It is problematic, is it not?
No, it isn't ... Christianity has never had a problem with it, for 2,000 years. I suggest Bishop Spong is making problems where there aren't any.
Spong:
We need to note that it would be another 30 years before Luke would write the story of the ascension of Jesus...
OK. That does not mean that the story of the ascension was not being told, does it?
a story made necessary by the increasing tendency to assert that the resurrection was Jesus coming back into this world--from which he eventually had to make an exit by ascending.
That's Spong's thesis.
I would rather say that as Luke addressed a gentile audience, and generally a Greek philosophical outlook, the assertion of the Resurrection in the flesh was all the more important because the Greeks found the idea distasteful, if not abhorrent. Not so the Jews, who had already been speculating on the idea of physical resurrection for over a century.
It was precisely because the Gentile world is prone to dualism that Luke went to great lengths to emphasise the physicality of Jesus, and His physical ascension into heaven. Had He not, the Gentile mind would have assumed his spirit ascended, but not His body. Neither Mark nor Matthew were contending with the same problems.
John, on the other hand, was coming at it from a different angle, contending the notion that Jesus was some angelic entity and not quite human at all.
Resurrection in its earliest New Testament understanding was the raising of the crucified Jesus into the presence and meaning of God. So our first conclusion is that resurrection originally meant something quite different from what traditional believers have been led to conclude. . .The idea of a bodily resurrection receives its first mention in the ninth-decade writings of Matthew, and it is present in only one episode.
Pure invention on Spong's part ... unless he can cite pre-Matthaen sources to substantiate his claim? I suggest his conclusion is wrong.
Of the four Evangelists, John was probably the most aware of current Jewish thinking. If, say, we assume Spong is right, then John and the disciples would have understood from the outset that by resurrection Jesus meant justification before His Maker ... but John points out that even after the resurrection, they still did not understand, which indicates that the physical resurrection of the material body of The Lord was something wholly unexpected by them ... so I would suggest John's Gospel drives a very big cart through Spong's thesis.
So I state a second reality: While Christianity was certainly born in whatever the "Easter experience" was, around the year 30, it was not interpreted as the physical resuscitation of the body of the deceased Jesus until about 50 years later.
But it's not a reality is it, it's an unproven and very shaky thesis at best ... without any supporting material evidence? He is overstating his case by a long shot. There's no way it's a reality.
The reality is ... he doesn't know, as no-one can know, if one refutes the testimony of Scripture and Tradition.
If you refute scripture, how can you assert anything? There's no alternative material to work with.
So his whole argument is based on his own unproven assumption that scripture is a myth — we're back to Bultmann — and scholarly thinking today suggests this way of thinking is wrong.
Basically he's rationalising his lack of belief ... and turned it into popular literature. His argument is not new, and others have done it better, but they do it in scholarly works that don't exactly fly off the shelves ...
By the same principle, I could come along and, choosing
not to believe even those things that Bishop Spong
chooses believe in, I can reduce his doctrine by the same process he employs, and so on ... I could argue that the nativity story is such a concoction, there probably never was a man at all.
I was reading some of it today. He clearly believes that Jesus physical body ascended to heaven.
Exactly. St Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of St John. It is evident in St Irenaeus that everyone believed that Jesus rose physically from the dead, and ascended physically into heaven.
The gnostics of course, must deny this or the fabric of their doctrine is shredded. They hold to an absolute dualism, that 'Jesus' is one thing, and 'Christ' is something else altogether ...
I have the text of Irenaeus, btw ... a reference would be useful.
Maybe you are right, but as from what I have learned thus far, you took Paul's words out of historical context.
I don't think so.
But I am wondering what you're trying to get to:
1 Are you denying the resurrection of the body?
2 Are you denying the ascension?
If not ... what is the problem?
Thomas
