The Sins of Scripture (23 page)

T
here is a specific antidote in the gospels that challenges the exclusiveness that is claimed by the words “No one comes to the Father, but by me.” It is found in three sayings attributed to Jesus in the synoptic tradition that at first glance appear to be quite similar. Closer examination, however, reveals them to be not only radically different, but diametrically opposed. Each illustrates how a saying can get twisted when the context in which it is spoken is different. I am certain that behind their textual confusion there was an original, consistent and inclusive saying of Jesus. The present confusion reveals much about how the religious needs of people drive us to accentuate the negative when we are in conflict with another faith tradition.

These three sayings are found in Mark 9:40, Matthew 12:30 and Luke 9:50. Because this difference is so important, I want my readers to see them exactly as they are printed in the gospels themselves. I quote from the translation we call the Revised Standard Version:

Mark 9:40:
“He that is not against us is for us.”

Matt. 12:30:
“He who is not with me is against me.”

Luke 9:50:
“He that is not against you is for you.”

The wording is so similar that we almost have to read these verses twice to catch the difference, even if the difference is profound.

Mark is the earliest writer, so one might suggest that his version is the original one. In his rendition of this saying of Jesus is the suggestion that Christian allies are the ones who are not overtly negative to those people or concepts in the Jesus movement. That removes the claim that there is only one true pathway to God, and it opens the door to countless ancillary relationships.

Both Matthew and Luke have Mark in front of them when they write. However, Matthew changes this text into the exact reverse of what Mark has suggested that Jesus said. He has Jesus declare that if you are not in complete agreement with him, then you are against him. His suggestion is that people are either in or out of the Christian movement. There are no gray areas. That attitude supports the “only my way” mentality and closes the door to everyone who is not single-minded in devotion to that primary way of acting and believing. Luke, who writes after Matthew, reverts to the Marcan original and once again poses Jesus as suggesting that even in a religious world, agreement to walk arm in arm does not require unanimity of belief or identity in practice. In other words, two out of three renditions of this saying of Jesus are open to a variety of approaches to the wonder of God, while one out of three says there is only one way: agree with me or you are against me. To our great discredit, institutional Christianity has always acted on the basis of the minority report of Matthew.

This did not constitute a critical issue for anyone but the Jews through most of the centuries of Christianity simply because the world was so large and communications were so slow that generally we lived in great ignorance of other people and other religions. Even as recently as the nineteenth century, during the War of 1812, which was in some sense round two of the American Revolution, the final battle of New Orleans was fought well after the treaty of peace had been signed. The word of peace did not get through to Andrew Jackson, the American general, for some three months. Communications are so rapid and the world is so small today that such an occurrence would now be inconceivable.

Because the Jews lived primarily as minority voices in a predominantly Christian world, however, they bore the brunt of the fact that they were different. They stood outside the majority system. No one stopped to ask what were the things Jews and Christians had in common, the areas in which they walked together. Yet those binding shared realities included such significant things as a single unbroken religious heritage, one God, a commitment to ethical behavior as the way to serve that God, the requirement to love that God with our hearts, souls, minds and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves and finally a willingness to care for and show mercy to all who are in need. Surely in these great commitments, Jews and Christians could never have been against each other. But that is not how the relationship was acted out. Imperial Christianity simply asserted, “Christians have the truth; the Jews are not Christians and do not accept Christ as Messiah, so they are not with us,” which was interpreted to mean, “They are against us.” So Jews were treated as enemies of Christianity, to our great shame and to their great persecution.

The rest of the religions of the world were simply not on our radar screen for most of Christian history. Of course, there were moments when we touched each other. The journeys of Marco Polo made us vaguely aware of the religions of Asia. The rapid growth of Islam after the death of the prophet Muhammad caused the Christian world and the Islamic world to bump into each other on the edges of the Mediterranean Sea, in Turkey, in Croatia and in North Africa. The Battle of Tours in 732 CE stopped the encroachment of Islam into Christian Europe and divided the world into religious spheres of influence. The Crusades represented a hostile invasion of Christian power into Islamic strongholds. Each of these, however, was minor in the scheme of things, and none of the great religious systems of the world ever really interacted with each other except on the most superficial of levels. So all of our grand religious claims to be the true faith, to have a corner on the market of salvation, never really got tested. They remained as the pious mantras of an unchallenged religious system. We assumed the truth of our claims without fear of being contradicted by reality. That luxury lasted until airplanes, radio, television, the Internet and the World Wide Web came along and changed the world.

