IN WHAT IS UNFORTUNATELY* his best known book, The Real Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson said some worthwhile things about the birth narratives of Jesus in response to popular books by the now late Bishop John Spong and such other popular writers who had jumped on the "historical Jesus" gravy-train of the last decades of the last century. I'll quote much of what he said.
John Spong, an Episcopal bishop, has been for some years waging a rather public war against "fundamentalists," by whom he appears to mean anyone who takes the literal meaning meaning of the New Testament texts seriously. He clearly conceives of himself as heir o the tradition of maverick Anglican and Episcopal bishops like J. A. T. Robinson and James pike, who also had reputations for being radical and "provocative." His first foray into the Historical Jesus market was through Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus (Harper SanFrancisco, 1992). Both he and the publisher undoubtedly grasped and intended the provocative character of he book's subtitle, "A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus." The reader is primed to expect precisely what the reductionist rereading of the Gospels that Spong provides.
In Spong's "rethinking," the unexceptional observation that the infancy accounts of the Gospels are late in composition and yield little significant historical information - a position shared by such mainline scholars as R. E. Brown in his Birth of the Messiah (Doubleday, 1979) - quickly becomes the claim that "what really happened has been "covered up" by the evangelists. If the virgin birth seems historically unlikely, one would think that a normal birth would be the logical alternative. In such a reading, Christians would have exercised the widespread Hellenistic practice of giving their hero (perceived in hindsight as extraordinary and indeed divine) an exceptional birth. But Spong's rage against "literalists,"whose belief in the virgin birth and whose honor of Mary have apparently been responsible for every oppression against women in Western history,*** demands a conspiracy of more sinister character. Thus Spong's therapeutic rereading: Mary was "really" a teenaged girl who was raped and became pregnant with an illegitimate child. She was then taken under the protection of Joseph.
Spong is not so much interested, however, in what "really happened as he is in freeing Christianity from its dogmatic entanglements which he more or less identifies with fundamentalism. Spong is hostile to the birth narratives in the first case, he says, because they represent a displacement in Christianity, which made Christmas rather than Easter the focal event. But what is Easter for Spong? It appears to have been "not so much . . . a supernatural external miracle but . . . the dawning internal realization that this life of Jesus reflected a new image of God, an image that defied the conventional wisdom, an image that called into question the exalted king as the primary analogy by which God could be understood." The resurrection, it seems, is really a mental adjustment by the first disciples, a shift of their perception in the direction of the politically correct. But then Spong goes on to argue that Christians also got "Easter" wrong, since they concluded from the resurrection that Jesus was divine. Thus, if I have his argument right, the infancy accounts represent a further extension of the fundamental error that birthed Christianity.
Having a bishop with opinions like these is a bit like hiring a plumber who wants to 'rethink pipes" Spong imagines that he has escaped his own fundamentalist past, but he has not. He remains defined by the literalism he so doggedly battles. His vaulted "liberalism" is in reality a tired rationalism. Readers who struggle on to the end through his repetitions, non sequiturs and narcissistic self-referentiality are not really surprised to find Spong arguing that Jesus might have been married to Mary Magdalene, and that it was his own wedding at Cana for which he catered the wine. Bishop Spong seems to think that having Jesus born illegitimately and married to a prostitute** will be received as good news by unliberated women everywhere.
I've noted before that those playing the "historical Jesus" game always seem to want to be able to practice what they debunk when it comes to the New Testament. If the birth narratives are to be distrusted based on their supposed "late composition," that is less than a hundred years after the death of Jesus, why doesn't something made up by a 20th century scholar or even scribbler like Spong have correspondingly less credibility? I would say that one shouldn't be too hard on the bish who was nothing like a New Testament scholar of the kind who LTJ usually addresses but a celebrity cleric because the first one I noticed doing that was, in fact, a notable New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan and I was as critical of him when he rather blatantly practiced the same double-standard with his invented narratives. As I have discovered during my decades of arguing with atheists only to realize that they are constantly inventing gods to replace the God they deny, even as they deny that's what they're doing, it would seem that the "historical Jesus" guys do little but invent new Jesuses without the possibility of them ever knowing and talking to eye-witnesses of the real Jesus or perhaps having known him. I think it's quite possible that the Letter of James was from the James who was one of the leaders of the first Jerusalem Church and that the reports of Levi (Matthew) are embedded in the many sayings and, perhaps, some of the narrative in that Gospel. I'm not even entirely convinced with the common claim that the author of Mark didn't know him or at least talk with those who did know him. What I am sure of is that none of the "historical Jesus" writers and media babblers have any claim to that level of acquaintance with the source of Christianity.
