Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Controversies about the Gospel of the Views of John Spong by Bart Ehrman Just how reliable is the Gospel of John? Is there anything in it that's historical?
[00:00:15] A radical view of John was presented by John Shelby Spong in one of his last books. He published some 19 or so over the course of his long career.
[00:00:23] In my previous post, I gave a brief biographical notice about John Shelby Spong in in commemoration of his death in 2021. In case you didn't know who he was now, there aren't too many Christian scholars who are more sceptical of John's historical value than I am, but he is one.
[00:00:41] Here is how I discussed and engaged with the book when it came out, and this will take 2 posts John Shelby Spong, former Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey and a highly controversial author because of his skeptical views about the New Testament and traditional Christian doctrine, has just published a new book on the Gospel of John called the Fourth Tales of a Jewish Mystic.
[00:01:04] He also wrote an interesting article on it that appeared in the Huffington Post yesterday.
[00:01:10] In the article, Spong summarizes the conclusions he advances in the book based on an intensive five year long study.
[00:01:18] He acknowledges that many of his findings are those that scholars have held for a long time.
[00:01:23] Spong himself is not trained as a biblical scholar, but he has made a very successful and useful career out of making scholarship known to a wider audience.
[00:01:33] So too, his goal in the book in large measure is to bring major scholarship to a general reader, a goal I obviously sympathize with deeply.
[00:01:42] The following are the points that he stresses in his HuffPo article.
[00:01:46] I will comment on them from my perspective, with the caveat once more that I haven't read what he adduces as evidence, only what he says in this article.
[00:01:56] I will respond to his views in two posts.
[00:01:59] So here are his first four major points.
[00:02:04] There's no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus, Barthes says. I absolutely agree. This is a common view among scholars.
[00:02:15] Number two, There is probably not a single word attributed to Jesus in this book that the Jesus of history actually spoke, Barth says. Well, that's a bit extreme. Jesus first words in the gospel, chapter one, verse 38 are what are you seeking? And I'll bet that Jesus said that at some point in his life.
[00:02:34] In any event, Jesus surely said some of the things in the Gospel.
[00:02:39] Number three, not one of the signs. The Fourth Gospel's word for miracles recorded in this book was in all probability something that actually happened Barthes says, again, I completely agree. The seven signs are not historical records. John explicitly doesn't call them miracles. It's striking that in the synoptic gospels, Jesus refuses to do signs, that is, to show who he really is. But in the Gospel of John, that's virtually all he does.
[00:03:07] Moreover, in the synoptics, he never teaches about himself. And in John, again, that's virtually all he does. So unlike the synoptics, Jesus in John teach us who he is, that that is the one sent from heaven to provide eternal life. And he does signs to prove that what he says about himself is true. So he says that he's the bread of life, and then he feeds the multitude with the loaves. He says that he's the light of the world, and then he heals a man born blind. He says that he's the resurrection and the life, and then he raises a man from the dead and so on.
[00:03:39] And number four, Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author, and they were never intended to be understood as real people who actually lived in history.
[00:03:52] Barthes says. Now Spong's getting on tricky grounds.
[00:03:56] I don't think you can say that because someone's unhistorical that the author either knew that they were unhistorical or that he wanted you not to think that they were historical. We don't know what the author intended, but I don't see any reason to think that he wanted his reading audience to think that he was producing fiction.
[00:04:15] Moreover, the fact that Nicodemus in chapter 3 or the Samaritan woman in chapter 4 do not appear in the other gospels. This is one of Sponge's points, does not mean that the author wanted you to assume that they don't exist.
[00:04:28] For one thing, I don't think he assumes that you've read the other Gospels, so he himself would not be assuming a point of comparison.
[00:04:36] For another thing, it's not clear to me that these figures are inventions of the author of the Gospel. He may well have inherited these stories and so these narrative figures from the traditions that he had heard.
[00:04:47] If so, why wouldn't he think that they were historical?
[00:04:50] And even if he did make them up himself. And how would one show that? I don't see any indications in the text to suggest that he wanted his readers to think that they were make believe rather than figures that actually interacted with Jesus.
[00:05:03] In short, the fact which I take to be a fact that they were not historical figures who interacted with Jesus has no bearing in my mind on the question of what the author's intentions were in narrating his stories.
[00:05:16] As you can see, this will be a controversial book for laypeople who have never been introduced to joannine scholarship before, and it will store up some serious disagreements among scholars who've worked for a long time in the field. We'll see more of the latter in my next post.