In the twentieth century, however, the Western world, by engaging during World War II with the empire of Japan, discovered a non-Christian religion that was so vibrant that Japanese pilots would dive their planes into American and British ships in suicide missions because “to die for the emperor is to live forever.” It was startling both to the Western psyche and to our religious consciousness to realize that a “pagan” religion could elicit such levels of devotion. In the Korean War, we watched the Chinese army accept losses that would have been intolerable in the Western world because the religions of China did not affirm the value of individual life in the same way that the Christian West had always done. We found it difficult to defend ourselves against an army that would run wave after wave of troops over a field of land mines, allowing the later waves to go safely once the first waves had cleared the mines with their now deceased bodies. It was another witness to the power of what we thought of pejoratively as a “pagan” religion. In the Vietnam War, we watched Buddhist monks immolate themselves in acts of religiously inspired protest. Buddhism, we discovered, still possessed great power. In the 1970s and ’80s, we confronted Islamic power tied to oil—power that had the ability to topple Jimmy Carter, a sitting president, and to require the
Wall Street Journal
to hire its first religion writer, Gustav Niebuhr, since religion, even a “pagan” religion, now had economic consequences. Today we face the specter of Muslim militants who do not hesitate to offer themselves in suicide missions if it furthers their religious aims. The
New York Times
quoted a young Islamic fanatic speaking in a mosque in West Virginia as saying, “To love the Prophet Muhammad is to hate those who hate him.”
⁹

A veritable renaissance of religious terror now confronts us and is making against us the claims we have long made against religious traditions different from our own. It feels very different when we confront the religious claims of being the true faith, of controlling access to God, of being committed to the task of converting the world to our religious thinking and discover that we are the object of that religious invective rather than being the ones who are making the claims. The time has surely come to abandon what was a minority idea in the gospels, created when Matthew changed Mark’s original wording—the idea that for one not to be identical in faith with us is to be our enemy. The probability is that the literal word of Jesus was the original text as Mark recorded it,
¹⁰
and that earlier wording suggested that if other religious traditions are not against us, they are in fact for us. Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus are not against our religion, so we can embrace them as sisters and brothers, honor the pathway that each walks in their quest for God and begin a new era of religious cooperation. We can lay down the misinterpreted claim that we possess the only doorway to God.

Does the interfaith future mean that all the religious traditions of the world must seek to come together in an attempt to find our lowest common denominator? I do not think so. That would only reduce each tradition to something bare and bleak. It would be nothing more than a manifestation of our least divisive and therefore least characteristic affirmations. No richness, no uniqueness would be found there.

Is our only alternative then to seek to honor positive traditions in all religious systems, creating in the process a pantheon large enough to hold us all together, a religion of consensus where the edges are blurred and the divisions are papered over? Some traditions, like B’hai, seek to do that, and they do it with great integrity, but that pathway, while positive for many, does not seem to me to offer the best hope for either religious toleration or a religious future.

I propose, rather, a different route into what I think is our inevitable interfaith future. Each of us as participants in our own particular faith must journey into the very heart of the tradition that claims our loyalty. I, as a Christian, must plumb the depths and scale the heights of my own faith system. I must learn to separate the essence of Christianity from the compromises this religious system has made through history. It is tribal boundaries, not creedal affirmations, that most deeply shape the various Christian denominations. In the New World, Lutherans come from northern Germany and Scandinavia, Anglicans from England, Presbyterians from Scotland, Roman Catholics from Ireland and southern Europe and so on. We Christians must journey beyond these forced political divisions to the core of our faith and there allow ourselves to discover its essence, to enter its meaning and finally to transcend its limits. We do that, however, while still clinging to what we call our ultimate Truth and what we regard as our “pearl of great price.” That must also be the pathway that every Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and any other participant in any other religion of the world must walk.

