Good points from John which I think conclusively answer beliefs some (not myself) Christians may have that moral ideas and equality were absent pre 30-33AD.I've appreciate both standpoints in this Blog! I think the source of Jesus' & Paul's beliefs has to be founded in OT theology due to their context which was most certainly Jewish?

(James Thompson, on "Atheism and the Good Life")

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Review of Bishop Spong’s Jesus for the Non Religious

An historical approach

John Dickson

The HarperCollins press release accompanying Jesus for the Non-Religious describes its author, John Shelby Spong, as ‘the controversial, bestselling Bishop’—and for good reason. I have no doubt this book will cause some controversy and become a bestseller. Spong writes beautifully and with such wit and verve that many readers will be swept along by his portrait of a Jesus who overturned the barriers of race, creed and sexuality, who rejected the tribalism of religion and who came not with ‘the tribal message of rescuing sinners’  but in order ‘to free our humanity to enter another realm of consciousness’ (157).

To arrive at this figure of Jesus the author first explains why almost everything the Gospels say about Jesus—his birth in Bethlehem, the names of his parents, his twelve disciples, his healings, the crucifixion narrative and, of course, the resurrection story—is historically false.

The stories about Jesus, Spong asserts, were created by the early church in the period AD 70-100 as a deliberate retelling of various Old Testament stories. So, for instance, we are told the crucifixion narrative contains almost nothing historical. It was simply remembered that Jesus was executed and, in a pious attempt to explain what this event meant, the early Christians fashioned a narrative about their beloved Jesus built almost entirely out of Psalm 22 and the Jewish Passover festival. The same logic applies to most of the Gospel story—the resurrection, the healings, Jesus’ baptism and so on.
     
 

What was the impetus for this religious creativity on the part of the early believers? Spong suggests it came from the liturgy of the Jewish synagogues. Christians met in synagogues, Spong assures us, and so must have designed their stories about Jesus to coincide with the major festivals of Judaism. Rosh Hashanah (New Year), for instance, required a Jesus story about preparation and renewal; hence, the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 1 gives us the preaching of John the Baptist. Again, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), ten days later in the Jewish calendar, would require stories of forgiveness and cleansing, which is exactly what we find in Mark 2.

Spong lays out for us which passages in Mark were designed to fall in which Jewish season. Thus, Mark (and Luke and Matthew) is not history but liturgy fashioned to lend expression to the powerful religious feeling Jesus left with his disciples. Once we learn to read the Gospels in this way, Spong affirms, we can jettison the theistic nonsense about miracles, a divine incarnation, a coming kingdom and the salvation of sinners. Only then can we open ourselves up to the fullness of humanity that Jesus embodied, and in this we find ‘the God experience’ (290).

Spong says he writes as a Christian (7) motivated by a desire to share with the public something of what he calls ‘the Christ-power’ (292). But there is surely another reason he has written a general market volume rather than one pitched at his more well-informed peers. In almost every respect Jesus for the Non-Religious runs counter to the findings of mainstream scholarship: By ‘mainstream scholarship’ I do not mean simply those with whom I agree - far from it. I mean not only a numerical majority, but more especially the scholars whose names regularly appear in the professional academic journals of this discipline. I contrast the ‘mainstream’ with both the sceptical fringes and the Christian apologists, most of whom never publish in the appropriate academic forums where their ideas can be subject to scrutiny.

While he does not tell us so in this book, Spong draws his ideas about Jesus and the Gospels almost exclusively from the theory of Michael Goulder who in 1974 attempted to argue that the Gospels are a form of Jewish biblical interpretation/application known as ‘midrash’ and that the midrashic stories about Jesus were constructed out of the liturgy of the synagogue (five of Goulder’s works are in the Bibliography). The theory convinced virtually none of the experts, least of all the Jewish scholars on Jesus, and for good reason.

Firstly, the examples of midrashim we have from antiquity look nothing like the Gospels. If the Gospels are midrash, they are a previously unknown form. Secondly, we know almost nothing about the synagogue liturgy prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD70 - it is in this period that many of the ‘stories’ of Jesus, on Spong’s view, must have been formed. Thirdly, after AD70, when Spong thinks the first Gospel was written, Christians were certainly not meeting in Jewish synagogues. Actually, it is doubtful significant numbers ever did, since the earliest evidence reveals that Christians met for prayer, praise and preaching not on the Sabbath but on the first day of the week, i.e., Sunday.

A fourth reason to doubt the central hypothesis of Bishop Spong is that the purported connection between passages in the Gospels and the cycle of the Jewish festivals is entirely speculative and lacks any methodological rigour. You can find Passover themes, for example, in virtually every chapter of Mark, not just in the account of Jesus’ suffering and execution, or Passion narrative. It is well known, for instance, that Mark 1 is replete with hints of Exodus/Passover themes that were central to the Jewish psyche. Spong himself unwittingly lets this cat out of the bag by arguing in one place that the Passion narrative is based on the Day of Atonement liturgy (159-169) and then in another that it is based on the liturgy of the Passover (194-196), which falls six months later in the Jewish calendar.

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