jeudi 9 septembre 2021

John Shelby Spong Decided to be Wrong ...


Progressing Spirit had a new article on historicity of the Gospels, with the Questioner asking what we can historically actually know, given that, on their common view, Matthew is supposed to be liturgy which by definition is supposed to be non-historic.

I just finished Bishop Spong’s book arguing for Matthew as 1st century synagogue liturgy. ... Accepting that the Gospel accounts of events in Jesus and the disciples’ lives are nonhistorical creations intended to reach Jews in a traditional Jewish liturgical framework,


which obviously leads up to the question:

what *did* Jesus do and say that made the God’s presence in human life so clear to his followers, that it was worth teaching about in synagogues 50 years later?


Now, the obvious stumbling block is Spong's assumption (according to the Questioner Hugh's resumé) that liturgy by definition is non-historical.

It would be a very Protestant approach to imagine the Martyrology entries are non-historical, and it would be a very ignorant approach to imagine they are not liturgy. The Martyrology was read at a specific entry in the liturgy of hours, during Matins.

In Pagan liturgy too, namely Greek tragedy, the fact that the context is a liturgy of Dionysus doesn't mean that the tragedies are supposed to be non-historical (note, in the case of dialogues, it was accepted that dialogues were fictional renderings of what was said rather than straight recordings, but as the dialogue snippets in the Gospels are much shorter, this need not have been the case with these, as with predecessors even back to Genesis).

Disqualifying liturgy and other religious text types from being thereby historical accounts would definitely leave us with questions like the follow up by Hugh.

Behind the proposition, sometimes you do find rank atheism, but in this case it's revolutionary para-Christianity:

But then matters changed. As the disciples died a new generation of followers arose and the thinking and organization of the “Way” changed dramatically. The written gospels took shape in different locales with different purposes, and so also did other Christian writings of the same period. Much of that writing makes it painfully obvious that a reaction to the revolutionary impetus of Jesus and his disciples had set in. If Jesus had manifested equality of caring and sharing in the community of friends, much of the later writing rejects that vision, epitomized in the warning of 1 Timothy that slaves obey masters, women obey men, the church obey the bishops, and everyone obey the rulers. Not what Jesus had in mind.


So, Dr. Carl Krieg claims to know what Jesus had in mind despite tradition and despite texts accepted by tradition as by contemporaries (directly with Matthew and John, by intermediates who took good note with Marc and Luke). With such an agenda - for his agenda is showing "Jesus" forth as a prophet for Lenin - he has a vested interest in the pretexts that Spong and others invent for not taking the texts as what tradition accepted them as.

Then the fact that such apostates with "Christian" sugarcoating invest their erudition and reputation as scholars into such wild schemes helps atheists to pretend "we don't know who wrote the Gospels."

We do, but some don't want to know.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sts Dorotheus and Gorgonius
9.IX.2021

Quoting first entry for today's martyrology:

Nicomediae passio sanctorum Martyrum Dorothei et Gorgonii, qui, cum essent apud Diocletianum Augustum honores amplissimos consecuti, et persecutionem, quam ille Christianis inferebat, detestarentur, praesente eo, jussi sunt primo appendi, et flagris toto corpore laniari; deinde, visceribus pelle nudatis, aceto et sale perfundi, sicque assari in craticula; atque, ad ultimum, laqueo necari. Interjecto autem tempore, beati Gorgonii corpus Romam delatum fuit, ac via Latina positum, et inde ad Basilicam sancti Petri translatum.

Of course the Gospels were meant for liturgic reading, that makes them a very conservative and well conserved text type. Like martyrologies./HGL

PS, it seems Jewish rejectors of Jesus are also into the game, an ex-Christian Muslim just recommended Geza Vermes.

He was also an apostate from Catholic priesthood.

And when getting back to the Judaism he came from, very badly wanted to get Jesus with him, so badly he was willing to invent "Christian editing" adding fake stories to the Gospels. He pretended even the reachout to Samaritans was an invention, not a fact.

He died 2013 and is arguably in Hell.

Also in Paris, Vermes befriended and worked with Paul Demann, a scholar, like him, of Hungarian Jewish origins.[7] Together with a third collaborator, Renee Bloch, they battled doggedly against the anti-Semitic content in Catholic education and ritual of the time.[7] The Second Vatican Council would later accept many of the trio's theological arguments.[7]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9za_Vermes

With footnote 7 referring to:

Geza Vermes, Hungarian Bible Scholar Who Returned to Jewish Roots, Dies at 88
Benjamin Ivry | May 15, 2013
https://forward.com/news/176752/geza-vermes-hungarian-bible-scholar-who-returned-t/

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