John Shelby Spong on the Burial of Jesus
An Open Letter to John Shelby Spong
~ On the Burial of Jesus ~
| The Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong is the former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark (1976-2000). Bishop Spong has written more than fifteen books and dozens of articles. He has been interviewed more than two dozens times on National Television shows including Politically Incorrect and the Bill O'Reilly Show. John Shelby Spong is now the William Belden Noble Lecturer at Harvard University and operates a fee-based newsletter and Internet discussion website; "A New Christianity for a New World: Bishop John Shelby Spong on the News and Christian Faith." |
Dear Bishop John Shelby Spong:
Like you, in the early 1960s, I read and reread John A. T. Robinson’s important little book, Honest to God. Robinson is important to both of us. You claim frequently that Robinson’s book shaped your life. I feel the same way. But did we perhaps find something different in that book? Bishop Robinson’s unambiguous ‘cri de coeur,’ that so buttressed everything he wrote, became central to my thinking about faith throughout my entire adult life. He wrote:
All I can do is try to be honest, honest to God and about God and to follow the argument wherever it leads.
It has been with this guide that I developed a biblically liberal, theologically conservative and socially liberal perspective. Like you, I am an Anglican by tradition and an Episcopalian by practice. And even as I age into my own 60s, and as I feel a meaningful tug toward orthodoxy, traditional Anglo-catholicity, and even Anglican-style evangelical eagerness, I have always held you in high regard. I have not agreed with you on many things but I admired and respected you for what I believed was your integrity and honesty. In fact you wrote these words in your book, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (John Shelby Spong, HarperSanFrancisco; 1995)
Integrity and honesty, not objectivity and certainty, are the highest virtues to which the theological enterprise can aspire.
I am disappointed, but not about what you believe or don't believe about the burial of Jesus or anything else. I am disappointed in the dishonest method you use to try to convince others.
John Shelby Spong & Consensus
In an article -- actually a five part criticism of Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ," published in installments between February and June, 2004, by Insights, the magazine of the New South Wales Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia, you wrote:
The idea that a convicted felon, like Jesus, would be given a burial attended by such splendor is obviously not history. . . The probable fate of the crucified Jesus was to be thrown with other victims into a common, unmarked grave. The general consensus of New Testament scholars is that whatever the Easter experience was, it dawned first in the minds of the disciples who had fled to Galilee for safety, driving us to the conclusion that the burial story in the gospels is … legendary …
I was not troubled because you denied that Jesus was buried in a tomb -- that is a tired old claim by now. I was troubled that you who declares Robinson is your mentor; who tells us that people call you the American Robinson; who once wrote, “I increasingly found myself occupying the space in which John Robinson once stood . . .” would so shy from Robinson’s call for honesty. We might quibble with your sentence syntax and your use of the word ‘us’ in the last sentence above, but unquestionably, by the pattern of your argument, you want us to accept that the consensus of New Testament scholars think that Jesus was not buried in a tomb. That is certainly not true and you know it, Bishop John Shelby Spong.
Furthermore, you minimize the truth when you say that scholars agree ‘that whatever the Easter experience was, it dawned first in the minds of the disciples who had fled to Galilee for safety’ That they fled in fear is probably accurate. But that is not the whole story as most scholars see it. That Jesus' disciples did so without any preceding events is not something on which there is consensus in favor of your position. It would be more accurate to say that the understanding of resurrection evolved but not that the ‘Easter experience’ merely ‘dawned in the minds of the disciples.’ For as tentative as the history may be to some, there is a very real widespread consensus that some events occurred in Jerusalem after the crucifixion. And at least some of the disciples were involved.
Your attempt to paint yourself into a consensus camp that does not exist is irresponsible. I would be surprised if an ethical, juried, scholarly journal would have allowed such a claim into print. I am dismayed that Insights’ editors let it get through. It is inappropriate in a public, general-readership journal to imply that such thinking is widespread. It isn’t that you don’t know better and you are certainly not a careless writer. From someone who claims to walk in Robinson’s shoes, this seems to be an inappropriate expediency.
John Dominic Crossan and Bishop Spong
Jesus Seminar Fellow John Dominic Crossan and other revisionists have long suggested that the burial story is fiction. But the argument has never been substantially because the disciples fled. Crossan does make that point and suggests that in fleeing the disciples had no idea what had happened to Jesus. But the essence of the argument by Crossan and others is that people who were crucified by the Romans were simply not buried. Crossan wrote in Who Killed Jesus:
Crucifieds were left, kept, or guarded on the cross even after death if there was any chance that relatives or friends might take them down for proper burial before it was absolutely too late. Such an act would be, of course, extremely dangerous unless done with bribes or permissions.