Then—when we have all walked into our own depths, found the deepest essence of what our faith is all about and separated out that essence from the compromises of history—we can each lift up what is our most precious gift. I envision the adherents of these various faith traditions of the world all sitting in a circle of equals addressing one another. I, as a Christian, would say to the others, “This is the essence of Christianity that I have discovered on my journey; this is my ‘pearl of great price,’ and I want to offer it to you.” Then the Jew would say, “This is the essence of Judaism, my ‘pearl of great price,’ and I want to offer it to you.” In turn, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the Hindu and any other would do the same. No one sacrifices his or her own tradition. Every person is enriched by the gifts of others. Competition fades into complementarity. Each of us becomes richer and more full. Our humanity is enhanced; the threat, the fear and the need to conquer disappear. The opportunity to share replaces them. The world moves out of the quest for tribal or religious survival and into an interfaith future in which the pathway each of us walks into holiness is honored and we recognize that the essential truth about all religion is its goal, not its highway. No system captures God. All systems finally empty into God.

No one holds a corner on the market of salvation. There is no one way into God that all must follow if they hope to arrive. There is, however, an Ultimate Reality beyond all human religious traditions. We call that Reality God, and into that Reality all religious systems must journey. We follow our own path with integrity. We spit on no alternative path that might shake our confidence. We join hands in our common humanity and rejoice in the journey that each of us has taken. A new day dawns and it maybe begins to look vaguely like the Realm of God.

Part 1: The Dawn of Human History

In the ancient Greek world there were two epic poems that citizens of that day treasured. They were called the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. Under the guise of describing the ancient history of the Greek people, which included their mighty military exploits, these epic poems accomplished an even more important function in human development. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
told their people who they were, what their life was all about, why they held the values they did and how their human fears and anxieties could be managed or conquered. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
thus provided the people with a mirror into which they could gaze at themselves. That is what an epic is, and so the rise of the epic poems represented a new stage in human development.

These narratives were the means by which human beings, who were at that time only beginning to understand the idea of history, could embrace the meaning of time. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
enabled people to relive vicariously the exploits of their ancestors, so they served to stretch the human consciousness until men and women could begin to see themselves as people who had a past that could be remembered and a future that could be anticipated. In this manner, time-bound creatures began to contemplate timelessness. Finite men and women began to enter infinity and earthbound people began to engage the experience of transcendence. The poet Homer, whoever he was—and it matters not if he was one person or many persons—captured in this poetry something of the essence of what it meant to be human and of what humanity looked like to people perhaps five thousand years before the Common Era.

The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
surely began as oral stories passed on by word of mouth. That was essential, because no written language existed in the early days of human consciousness.

Most people are not aware of how recent the development of written language is. It came as a surprise to the European explorers who first touched the shores of the New World to discover that among the native American people they found here, there was no such thing as a written language. Anthropologists now believe that the native Americans migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait sometime between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand years ago, when Asia and North America were still connected by a land bridge.

Spoken language appears to be no older than fifty thousand years, having begun, anthropologists now believe, in the Upper Paleolithic Period, while written language appears to be no older than five to ten thousand years. These two steps, however—learning first how to speak and then how to write—were dramatic steps in our human evolutionary development, and together they ushered us into self-consciousness, which was the experience that finally separated human beings from the natural world that had produced them. If one defines human life as marked by language and self-consciousness, we are a very late development in the history of the world.

Words are by definition abstractions, which serve to unify the common experience of those who develop them. The use of words implies the ability to remember. That is why students of language believe that nouns were the first thing to enter human vocabulary. Our ancestors used nouns to name things that looked alike, both inanimate things and animate things. It is of interest to note that in the oldest biblical story of creation, Adam named all the animals as God created them (Gen. 2:19–20). Nouns were born when the same sound was applied by common consensus to various manifestations of the same thing. That is how a rabbit, a bird, a fish, a bush, a flower, a tree, a fruit, a tiger, water or a dwelling place, just to name a few, came to be known. A new noun would have to be developed whenever a new thing entered the human consciousness with consistency.

