November 15, 2006
When we begin to dissect the miracle stories of the gospels, it
is easy to notice some fascinating connections. The nature miracles, for
example, are clearly the retelling or reworking of earlier biblical stories
about Moses or Elijah. One can see the similarities between Moses asking
God to feed the multitude in the wilderness with heavenly bread and Jesus
feeding the multitude in the wilderness with five ever-expanding loaves.
The story of Jesus walking on water has its ultimate root in the story of
Moses splitting the Red Sea. That feat was then celebrated in the psalms
and prophets in such words as God is able to make “a pathway in the deep”
and God’s “footprints can be seen on the water.” When those words are then
applied to Jesus in the gospels they represent a God claim far more than
they are a story of the supernatural.
When we come, however, to the narratives in the gospels that
portray the power of Jesus to bring healing to the people, the problems get
more intense and the debate becomes more emotional. Miraculous healings by
Jesus have been associated with his divine nature for so long that many feel
that to question the literal accuracy of these stories is to attack the very
essence of the Jesus story, which portrays him as a God-presence. If God
can do miraculous healings, the argument goes, could not Jesus, as part of
who God is, do the same? It is an interesting thesis and demands a careful
and considered approach to the definition of both God and Jesus.
I begin this discussion by noting that we have no record of
Jesus doing supernatural acts of healing until the gospel writing tradition
begins around 70 C.E. That means that we know nothing of this miraculous
tradition until at least 40 years, or two full generations, after the
earthly life of Jesus had come to an end. There are some biblical scholars
who date what is called the Q material, which appears in Matthew and Luke,
and the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas as earlier than any of the
written gospels. Whether those claims can be sustained or not is still
hotly debated in New Testament circles and I personally tend to doubt them,
but the fact remains that neither of these two sources contains a
description of a miracle story or a healing episode. There are also no
accounts of Jesus doing miracles in the writing of Paul (50-64 C.E.).
Certainly no one can suggest that this fact diminishes Paul’s view of the
divine Christ, since Paul has one of the highest Christologies in the entire
New Testament. So the door is pushed ajar just a fraction to the
possibility that the narration of the supernatural healing miracles might
have a purpose other than that of being descriptions of events that actually
occurred. I ask you to hold these possibilities in your minds for just a
moment while we proceed to uncover some biblical data and to assess some
biblical facts that might put new light on this subject.
There is a fascinating narrative told us only in Matthew and
Luke, which may offer us a clue as to how miracle stories came into the
Christian tradition. These two gospel writers take a story from Mark
describing how John the Baptist was imprisoned and executed and expand it.
In their expansion John in prison sends a messenger to Jesus asking the
messianic question: “Are you the one who is to come or must we look for
another?” It is a question that could not have arisen until the debate
about whether or not Jesus was the anticipated messiah began to be engaged,
which surely occurred well after his death. The way Jesus was made to
respond to John’s question is also noteworthy. He did not say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
He said, rather, “go back and tell John what you see and hear, the blind
see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing.” No miraculous tales
were included in the narrative, but Jesus was portrayed as claiming that
these signs have gathered around him. What was that answer all about? What
did it mean? What was Jesus being portrayed as trying to convey?
Only those who are deeply familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures would have any
clue as to the context out of which Jesus was speaking. He was referring to
the 35th chapter of Isaiah, written in the late years of the 8th century
B.C.E. The historical situation was that the Northern Kingdom of Israel had
fallen to the Assyrians. Its citizens had been carried off into captivity,
where they became the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel,” disappearing into the DNA
of the Middle East. The Southern Kingdom of Judah would, in that same
critical moment of history, accept vassalage to the Assyrians and pay
tribute in exchange for tiny vestiges of freedom. It was a bleak time in
Jewish history and that bleakness gave rise to intensified messianic hopes.
The Jews began to dream about the coming of the Kingdom of God. In time
tales about the one who would usher in that kingdom would be added to that
dream. This figure was called by a variety of names: ‘the anointed one’
(maschiach in Hebrew, messiah in English), ‘Son of Man,’ the ‘new Moses,’
the ‘new Elijah’ and even the ‘Son of God.’ When Isaiah wrote he went on to
depict the signs that would accompany the dawning of this Kingdom of God.
