Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel

by John Shelby Spong

So this is my dilemma. At one and the same time, I have found the Bible and my study of it to be a deep resource to my life and my faith, but I have also been deeply embarrassed by the way the Bible has been used over the centuries to justify one dehumanizing attitude after another. I cannot apparently have it both ways. I must either reject the Bible to live in a modern world or I must reject the modern world in order to cling to the Bible. That is a choice I cannot and will not make. So I am driven to find a different way to read the Bible that allows me simultaneously to be both a person of faith and a person thankful for and dedicated to the century in which I am privileged to live. For anyone to call the Bible the “Word of God” or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate. To read from this book in a Sunday worship service and then to end that reading with some version of the phrase “this is the Word of the Lord” is, to me, little more than the perpetuation of religious ignorance and religious prejudice.

The fracture between the synagogue and the church did not occur officially until around the year 88 CE. This means that Paul died a Jew, and the missionary goal of his life was not to destroy Judaism, but to open Judaism to Gentile inclusion. Synagogue worship was at the heart of Paul’s life, and when his converts gathered on the first day of the week to “break bread” in the name of the Lord, it was not designed as a step toward founding a new religious movement so much as it was in the service of adding a new dimension to their life in the synagogue.

Let me go back now and examine, as best we can, the meaning behind the words we just read. “After the reading of the law” is a reference to the Sabbath Torah tradition. The most important part of the synagogue worship was a reading from the books of Moses, as they were called—the first five books in the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These five books were the “holy of holies” in the Jewish scriptures. In traditional synagogue practice, the Torah was read in its entirety at public worship throughout the Sabbaths of a single year. Getting through the Torah in that time frame meant that each Sabbath Torah reading might last thirty to forty minutes. This reading of the Torah progressed from beginning to end, starting on the first Sabbath of the new year with the book of Genesis and ending on the last Sabbath of the year with the completion of the book of Deuteronomy. It was read from sacred scrolls, which were kept in the tabernacle and were solemnly and ceremoniously brought out for reading. A given Sabbath’s scroll would be opened to the place where the previous Sabbath’s reading had concluded. One did not skip around in a scroll! There was some question as to when the Jewish year actually began. The Torah itself, however, is determinative: It describes the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, as coming on the first day of Tishri, the seventh month of the year (Lev. 23:24). If Tishri is the seventh month, then the year had to start with Nisan. This w...

This insight, which suggests that the story of Jesus was passed on primarily in the synagogue, opens to us a window into the oral period of Christian history and reveals the context in which the story of Jesus was repeated and thus preserved. It was not a random process in which parents told their children about Jesus, or neighbors passed on Jesus stories over the back fence, or people in the marketplace related stories of Jesus to one another. That kind of oral tradition would have resulted in little more than a few anecdotal episodes that stand out in everyone’s family history—defining stories, embarrassing stories, or survival stories. One would certainly not get a cohesive pattern, such as the one revealed in the gospels, just from anecdotal recollections.

By about the year 150 CE, and that is obviously an arbitrary date,* there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian movement. From that day to some point after the end of World War II, the only people who read the New Testament were Gentiles, who had no understanding of and no appreciation for the original Jewish context of the gospels.

Please note that the Jews saw their scriptures as something being regularly created. These texts did not come as the revelations of God, but rather out of the history of the Jewish people, and they were always born in the service of liturgy.

Once Passover and the crucifixion are firmly tied together liturgically in our minds, we can roll the earliest gospel, Mark, backward over the rest of the liturgical year of the Jews. As we do so, two things quickly become obvious. First, there is an appropriate Jesus story (the transfiguration) in exactly the place where the observance of Dedication-Hanukkah comes in the Jewish liturgical year. Second, there is an appropriate Jesus story first for the harvest season of Sukkoth (Mark 4), then for Yom Kippur (Mark 1:40–2:12) and, finally, for Rosh Hashanah (Mark 1:1–13). John the Baptist appears to speak the Rosh Hashanah message that the kingdom of God is at hand and to call the people to repentance. So the first gospel reveals a liturgical order for telling the story of Jesus, but it runs only from Rosh Hashanah to Passover.

The image of conception in Matthew’s mind was that of the Holy Spirit hovering over the womb of Mary in order to bring forth in her a new creation, just as in the Jewish story of creation the Holy Spirit had hovered over the chaos to bring forth life in the first creation (Gen. 1:1–3).

