from the mount

BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the Love of God, by John Shelby Spong, HarperCollins.

If John Shelby Spong knows fear, he never shows it. Foaming evangelical detractors depict him as a sly Mephistophelean backslider, alleging bad faith and wicked tricks - omission, distortion - but he holds firm. Spong, the bestselling author of Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism and an intellectually ferocious retired Episcopal bishop, celebrates expansion and diversity within the church, rejecting prejudice, murder and punitive stupidity in the name of God.

His latest book is simply spectacular. A scholarly exposé of the Bible's fatal ideological and factual errors, The Sins of Scripture not only challenges injustices excused by fundamentalists as the “mysterious” ways of God, but presents the blueprint for a far more accurate and honest Christianity. “I believe now that these insights would have come to me even sooner had I not been what the Bible seems to regard as a privileged person,” he writes. “I do not refer to my social or economic status, which was modest to say the least, but to the fact that I was white, male, heterosexual and Christian. The Bible affirmed, or so I was taught, the value in each of these privileged designations.”

The philosophically primitive – and essentially masturbatory – rigidity of dead white males aside, how is it possible for the Bible to be considered the “Word of God” when it consists of sixty-six books (more if you count the Apocrypha) written over a thousand years? Spong asks: “Can such a claim stand even the barest scrutiny?” At a loss as to how God can be saddled with the motivations of authors warped by the “tribal and sexist prejudices of that ancient time,” he is left no choice but to enter the ring swinging.

“Moses,” he begins, “did not write the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Moses had been dead for three hundred years before the first verse of the Torah achieved written form.” Nor did David write the Psalms. “Yet, once again in the gospels, the Davidic authorship of the Psalms is asserted by Jesus (see Mark 12:36-37; Matt. 22:43-45 and Luke 20:42-44).” Epilepsy and mental illness resulting from possession, profound deafness caused by the devil tying the tongue? “[O]nce again in a variety of biblical passages Jesus is portrayed as making these specific claims (see Mark 1:23-26, 9:14 -18; Matt. 9:13 and Luke 9:38-42).” And it just gets better.

The errors in translation and interpretation revealed by Spong call for a complete restructuring of the Christian faith. Matthew, whom he accuses of manipulation by tearing stories from their Hebrew context, “bases his virgin birth story, for example, on Isaiah 7:14 . Yet he translates that text to read that a virgin shall conceive (see Matt. 1:23) when the text in Isaiah not only does not use the word ‘virgin' but says that a young woman is with child.” This pregnant “virgin” promptly became “the ideal woman against which all women were to be measured … Since it is quite impossible in the normal course of events for a woman to be both a virgin and a mother, every other woman was immediately, by definition, assumed to be less than the ideal.”

With a trial lawyer's acuity, Spong follows the evolution of the “virgin” myth throughout history. Mary first became a virgin mother in the ninth decade, when Matthew, and then Luke, promoted the grotesquely tabloid concept. Entering the creeds in the third and fourth centuries, it became the “chief bulwark in the battles that engaged the church in later centuries as that body sought to define the divinity of Jesus.”

In short, the Western Catholic tradition could not glorify a woman unless she had been both desexed and dehumanized - that is, debased.

And how about the apple into which Eve sank her fangs? “A tree stood in the midst of the garden, the fruit of which was forbidden to human beings. It was called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was not an apple tree. It did not become an apple tree until Jerome translated the scriptures into Latin in the fourth century of this Common Era.” Again, woman – that chromosomally-determined dodo, Satanic coconspirator and all-purpose floating rib - took the Fall: all evil results from her (hormonal) reluctance to obey The Great White Male. (Anyone ever pictured Adam as Pakistani or Japanese?)

“Paul certainly contributed to that definition,” Spong states. “So did Augustine … He made it the keystone of his thinking, and through him it was destined to dominate Christian thought for a thousand years. To this day this negativity toward women and sex is a major, if subliminal, feature of our religious life … Women are still defined as the corrupters and polluters of human holiness.” The two largest Christian churches in the world still refuse to ordain women and conservative Protestants “continue to argue about something they call ‘headship,' which means that no woman should be allowed authority over a man.” (An evangelical minister consulted for this piece simplified the concept for my hormonally addled brain by explaining that men are life's “captains” and women their “vice-captains” - although, he tenderly added, both roles are “equally important”.)

Spong's primary – and most devastating - charge is that Christian evangelists have made an idol of the Bible itself, worshipping the Word of God above God. “Religion has so often been the source of the cruelest evil,” he elaborates. “Its darkest and most brutal side becomes visible at the moment when the adherents of any religious system identify their understanding of God with God .” It's an infinitely elegant distinction, and one with serious repercussions. “[W]hen one is ‘born again,' one is newly a child. It represents a second return to a state of chronic dependency. Perhaps what we specifically need is not to be ‘born again,' but to grow up and become mature adults.”

The Sins of Scripture should not only be read by all those who consider themselves Christians, but by those whose lives have been deformed or lessened by the word of bigots, homophobes and misogynists masquerading as God. Spong's closing word? Shalom.

*Originally published in The Weekend Australian