Bishop Spong Reveals the real Jesus
"behind the language
of myth, magic and superstition."
THIS HEBREW LORD probes the
meaning of Jesus in different ways. We have attempted to set him in the context
of his Hebrew heritage so that we can see beyond the theological accretions
that blind us to his power. We have isolated images from that Hebrew
world by which people sought to get an explanatory handle on his life. We
have recreated in detail the portait in the Hebrew scriptures of the servant
figure by which, as we suggested, Jesus and the early Christians came
to understand his life....
Rudolf Bultmann, the German Bible scholar
of the first half of the 20th century, gave the world the word
demythologize. In fundamentalist circles it was and perhaps
still is a fearful word. Literal minds heard in it the hint that
Christianity was mythical, like Grimm's fairy tales. This was not Bultmann's
suggestion. No reputable scholar today seriously doubts that Jesus
of Nazareth was a fact of history. But Jesus as a fact is always
interpreted. Those who interpreted him were creatures of their times
who looked at reality through the mind-set and assumptions of their day.
There was no perfect objectivity in any of their
interpretations.....
To demythologize the Jesus story, we must
seek to determine what it was that really occurred, as distinct from the
way in which it was interpreted. We need to discover what first-century
people experienced that compelled them to tell the Jesus story in the approprate
categories of their day.....
The Christian community of the 1st century had
no other words or concepts with which to describe this unearthly power present
in Jesus of Nazareth except the unearthly vocabulary of the 1st century.
So they wrote that in Jesus, God had come down to reconcile (2 Cor.
5:19) . They told of his birth to a virgin mother. This was their way
of explaining why human categories could not contain him (Luke 1, 2;
Matt. 1, 2). They told of his living, his dying, his descending, his
resurrecting, and his ascending. These were the words dictated by the
mind-set of the century in which this experience of love became a reality
in human history.
The explanatory packaging is not relevant to our
day, but the experience of brokenness and our need for love is still the
universal human condition. The power seen in Jesus is still our deepest
yearning, our eternal hope. The experience of being healed, made whole,
is still the meaning of conversion. To bring perfect affirming love
is still to save.
From This Hebrew Lord Chapter 15