Matthew had experienced a “God presence” in Jesus of Nazareth. He was convinced that Jesus’ origins were of God and were therefore holy. He knew, as a scribe, that the text he used from Isaiah, and on the basis of which he had asserted the holiness of Jesus, was a weak one that really did not support his contention. So he introduced in this very creative way the story of Jesus’ virgin birth, a narrative which he knew had nothing to do with biology. He prefaced it with a genealogical chart of Jesus’ ancestors. He obviously also knew that this genealogy was not literal history. When the two are put together, however, Matthew’s message becomes obvious. We have experienced the presence of God in the life of Jesus, he was asserting. We believe that Jesus is from God, that God is in some sense the source, the father of his life. Even if that argument is not sustainable in any literal way, Matthew was saying, it makes no difference, because God can bring holiness out of any human symbol of brokenness, inadequacy, or even evil. God can bring holiness out of incest, prostitution, seduction, and adultery. So let the enemies of the Jesus movement rail! Let them try to assassinate Jesus’ character by suggesting that he was base-born—we know better. We know God was in Christ and we know that God can work through any set of human circumstances to bring holiness out of life.

As long as the Christian movement was made up primarily of Jews, the implicit, non-literal meaning of Matthew’s birth narrative was clear. By the year 150 of the Common Era, however, there were few Jews left in the Christian movement, which had become an almost completely Gentile church. These Gentile Christians had neither a knowledge of Jewish symbols nor a familiarity with the Jewish scriptures, so they assumed that these opening chapters reflected a literal account of how Jesus came to be born. From the year 150 on, literalism, a Gentile heresy, became established as the only proper way to read the gospels; from that point on, Christians read the gospel texts as if they were describing literal events that actually occurred in history. A revolution in biblical scholarship that started in the early 1800s began the slow but certain decline of this way of understanding the New Testament. In the late twentieth century some movements began to appear that were designed to bring Judaism and Christianity into a deeper relationship by recognizing their mutual interdependence.

His purpose in developing this story was clear. He had found in the life of Jesus of Nazareth one who was for him “the light of the world,” one who could draw all people into a sense of oneness as they came into the meaning of this Christ; and he sensed that this would also draw people into new dimensions of their own humanity. Since in his mind this Jesus was destined to change the entire world, that world needed to glimpse this new light at the moment of his birth, feel drawn into his presence, and thus be compelled to seek out new understandings of what it means to be human. They needed to acknowledge the presence of this Jesus with appropriate symbols of the messianic claims.

This is the moment in the Sermon on the Mount that Matthew has Jesus say, “Pray then like this,” and then the words of the Lord’s Prayer follow (Matt. 6:9). This prayer, which is above all else a prayer for the kingdom of God to come in human history, begins by addressing itself to the one who is beyond all limits. That is what it means to say, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” Heaven, in its primary meaning, was never a place located somewhere above the sky, but an expression of the limitlessness of God. God’s kingdom is, therefore, not a physical realm, but an experience of God’s presence. The kingdom thus becomes that moment in which the life and reality of God become visible in another person or in an event of history.

In this prayer Jesus has already, and quite obviously, been cast in the role of the messiah, whose task it is to inaugurate the kingdom of God. In all likelihood, then, this prayer is based on an understanding of Jesus that surely had not been worked out by his disciples until well after the defining experiences of his crucifixion and his resurrection, through which his followers had to walk before their hearts and minds could finally recognize his meaning.

So it becomes obvious that the Lord’s Prayer is the creation of the church and never was taught us by Jesus. It reveals that his followers, well after his death, have realized that in the life of Jesus they had seen the meaning of God’s kingdom and now waited in joyful anticipation for his “second coming,” when God’s kingdom would be fully realized.

“Thy kingdom come” means that our eyes must be trained to see the divine inside the human. It means that the kingdom of God comes when we are empowered to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that we are capable of being. It means that the work of the kingdom of God is the work of enhancing human wholeness; it is not the work of denigrating humanity or proclaiming the doctrine of original sin and human “fallenness.”

That will thus become the moment when we are finally able to pray the essentially Christian prayer. The distinction of being the earliest prayer in the gospels, I repeat, was not the Lord’s Prayer, but the prayer “Come, Lord Jesus!” Come and establish the realm of God in each one of us. Show us what it means to live, not for our survival, but for a higher purpose, for that will be the moment in which we will finally learn that to be human and to be Christian are one and the same thing.

A second category of supernatural acts that are attributed to Jesus appear to have arisen out of the Jewish messianic tradition. When the Jews first began to develop the idea of the messiah, the one who would inaugurate the kingdom of God, they populated their dreams of “the age to come” with accounts of human wholeness replacing human brokenness, with healing replacing sickness, and with the power of life overcoming the power of death.

