In a deep and significant way, we are now able to see that all the Gospels are Jewish books, profoundly Jewish books. Recognizing this, we begin to face the realization that we will never understand the Gospels until we learn how to read them as Jewish books. They are written, to a greater or lesser degree, in the midrashic style of the Jewish sacred storyteller, a style that most of us do not begin even now to comprehend. This style is not concerned with historic accuracy. It is concerned with meaning and understanding.
The Jewish writers of antiquity interpreted God’s presence to be with Joshua after the death of Moses by repeating the parting of the waters story (Josh. 3). At the Red Sea, that was the sign that God was with Moses (Exod. 14). When Joshua was said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River, it was not recounted as a literal event in history, rather it was a midrashic attempt to relate Joshua to Moses and thus demonstrate the presence of God with his successor. The Same pattern operated later when both Elijah (II Kings 2:8) and Elisha (Ii Kings 2:14) were said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River and to have walked across on dry land. When the story of Jesus’s baptism was told, the Gospel writers asserted that Jesus parted not the Jordan River, but the heavens. This Moses theme was thus being struck yet again, and indeed, for a similar response. The heavens, according to the Jewish creation story, were nothing but the firmament that separated the waters above from th waters below (Genesis 1:6-8). To portray Jesus as splitting the heavenly waters was a Jewish way of suggesting that the holy God encountered in Jesus went even beyond the God presence that had been met in Moses, Joshua, Elijah, and Elisha. That is the way the midrashic principle worked. Stories about heroes of the Jewish past are heightened and retold again and agin about heroes of the present moment, not because those same events actually occurred, but because the reality of God revealed in those moments was like the reality of God known in the past. As this journey through the Gospels progresses, we will watch this midrashic principle operating time after time.
We are not reading history when we read the Gospels. We are listening to the experience of Jewish people, processing in a Jewish way what they believed was a new experience with the God of Israel. Jews filtered every new experience through the corporate remembered history of their people, as that history had been recorded in the Hebrew Scripture of the past.
If we are to recover the power present in the Scripture for our time, then this clue to their original meaning must be recovered and understood. Ascribing to the Gospels historic accuracy in the style of later historians, or demanding that the narratives of the Gospels be taken literally, or trying to recreate the historical context surrounding each specific event narrated in the Gospels — these are methods of people who do not realize that they are reading a Jewish book.
Before we can fully address this issue and begin to read the Gospels as Jewish books, we must cast our gaze on the early history of the Christian movement to seek to understand where things went wrong. What were the forces of history that collaborated to tear the Christian church away from its Jewish origins? If we are able to find our way back to the Jewish perspective that produced our Gospels, then we must understand that perspective was first broken, then denied, and then lost. It was not an accident.
Compiler’s Notes
It is my conviction that all the events described in the Bible (both Original and New Testaments) were actual historical events. While I cannot agree with most of what Rev. Spong has written in the past, I could not agree more with him when he said that in order to understand the Gospels we must first realize that we are reading Jewish books and that they must be understood in that light. Without that perspective, our understanding will always be severely limited. The Word of God (including the Gospels) is the most incredible book ever to be written. I believe that the Lord Yeshua has a special blessing for those who are willing to put forth the effort to try to understand it in the way He intended it to be.
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