Most people have no idea how to read the Bible.
This is basically due to conscious and unconscious ideas and attitudes they hold toward the Bible. It is a caricature to say that many assume the Bible dropped from heaven fully written and usually in the King James Version; but more than one might want to suspect, such a view is not so far from the truth. For so many years the Bible was set apart from the common affairs of life that it developed its own mythologies. The tissue-thin, gold-edged pages, the print style of two columns on each page, the beautiful but archaic Elizabethan English, and the floppy leather cover all added to its mystique. I can remember as a child being reprimanded by my mother for placing something on top of the Bible. The Bible was always prominently displayed in our home, but I have no memory whatever of seeing or hearing it read. Important events like births and deaths were entered in it,but that seemed to be its only purpose so far as I was concerned.
In the average congregation of regular churchgoers, even the distinctions between the Gospels are far too subtle for most lay people to grasp. That is particularly obvious on the picture side of Christmas cards or in lawn crèche scenes when the shepherds and wise men are depicted together at the manger, a circumstance that no biblical data would support except by a blending process that the texts themselves would never support. Matthew, for example, who alone tells the wise men story, never knew the tradition of the manger or the story of no room for Mary and Joseph in the inn or the special census that compelled the holy family to go to Bethlehem. Matthew’s sources assume, and his text accept the assumption that Mary and Joseph lived permanently in Bethlehem in a house, not a stable, and he further suggests that the magi might have arrived as much as two years after Jesus was born.
The most familiar folk knowledge about the Bible assumes a certain biographical order that begins with the birth of Jesus and progresses in an orderly narrative to his death and resurrection. The facts are that birth stories are given us only in Matthew and Luke, and their details are irreconcilable. Mark begins with Jesus’ baptism; John begins with a theological, interpretive prologue and then moves to the adult life of Jesus. The only skeletal outline that can be discerned in Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that Jesus’ public ministry began in Galilee and his crucifixion was in Jerusalem, and obviously it took a journey to get from one to the other. So basically these synoptic gospels have a Galilean phasè, a journey phase, and a Jerusalem phase in their story of Jesus. Even this threadbare narrative outline iscontradicted by the Fourth Gospel. The synoptics suggest a one-year public ministry, and the Fourth Gospel a three-year public ministry.
What the average lay person does not realize is that most of the material that is included in the Gospels existed in isolated vignettes without any time or space references in the oral period between the life and death of Jesus and the beginning of the era of written material. This oral tradition was kept alive by word-of-mouth transmission, and indeed the only part of the Jesus story that has an early narrative tradition is the passion account from Palm Sunday to Easter. The separate stories (pericope) were of several types: sayings of Jesus (sometimes with no context at all, sometimes with the briefest of contexts), miracle stories, stories about Jesus, and parables. These treasured accounts were like Christmas tree ornaments. Each was beautiful in and of itself, and each would fit onto the Christmas tree and add lustre to the whole no matter where it was placed. If Mark had written a year later and had arranged his separate vignettes in a different order, the story would not have been dramatically different.
This indeed happens among the separate Gospel authors. The miraculous catch of fish is told by Luke as an event in the early Galilean phase of Jesus’ ministry, but in the Fourth Gospel it appears as a post-Resurrection narrative. Matthew, Mark, and Luke place the cleansing of the temple as an event of the last week of Jesus’ life, part of the very climax itself, while the Fourth Gospel makes it an early event in the life of Jesus.
The most important fact to embrace about the Bible, however, is its historic context. Not one line, not a single verse of the New Testament is written except as aproduct of a community who lived in the power of Easter. Nothing was written during Jesus’ life. No biographical detail is recorded except insofar as the post-Resurrection community demanded to know about the life and the teachings of the Risen One.
The stories of the Gospels are not biographies; they are proclamations about the Risen Christ. No Gospel writer tells infancy stories or childhood stories or ministry stories or records Jesus’ words apart from an assumption of the events of Holy Week and Easter. The best and most overt symbol of this is that one-third of Mark and Matthew and forty percent of the Fourth Gospel are devoted to the events of the last one week in the life of Jesus. Only twenty-nine percent of Luke is devoted to the last one week, but that is probably accounted for by the later addition of Luke 1 and 2 to the corpus of this work. Chapter 3 of Luke with its elaborate dating system appears to be the original beginning of this work. The birth narratives are filled with words, phrases, and Hebraisms that appear nowhere else in Luke’s writing and add weight to the suggestion that Luke took over a Palestinian Christmas pageant complete with metered hymns (Magnificat, Benedictus, Gloria in Excelsis, and Nunc Dimittis) and attached this profound and beautiful narrative to his Gospel account. Without the birth narratives Luke is in line with the other Gospels with thirty-five percent of his corpus being devoted to the last one week of Jesus’ life.