Adjectives to modify these nouns came next, pushing language beyond the specific to the abstract. Since all tigers, rabbits, trees and fruits were not the same, descriptive words developed to distinguish them from one another. I suspect that words for size, taste and color came first. These developed adjectives pushed language deeper into abstraction. For example, color emerged when these speaking creatures observed the same color on more than one thing: a red flower, a red leaf and a red bird; or a black dog, a black lynx and black coal; a white cloud, a white duck and a white bear. Things that had a color in common gave rise to the much more abstract ideas of redness, blackness and whiteness.

Verbs appear to have developed next. A mind that remembers, that lives in the flow of time, was essential for this development to take place. People needed to describe what it is that creatures or plants do: rabbits run, birds fly, fish swim, plants grow, flowers bloom, trees bear fruit. In this way action, which requires a sense of the passing of time, remembering what things were and anticipating what things will become, entered the human vocabulary.

Pronouns probably came next and since pronouns are abstract nouns, they served to increase the flexibility of language. They not only enabled our speech to expand, but once again forced our consciousness to stretch. Adverbs were born when actions needed modifiers. Some birds flew higher; some animals ran faster; some humans grew older. But once again this process took centuries.

Putting sounds, now turned into words, into recognizable written signs was an incredible advance, but one that was absolutely essential to human development. Written language probably began when trade required some mechanism for counting, but of that almost no certainty is guaranteed. What is certain is that this new skill of writing, the process of making words into symbols, enabled a cohesive sense of community to develop within the tribe. It was also through writing that people began to pass on to their successive generations the most basic questions of self-awareness: Who am I? Where did I come from? Who are my ancestors? What is my purpose? Why am I here? What is my meaning, my destiny? Why was I born? It was in the experience of answering these questions that every people walking through history developed an epic of self-understanding. An epic was first oral, but as it found expression in the growth of written language it began to enter into timelessness, transcending generations.

Some ancient tribes did not remain an identifiable people long enough for their epic history to achieve written form and so it perished without a trace. Other tribes lost their epic after they were defeated or enslaved and their history was incorporated into the epic of a more dominant and successful tribe of people. The epics that endured, like the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
were powerful devices in human development and therefore epics that must be valued as a great reservoir of human wisdom. Each epic sought to explain the existence of the earth and the centrality of the people whose story it was. As such it began to explain how their values emerged, what was the significance of their achievements and why it was that a particular people basked in the favor of the gods or God.

Exorbitant claims were in time always made for these epic tales. At the very least the gods or God had directed the affairs about which the epics were written. Then the values espoused in the epics were said to be values of that which was called divine. Next it was said that these gods had inspired the human authors to write as they did. Finally, for some people, the writings themselves came to be held in such high esteem as the source of all wisdom that they were said to be the very words of God, holy, true, unchanging and inerrant. That is a familiar pathway that has been traveled by many an epic. Every epic is the sacred history of the people who created it.

So I invite you to journey with me into the biblical origins, a journey that must begin by setting aside the idea that a supernatural being either wrote or inspired the narratives. Only then will we ever be able to see why these epics are still worthy of being honored in a special way.

Part 2: The Hebrew
Iliad—
the Yahwist Document (ca. 950 BCE)

Like other ancient tribes, the Hebrew people had an
Iliad
and an
Odyssey
. The Hebrew
Iliad
is called by scholars today the “Yahwist Document.” It is the oldest continuous narrative that we can identify in the Bible. It seems to have achieved written form during the middle years of the tenth century before the birth of Jesus. The Hebrew
Odyssey
is called the “Elohist Document.” It is the second oldest continuous narrative that we can identify in the Bible. It dates from the middle years of the ninth century before the birth of Jesus. Both epics give evidence of having been orally transmitted for centuries before achieving written form. These epics had an interesting relationship, beginning separately, merging and undergoing massive revisions in the light of a changing history.

