If you attended the services here at Central Unitarian Church over the last three weeks, you heard our minister, the Rev. Dr. Justin Osterman, deliver a sermon series he called "The Ecclesiology of Football".
When I got home last week and read my newsletter, I found that there was no title given for the sermon I’m delivering today. I remarked to someone that perhaps I should set Justin’s sermon series off with a talk today about "How Life Imitates the World Series". My companion looked at me and said, "Don’t you dare talk about baseball!"
Accordingly, our closing hymn is number 108 ... (No, I’m not going to let you off that easy.)
Those of us who were here last week remember how Justin wrapped up his sermon with a call for us to work together as a team, to bring our message of a hopeful religious faith to the masses and thus fight against those who would (and do) bring us interpretations of God’s Word that don’t mesh with our understanding of the Divine.
Today, I’m going to discuss God’s Word itself ... specifically, the Gospels and how they got to be what they are today. Who wrote them? Who changed them? And how can two people have such divergent views of the same passage?
Back in 2003, I gave a Summer Services sermon which I entitled "I Love Jesus, Whether He Existed or Not!" In that sermon, I talked about the fact that there are people – scholars – who debunk the entire idea that there existed one person called Jesus, who was born (either of the Virgin Mary or not) in the Middle East and preached the Good News until he was crucified in Jerusalem one spring, around the time of the Passover. These scholars believe that the Gospel stories are woven from tales of several itinerant preachers of the day, and that "Jesus" was a convenient vehicle by which to bind them.
I, for one, have always believed that Jesus existed. I grew up in the Roman Catholic faith, which meant that I was told to believe in Jesus as the Son of God. And I did believe that for a while. But my path to exploration of religious truth began on the day of my Confirmation, when my parents presented me with The Jerusalem Bible, a 1950s translation of the Bible which leaned on what was then the latest Biblical scholarship and also laid out a timetable of events referenced in the Good Book.
It is now generally believed that Jesus was born five or six years before the beginning of our Common Era, of which this is the year 2006. A seventh-century cleric accepted the Pope’s challenge and calculated when Jesus was born, in order to fix the dates of the calendar as years Anno Domini, "the years of our Lord". But it seems he was off by several years. The Gospels tell us that Jesus died at the time of the Passover, on a Friday afternoon, and this would most likely have occurred in the year 27 or the year 30, which makes Jesus somewhere between 32 and 35 years old when he died. Scripture attaches an age of 33 to Jesus; three is often seen as a mystical number and a pair of threes doubly so, but in this case it’s a reasonable estimate.
As I said in my sermon three summers ago, we don’t have microfilm of The Jerusalem Post available to us in order to find out what really happened in those days. We have to rely on descriptions which began as oral accounts, and which eventually got transcribed and re-transcribed. It took nearly forty years for the oldest Gospel in the church canon, the Gospel of Mark, to be written down. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke followed ten to fifteen years later, and the Gospel of John came about twenty years after that. So about seventy years passed between Jesus’ death and the Gospel of John.
But Mark, the oldest Gospel in the Bible, isn’t the oldest Gospel. Scholars believe the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke were all inspired by a previous text that no longer exists but is known as Q – the initial of the German word Quelle, meaning "source". Q, which likely also began in oral form, was probably written down around the year 50 or 55 – still 25 years after Jesus’ ministry.
In the meantime, collections of sayings of Jesus were also circulating as Gospels. I’m sure a number of us have read, or read about, the Gospel of Thomas. Unlike the narrative Gospels in today’s canon, this was a sayings Gospel, another source we have to learn about this man who continues to shape our lives today. And other Gospels were written that supported different beliefs about Jesus. In April, I gave a sermon on the Gospel of Judas, a narrative which is recognized as a Gnostic Gospel. That sermon sparked such interest among us that our Adult Religious Education committee has scheduled a two-part class on Gnosticism for the next two Wednesdays. I, for one, am looking forward to attending.
But let’s get back to the Bible, and specifically the four Gospels that made the cut when the Roman Catholic Church decided in the fourth century which texts would be the foundation of the Christian faith.
Last November, our Adult RE program presented the viewing of, and discussion on, a series of video lectures on the Gospels by scholar Bart Ehrman, who is the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In his recent book, Misquoting Jesus, Professor Ehrman describes how he grew up a Bible-believing Christian but, in the course of scholarly research, turned decidedly agnostic. The book itself discusses the field of textual criticism; that is, an analysis of how the words of the Bible got to be what they are today. Dr. Ehrman posits that not only is the King James Bible not the inerrant word of God, but that over the centuries, scribes have made changes, both unintentionally and intentionally, to the text so that – unless God himself is telling one thing to one author or scribe and something entirely different to another – the words are not necessarily even divinely inspired.