The second obvious but not generally recognized fact is that no New Testament author assumed he was writing a piece of a larger volume to be called the New Testament. The unity the New Testament has is an imposed unity, imposed by the church as Christians grappled with the challenge that stemmed from a man named Marcion ( A.D. 100–160) who had wanted to separate Christianity forever from its Hebrew and Old Testament roots. Marcion had drawn up a list of books and parts of books that he regarded as canonical. This forced church leaders to counter his influence by creating in effect a canon of Holy Scripture. There were many more Gospels than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, many more Epistles, more Acts-type books, and Revelation-type books than the twenty-seven finally recognized by the church as authoritative holy scripture.
The books chosen were not written at the same time or under the same circumstances. Perhaps a period as long as 100 years separated the first book of the New Testament to be written (either 1 Thessalonians or Galatians) from the last (2 Peter). The Gospels appear in our Bible first, but the fact remains that every epistle of Paul was written and Paul himself was dead before the first Gospel was written. It should also be noted that between the first Gospel (Mark) and the last Gospel (John), a period of perhaps 35 years elapsed.
When the books of the Bible are arranged chronologically, one can discern an historic progression and the growing apologetic needs of the church. One sees the need for expanded explanations, the heightening of miraculous elements, and even the growth of legend. Paul, who wrote his epistles between A.D. 49 and 62, simply proclaimed, “God was in Christ.” It was not his intention or his need to explain how that great and mighty wonder came to pass. It was quite enough to testify to the reality of the experience of the Christian community that in Jesus of Nazareth God had been encountered, met, and worshiped. Hence, Paul proclaimed; he did not explain.
Inevitably, critics of the Christian movement began to question this assumption. How did the holy God get into this Jesus? By the time Mark wrote in A.D. 65–70, he offered an explanation. At his baptism, Mark tells us, the heavens opened, and the Spirit of God entered this Jesus, and God owned him as his unique son. That was the only written Gospel explanation the church had for about twenty years. In the middle of the eighties of the first century, two additional Gospels appeared in two different parts of the world written by two different people, neither of whom appears to have known about the other. They were Matthew and Luke. They both employed Mark, but in remarkably different ways; and they both had another common source, a collection of Jesus’ sayings called Quelle.
By this time the weakness of the Markan explanation of the source of Jesus’ divinity had become apparent. Mark alone can be read as supporting an adoptionist Christology; that is, Jesus was adopted into God at his baptism, a position clearly inadequate to the fullness of the Christian claim for their Lord. Both Matthew and Luke sought to correct that erroneous Markan impression by suggesting that his divinity was not imparted to him at baptism but at conception. He was conceived by the power of the Spirit. In his conception and birth, divinity and humanity were wondrously merged. But by the time the Fourth Gospel was written some fifteen to twenty years later, even that appeared to be an inadequate explanation. Perhaps people had already begun to literalize the birth narrative into biological rather than theological truth.
In any event, the Fourth Gospel drops the birth narratives completely and substitutes a moving and profound theological treatise we call the Johannine prologue, which says that neither baptism nor conception is an adequate explanation of how God was in Jesus. From the dawn of time, writes John, the Word was with God and the Word was God and in the Word was life which was the light of men and women. That Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. This was the Fourth Gospel’s explanation of the source of the power in Jesus of Nazareth. An explanation that was not necessary for Paul had certainly become necessary as the church sought to defend and explain what Christians believed as they moved into wider and wider orbits and into more and more alien cultures. Not to embrace the chronological gap between Paul and John deprives one of helpful insights into the growth of Christian thought and Christian theology.
We also need to recognize that between us and the actual history the New Testament describes there is first of all a translation from Aramaic into Greek and then a second translation into English. Secondly and even more important, there is an oral period of at least twenty years’ duration during which there were no written records at all before Paul’s first epistle. Between the time of Jesus and the first Gospel, there was a thirty-five-year gap during which only an oral tradition existed. It does not take a genius to realize what happens to an oral tradition as it is passed from life to life or from community to community. The opportunity for distortion and human error is enormous.