But Crossan, although doubtful, leaves open a slim possibility:
Burial of crucifieds by their families is certainly possible. In fact, we now have both material as well as textual evidence for their possibility. … However it was managed, be it through bribery, mercy, or indifference, a crucified person could receive honorable burial in the family tomb in the early or middle first-century Jewish homeland. Second, with all those thousands of people crucified around Jerusalem in the first century alone, we have so far found only a single crucified skeleton, and that, of course, preserved in an ossuary. Was burial, then, the exception rather than the rule, the extraordinary rather than the ordinary case?
If agreement is to be found with you and Crossan, one would expect to find it among the fellows of the Jesus Seminar. But one does not find general consensus. According to Robert Funk (The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus) many of the Jesus Seminar Fellows think that I Corinthians 15:3-8 is essentially an understanding or creed from the Jerusalem based early church that originates in the early 30s shortly after the death of Jesus. And of course many scholars outside of the Jesus Seminar also take this position. Paul writes in I Corinthians 15:3:
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4: and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures . . (NRSV, emphasis mine)
Spong without a Consensus
Jesus Seminar Fellow, Bruce Chilton, is far more explicit in his book Rabbi Jesus:
A straightforward reading of the Gospels' portrait of the burial has been challenged by revisionist scholars, who theorize that Jesus died in a mass crucifixion: the body was thrown into a common, shallow trench, to become carrion for vultures and scavenging dogs. This makes for vivid drama but implausible history. Pilate, after all, had been forced in the face of Jewish opposition to withdraw his military shields from public view in the city when he first acceded to power. What likelihood was there, especially after Sejanus' death, that he would get away with flagrantly exposing the corpse of an executed Jew beyond the interval permitted by the Torah, and encouraging its mutilation by scavengers just outside Jerusalem?
Revisionism can be productive. But it can also become more intent on explaining away traditional beliefs than on coming to grips with the evidence at hand, and I think this is a case in point…
Bruce Chilton is certainl not part of the consensus you claim.
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his essay “Between the Cherubim,” characterizes the non-burial theory as controversial and based on mere assumption. He sees it as but one “reconstruction on the market.” Certainly, Williams does not agree with those words that there is a consensus.
William Lane Craig declares that the consensus is otherwise. In Jesus Under Fire he writes:
Having carried out fairly extensive research into the historicity of Jesus' resurrection, I was well aware that the wide majority of New Testament critics affirm the historicity of the Gospels' assertion that Jesus' corpse was interred in the tomb of a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea. Thus it puzzled me why a prominent scholar like Crossan would set his face against the consensus of scholarship on this question.
If there is a real consensus it is probably as Raymond E. Brown wrote in The Death of the Messiah:
That Jesus was buried is historically certain. . . . That the burial was done by Joseph of Arimathea is very probable, since a Christian fictional creation from nothing of a Jewish Sanhedrist who does what is right is almost inexplicable, granted the hostility in early Christian writings toward the Jewish authorities responsible for the death of Jesus . . . ."
or as Geza Vermes, wrote after he had left the Catholic Church and Christianity, in Jesus the Jews: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels:
When every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that the opinions of the orthodox, the liberal sympathizer and the critical agnostic alike—and even perhaps of the disciples themselves—are simply interpretations of the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb.
We could list dozen upon dozens, if not hundreds upon hundreds of other New Testament scholars who agree that Jesus was buried: Gerald O'Collins, N. T. Wright, William Lane Craig, Jeffery Jay Lowder (perhaps the only key point on which Craig and Lowder agree) and Ben Witherington III.
John A. T. Robinson Disagrees With John Spong
And very significantly, your claimed mentor, John A. T. Robinson must be counted among those who disagree with you. His words, below, are not the words of a bishop talking guardedly to his flock from a pulpit, but words expressed passionately fifteen years after he wrote Honest to God. He was speaking to scholars. He was explaining why he doubted that the Shroud of Turin was a forgery. These are words that must be taken at full force:
This [=the tomb burial] incidentally is one of the best attested of all historical facts about him. That Christ not only died and rose but was `buried' is part of our earliest summary of the Christian faith . . . . The view that we can know nothing about the body of Jesus, because as the corpse of a condemned criminal it would have been thrown into a lime-pit, is sheer dogmatic scepticism, flying in the face of all the evidence that, contrary to what might have been expected, it met no such fate.