So, in my opinion, Matthew did get this story from Mark, but he has edited it and expanded it to suit his purpose. Miracles represent the edited and expanded understanding of the Matthean principle, namely that God is present in Jesus and all people will be united in him. It is a wonderful interpretive portrait. It points to the experience of life expanded and made whole in the presence of Jesus. That experience is literal. The story is not. Matthew calls people to enter that experience. It is not a call to believe in miracles, but a call to enter the one who makes all life whole.

Much of the language used in telling the Christian story is directly related to Yom Kippur. One can hardly escape in any Christian worship service some variation of what has become the “mantra” of Christianity: “Jesus died for my sins.” That mantra is present overtly and covertly in our hymns, in our prayers and in most of our sermons. The nature of a mantra is to assume that its meaning is self-evident and thus does not ever need to be explained. While these words are constantly repeated, few Christians would be able to articulate what they mean. Fewer still would recognize them as coming, even in this distorted form, from the Jewish Day of Atonement.

The “fathers” of the church, especially Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, read the Bible as if it were one continuous book written presumably by God. That is why they called the Bible “the Word of God.” They had no understanding, as we have come to learn in the last two hundred years, of the relationship between various parts of the biblical story to history or to one another. The book of Genesis, with which the Bible opens, is, we now know, the composite of at least four Jewish sources written over a period of up to six hundred years. It was not a single story in which one event followed another in sequential order.

Working against this traditional Christian mentality are proponents of a revolt against all things religious. Theirs is not an impotent attempt to shore up yesterday’s truth so that it will endure forever, but rather a rejection of all religions based upon their supernatural assertions. The people who share this point of view form the core of a newly organized, growing and thoroughly secularized society. They see no place in their lives for yesterday’s religious systems. Reflecting the educated ranks in our society today, they have come to embrace not just Galileo, but an understanding of the vastness of the universe that even Galileo could not have imagined. Since most of them have never heard of a God other than the supernatural deity who lives above the sky and who possesses miraculous power, they assume that there must not be any God at all. Their former image of God violates everything they know about how the world operates, and so the idea of God itself becomes an irrelevant idea for them.

It was in that transition movement in Christian history that Christians first co-opted and then corrupted the Jewish concept of atonement, turning it into something they called “substitutionary atonement.” It was based on the ancient myth rooted in Augustine’s misunderstanding and subsequently on the literalization of that misunderstanding. That transition period was when Christians began to talk about “the fall of man.” This kind of thinking became so dominant that by the time Christianity achieved power in the Roman Empire, substitutionary atonement had become the cornerstone of all Christian theology, and would remain so throughout the centuries until this very day. This theology was captured best in the words that became the Christian mantra that I have previously identified: “Jesus died for my sins.” This mantra was then incorporated into everything that was called Christian. Substitutionary atonement, which became the Christian view of salvation, presented us ultimately with a God who is a punishing monster, with a Christ who is God’s eternal victim and with a humanity characterized by a debilitating guilt.

First, Matthew has Jesus change the focus of this Sukkoth celebration from gratitude for the harvest that feeds one’s body, to the idea of heavenly food that satisfies one’s deepest hunger as one journeys to the messianic age. The harvest itself has been transformed into a symbol for the final judgment. The theme of these parables is not the meaning of Jesus, but the need for the expansion of the Christian movement. As such, these parables address the concerns of the early Christian church and thus must have originated in that period of history when the growth of the church was a primary concern. Since there is no evidence that the Jesus of history envisioned the establishment of a church, much less its growth and development, there is no way that these parables could have originated with Jesus.

The parable of the sower is about the need to plant the Christian message in the kind of soil that will bear fruit. The parable of the wheat and tares is about the compromises one must make with the world in order to accomplish the tasks of the church. Human life is always a mixture of good and evil; one cannot separate them from each other without destroying both. The parable of the mustard seed is a picture of the early church. It was at that time as small and as insignificant as a mustard seed, but was destined to grow, Matthew and his fellow adherents believed, to be so large that even the birds of the air could build their nests in its branches. The “birds of the air” was a reference to the Gentiles, who would ultimately make their homes in the Christian movement. The treasure in the field and the pearl of great price were symbols of the way early Christians valued their Christ message, believing that its success was worth any sacrifice. These are the concerns of the Christian community at the time Matthew’s gospel was being written. They would have been totally foreign concerns to the Jesus of history. So Jesus has now been related to the great fall festival of the harvest.