Now the early Christian Church – the widely dispersed group of followers of this prophet Jesus – relied not only on Gospels which were first told and then written over the course of the century after Jesus, but also on letters written by early church leaders. To this day, the Catholic Mass includes, in addition to an Old Testament reading and a Gospel reading, a reading from one of these epistles – most frequently the letters of Paul, who, it is written in the Acts of the Apostles, had a conversion experience and became the most fervent missionary of the Good News. The Catholic Church is sometimes described as "the Paulist Church" because Paul’s fervor and teachings were so vital in the formation of the church.
Paul and other apostles taught that Jesus would soon return from heaven to pass judgment on the affairs of the earth. Several apocalyptic visions were recorded; one of those, the Apocalypse of John, made it into the Bible as the Book of Revelation. Other early texts explained what administrative form the church would take, or were designed to allow followers to defend their faith, or eventually to produce a "proper" interpretation of the truth of the religion. Then as now, these texts were read when the faithful gathered, then as now usually on a Sunday. And since most of the population was illiterate – and remained so until the Industrial Revolution – these readings at church services became the primary way followers learned the tenets of their faith.
The first "editor" of New Testament Scripture that Dr. Ehrman finds is Marcion of Sinope, who apparently bought himself a bishopric around the year 140 and was soon after excommunicated as a heretic. Marcion believed that Church teaching had become corrupted by Jewish doctrines, and he sought to restore the Pauline conception of the Gospel – that the Law and the Gospels are two distinct and separate things. Most notably, Marcion defined, perhaps, for the first time, what was Christian scripture – and he proceeded to edit out references to the Old Testament God in his Gospel (a variation on the Gospel of Luke) and the ten epistles he included in his canon. He also excised any talk of the creation as the work of the one true God, as he believed (much like the Gnostics, although he was not one) that the God of the Jews was a lesser God and the Risen Christ was the True God.
But the larger issue in days of yore was the problem of disseminating these texts that were seen as sacred. Not only did we not have a Jerusalem Post to preserve the events of the day, we didn’t have movable type until the 15th century. It should come as no surprise that the first text Gutenberg tackled when he started mass-producing books was the Bible – and that it had transcription errors in it.
For the most part, copying of books was done by trained scribes, most of whom had some degree of literacy. But for many of the early Christian texts, the people doing the transcriptions might well have been less literate people, some of whom "could not distinguish between the syllables". This would not be unusual, as many ancient texts were written without spaces or punctuation. This in turn leads to the possibility of interpretive errors. Take, for instance, the letters "G-O-D-I-S-N-O-W-H-E-R-E". One person could read that as "God is nowhere", while another might say "God is now here", and either interpretation could be supported by the text.
On top of that, there is evidence that on occasion, people who were interested in giving a slightly different interpretation to a different audience would make subtle alterations to the text sent to a particular place in order to achieve their goal. These people are called "politicians". Quite seriously, politics played a huge role in the early Church, and people on both sides – the orthodox and the heretical (as later determined) – would make alterations. But more often, simple errors, such as omission of syllables by a tired copyist, would creep into the text.
In the days before printing presses and copyright laws, authors were just as protective of their work as they are today. Near the end of the Book of Revelation, the author writes: "I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book; and if anyone removes any of the words of the book of this prophecy, God will remove his share from the tree of life and from the holy city, as described in this book." That’s quite a penalty for altering the text – if you’re a believer, anyway.
Professor Ehrman cites two specific examples of Gospel texts that clearly didn’t appear in the original manuscripts yet are part of the Gospels as we see them today.
The first is the story of the adulteress in the Gospel of John. In this familiar story, the Pharisees bring Jesus a woman who has apparently been caught red-handed violating the proscription against adultery. They try to trap Jesus by asking him whether she should be stoned, according to the Law, or show her mercy. Clearly, his detractors are looking to prove whether he would rather violate the Law or his own teachings about goodness. Instead, Jesus starts writing something on the ground (perhaps the sins of the accusers?) and then looks up at the men and says, "Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone." They slowly walk away, and Jesus asks the woman, "Is there no one who condemns you?" She replies, "No one, Lord," and Jesus tells her, "Nor do I condemn you. Go and sin no more."
A powerful story, indeed, except that it doesn’t appear in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John. It was apparently a well-known story, and it may have appeared as a marginal note on someone’s copy, and so it was later transcribed as part of the Gospel, as scribes believed it belonged there. But some put it in chapter 7, where it resides now, while others put it in chapter 21. One scribe even inserted it as part of the Gospel of Luke – where it’s entirely out of place because this sort of story simply doesn’t fit there. Yet from about the fourth century on, the story is part and parcel of the Gospel of John, and of the mysterious being that is Jesus.
