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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All scholars agree there are elements of Jewish midrash in the Gospels: the crucifixion scene, for instance, is clearly narrated in a way that recalls the righteous sufferer of Psalm 22. But far more striking is the way the Gospel writers appear to struggle to show how the very odd Jesus-event could be the fulfilment of Jewish expectations about the Messiah.

If the first Christians were happy to create stories that fitted well with Old Testament and Jewish liturgical interpretations of the period, we would have ended up with a messiah figure that conformed far more easily to Jewish hopes and expectations than the one we find in the Gospels. As it is, the Jesus of the Gospels is as subversive of 1st century Judaism as he is resonate with it.

Oddly, Spong thinks he finds evidence for his (Goulder’s) theory in Acts 13:13-52 where Paul is invited to address the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch after public readings from the Law and the Prophets. Spong speculates that here we have a picture of how the Jesus story was fashioned—people like Paul and others invented episodes from Jesus’ life to tie in with the reading of the week. Actually, in Acts 13 Paul ignores the Sabbath texts and tells the story of Israel from the patriarchs to King David, finally presenting the Jesus story—his resurrection in particular—as the punchline of Israel’s hope for an everlasting kingship. Paul’s use of Old Testament texts here appears rather convoluted and ad hoc (Ps 2:7; Isa 55:3; Ps 16:10) making clear to most scholars that Paul and the first Christians were working back from the Jesus-event to find an Old Testament explanation; they were not starting with stock scriptural passages and fashioning a story that would resonate with them. Spong has it back-to-front.
  Spong speculates that people like Paul and others invented episodes from Jesus’ life to tie in with the reading of the week.
 
 

The bishop is operating on an idiosyncratic view of the literary form of the Gospels (as midrash). He writes of the Gospel of Mark: ‘Its form makes it very obvious that when this drama was first described, it was not history but liturgy that was the driving force’ (104). This completely ignores the consensus of New Testament historians over the last 15 years that describes the Gospels as a Jewish-Christian form of the well-known Graeco-Roman Biography (Bios).

All would agree that ancient biographers, like the Gospel writers, had a particular agenda in retelling the stories of famous people but there is no question they were setting out to tell actual episodes from the subject’s life. It is anachronistic to say that ‘the concern of the gospel writers was not to record what happened in history, but to probe the experience that people had with Jesus’ (157). This statement will resonate with many in the modern literary world and some in theological seminaries, but it will puzzle the trained ancient historian.

In Spong’s long list of things that are historically untrue in the Gospels (128) he shows just how far from the scholarly mainstream he has travelled. The names of Jesus’ parents, the existence of his Twelve disciples, his status as a healer, his significant final meal, his betrayal unto death and his disciples’ claim to have seen him alive again after death—things rejected by Spong as late additions to the story—are accepted by the vast majority of biblical historians as belonging to the earliest traditions about Jesus. They are regarded as historical, and with good reason. A quick check of the relevant literature in any university library will bear this out.

There are numerous non-sequiturs in this volume. For example, because Mark 6:3 says Mary was the mother of at least seven children Spong concludes that Mark knew nothing of the Virgin Birth story. Apart from being an argument from silence, what are we to make of the fact that Matthew, who tells the Virgin Birth story, happily carries over the reference from Mark about Mary’s seven kids (Matt 13:55-56)? A similar argument from silence appears in Chapter 9 where Spong asserts that the credal summary of 1 Cor 15:3 (‘Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures’) was the only information Paul had about Jesus’ death. This is disproved by 1 Cor 11:23-25 where Paul quotes Jesus’ words from “the night he was betrayed …” but, more importantly, how could we tell that Paul knew nothing more than what was contained, by way of summary, in the credal formula of 1 Cor 15:3?

Spong’s arguments collapse under their own weight but it is revealing that the Bibliography at the end of the book, which lists no fewer than 180 titles, has inexplicable omissions. It is not surprising that Spong would avoid interacting with Christian academic apologists but a 300-page book about Jesus with claims this significant, cannot justify overlooking the landmark contributions of scholars such as Martin Hengel, Sean Freyne, James Charlesworth, Richard Bauckham, James Dunn, N. T. Wright, Dale Allison, William D. Davies, Gerd Theissen, Joseph Fitzmyer and Graham Stanton. These are recognized leaders in the field and yet none of their writings appears in Spong’s bibliography. Those with even a cursory knowledge of historical Jesus studies over the last 20 years will justifiably conclude that Jesus for the Non-Religious is a work from the margins of scholarship prepared for an unsuspecting general market.

Dr. John Dickson
Director of the Centre for Public Christianity
Honorary Associate of the Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University (Australia)