Even among those who are aware of these things, most have never stopped to wonder why. We Christians seldom seem to ask “why” questions in the study of the gospels. So long as we read gospel accounts assuming that they are describing literal events that actually happened, then “why” questions, which seek a different level of meaning, will not be encouraged. It is also worth mentioning that, attached to these feeding of the multitude stories in every gospel, there is an account of Jesus walking on the water. Never in any of the gospels are these stories separated from each other.

The Canaanite woman forced Jesus to see her. He did not succumb to the tactic of pretending that a prejudice will disappear when the victims of that prejudice become invisible. Perhaps that is why the rhetoric of this story is made to sound so harsh. Matthew designed it carefully, so that it expresses the depths of the feeling that the Jews held toward the Canaanites. Keeping themselves separate had been for the Jewish people a tactic of survival. They had erected fixed boundaries to guarantee their continued Jewish existence. They had adopted certain customs that made them different and therefore not absorbable, so that they could always be survivors. The universal claim to the love of God, which Jesus acknowledged, ran counter to those survival techniques, learned and fashioned over many centuries. The collision between survival themes and universalism was deep among the Jews, and Matthew suggested that the collision between the two in the life of Jesus was at the heart of what Jesus meant. The Canaanite woman thus became a powerful symbol in Matthew’s understanding of the Christ story. Can the love of God embrace those who are the most eminently rejectable? Can any limit whatsoever be placed on the availability of the love of God?

Matthew, in his narrative of the Canaanite woman, is continuing this theme of universalism. The love of God includes the one whom you have defined as the most despicable of all humankind, the most unclean, the most unworthy. That is Matthew’s meaning in the story of the Canaanite woman, and a powerful story it is.

The Canaanite woman is, therefore, not a person of history, but an eternal symbol, always standing before the human conscience, challenging its limits, demanding to be heard; and she will not go away until she is embraced.

Matthew next moves to his second character in what will be his last episode before he relates Jesus to the festival of Dedication-Hanukkah, the next great feast of the Jews. This character’s name is Peter. He is a person of history, but he is so much more. In the narrative of Peter’s confession of faith, which Matthew locates in a place called Caesarea Philippi, Peter uses all the correct words. Of Jesus he says: “You are the Christ, the son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). For this confession, he is said to have received the affirmation of Jesus. “Flesh and blood alone could not have revealed that to you, Peter,” says Jesus (Matt. 16:17). You have become capable of receiving this knowledge only as the gift from God. It has come to you because you finally understand, says Jesus. Now you will be given the keys of the kingdom (Matt. 16:19).

Reinterpreted CHAPTER 24 Dedication: The Return of the Light of God

The gospel writers, including Matthew, were trying to relate the teachings of the Jesus of history to the issues being faced by those coming into the Christian community in their own time, and they were trying to discern “the mind of Christ” in regard to those issues. These post-Jesus “teachings” are, therefore, attempts on the part of the followers of Jesus to have him speak to the problems they were facing in the ninth decade of the Christian movement. What this means is that we cannot and should not relate to these teachings as if they represented the literal words of Jesus. Only those who were not familiar with the Jewish practices out of which this teaching section arose would ever have made that mistake. That is why biblical literalism is, in the last analysis, a Gentile heresy. With that introduction now in our minds, we turn to the journey section of the gospel of Matthew and we listen to the “teachings of Jesus” being given through the church to the second and third generation of those who described themselves as followers of Jesus.

These bits of the record from Paul lead me to conclude that no earlier and independent source affirms that the developed story line, purporting to describe the events from the Last Supper, the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, and the resurrection itself, might be remembered history. If this crucial part of our faith tradition is not to be understood literally, then how is it to be understood? Did the death of Jesus not happen the way we have been told for centuries? Is the Christian story based on a fantasy or on a developed mythology? If this part of the Jesus story is not trustworthy as objective truth, then is any part of the gospel story trustworthy?

Is it possible that the familiar narrative of the crucifixion originated, not in an attempt to describe what actually happened, but in an effort to assert that in his life and in his death, Jesus fulfilled the messianic expectations of the Hebrew scriptures?

Armed with these possibilities, we are now in a position to turn back to the familiar narrative of the passion and death of Jesus outlined in the previous chapter and to search within it for interpretive clues that might open the passion story to truth that is not historical truth, but just might turn out to be profound truth.

