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September 9 - December 20, 2018
Elijah became the first biblical character about whom the claim was made that he raised someone from the dead. The person raised was the only son of a widow. Elisha matched that Elijah miracle, but the person he raised was a child, and he did it in stages beginning from a distance. Elisha took it one step further with the first recorded healing miracle, curing Naaman, a foreigner, of leprosy.
Miracles now once more go into an eclipse in the Bible and are heard about no more in any systematic way until we come to Jesus and the New Testament.
On only one occasion is there a miracle story that is told only in Matthew and Luke, without a version in Mark.
When we come to the Fourth Gospel, miracles are presented in a quite different manner. In John they are never called “miracles,” but are called “signs.”
First, we note the fact that miracles of any sort do not appear to have been connected to the life of Jesus until Mark’s gospel was written in the early years of the eighth decade, although the majority of the writings that would later be deemed canonical predated Mark.
Paul never mentions a miracle being connected with Jesus in the entire body of his authentic epistles.
Paul did not know Jesus.
This Lazarus story appears only in John, which was written near the turn of the century, about 100 CE. In other words, for sixty-five to seventy years after this spectacular public event, no one wrote about it.
It seems that Lazarus has been taken by John from the parable in Luke and turned into a figure of history to prove that the biblical message is accurate.
So we reach a conclusion of biblical scholarship: None of the raising-of-the-dead stories in the gospels appears to be treated by the gospel writers themselves as events that actually happened.
When I wrote my book on the gospel of Matthew under the title Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy, I noted the problem that Matthew and Luke had in dealing with the figure of John the Baptist. Both Matthew and Luke had expanded Mark into their longer and more provocative gospels, and in so doing they had to introduce John the Baptist earlier in their narratives. Mark had opened with John the Baptist and had related him to the Jewish observance of Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, was associated in a special way with Jewish messianic expectations.
In the sixth century BCE, following the Babylonian exile, Jewish messianic thinking had added to the Israelites’ expectations a figure who would prepare the way for the messiah’s coming, a figure that II Isaiah (as we call the unknown prophet who authored Isaiah 40–55) simply called the voice that “prepared the way.” The voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”—these were the exact words of this prophet (Isa. 40:3).
Mark applied those prophetic utterances and messianic expectations about Elijah to John the Baptist.
Because a major note of the Rosh Hashanah observance in the synagogue was to pray for the coming of the messiah, Mark chose to start his gospel at Rosh Hashanah and to make the appearance of John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus the primary Jesus story told at Rosh Hashanah.
Many people do not realize that the reason the gospel of Mark is shorter than Matthew and Luke is that Mark related stories in his gospel from Rosh Hashanah to Passover, or for just six and a half months of the liturgical year of the synagogue.
When they arrived at the Rosh Hashanah observance they could not retell the baptism story, which they had already used. So what did they do? They reintroduced John the Baptist into their texts at exactly the Rosh Hashanah moment by using the technique of a flashback in which John reappears, not in person, but in the voice of messengers sent from John. The story is essentially the same in both gospels and, in my opinion, constitutes another hint that Luke had Matthew to draw on as well as Mark.
Then Jesus quotes from Isaiah 35, a passage regularly associated with Rosh Hashanah. In that chapter, Isaiah painted a portrait of the signs that would mark the arrival of the kingdom of God.
Matthew and Luke were issuing the claim that the messiah whom the Baptist had baptized at the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus, was the life around which the signs of the kingdom that the messiah would bring were seen.
We do not have to twist our brains into first-century pretzels in an effort to believe the unbelievable. We can read the miracle stories as the symbols they originally were and still read the gospels
After centuries of laboring to understand stories that made no sense to us, we now discover that the problem was that we did not know how to read those stories. With this insight, our ability to chart a new reformation has passed another huge obstacle!
Now we know why miracles were not attached to the life of Jesus until the eighth decade. The miracles were interpretive signs. The writers of the miracle accounts saw Jesus as the messiah from whom miracles were expected.
I want to examine the traditional Christian way of talking about salvation. We call it “atonement theology.”
For many people there appears to be a deep human yearning for oneness with that which we call God or even what we call meaning, but little seems clear about that yearning.
All of these things serve to create a sense of separation and thus of loneliness in the human psyche, a loneliness that I suspect none of us ever fully escapes.
All of this is to say that there is in the heart of life an almost universal yearning for oneness, for at-one-ment, that never quite goes away. Much of what we call “the experience of God” is fashioned to meet us at this point of our human vulnerability.
