckless and disorganized manner. Once those things were discovered, then prayers requesting the miracle of healing, or a sacrifice offered to appease the punishing deity, began to be seen as nonsensical.

By the time the Fourth Gospel was written (95-100 CE), miracles had been transformed into “signs.” There is a difference. A miracle is defined as an objective event, which can be observed and documented. A sign is an event that points beyond itself to something that is mysterious and unseen, but not doubted. In the Fourth Gospel, John portrays Jesus as the author and originator of seven powerful signs, two of which are absolutely unique, having never been mentioned or even hinted at in the three earlier gospels. The first of these is the strange story of Jesus changing water into wine. The other is the dramatic story of Jesus calling forth from his burial place, the four-days-dead-and-buried Lazarus. This brief analysis drives us to ask: “Did any of these miraculous events really happen?” The answer to that question is, I now believe, a firm no. Does this mean that the gospel writers were telling us about things that never happened, or does it mean that we have literalized inappropriately the gospels for far too long?

Earlier in this series, we traced the development of miracles in the entire Bible; they are not omnipresent. Biblical miracles only seem to occur in the cycles of stories that have gathered around the heroic figures in Jewish history. In particular, these figures focus on what might be called the “twin towers of Israel’s religious life,” the law and the prophets. Moses was the father of the law while Elijah was the father of the prophets. These are the major biblical figures around which miracle stories have gathered in Hebrew history. We also noted that these miracles occurred in the lives of Moses and Elijah’s immediate successors. It looks as if the miracles stories identified with Moses were then wrapped around Joshua, while the miracle stories originally identified with Elijah were then wrapped around Elisha.

When we arrive at the Jesus story, we discover that Moses-Joshua stories have now been wrapped around Jesus. Like Moses, Jesus has power over nature. Moses could split the Red Sea, Jesus could calm the storm and walk on water. Moses could cause manna to fall in the wilderness to feed the hungry children of Israel, while Jesus, in another wilderness, could take a limited number of loaves and fishes and feed a multitude. Are not these gospel writers following an ancient Jewish story-telling tradition, to assert that the same God who was experienced as present in Moses was now clearly present in Jesus? Did these biblical authors ever consider the possibility that these miracle stories would ever be taken literally? Did they think for a moment that they were writing history? No, of course not! They were, in a typically Jewish manner, painting an interpretive portrait.

Elijah and Elisha expanded the domain of the miraculous from the world of nature, as it was for Moses and Joshua, to the world of human experience. Both Elijah and Elisha were said, for example, to have been able to raise the dead. It was a widow’s only son, who was raised in the Elijah narrative. So are we surprised when Luke wraps that story around Jesus and it becomes Jesus raising the only son of a widow in the village of Nain? Elisha raises a child from the dead. That story is also wrapped around Jesus when Mark, Matthew and Luke all relate a story of Jesus raising a child from the dead. So both the nature miracles and the ability to raise the dead appear to be Jewish stories about past heroes now being retold about Jesus.

That still leaves us, however, with two categories of miracle stories attributed to Jesus that do not fit into these Hebrew patterns. The first category includes most of the healing miracles, in which Jesus is reported to be able to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to sing to the mute and the ability to walk to the lame. The second are the “signs” that occur in the Fourth Gospel. What is their source? From whence are they derived? Could these still be viewed as literal accounts of historical events? Time and space require that we separate the two categories, so I will deal with the healing miracles this week and the Johannine signs next week.

If we were people familiar with the Jewish Scriptures, we would know that messianic thinking had long viewed the promised messiah as the one who would inaugurate the reign of the Kingdom of God in human history as spelled out by Isaiah in the 8th century BCE. When the Kingdom of God dawned, telling signs, Isaiah said, would make all people aware of it. Water, he said, would flow in the desert, allowing the crocuses to grow there. Then human wholeness would transform human brokenness. In the messianic age, Isaiah suggested, the blind would see, the deaf hear, the mute sing and the lame walk. If one believed Jesus was the messiah inaugurating the Kingdom of God, then the signs of that age must surely be attributed to him. This, I now believe, is the primary source of the New Testament healing miracles. This is also why miracles were so late in being attributed to Jesus. They had to wait until this understanding of Christology developed. The healing miracles in the gospels were not ever events that actually happened, they were rather signs of the presence of God bringing the messianic age into being. We have misread them as miracles. It is a new insight – the burden of the miracles is lifted off the memory of Jesus in our age when supernatural thinking does not fit well into our world.

John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.

Raymond Rakower From Gex, France, writes:
 

It’s always a new pleasure and enrichment to read your weekly issues. If you’ll forgive my arrogance, I would like to make a suggestion, a tentative explanation of the unshakable conviction of so many people that there is an almighty theistic God outside our universe

It might be the vague recollection, an echo of the last weeks or months of our fetus life when our universe was limited to our mother’s placenta but with an acoustic system already operational and connected to our primitive brain. We heard the voice of our father coming from outside of this universe and many a time with a deep caring male voice. This recollection would be later incorporated in the baby after a couple of years when its unconscious mind would develop. Hence so many people will never accept to abandon their belief. I got this idea whilst reading (and translating into French at my favorite publisher’s request) the book of Aletha J. Solter, PhD, The Attachment Play, based on the behavior theory. She demonstrates in this book the fact that after the birth, the baby remembers sometimes for clearly a couple of years what happened before and during its birth! She used this remarkable memory of the early childhood to heal some children’s behavior problems.

My second point in this email concerns your Q&A, in your response to the question of Sue Stover. I recently read a book, which analyses many details that are quite familiar to you: The Yahweh vs. the Elohim traditions of the Old Testament. Its title is Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman. It may contain some interesting hypotheses about this topic.

 

Dear Ray,

Thank you for your letter with your provocative insights. My readers need to know that I have had the chance to know you and to talk with you about these and many other things in the years of our friendship. They also need to know that you were the first translator of my books into French. You have always been a resource to my life and both Christine and I look forward to our opportunity to see you in Basel, Switzerland next October.

In regard to the comments and questions expressed in your letter, let me say that I am certain that there is something called “pre-birth memory.” Evidence for that seems well established. I am also convinced that there is something real about what Carl Jung called “the collective unconscious,” which looks at some other interconnections. I have not, however, read deeply enough on that subject to have formed sufficiently well-researched opinions that I would be comfortable sharing with others. In the field of theology we are oft times tempted to say more than we know and even to become dogmatic in the face of mystery. The Christian life, I remind myself daily, is a journey into a dimension of truth that no human mind can ever fully possess. So I have no great light that I want to flash before your fascinating suggestion that the idea of a theistic God is derived from the suggestion that an unborn child experiences his or her father first as a presence from a universe different from the one the fetus occupies. I find that suggestion intriguing, but not convincing. It seems to me that there are many sources of that idea, not just one. Above all I am convinced that every idea of God ultimately arises from a human experience, but that does not mean God is no more than a mythologized human experience. Over the years of human history every human definition of God has finally died, or been radically revised in the light of new knowledge and expanded human experience. So in my mind there is a reality to God that transcends every definition. God does not die when any human definition of God, like “theism” dies. I make a clear distinction between God and every human idea of God. So I will take your idea under advisement, just because it is your idea, and I will explore it further. Perhaps we can discuss it more in October. Until then we send you our best wishes.

John Shelby Spong