I do well remember seeing Spong on a number of talk shows going pretty far back and I always found him rather full of himself and not at all convincing, even though we certainly agreed on any number of things in politics and society, even on some points of morality. I can say that Luke Timothy Johnson and I also agree and differ on things - I'm on a two-year program of reading as much of his writing as I can afford to get hold of, including his textbook The Writings of the New Testament which I've read large parts of but haven't really studied, yet. I'm not entirely sold on his handling of the authorship of the Pauline material, though I can sort of understand why, given the ambiguities of the competing claims of their sourcing, assuming that Paul was behind it is as good a way of dealing with that and getting on with what it means for the practice of Christianity, which he, at least, seems to understand is the point of it all.
One of the things I think is important in Johnson's book, The Real Jesus, is to point out that the anti-fundamentalists (which Johnson as well as I am, actually) is that the "historical Jesus" guys are reading the Scripture out of the same early modern on assumptions of how to read a text and what its potential value comes from. Elsewhere he discusses how going from being a Benedictine monk who prayed and lived and encountered in an almost "kinetic way" Scripture for five hours every day to studying it at Yale in the way of academics was pretty shocking and, though he is one of the most respected New Testament scholars around today, he wasn't entirely sold on the academic way of doing it.
And as a monk, we sang the psalms and read scripture out loud, five hours a day. So when I went to Yale to get a Ph.D. in New Testament, I was stunned by sort of the academization of all of this and especially by the privileging of history as somehow, if we could get the history right, then, you know, everything would be OK. We have to find the historical antecedent. And that was quite a contrast from living within, in fact, a living tradition in which scripture was almost kinetically inhabited. I mean, you bowed and scraped and genuflected and sang scripture. So the notion of scripture as being a cadaver that one performs an autopsy on, as opposed to a living body with which one danced, was stunning to me, and I never have completely bought it. And I think that part of my peculiar position within scholarship is that I actually am not only postmodern but premodern. I have never bought the premise of modernity that history is the only way of knowing.
He and I share a deep skepticism of modernism. I'm always a little reluctant to point that out because just about everyone figures that means that you yearn after some past, medieval or classical or, heaven help us, the cartoon or Hallmark card view of 19th century Protestant America, or whatever. No, Christianity like Judaism is a faith which believes that history, while not progressive does move on towards an end. I think it's a moral flaw at the very least to want to return to the past, we have to face forward to the future while trying to learn what we can from the past and the present. It is one of the ironies that modernism carries embedded in such things as the academic and the literalists' reading of things that that ideology will, eventually, have to be seen as living in that particular past. Which I think you atheists and mockers and despisers of Christianity do while thinking you are pushing forward. You're not, you're living in a past which has already fallen through its own success.
I was researching a review of the now 88-year-old Dennis Rawlins, someone who was right about one thing and whose public persona was formed by it, the sTARBABY scandal that proved that CSICOP was an intellectual and academic fraud and many of the academics who fomented the scandal and tried to cover it up exposed some of the worst aspects of materialist-atheist-scientism which is, still, largely the orthodoxy of modernism and modern intellectualism. It relates to this in ways that are too complex to go into without writing a long piece which I hope to get back to. That might happen later this month or in the new year.
* Unfortunate not because there's anything wrong with the book, it's quite good, but because he has written much more important books which are not polemical in nature.
** This is one point I think LTJ may have gone over the line, I am quite certain that he, rightly, has held that the common Western Christian identification as one of the most important of the apostles of Jesus had been a prostitute was wrong, though I have not seen that particular book and what Johnson says may accurately report what Spong said in it. I believe Spong either then or later admitted that that picture of Mary Magdalene was a later invention or misunderstanding by Pope Gregory I. That given, there is no evidence at all that Jesus married her or anyone, none. Even the Harvard faculty Jesus Seminar member who got spectacularly suckered by two obvious and sleazy conmen, Karen King, had to admit she'd been duped after the figured the "wife of Jesus" fragment of forged papyrus she figured would make her reputation blew up in her face.
I don't know what to think of his comment I wouldn't be surprised if Johnson's statement is accurate as of that date, he's one of the more careful scholars I've looked into. Perhaps Spong said it in that book.
*** The notion that Women were better off under classical period Roman, Greek, etc. or such as Druidic or Odinic religion, law and society than under Christianity is so absurd that it has to be held by seeing of those with the daffiest of 19th century romantic bullshit covered glasses. Yet such is ubiquitous among everyone from famous academics to popular scribblers to the lower ends of internet trolls to those too lazy and stupid to even be internet trolls.
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