When we seek to enter and probe that oral period we hit a dark curtain that we can penetrate only in a speculative way. What was not important in the ongoing life of the early church clearly would not be remembered or repeated. For example, the relationship of the Christians to the civil government was an every-day problem. Should Christians pay taxes or should they join a guerilla movement? Time and time again, the remembered words of Jesus would be quoted, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” In the historic moment of fracture between the Christian movement and Judaism when Christianity found it could no longer live as a sect of Judaism, it was terribly important that a word from the Lord anticipating this fracture could be quoted. Indeed, the conflict could have shaped that word or even created it.
What was remembered, told, and retold in that oral period was inevitably determined and shaped by the apologetic needs of the early church. No one was being dishonest, but objectivity was again being battered. How anyone can be a biblical literalist is difficult for me to understand, for it requires one to ignore reams of data and to make completely irrational assumptions. Perhaps that is the clue. Literalism or fundamentalism is not rational. It is a religious attempt in a pseudorational form to minister to the human insecurity that craves certainty and authority. The anger that so frequently is part of threatened fundamentalists when they confront those they call modern secularists betrays something quite different from either certainty or love. The oft-muttered threat of hell, fire, and damnation makes sense only when viewed in this light.
When we turn these insights onto that part of the New Testament that tells the Easter story, some interesting and provocative possibilities emerge.
Lest anyone misunderstand, let me state categorically that I am convinced that there is an objective reality to Easter. Whatever Easter was, it was experienced by historic people in finite time and space and with life-changing intensity. I believe that the word Easter stands for and was a tremendous moment of rending truth in which the disciples experienced Jesus of Nazareth who had died to be alive again in a way that defied description and broke barriers. To me, that is the center and heart of Christianity. But it is essential to face the biblical fact that even in the Bible there is no description of the actual Moment of Resurrection. No one claims to have been an eyewitness of the Resurrection Moment. Only in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter written about A.D. 150 do we get to that level of literalism. In the New Testament, the Resurrection is neither depicted nor described. The raised Christ is the emphasis, not the moment of his being raised.
People defensive about what they believe and eager to give the faith test to another always seem to ask, “Do you believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus?” The question is both naïve and biblically illiterate, for the Resurrection of Jesus in the Bible is distinctly not physical resuscitation, which is what the question presumes. Even if one literalizes the story of the raising of Lazarus, clearly Lazarus was called back to this earthly existence from which he would at some later date have to die again. But the Resurrection of Jesus is certainly not physical in the sense that the resurrection of Lazarus was. Paul was claiming this clearly when he wrote, “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more. Death has no more power over him.” The details in the resurrection narratives of the Bible clearly do not refer to physical categories. Even the most literal reading of the New Testament portrays the risen Lord appearing and disappearing in a most nonphysical way and as entering rooms where the doors are locked andthe windows are barred. These are clearly nonphysical symbols.
What the person posing that question is really attempting to ask is not whether Jesus’ resurrection was physical, but whether or not the Easter event is real. And human language is so bound to time and space, to the limited categories of an earthbound vocabulary, that the question is quite difficult to put. If I had only the categories of physical and spiritual to describe the Moment of Easter, I would with great reluctance choose physical as the least limited and therefore more accurate word because spiritual has become an airy word that sometimes means not real, ghostly. But frankly, the word physical is a dreadfully inadequate word, which limits to the point of falsifying the experience that word is seeking to convey. Physical is simply not big enough nor broad enough to embrace the meaning of Easter.
If I had only the categories of objective and subjective to apply to the Moment of Easter, I would choose objective because the word subjective has come to mean something that is real only in the mind of a subject. But once again objective is not nearly a big enough word or category to grasp the meaning of Easter. The paucity of the English language becomes apparent when we try to describe that which is beyond our human experience and perception.
The best I can say is that Easter was experienced by historic people in objective history, but Easter itself is of a dimension that is greater than our ability to describe it. There are measurable effects of Easter, but Easter itself is not measurable. So we can demonstrate that something happened, but we cannot photographor describe that which created the effects that we can demonstrate. The Easter Moment must be big enough to account for and to embrace the changes it produced, but we must get behind the limited words, the human understandings that created the written Easter tradition.