Inspired by a literalized understanding of the mythical fall into sin, however, Christianity took this valid human experience and transformed it into a doctrine. “Original sin” was the way the church articulated this problem. “Salvation” was the church’s stated resolution of this problem.
In the process of working out the details of original sin and salvation—that is, of the doctrine of atonement—the church turned God into a righteous judge who required satisfaction and was quite incapable of offering forgiveness.
I begin this exploration with a statement that will offend some, amuse others and shatter a few, but that still needs to be said if we seek to move away from the almost unbelievable into a modern Christianity: Jesus did not die for your sins or mine!
We human beings are all fallen people. Sin is the universal mark of our humanity. We were created in perfection, but we live in sinfulness.
Salvation can come only at God’s initiative, we said. That is why Jesus had to be clothed in divinity and portrayed as “God incarnate” (and ultimately even as the second person of the Trinity). If Jesus were not God, the rescue effort would not work, for human beings cannot save themselves from the effects of both original sin and “the fall.” Salvation requires that Jesus be not just the agent of God, be not just of “similar” substance with God, but be of the “identical” substance of God. That was at least the conclusion drawn by the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, when a new creed was adopted to
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Is this what atonement really means? Is this an essential aspect of Christianity? I think not. Thus any effort to reform Christianity must address this deep, internal theological sickness. Surely there must be another way to tell the Christ story.
The focus of each of the four gospels, one quickly notices, is on the fact of the crucifixion. From twenty-five to forty percent of the content of each gospel is dedicated to the last week of Jesus’ life.
Think about what that means. God has required that Jesus suffer because of my sins! Can one imagine a more powerful guilt message?
How did such a destructive theology emerge in Christianity? It was born, I believe, out of Gentile ignorance of things Jewish. It emerged because the words and forms of Jewish worship continued to be used in Christian churches long after Jews were no longer part of that worshipping community and Gentile Christians totally misunderstood and misappropriated those Jewish words and forms.
We sing the Agnus Dei, “O Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world,” without being aware that those words were taken almost verbatim from the Jewish day known as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
In Jewish worship, however, the lamb was a symbol, not of a sacrifice that an angry God required, but of the human yearning to achieve the fullness of our human potential. The lamb, chosen carefully for the sacrifice, represented our longing to be all that God created us to be.
Thus the lamb of Yom Kippur was a symbol of our recognition that we had not become all that God wanted us to be. Human life, compromised as it was, did not share in God’s perfection.
Gentiles took that symbol and read into it the ancient animal sacrificial practices that once had even included human sacrifice.
Atonement theology must be abandoned if there is to be a Christian future. The repudiation of atonement theology is an essential step before Christianity can ever appeal to the emerging generation.
Jesus, perceived of as “savior,” “redeemer” or “rescuer,” will never bring us wholeness. Jesus as the “life of God” calling us to live fully, the “love of God” freeing us to love wastefully and the “being of God” giving us the courage to be all that we can be, will.
If Christianity is to have a future, the paradigm must shift from being saved from our sins to being called into a new wholeness from our sense of incompleteness.
Without Easter, there would be no Christianity!
Mr. Carter replied: “My belief in the resurrection of Jesus comes from my Christian faith, and not from any need for scientific proof. . . . I look on the contradictions among the gospel writers as a sign of authenticity, based on their different life experiences.”*
First, while not one word of the New Testament was written without a firm commitment to the reality of the Easter experience, none of the Bible’s sources represents eyewitness, first-generation reporting. Second, there is hardly an Easter detail proclaimed in one part of the New Testament that is not contradicted in another.
To begin this journey into the resurrection we start with the fact that Paul and the gospels disagree on both whether there was a tomb into which Jesus was laid and whether that tomb literally became empty.
They disagree on who saw the raised Christ first. It was Peter, says Paul; the women at the tomb, says Matthew; Cleopas in Emmaus, says Luke; and Magdalene alone, says John.
The resurrection of Jesus needs to be treated very differently from the way the virgin birth was treated.
The resurrection, however, was the experience that brought Christianity into being.
He describes Easter in the briefest of ways. Jesus “was raised from the dead in accordance with the scriptures,” he says (I Cor. 15:3–4).
He does not address the remainder of this section of 1 Corinthians
Paul does not say that Jesus “rose,” but rather that he “was raised.” The Easter action did not come out of Jesus himself, then. Something outside of Jesus acted on Jesus to “raise” him. Jesus, Paul asserts, was raised by God.
“Into what?” then becomes our next question. Did God raise Jesus back into the physical life of our world, thus restoring him to the life he had possessed prior to the crucifixion? From everything that Paul says in other parts of the body of his work, the answer to each of these questions is an emphatic no.
