THE JEWISH TRADITION! We know today that God did not dictate the Torah to Moses at any point in human history. That is not how the Torah was either created or received. In fact we know that Moses did not write a single word of the Torah. Indeed, the Moses of history died some three hundred years before the first word of the Jewish law was placed on parchment by a human hand holding a quill. We know that the Torah came into being over a period of close to five hundred years from a series of sources that have been isolated and studied over the past two centuries in the academies of higher biblical learning. We also know that the entire Torah was treated with great reverence in Jewish worship centers and that well before the time of Jesus the Torah was read in its entirety in synagogue settings on the Sabbaths of a single year. We know that when the Jewish people returned from exile in Babylon during the 5th century BCE, under the leadership of Ezra, the priest, and Nehemiah, the governor, they covenanted to keep the Torah, to honor the Torah and to acknowledge Moses as the mythological father of the Torah. This devotion found its way into their annual worship life in the festival called Shavuot, observed in the Jewish calendar in the month of Sivan, which would make it fall in late May or early June in our calendar. Shavuot was a time for the Jews to give thanks for the law, thought by the Jews to be God’s greatest gift to the world. In that celebration, the worship leaders of Judaism called for the people to observe a twenty-four hour vigil in which they would recall the Sinai moment when they believed the law was given to Moses. That twenty-four hour service was divided into eight three-hour segments. For that 24-hour vigil, they created the 119th psalm. Psalm 119 was the longest psalm in the Psalter because it had to provide readings for each of the eight segments in the 24 hours. Psalm 119 was thus made up of 176 verses in 22 segments, with each segment being named after the 22 letters of the Jewish alphabet from Aleph to Taw. The content of this psalm was and is a constant hymn of praise to the beauty and wonder of the law. It includes such phrases as “My lips pour forth your praise, when you teach me your statues (i.e. law);” “Great peace have they who love your law; for then there is no stumbling block;” and “Happy are they who observe God’s decrees…those who walk in the law of the Lord.” So, once a year, the people would gather at Shavuot in solemn assembly to give thanks to God for the law and to pledge their renewed allegiance to it. Psalm 119, the psalm of Shavuot, begins with an introductory stanza of eight verses. In the first two of those eight verses, the opening word is “Blessed,” which is sometimes translated “Happy.” The author of Matthew’s gospel quite obviously took that 119th psalm and used it as a model to create the “Sermon on the Mount.” In Matthew’s introductory stanza to his “sermon,” he made each of its eight verses begin with the word “Blessed.” Today, we call those eight verses “The Beatitudes,” but they are clearly based on Psalm 119:1-8. Then Matthew fashioned the entire sermon to be divided into eight segments in order to provide words of Jesus to be read during each of the eight three-hour segments of the 24-hour vigil of Shavuot. That is how the “Sermon on the Mount” came into being. The rest of this “Sermon” involved a commentary on the eight Beatitudes, but in reverse order, with the first commentary being on Beatitude number eight and the last commentary being on Beatitude number one. Jesus never preached the Sermon on the Mount! Some of the content recorded in that well-known part of Matthew’s gospel may well stretch back to the literal words of the Jesus of history, but there was never a time in the life of Jesus of Nazareth when he went up on a mountain and delivered the material we now find in chapters 5-7 of Matthew’s gospel. The Bible is not literal history; it is not eyewitness reporting. It is a Jewish book, written by Jewish authors, telling a profoundly Jewish story about an indefinable God working in a special human life. Jesus was a Jew! The Bible tells the story of a Jewish Jesus, in a Jewish tradition. If we recover the Jewishness of the Bible, we will be freed from both the killing fundamentalism of our time and from the rebellion against that fundamentalism that masquerades as an unbelieving “secular humanism.” Matthew is writing neither a biography nor a history. When Matthew wrote his gospel, the Christian movement was still a movement within the synagogue, not yet a separate movement. He was taking the life-changing experience found in Jesus of Nazareth and interpreting it inside the symbols and observances of his Jewish faith system. His Jewish audience understood that and reveled in it. Gentile Christians, blindly unaware of these Jewish traditions and of the content of Jewish Scripture with which Matthew was so familiar, did not. The Gentiles in their misunderstanding interpreted these narratives literally; that was when biblical fundamentalism was born. It is time to reverse this process. ~ ~ ~Bishop John Shelby Spong
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 06:41:02 +0000
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