Gwalcmai

Spong claims:

First, the data about his historicity. Paul writing to the Galatians around the year 51 C.E. chronicles his activities, including his consultations with Peter and others who were called by Paul "the pillars" of the Christian movement. This means that Paul knew Peter and others who were the disciples of the Jesus of history. Paul says that this meeting took place three years after his conversion (see Galatians 1:18-24). The best evidence that has been amassed to date the conversion of Paul was done by a 19th century church historian named Adolf Harnack, who places it no earlier than one year and no more than six years after the crucifixion. So Paul was in touch with disciples of Jesus within 4 to 10 years after the crucifixion. These disciples did not think of Jesus as a fantasy or a mythical person. Indeed myths take far longer than 4 to 10 years to develop. There is thus ample data to support the historicity of the man Jesus. Paul would hardly have given his life to a myth.

There are other things that are so counter-intuitive about the way the Jesus story has been told that to me they constitute compelling additional evidence for his historicity. One is that Jesus is said to have come out of Nazareth, a dirty, petty and insignificant town that had a dreadful reputation. It was said even in the New Testament that people asked "can anything good come out of Nazareth" (see John 1:46)? His Nazareth and Galilean origins were an embarrassment to the Jesus movement. No one creates a myth that will embarrass them. It was undoubtedly this embarrassment that helped to create the myth of his birth in Bethlehem. One does not try to escape a lowly place of origin unless that place is so deeply a part of the person's identity that it cannot be suppressed. Jesus of Nazareth was a person of history.

Another counter-intuitive piece of data is that Jesus began his public life as a disciple of John the Baptist. John was originally the teacher that Jesus followed. That is why the gospels seem compelled to have John say constantly things like: "He must increase, I must decrease." "After me comes one whose shoelaces I am not worthy to tie." Luke goes so far as to have the fetus of John the Baptist leap to salute the fetus of Jesus before either was born. When people try to alter history it is not because there is no history, it is because the reality of history has caused embarrassment. The early Christians worked hard to prove that though John was older, he was quite secondary, the one who "prepared the way."

The third fact in the life of Jesus, to which we can point as history, is that Jesus was crucified. The Christian movement had to find a way to understand and even to celebrate his death, which ran counter to everything they believed about a messiah. If they could not transform his crucifixion, there would have been no resurrection. Indeed the resurrection was the story of that transformation. That took hard work. They did not do that by making up the story of the crucifixion. His death was real. The interpretation of his death as the gateway to life made the Christian faith possible.

Mythology was surely added to the Jesus of history even in the writings of the gospels, but those myths were placed on the back of a real person. Mark, writing in the 8th decade, said that at his baptism the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit poured out on him. Then Mark said that after his crucifixion that the grave could not contain him.

In the ninth decade, Matthew added such details to the growing mythology as the miraculous birth, the heavenly star, the wise men, and the physiological appearances of the raised Jesus. Some five to ten years after Matthew, Luke added to the developing story such parts of our tradition as the shepherds, the swaddling cloths and the appearances of the angels. Later he intensified the physical character of the resurrection until it became resuscitation back into the life of this world, which in turn necessitated his eventual escape from this earth in the story of the cosmic ascension. Still later John identified him with the Word of God spoken in creation. As these mythological layers were laid on top of him, his humanity began to fade. That is where the faith crisis of today emerges. We have begun to strip away the mythology, and as we do we begin to fear that there is nothing under it. So we hesitate and even pretend to believe what, when pressed, we would say we no longer believe. Many of the fundamentalist churches are made up of pretenders who reveal their vulnerability by getting angry whenever they are forced to face the game that they are playing. There is, I believe, another way. I am now convinced that only by recovering the full humanity of Jesus is there any possibility of seeing the meaning of his divinity. That is the dominant theme of my next book JESUS FOR THE NON-RELIGIOUS (or via: amazon.co.uk), which will be out in March of 2007. I see it as a radical restatement of the earliest Christian proclamation that in the human Jesus, the holy God has been encountered. I look forward to the debate and the dialogue that I hope this book will engender.

-- John Shelby Spong

fatpie42

Just skimmed it. Sounds alright. I'll be interested to hear comments from people who've studied this in more depth than me....

Gooch's dad

Yikes. I just skimmed it too, and even as a HJ'er, I think Spong is begging the question.

He says that Paul knew the "pillars of the church", and then claims that <10 years is too short of a time for a myth to develop. <10 years after WHAT? It is only <10 years after Jesus' death, if you already assume that Jesus existed.

Malachi151

Whoooah, back that ass up!

