Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] More Criticisms of the Criticisms of the Gospel of John by John Spong by Bart Ehrman Yesterday I wrote a post in which I began to discuss the recent Huffington post article from 2013 by John Shelby Spong in which he discusses his then new book on John. The book's called the Fourth Gospel Tales of a Jewish Mystic.
[00:00:22] Today I'll finish out what I started to say yesterday.
[00:00:26] Let me say again that I long appreciated Spong's work and was sympathetic to his mission.
[00:00:32] He was trying to do from inside the church something very similar to what I have long tried to do outside of it.
[00:00:39] He's trying to help educated laypeople outside the field of biblical scholarship see what scholars who are believers and non believers alike what they are saying about the New Testament.
[00:00:50] Since Spong was operating within the church, however, and he saw himself as a Christian, some of his perspectives and goals were different from mine.
[00:00:58] At the end of the day, he was interested in reforming Christianity in order to make it sensible for the 21st century.
[00:01:05] That's not my goal since I am not a Christian.
[00:01:08] And it's this difference that I think, as I'll try to explain below, explains our different interpretations of what the author of John is trying to do.
[00:01:17] Both Spong and I agree that it's important for believers to think and to examine their beliefs and their scriptures critically. Critically from the perspective of real scholarship. The goal is not of course, simply to make believers into scholars, but it is to help people recognize what it is that scholars are saying and to help them rethink what they believe in the light of those scholarly views.
[00:01:40] In any event, the following are the final three points that he makes in his HOFPO article. I have less agreement with him on these than on the previous points from my previous post, and the points I cite are in his own words.
[00:01:54] Point 5 John's gospel seems to ridicule anyone who might read this book as a work of literal history.
[00:02:01] For example, Jesus says to Nicodemus, you must be born again. Nicodemus the literalist says, born again? I'm a grown man. How can I crawl back into my mother's womb and be born again?
[00:02:13] Barth replies, here's where I start to disagree strongly. This gospel, in my opinion, was indeed meant to be read literally.
[00:02:22] The point with the discussion with Nicodemus is that Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus statement and Jesus has to correct him.
[00:02:30] That's because when Jesus says that you must be born again, he uses this word again. That has two meanings, the second of which from above is the one that he really means. But Nicodemus thinks that he means the other meaning of the word again or a second time and he can't understand.
[00:02:48] Jesus corrects him. He means that a person must be born from heaven in order to experience the kingdom of heaven. John really does think this and means for it to be taken literally, and the text assumes that the reader will take it seriously and implement the lesson literally. The author is not ridiculing those who take him at his word, he is inviting them to understand the deeper, real meaning of his words.6 the gospel also exaggerates its details once more, I believe, to counter any attempt to read it literally. For example, Jesus doesn't just turn water into wine, he turns into 150 gallons of wine. Jesus does not just give sight to a blind man, he gives sight to a man born blind.
[00:03:33] Barthes replies, I again disagree. The miracles are big miracles precisely because they are meant to show that Jesus is unbelievably powerful.
[00:03:43] Why? Because he's God on earth and can prove it by what he does. There is nothing in the text to suggest that the author doesn't mean what he says, or that he expects his reader to laugh off his stories as obvious fictions. Quite the contrary.
[00:03:56] Point 7 Finally, this book will challenge the way the fourth gospel has been used in Christian history as the guarantor of what came to be called Christian Orthodoxy or creedal Christianity.
[00:04:09] The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE leaned on the fourth gospel as literal history in order to formulate the creeds and ultimately to undergird such doctrines as the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity.
[00:04:23] The texts used to support that creedal development, my studies have led me to affirm have nothing to do with an external God entering humanity in the person of Jesus, but are rather attempts to describe the experience of the human breaking the boundaries of consciousness and entering into the transformation available in inside a sense of mystical oneness with God.
[00:04:43] Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine.
[00:04:49] Bart replies, I think this point is overstated and it sets up a completely false either or.
[00:04:56] John's Gospel is not only about a divine person becoming human, it's also about how that incarnation can allow humans to become children of God.
[00:05:05] But it's wrong to think that it has to be one or the other.
[00:05:09] Without the Incarnation, the Gospel's teaching about Christ, humans cannot become children of God. It's teaching about salvation.
[00:05:17] All this is stated quite explicitly in the prologue, especially chapter one, verses 12 and 13 but it's simply wrong to say that the gospel is not concerned to talk about God becoming human in Jesus.
[00:05:28] It's the overarching lesson of the entire gospel.
[00:05:32] Jesus teaches about almost nothing else. See chapter 8, verse 58, or chapter 10, verse 30, or chapter 14, verse 7, or chapter 20, verse 28, and so on.
[00:05:45] Yet the point of this becoming human is salvific. Jesus, the Son of God, becomes human so that humans can become sons of God.
[00:05:53] I think the reason Spong is stressing the salvific character of the gospel to the exclusion of its Christology is precisely because he doesn't think that a modern person can take it literally as a description of who Jesus really was.
[00:06:06] I agree with him on that. It's not a literal description of who Jesus really was. That is, I don't think that Jesus really was the word of God who became human, as John claims.
[00:06:16] But it is a completely false move to argue on that basis that the author did not want you to think that it's a literal description of who Jesus was. The gospel is all about incarnation and its effect.
[00:06:29] If one can't believe in the incarnation for this gospel, then there is no salvific effect.
[00:06:35] In short, Spong wanted to redeem this gospel for his own pastoral purposes in the modern age. And that's why he needed to argue that it was never meant to be taken literally.
[00:06:44] He wanted it to guide modern Christian spirituality, even though he knew that the christological message it delivers is no longer acceptable.
[00:06:53] I am not at all opposed to that agenda. But it's different from my goal of wanting to understand John as a historical document on its own terms, without regard to its religious values, value for those in search of a deeper spirituality.