Like all epics, these ancient Jewish sacred traditions were designed to explain some of the observed mysteries of their very human experience. Why do people become ill if they eat certain foods? What is the source of evil? Why do human beings feel alienated from the world of nature? Why are there differences in language? Why is this land our land? Why is God our God? How did we become God’s chosen people? Epics always address the questions of existence. The Jewish epics were no different. These questions, found in every national epic, are all but universal. They are human questions designed to help human beings make sense out of their existence.

When the Yahwist writer wrote the original strand of the Jewish faith history, the author did so from within a very specific historical context. The Jewish nation was settled victoriously in what they called their “Promised Land.” A monarchy of some power had been established. A city named Jerusalem had been conquered and transformed into the capital city of the Jews. That city had originally been erected on a hill, making it easily defensible. Jerusalem also possessed an internal water supply, which was the basis of its life. Inside that city a temple, in which the God of the Jews might live, was promised and indeed might well have been actually under construction. That temple would solidify the claims that God had chosen the Jews for a special purpose. This writer had access to the rich oral history of his people. Part of that history purported to tell the story of how the world was made. It was primitive and quite patriarchal. God created the first human being, who was fashioned in a “hands on” way, which suggested that God had molded the dust of the earth into a human form and then had breathed life into this form through the creature’s nostrils.

A sense of alienation that was deep in the human psyche, however, could not be ignored. So the story was told of the human family’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the separation from the Creator that resulted from that expulsion. The human quest was a quest for a restoration of unity with God and/or nature. This would be a dominant theme of the Jewish epic. These people who saw themselves as the direct descendants of the original man and woman would, according to their sacred story, seek to build a tower so tall it could reach the heavens in an attempt to be one with God. That project would fail. It did, however, help them account for the fact that each tribe spoke a different language. One of the descendants of Adam was then said to have been chosen by God to help overcome this alienation. That is why God called Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldeans in order to form a new people. The struggles of this people to survive and to keep the dream of restoration alive is chronicled in wondrous detail. In the pursuit of their destiny, this chosen people did not always follow the traditional laws by which the people of the world seemed to operate. For example, it was Isaac, the second son of Abraham, not Ishmael, the firstborn, who was to be the heir of the promise. It was Jacob, the second son of Isaac, not Esau, the firstborn, who was to be the line through which the life of this nation was to flow.

The enemies who lived in the world around these special people defeated them, enslaved them, corrupted them and exiled them, but God’s promise was never lost and that meant that God’s faithfulness required that the promise be redeemed. Their destiny was to be the nation through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. It was a high purpose, a noble vocation.

As the Yahwist writer put this oral history into writing, it was the monarch, the city of Jerusalem and the temple that seemed to this author to guarantee the promise. God had anointed David to begin the monarchy. God had led David to conquer Jerusalem and to transform it into the holy city of God. God had instructed David’s son and heir, King Solomon, to build the temple. So the Yahwist writer’s view of all the world and all of human history was seen through the lens of these three institutions. God, to the Yahwist writer, seemed to work from the top down. God made the divine covenant with the king. Through the king the people were incorporated into the covenant. God began the ordered tradition of divine worship that marked these people’s lives with Aaron, the brother of Moses and the first high priest. Through obedience to the high priest and the temple, the people were incorporated into this worship. To rebel against the king, the temple or the priest was to rebel against God. As long as these institutions existed, the promises of God were in effect. That was the operative thesis of the author.

The writer of this first Jewish epic called God by the name of Yahweh, or at least that is our best guess as to how the Jewish letters JHWH or YHVH were pronounced. In one sense the name for God was never to be uttered, for to speak the holy name implied some control over the one whose name it was. That constituted, of course, the definition of blasphemy.

The Yahwist Document was the Hebrew
Iliad
. It described the origins of the Jews. It articulated their destiny. It told the people by whom that epic was created who they were, why they mattered, where they had come from, who God was and why the Jews were special people. It was their defining story. In this epic the earliest strand of the Hebrew Bible is located. It was not, however, destined to remain a single story.