Yes, John A. T. Robinson believed that the Shroud was genuine. Granted, Robinson expressed his views about the Shroud before the carbon 14 testing supposedly proved that the Shroud was medieval. Robinson died in 1983, five years before the carbon 14 testing. Would he have changed his mind when faced with this scientific evidence? We can’t know. But understanding why he doubted that the Shroud was a fake relic, it seems unlikely. He was not one easily swayed by a singular argument.
But let us suppose that he had changed his mind. Would he have changed his mind again when on Good Friday of 2004, National Geographic, in a news release, explained the evidence that what was subjected to carbon 14 testing was actually a medieval repair patch. It is solid evidence; solid enough that the results can no longer be deemed definitive.
Robinson, the former Anglican Bishop of Woolwich; once a dean of Trinity College, Cambridge; a highly respected New Testament scholar and the man who did so much to lift old -- and what he considered outdated -- Christian images of God and God’s actions into the lingua franca of the modern worldview, had carefully considered the Shroud of Turin. He dug deep into the nuances of the ancient Greek language, the way the Gospel writers gave words to meaning. And relying on his extensive historical knowledge he considered the way a potential medieval relic forger would have imagined a shroud. He decided that the Shroud was not a fake relic. He also suggested, in classic Robinson style, that the images were probably natural; perhaps even a little bit more than natural yet not so much as to be ‘supranatural’ (Robinson’s favored spelling). Robinson did not call the images natural. He called them paranormal.
Robinson did not pretend that a consensus of scholars agreed with his views to try to convince others. The reality was that he often stood alone with courage and honest conviction.
We must be careful with the word paranormal and avoid popular connotations. In a rejoinder to a discussion between John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Luke Timothy Johnson, N.T. Wright, and Deirdre Good, in a 1996 Episcopal Teleconferencing Network follow-up to Trinity Institute’s “Jesus at 2000 Symposium,” Borg offers a definition that may define what Robinson means. Borg wrote:
miracles [are] supernatural interventions into a universe understood as a closed system of cause and effect operating in accord with natural laws. . . I prefer to speak of "the paranormal" (meaning experiences/events for which we don't have a very good explanation within our world-view).
Robinson was not particularly concerned about how the images on the Shroud were formed. He seemed disinclined to think they were miraculous. What is important is to recognize that he doubted the Shroud was a forgery and he was open-minded to the idea that the images are not easily explained. He was concerned with it authenticity and its value in ascertaining, honestly, the truth about Jesus’ burial.
New News in 2004 Supporting Robinson
At the same time that your article appeared in Insights, two other significant articles were getting attention (in addition to the National Geographic news article about the carbon 14 testing):
1) On July 5, 2004, a paper previously published in a scientific peer reviewed journal, Melanoidins, a journal of the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities (EU, Volume 4, 2003) was republished on the Internet. The purpose of posting it on the Internet was to invite public scrutiny. The paper, by chemist Raymond E. Rogers, a Science Fellow of the Los Alamos Laboratory, and Anna Arnoldi of the University of Milan was titled, "The Shroud of Turin: An Amino-Carbonyl Reaction (Maillard Reaction) May Explain the Image Formation." It suggests that a complex but common, natural chemical reaction may explain how the images were formed. The proposal is hypothetical. But it is significant because it is the only so-far-thought-of hypothesis that conforms to the known chemistry of the Shroud images. If right, it is an important clue in determining the relic’s authenticity. If right, it could have significant implications in questions about Jesus' burial.
2) The April 2004 issue of Journal of Optics: Pure and Applied Optics, a journal of the Institute of Physics carried an article by Giulio Fanti and Roberto Maggiolo of the University of Padua titled, "The Double Superficiality of the Frontal Image of the Turin Shroud." This article significantly reinforces the hypothesis that the images are the result of a very natural, complex Maillard chemical reaction between amines (ammonia derivatives) emerging from a body and saccharides within a carbohydrate residue that, in fact, covers the fibers of the cloth.
There have always been those, who relying on a preponderance of other evidence or by the sheer power of religious faith, doubted that the carbon 14 results were accurate. I suspect Robinson would have been one of them.
The Real Issue, Bishop John Shelby Spong
But, of course, the issue in this letter is not the Shroud. And the issue is not even your belief about Jesus' burial. The issue is being honest to God which means being honest to his people.
Why not say it with honesty: most scholars disagree with you.
Sincerely and honestly,
Daniel R. Porter
For more about the newest news on the Shroud of Turin see: The Shroud of Caiaphas: A Forensic Science Mystery and The Pictures of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin.
Home Page & Introduction: The Shroud of Turin Story - A Guide to the Facts 2005
© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
