Is the Jesus Story a Myth? Did a Man Named Jesus Ever Live?

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 13 March 2014 8 Comments
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Question

“How do you stay healthy and do you think your study is related to your health?”

Answer

Dear Cynthia,

Thank you for your question and your assumption that I am healthy! I am glad that you think it shows! I feel healthy, I am very active and I love life, but I am also aware that life moves unceasingly toward its inexorable end. My desire is to burn out still loving every minute of life that I am granted, rather than to rust out and limp somewhat pathetically toward the finish line. We do not always have that choice, but that is at least my desire.

I have a deep appreciation for both life and health. My father died at age 54, his father died at 54 and his brother died at 49. I did not grow up with expectations of longevity. My father, however, got no exercise, weighed 220 pounds on a 5’9” frame, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank alcohol excessively. His father died in the post-World War I influenza epidemic and his brother died as the result of an automobile accident. So the lack of longevity in their cases had extenuating circumstances. I will be 83 years old in a few more months and am grateful for every year granted to me.

I have always enjoyed exercise. Earlier in my life it was golf; later, I turned to squash and tennis, because they took less time, and still later to jogging and hiking. I still do about four miles a day, mostly on my treadmill, which is in my study and library on the first floor of our home. That takes me between an hour and an hour and 15 minutes (it seems to take a little longer as I grow older). People tell me they stopped using their treadmill or exercise bike because it was so boring! Not so for me. Not only do I look out on our beautiful wooded backyard with our bird feeder attracting interesting varieties of birds each day, but I also have a DVD set up to engage my mind. On that DVD I take university courses through the good offices of the Teaching Company. I take every course I can get my hands on, but mostly on subjects with which I have no scholarly background like physics, astrophysics, biology and evolution. One of my daughters has a PhD in physics from Stanford and I like to be able to converse with her. I also have CD books on history, politics and biography in my reading program. I don’t usually read fiction, but I will take a university course on Shakespeare, the Victorian novel and even a series of lectures that serves to introduce me to someone’s conception of the fifty greatest novels in the English language. I take every philosophy course I can find and love putting together the forces that produced the great turning points in Western thought from Copernicus through Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein to someone like Stephen Hawking. I have also become a devotee of a professor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, whom I have never met. His name is Robert Greenberg. He is a master teacher, perhaps the best I have ever heard. He is also a native of New Jersey! He has educated me in opera (I have just finished a study of Puccini’s Turandot), to say nothing of the life and works of J. S. Bach, the great symphonies of Beethoven, the piano concertos of Mozart and the works of such favorites of mine as Mahler and Dvorak. His introductory course entitled, “How to Listen to and Enjoy Great Music” was fantastic. What really serves to get me up early each morning to go to my treadmill is that I cannot wait to get back to my DVD or CD and my continuing education. Someday I hope to qualify as an educated man.

When that early and exciting first hour of the day is complete, I go immediately to my desk in the same room and then I begin my professional study. I focus on one major area at a time. At this moment it is Matthew’s gospel. Since the beginning of 2013, I have read six major commentaries on Matthew. My two favorites thus far are Michael Goulder’s Midrash and Lection in Matthew and Amy-Jill Levine’s book of essays on Matthew’s gospel from a Jewish and feminist perspective. I also spend some of that time each day preparing the lectures that I am privileged to deliver each year (normally between 100 and 125) and the sermons that I am invited to preach. Some of that time also goes to the preparation and writing of this weekly column and the question and answer feature that is associated with it. I do not normally come out of my study until about 11 a.m., when I go up for coffee, juice, a bagel and to read the New York Times, my favorite newspaper. By 1 p.m. I am ready to run the necessary errands to the grocer, the bank, the library, the barber and a variety of doctor and dentist appointments that seem to punctuate our lives. None of these doctor’s appointments are about serious health issues, but more about health maintenance. The fact is that I also enjoy the company of every one of my doctors. The afternoon is spent with correspondence, editing and reading books that I have agreed to review or to endorse.

About 5 p.m. I go to our kitchen to prepare dinner for my wife and me. I have become the chief cook in our family and we basically have only one meal a day together and that is in the evening. I find cooking a pleasure and a time of relaxation, but I am not above listening to a book on a CD being read to me as I cook (at this moment I am working though a series of 36 lectures on pre-Christian religion in those parts of the world around the Mediterranean Sea). Our diet is rather simple, we eat very little red meat, lots of vegetables and Christine, my very wonderful English wife, does not think that any meal is complete without a potato in some form. I also bake biscuits and make corn muffins regularly. We love salads and New Jersey corn and tomatoes when they are in season. We hardly ever have formal desserts unless we are entertaining and then I like to bake pies best of all. My favorite pies are combinations: apple-blackberry, strawberry-rhubarb and nectarine- raspberry. My favorite cakes are applesauce and pineapple upside down; both of which are made from recipes that once belonged to my mother.

Most evenings we eat together, watch the news on PBS and talk. We go out for dinner to or with friends perhaps twice a month. We specially love to have friends from our church over for dinner or Sunday brunch. St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Morristown is a very important community for both of us. We are away from home about 50% of the time speaking in some part of the United States or abroad, so all of these patterns get adapted, but not abandoned on these trips.

From April to October, the New York Yankees draw me inexorably to the television screen each evening. Am I addicted to the Yankees? Well let me say that if I could see every game in the 162 game season I would. I find the time between the end of the World Series and the beginning of spring training to be an eternity! Earlier in my life, I was a radio play-by-play announcer, broadcasting for my listening audience football, basketball and baseball games. I was known as “the Voice of the Tigers” and was sponsored by “Wink, that Sassy Drink” and “Happy Dan, the TV Man.” These three sports are in my DNA, but baseball is by far number one.

The fact is I love my life, I love my family, I love my career, I love studying and writing and I love my church. Do those things increase my longevity? I do not know. I do know that these things make the years that I do have wonderful years.

I’ve probably told you more than you want to know, but I have enjoyed it and I thank you for asking.

John Shelby Spong

 

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