Resurrection by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Author:Bishop John Shelby Spong [Spong, Bishop John Shelby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia eBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Clues That Lead Us

Toward Easter

Chapter 14

The First Clue: It Occurred in

Galilee, Not in Jerusalem

We have examined the texts. We have looked at the symbols that were employed to explain the experience. Now we begin to probe the event itself. It will require a second look at the texts, but this time from a topical perspective rather than author to author. In this way we can see how ideas developed and discover hints that might otherwise remain hidden.

What occurred on the day that Easter broke upon the human consciousness? Can we find clues that will carry us back to that critical moment? I suppose if one means the kind of clues that will create an absolute certainty, or that will establish a literal facticity, the answer is no. But if one is willing to search the biblical narratives for suppressed or hidden bits of knowledge that illuminate the drama, and even to engage in the act of speculating about various possibilities, the answer is maybe. In this section I will try to piece together the story from data that I believe is available primarily in the biblical tradition itself, illuminated perhaps by history.

I will seek to speak to the basic questions of where, who, how, when, and why. Ultimately, I am convinced, we come to a place where one must stand before the vision of death overcome and say either yes or no to that vision. I have stood there and I have said yes, but that answer has come on many different levels, the last of which occurred only after I probed these texts to prepare to write this book. My research required me to enter in a new way the texts that purport to tell the story of Easter. I had to move again beyond the contradictions and inconsistencies of the texts. I will now seek to carry my readers into that drama by examining five essential clues. I begin with the question of where, with an attempt to locate in the geography of the world the place where human beings stood when the experience of Easter broke upon them. This question forces us to look at all issues of location when the story of Jesus is being told.

Was Jesus born in Bethlehem or in Nazareth? Was that which we call the resurrection experienced at an empty tomb in Joseph's lovely garden outside the walls of Jerusalem, or did that experience of resurrection actually occur in Galilee? What issues underlie this debate, which we see raging in the pages of the Gospels themselves? If we can settle this issue we will begin to take a step toward the goal of reconstructing the actual moment that propelled the church of Jesus Christ into being. So our journey toward Easter begins as we seek first to understand the ancient tensions that set Jerusalem and Galilee against each other in the history of the Jewish people.

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