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

by John Shelby Spong

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.