This relies on a whole host of assumptions:

#1) The assumption that there was a real Jesus who was crucified, which gets you into circular logic
#2) Using Mark to date the crucifixion
#3) Using later gospels to ascertain the "disciples'" view of Jesus

Nothing in the letters of Paul tells us that "the disciples" believed that Jesus was a flesh and blood person.

If Jesus did not exist, and was not crucified, then the time between "crucifixion and Paul's conversion" is irrelevant. You're trying to use a story from ~70 CE, which is itself clearly base on Hebrew scripture, not observation, to establish the reality of a crucifixion, which cannot be established by said gospel, and then using that established crucifixion to to determine how little time there was for a myth to form! Talk about circular logic!!

If the story written by Mark is fiction, then all bets are off, and you can't make any of these claims.

seeker

There are too many things in the bible account that don't fit together.

Neither Paul nor any of Jesus alleged disciples bring up any details about his life in their disputes over the direction of the church even when it would be to their advantage to do so. Outside of the crucifixion and Eucharist (both of which were features of many Roman religions of the time) they mention nothing.

Mark is the first Gospel and it isn't written until at least forty years after the supposed death of Christ. Since you have already admitted that some mythology (ie virgin birth, heavenly star etc.) why not acknowledge that the resurrection and eucharist were probably later additions to this legend as well?

The portrayal of the Sadducees and Pharisees in the bible is completely wrong. The Pharisees had no power in that society, the Sadducees having been appointed by the Romans as a ruling force. The author of Mark displays a fundamental misunderstanding of Judaism of that time.

It's much more likely that Paul, an apostate Jew, decided to start his own religion which was based on the mystery religions of the time but used the romantic figure of a zealous Jewish rebel. Evidence of this is found in what we know of the mystery religions of the time, many of which predate Christianity by a hundred or so years. Almost all of them featured ressurections and Eucharists.

Paul simply grafted that mythology onto the older and well respected Jewish mythology to create Christianity.

Justin Martyr an early Christian leader wrote, "When we say that God created and arranged all things in this world, we seem to repeat the teaching of Plato; when we announce a final conflagration [of the world], we utter the doctrine of the Stoics; and when we assert that the souls of the wicked ... after death, will be ... punished, and that the souls of the good ... will live happily, we believe the same things as your poets and philosophers ... When ... we assert that the Word, our ... Jesus Christ, who is the first-begotten of God the Father, was not born as the result of sexual relations, and that He was crucified, died, arose from the dead, and ascended into Heaven, we propose nothing new or different from that which you say about the so-called sons of Jupiter." Justin wrote these lines to win pagans to Christianity. He tried to tell them that Christian beliefs were not much different from their pagan beliefs.

aa5874

You have assumed the conversion of Paul to be credible, but just reading about the conversion, it is apparently a fairy tale. See Acts ch9.

The only certainty, about the conversion story of Saul/Paul, is that the story was a believable story 2000 years ago.

Your entire post is filled with speculation and therefore can not be taken seriously.

Malachi151

Gwalcmai, I want to make sure you understand the issues here.

Your treatment of Paul relies on many different documents. 1) Acts, 2) The Gospels, 3) The letters of Paul.

Acts was probably written in the early 2nd century. Mark was probably written between 66 and 85 CE. The "letters of Paul" were, presumably, written between 48-65 CE.

You can't use stories in Acts and the gospels to make positive claims about "Paul", his beliefs, or his interactions with various people. The only reliable source there are the letters themselves.

Now, we aren't asking for anything extraordinary.

If we had a simple "letter of Paul", which gave details about his own conversion experience, which affirmed that he believed Jesus was a real live person, or that included a discussion of the life and actions of Jesus among him and his fellows, then all of this could be put to rest, but this is not what we have.

Instead we have a patchwork of late stories written by unknown people which contain details absent from the earlier letters attributed to Paul.

Toto

This seems to be the most pertinant part of this post. The rest is just recycled historical Jesus justification.

Interesting that Amazon has paired the book with The God Delusion.

Mythra

I know that Spong is not your typical fundy xian.

But, he's doing the christian two-step here.

1. Assume everything in the bible is true.

2. Use it to prove itself.

Well, I guess it might work for reassuring the faithful.

Gwalcmai

Thanks for all the replies everyone. When I first read it, something didn't sit right with me, especially the assumption that Paul wouldn't have given his life for a myth. That argument has too many holes in it to be taken seriously.

I don't think some of you understand that that was written by Spong and not myself. Perhaps I should have been more clear.

Anyway, I learned some useful information from your replies. Thanks.