Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

by John Shelby Spong

Nature is survival-specific. By that I mean that the laws of nature protect the various species. Wasps and ants do not talk to each other; they simply do as instinct dictates.

Our biology itself has dictated to self-conscious human beings a survival mentality that is our highest value. That desire for survival inevitably means that we are self-centered. We do not respond well to people who are different—those who look different, speak a different language or worship a different God—because we have judged them as a threat to our survival. So to be human is to be prejudiced, tribal and sectarian. Self-centeredness is rooted, not in our morality, as we once thought, but in our biology. It is a given, not a consequence! That is the universal human experience that our ancestors once called “original sin.” The experience was real; the interpretation was false. We are not “fallen sinners”; rather, we are incomplete human beings.

The temptation was too great to resist and so she picked it and ate it. Disobedience at that moment was said to have entered God’s perfect world! Not willing to be alone in her act of disobedience, she then gave some of the fruit to her husband, Adam, and he also ate.

From where does this self-awareness, this shame, this sense of inadequacy come? Then it dawned on God just what this behavior meant: “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

Our destiny as human beings was to live somewhere “east of Eden,”* forever separated from oneness with God. An angel with a drawn sword was placed at Eden’s gate, eternally guarding it from human “re-entry.” Fallen human life was destined to die.

Early Jewish readers of this story never saw it in moralistic terms. For them, this was the story of human beings growing into self-awareness, learning to discern between good and evil, ceasing to be children dependent upon the heavenly parent for all things and finally having to enter their maturity and to assume self-responsibility.

The account of this myth in Genesis, now validated as the “Word of God,” set the pattern for the omnipotence of God. God was not so much the source of life and love, as God was the focus of judgment.

Baptism was then developed to wash symbolically from the newborn human life the stain of Adam’s original sin.

Wasn’t baptism an early initiation into the church?

So it was that Jesus came to be understood as the savior, the rescuer, and the redeemer. This theology trod roughshod over the idea of Jesus “who came that they might have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Human potential was trumped by guilt and behavior control.

Saved from what?

The question I have to ask is: Was this really the essential message of Christianity? The institutional church certainly claimed that it was so. I believe, however, that original sin obscures rather than illuminates that essential message.

It was the idea of a fall into “original sin” that formed the background of the way Christians told the Christ story that is now embedded in our traditions and creeds.

It reflected the dualism of the Greek world into which Christianity got translated from the second century on.

Nicene Christianity has come to be understood as “original” and “orthodox” Christianity. Few people embrace or understand just how foreign Nicene Christianity was to the original Jesus experience. What people tend to call “traditional Christianity” is, in fact, a fourth-century creation imposed on the original Jesus story.

The good news is that there is little or nothing about that traditional view of Jesus that is original to the Jesus experience.

Paul, who was the first author of any material that would later constitute the New Testament, appears never to have heard about Jesus having had a miraculous birth.

The second and last Pauline reference to Jesus’ birth was in Romans, written in the middle years of the sixth decade of the Christian era. Here Paul writes, making a messianic claim, that Jesus “was descended from David, according to the flesh” (Rom. 1:3).

It is not until the ninth decade, in the writing of Matthew, that the story of the virgin birth makes its entry into the Christian tradition.

The third gospel to be written, Luke, which appeared in the late ninth or early tenth decade of the Common Era (circa 89–93), gave us a second birth story. It is the details of this version with which we are most familiar, since Luke provides the story line that has been followed by most of our Christmas pageants.

What does this brief analysis of the biblical details of Jesus’ birth mean? It means that contradictions in the birth narrative abound.

In the final gospel to be written, John (circa 95–100 CE), the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus has disappeared altogether, a fact that most people are surprised to discover; that element simply is not there.

When that truth registers for the first time, people begin to ask questions that are almost frantic. Are there any facts here that we can trust?

In all probability Jesus was born in Nazareth. That is surely the assumption made in Mark, the first gospel to be written.

How many people, for example, realize that the name Mary, the presumed name of Jesus’ mother, appears only one time in Mark, the first gospel to be written; and on that occasion it is placed on the lips of an anonymous member of a crowd, who shouts out about Jesus: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mark 6:3).

One other little-known fact is that when the gospels were written, the followers of Jesus were defending him against the charge of the critics of the Jesus movement that their founder was “base born”—that is, illegitimate. How do we know that? We find hints of it in the texts of the gospels themselves. In the reference just mentioned from Mark’s gospel the anonymous voice in the crowd calls Jesus “the son of Mary.” Every Jew would know that to refer to a grown man in Jewish society as “the son of a woman” was to suggest that his paternity was unknown.

Hidden in this boring genealogy, however, is, I believe, the hint that unlocks the meaning of the story of the virgin birth, so we turn to these verses in search of that vital clue. Matthew includes in the line that produced Jesus four ancestral “mothers.”

The first of these women was named Tamar. Her story is found in Genesis 38. She is the daughter-in-law of Judah, one of the twelve sons of Jacob. Tamar becomes pregnant by Judah, which would have been called incest in Jewish society. That pregnancy results in twins named Perez and Zerah. The line that produced Jesus, Matthew suggests, flowed through Perez, one who was a product of incest. It is a strange connection that Matthew is making.

The second ancestral mother in his list is Rahab. Her story is told in the book of Joshua (chapters 2 and 6). In that narrative Rahab is a prostitute who runs a brothel located inside the walls of the city of Jericho. She entertains and protects Joshua’s spies and presumably later marries one of them. It is through the prostitution of Rahab that the line that produced Jesus flowed. Tamar was guilty of incest, Rahab of prostitution. Is a pattern developing?