I go into all of these numbers because it is obvious to me that the followers of Jesus took the three-hour Jewish observance of Passover and stretched it into a twenty-four-hour vigil with eight distinct segments. Matthew’s passion narrative was then purpose-written for that vigil. What we have in the passion narrative, then, is a scripture lesson, designed to be read at each of the eight segments of a twenty-four-hour vigil liturgy, allowing the followers of Jesus to “watch” with their Lord during the final twenty-four hours of his life.

Matthew, like Mark before him, has moved the story of the crucifixion into the season of Passover. That helped the followers of Jesus to identify him with the paschal lamb. When one reads the story of the first Passover in the book of Exodus (Exod. 12), one understands that it was the blood of the lamb of God sprinkled on the door posts of Jewish homes that banished death from those homes. Now, under the power of Christian preaching, the cross came to be understood as “the door post of the world.” The blood of the new paschal lamb was placed upon that new door post, and the result was that death would be banished for those who came to God through the blood of Jesus, the new paschal lamb.

The role of II Isaiah’s “Servant” figure is operative behind Jesus’ words and actions. Wholeness comes rather, we see through Jesus, from draining the hurt and anger from the lives of others, absorbing it and returning it only as love. Jesus is clearly living out the vocation of “the Servant.”

First, before we look at the divergences and outright contradictions in the various accounts of the resurrection in the gospels, I think it would be helpful to list the significant areas where there is agreement. The writers of these accounts all, for example, set the event on the first day of the week. They all assert that the Easter experience forced them to see Jesus in a new way with a radically new understanding. They all assert their conviction that something happened following the crucifixion of Jesus that forced them to entertain the possibility that the ultimate barrier that faces human life, our finitude and mortality, had somehow been breached. It is also evident that whatever Easter was, or is, and whether or not it was an objective event that interrupted time and space, its effects on lives that live in time and space were not only real, but measurable. The category of objectivity may not be applicable to the Easter event itself, but it can be applied to the effects of whatever the Easter moment was. Let me amplify that statement.

The New Testament, while disagreeing on the method of divine-human unity, appears to be very clear about the nature of the Christ experience as some kind of God experience, or an experience of transcendence. The question we then must ask is: Can an experience be real if the explanations of that experience are inconsistent and divergent? I think it can be. My reasoning is that every experience has to be explained to be shared; and whenever human language is used, objectivity is inevitably compromised. There is no such thing as an “objective language” or a “God language.” All of us must talk about our experiences of God in a human language. Human language can never be literal. Every word human beings speak is finally nothing more than a subjectively understood symbol. So while there is unanimity in the New Testament about the reality of the Easter experience, there is a wide divergence in the explanations of what that reality was.

In total, then, the New Testament provides us with five stories that purport to put the Easter experience into words. When we examine them, we find little that is consistent, little about which they agree.

Was the resurrection physical? Paul seems to say no. When he talks about a “resurrected body,” he says it is a body appropriate to the world that it now inhabits. He says what is sown is perishable, but what is raised is imperishable (I Cor. 15:42). Does “imperishable” not suggest something that is no longer subject to death and decay? He says it is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body (I Cor. 15:44). Do these words not counter the view of resurrection as physical resuscitation?

Are there any stories in the Hebrew scriptures of people being raised into God that might have supplied Paul, the rabbi, with the image of resurrection that he appears to hold—a resurrection that is “real,” but not physical? I know of three.

Please note that by the time this physical aspect of resurrection appeared, it was already the ninth decade.

That is the sum total of the resurrection narratives in the New Testament. They are contradictory and confusing, but all were written out of the absolute conviction that the boundary between God and the human, between heaven and earth, between life and death had been broken in the life of this Jesus.

Matthew, who was seeking to transform Judaism from being a religion of one people into being a universal religion for all people, suggested that Jesus was himself the new Temple, the new meeting place with God, the new place in which the divine and the human came together.

The gospel of Matthew is not about God, understood as an external being invading the world in order to rescue “fallen” human beings, lost in their sin and unable to rescue themselves. It is not about Jesus suffering and dying for the sins of that world. It is, rather, about human beings discovering the divine that is always in our midst. It is about the divine calling and empowering human life to break the boundaries that imprison us in a warped sense of what it means to be human. It is about setting aside the boundaries that we have created in our human quest for security. It is about stepping beyond those boundaries and into the meaning of God. It is about discovering the human in a boundary-free world.

The final promise of Matthew’s gospel from the lips of Matthew’s glorified Christ is simply a translation of the word “Emmanuel.” Matthew began his story with the angel telling Joseph that this child about to be born would be called “Emmanuel,” which, he said, means “God with us.” Matthew now ends his story with Jesus, once and for all, making the Emmanuel claim for himself: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:20).