The second example cited by Dr. Ehrman is that of the last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark. Now Mark, as the earliest Gospel to make it into the canon, is a Gospel in which his disciples never really seem to "get it". They never quite understand what Jesus is telling them; and when he admonishes them to be silent on an issue, they go ahead and blabber it to anyone within earshot. They respect him as a teacher, but not as God. It’s a lot like the TV crime drama where the viewers know whodunit from the first minute, but the entertainment value is in watching the detectives spend the next 45 minutes figuring it out. Except that on TV, someone eventually gets it. In Mark, we are told right at the beginning that Jesus is God, yet the author spends 16 chapters showing us how the disciples remained clueless.
In chapter 16 of Mark, Jesus has already been crucified on a Friday afternoon. He is buried before sundown in accordance with Jewish custom, and then on Sunday morning three women – including Mary of Magdala, who some believe was a tad bit more than just a friend of Jesus – come to venerate the tomb. Except that, according to a white-robed fellow overlooking the tomb, Jesus is gone. "He has been raised and is not here," he tells the women, and he shows them the empty tomb. "Tell the disciples they will see him in Galilee, just as he told you." But the women "are afraid" and say nothing.
The story continues in verse 9 with Jesus making a personal appearance to Mary Magdalene, and she goes to tell the disciples but they don’t believe her. He then appears to two others and then to the Eleven (the Twelve less Judas), he takes them to task for their lack of faith, and he tells them to proclaim his gospel to all of creation. Salvation is to those who are baptized in him; those who are not will be condemned. Verses 17 and 18 read: "And these are the signs that will accompany those who believe: they will cast out demons in my name; they will speak out in tongues; and they will take up snakes in their hands; and if they drink any poison, it will not harm them; they will place their hands upon the sick and heal them." Finally, Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father, and the disciples go forth and proclaim the gospel. And they all lived happily ever after, and right now, in one of our nearby communities of faith, a Pentecostal Christian is being overcome by the Spirit and calling out in a language no one can understand.
Once again, though, this ending doesn’t appear in the earliest manuscripts of Mark. Originally, the story appears to have ended with the women walking away from the tomb, in silence, because they’re mystified by what they have just seen. Were the last twelve verses added because the original author of Mark left it with an unsatisfactory ending? We want a nice, neat wrap-up to our story, but Mark leaves it that the women, just like the disciples, don’t "get it". In this new ending, it’s as if the disciples had their Archimedes moment and screamed "Eureka!" and ran off to tell the world.
So, was Mark really ending the story with this great mystery? Or had he penned an ending where Jesus does reveal himself to the disciples, and it was lost? Scholars disagree. Some people say that verse 8 is a perfectly logical place for the Gospel to end, because once again the disciples are left in the dark, as they have been for all of sixteen chapters. Others say, "It couldn’t have ended that way. Jesus had to reveal himself to the disciples." And it’s entirely possible that the scribes who added the last twelve verses were working from a tradition that included that tidy ending. We’ll never know.
I will bring up just one of Professor Ehrman’s other issues with the texts of the New Testament. As with Mary Magdalene and the other women at the tomb at the end of Mark, women played a rather large role in the Gospels. They accompanied Jesus as he traveled, they helped his travel party financially, and Jesus had no problem preaching to women – along with the other underprivileged members of society, such as the poor, the sick, and the outcast. This message, as relayed through the Gospels, was obviously attractive to women, and there were many women with prominent roles in the early Church. The apostle Paul mentions the deacon Phoebe and the missionary Prisca (or Priscilla), along with the trio of Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis, who according to his letter to the Romans are his "co-workers" in the Gospel. He also calls a woman named Junia "foremost among the apostles" at this time. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul proclaims, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free; there is not male and female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ."
Yet in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he writes, "As in all the churches of the saints, let the women keep silent. For it is not permitted for them to speak, but to be in subjection, just as the law says. But if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church." Ouch! How do we reconcile these two Pauls? Especially since three chapters before that reference, he talks about women being allowed to speak out in church – albeit with heads covered, as was the tradition in many cities at the time (and to this day in parts of the Middle East). Well, the majority of scholars believe that the Corinthians passage I just quoted wasn’t written by Paul. Again, it was likely included as a marginal note by someone who believed that women shouldn’t have such a prominent role, and so today we still have no women priests in the Roman Catholic Church.
So the ultimate question is: Whose words are they? As I quote Dr. Ehrman on the front of your Order of Service, "It would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place." The Gospels are great works of literature. They have inspired millions. But ultimately, they are the work of human beings – many human beings, even within the same text – and just as we read a book today and put it into our own words so we may better understand it, these stories were often put into the copyist’s own words. It is up to us, the faithful, to glean what is best for us from these works along with the prophetic words of others both ancient and modern, as we continue our collective work of spreading our vibrant faith to the greater community. This is our vision; this is our mission; this is our calling. May it ever be so.