Thoughts on the Future of Christianity After a Conversation with the Founder of the Alban Institute

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 9 June 2011 7 Comments
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Question

I’ve been reading your book Liberating the Gospels.  Your well supported hypothesis that the gospels are midrashic stories that cast light on the core stories of Jesus as they were understood at the time makes perfect sense.  I find it interesting that with the four gospels, the writing gets better with each one, Mark through John.   My problem is that Jesus is a “character” different in the mind of each evangelist, who does things essentially made up by the writer, perhaps some based on a verbal tradition, perhaps not.  My question is how do I get closer to understanding Jesus as a person?  Or is it a matter of always “seeing through a glass darkly?  I’m at the point in your book where you discuss the Gospel of John, which brings up the memory of when my New Testament professor, Sherman Johnson, listed 13 reasons supporting the idea that John was the earliest gospel.

Answer

Dear Bert,

Sherman Johnson was wrong! This was a popular belief in the late 19th century but contemporary biblical scholarship has rendered it no longer viable and no reputable biblical scholar (by that I mean scholars to whom other scholars pay attention) will affirm that conclusion.  There will always be those fundamentalists (and they come in both a Catholic and a Protestant variety, some more sophisticated than others) who will try to make a case for something out of touch with reality like, for example, an early, now lost, Aramaic original for one of the gospels, but no one except fellow fundamentalists will salute that flag.

There is no Supreme Court or infallible Pope to decide who reputable scholars are.  That is determined collegially, but it is also obvious.  Reputable scholars do not have Evangelical publishers like Eerdmans or Word.  Reputable scholars do not train in Evangelical schools (even those attached to great universities) or at Vatican institutes.  They encounter the world as it is, interact with many disciplines and do not pretend that they have captured the truth in some verbal container.  Reputable scholars write for and expect to be challenged by the other scholars in their field until truth emerges by consensus.

I do not bother to read Evangelical writers or traditional Catholic propagandists, for their agenda is never to seek the truth, since they assume they already possess it.

Yes, we do indeed see “only through a glass darkly” and the arrogance of thinking that the ultimate mystery of God could ever be contained in or bound by the limits of the human mind is one more indicator that the one making that claim is not a reputable scholar.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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