The pain of the world, he said, would be transformed, wholeness would
replace brokenness and perfection would overcome imperfection. What Isaiah
was really doing was to create a new image of the Garden of Eden into which
all people would be invited to enter. He described this vision in these
words:
“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and
blossom like the crocus. It shall bloom abundantly, and rejoice with joy
and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it. The majesty of
Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the Glory of the Lord, and the majesty of
our God” (Isa. 35:1-2).
How would people know that the Kingdom of God had broken into human history?
Isaiah answered that question with what he called the signs of the Kingdom:
“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf
unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the
dumb sing for joy, and a highway shall be there and it shall be called the
Holy Way. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with
singing, with everlasting joy upon their heads. They shall obtain joy and
gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Is. 35: 5, 6, 8a, 10,
11).
Jesus in his answer to John the Baptist was portrayed as making the claim
that in his life Isaiah’s signs of this in-breaking Kingdom were present.
Go tell John what you see: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and
the mute sing. When the Kingdom comes, the gospel writers were saying, all
of those things that represent the reign of God must become visible. So,
when people ascribed messianic claims to Jesus, they also had to attribute
messianic acts to his presence. That is how and why, I believe, the
tradition developed in which healing miracles were attributed to Jesus. It
was not that these things actually happened so much as it was, that this was
the way his followers interpreted who Jesus was, and how they described the
power that they experienced in his person.
The next step required of those of us who want to become proper interpreters
of the gospels is to expand our definition of these aforementioned
infirmities. What kind of blindness, for example, was it that was to be
overcome? Was it physical blindness or spiritual blindness? Did it have
to do with sight, insight or second sight? Was it more about those who,
despite the fact that they had eyes, could not see who Jesus was? Was it
about those who, though they had ears, were in fact deaf to his message and
reality? Was it about those who were physically crippled or spiritually
crippled? Was it about those who could not speak because they had not yet
entered the experience for which these words were originally formulated?
When we analyze the healing episodes in the gospels, we find that all of
them speak to the wholeness, the fullness of human life. In Mark’s Gospel
there are two episodes about sight being restored, two episodes about
hearing being restored, three episodes in which the physically lame and the
mentally impaired are cured, and two episodes in which the tongues of the
mute are loosened so that they can speak of the new reality. These are the
data that cause me to suggest that these stories were not literal events
that happened but interpretive narratives added to the memory of Jesus in
those years between his death and the writing of the gospel accounts. They
were designed to interpret both his life and his death in the light of their
dawning understanding of him as “the first fruits” of the Kingdom. He had
become the life in whom they first saw what the Kingdom of God was all
about.
If that reconstruction has substance, it would account for why miracle
stories are not attached to the memory of Jesus in earlier writings. It
would also suggest that even healing miracles were originally designed to be
interpretive symbols, not descriptions of literal events.
If such was the original intent of the gospel’s healing stories, one thing
becomes immediately obvious. That is, that the literal minds of the western
Gentile Christians clearly distorted these interpretive symbols because they
did not understand the Hebrew texts that lay underneath these stories. It
also suggests that if these stories were never intended to describe events
that actually happened, that fact ought to be obvious in the stories
themselves.
Next week I will begin to focus on representative miracle stories in the
gospels to see how well these ideas play when the texts themselves are
analyzed. I will look in particular at the “sight to the blind” stories in
the gospels to see if we can find in them interpretive, non-literal hints of
their original meaning. I believe we can and, when we do, a whole new level
of understanding the Bible in general and the gospels in particular opens
before our eyes. So stay tuned.
John
Shelby Spong
Question
Is there any material proof of any sort whatsoever that the man Jesus ever
lived at all? So many things are attributed to him that sometimes I think
he is a fantasy figure people make up in their minds, endowing him with more
capabilities that the fiction hero Superman had that prompts me to wonder if
that’s all he was, a make-believe figure, like the action hero, Zorro, who
was inspired by the life of a real 19th century person.
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