The third ancestral mother in Matthew’s genealogy is Ruth, the daug...

The final ancestral mother in Matthew’s genealogy is identified only as the wife of Uriah the Hittite. We know from other sources, however, that her name is Bathsheba.

Does it not strike you as strange that Matthew, who was the first to relate the narrative of the virgin birth, chose to introduce that narrative by suggesting that incest, prostitution, seduction and adultery are all in the line that produced Jesus?

In the virgin birth story Matthew claims a holy origin for Jesus, but then he seems to add that God can raise up a holy life even through incest, prostitution, seduction and adultery. I submit that this is a powerful witness!*

The product of a union between a deity and a human virgin could now never be either fully human or fully divine, which was the claim that Christians made for Jesus. Indeed such an offspring would inevitably and biologically be half human and half divine.

If the mother of Jesus had passed on to her son half of her own human genetic makeup, she too, as a child of Adam, would inevitably have passed on to him the stain of the fall into “original sin,” which we considered in chapter 3. Jesus would, like every other person, have been corrupted by original sin, since only his father was divine, not his mother.

There was in Jesus something that his followers believed could not have been produced by human beings alone. In the fullness of his humanity, they stated, the fullness of God had been met and experienced.

It is fair, therefore, to say that for all practical purposes miracles enter the Hebrew tradition with Moses, then they carry over to Joshua before disappearing in the Bible for almost four hundred years. Miracles then reappear in the Elijah story and carry on to Elisha, before disappearing again for about eight hundred years. Finally, they reappear in the New Testament in the stories that gather around Jesus of Nazareth. The pattern set in the Hebrew scriptures is followed, for these miraculous acts are then said to carry over to Jesus’ disciples in a manner that appears to replicate first the Moses/Joshua stories and then the Elijah/Elisha stories.

In all of the stories about Moses we need to remember that while the actual man appears to have lived in the thirteenth century BCE, the stories about him found in the Bible were not recorded until at least the tenth century BCE. This means that all of these Moses stories floated in oral transmission for about three hundred years before being written down in the Bible.

When Moses and his brother Aaron did in fact use both of these miraculous tricks in negotiating with the pharaoh, the Egyptian ruler’s own court magicians, were able to replicate each one!

It is a strange story on many levels. If God had infinite power, why, we have to wonder, was not one plague sent of such severity as to accomplish the Hebrews’ escape? Why are these nature miracles so ineffective as to have to be repeated and changed?

At the beginning, however, it appears that miracles may not be moral or even desirable.

First, if the text is referring to what we today call the Red Sea, and if the escaping slave people’s plan was to return to what they called their Promised Land, then they went far out of their way. Second, the Red Sea is approximately two hundred miles wide, which would make the miracle quite stupendous. Third, the words in the Hebrew text that are translated “Red Sea” are Yam Suph, which literally means not “Red Sea,” but “Sea of Reeds.” That body of water would be located on a direct route; it was an area of swampy land where the Suez Canal would later be built. So the dominating miracle that we refer to as the parting of the Red Sea may be considerably less dramatic than we once believed.

When Moses died in the land of Moab without entering the Promised Land (Deut. 34), another crisis appeared for the chosen people. Was God with the whole Hebrew nation or only with God’s chosen leader Moses?

Miracles expressing the reality of invasive, supernatural power designed to meet human needs disappear for all practical purposes in Hebrew scriptures after the death of Joshua.

Then, in the latter years of the ninth century BCE, another portrayal of the miraculous suddenly reappeared. It corresponded with the rise of another Hebrew hero. His name was Elijah, and he was destined to become known as the father of the prophetic movement.

Elijah is introduced as a Tishbite from Gilead (I Kings 17:1). He breaks on the scene as the “trouble-maker of Israel” and its King Ahab (I Kings 18:17). To him is attributed the power to stop the rain, creating drought. He was also thought to have the ability to call down fire from heaven. King Ahab saw him as a powerful and personal enemy, and was always seeking Elijah’s life.

In time the only son of this widow became ill and died. Elijah raised him from the dead, back into the life of this world (I Kings 17:17–24). This is the first time a raising-of-the-dead story appears in the Bible.

Once again Elijah went into hiding and felt quite alone. God comforted him, however, with a vision of others who were still faithful and directed Elijah to look for God not in the earthquake, wind or fire, but in a “still small voice.”

Moses, Joshua and now Elijah are said to have power over nature. Moses and Elijah have the power to expand the food supply. Moses, Joshua and Elijah have the power to split a body of water so they can navigate across it on dry land. Elijah adds to this collection of biblical stories the raising from the dead of the only son of a widow. A pattern is clearly developing.

Elisha also raises someone from the dead (II Kings 4:18–37). He restores a child in stages, initially from a distance by having his servant rush ahead with Elisha’s staff and laying this staff on the face of the boy. When Elisha arrives, he restores the child to life and presents him to his mother. So Elisha was able, like Moses and Joshua, to control nature and, like Elijah, to raise a person from the dead.

Elisha adds one other category to the biblical development of miracles. He is the first to do a healing miracle (II Kings 5).

First there were Moses and Joshua, both of whom performed nature miracles. Both split bodies of water. Moses expanded the food supply. Elijah and Elisha were featured in the second wave of biblical miracles. Both did nature miracles. Both split bodies of water so they could walk across on dry land. Both expanded the food supply. Both carried the miraculous theme to new levels.