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Several months ago, I received an invitation to give a couple of lectures for an organization of which I had never heard in a city then unknown to me: a school of theology for lay persons in Anderson, South Carolina.
The invitation conveyed by Tom Richie, the school's current board president and a retired Presbyterian minister, offered me an opportunity to share in depth and at a decent length some of the ripening fruit of my research and analysis of New Testament texts. More in a minute about what I had to say and the reaction to it.
Before I spent that weekend with the school of theology constituency, South Carolina for me could be summed up thus: Ft. Sumter, Strom Thurmond, the last stand of the Confederate flag and that old-time religion.
I can't vouch for the whole of the Palmetto State, but I can tell you that the couple of hundred or more people I met in Anderson -- who to the person say "y'all" -- are plenty sophisticated and liberal in their thinking.
The school of theology gave me pretty much carte blanche as to what my lectures would cover. That was a surprise unto itself because a number of people there read the essays in this series, which are not known for their theological or political orthodoxy.
These are the lectures I proposed and the school's curriculum committee accepted:
1: Is The Jesus of the New Testament A Composite Figure? The Evidence and Its Implications and 2: Conflicting New Testament Texts Concerning the Resurrection of Jesus.
The first laid out what are essentially differing accounts of Jesus, which, if one is liberated from ideological necessities, may be taken as portraits of different persons. With the help of the first-century CE historian Flavius Josephus, I was able to say that "Jesus" (or "Yeshua" in the Aramaic of the time) was a common name frequently given to male children in first-century Palestine.*
My analysis was understood to be a problem for conventional theology. It is, indeed, though I made it clear that I had not begun the research with that end in mind, though I have long thought the church would be better off without the drag systematic theology puts on the intellectual aspect of believing. In such matters, the inquiry is quite enough without the manufacture of facile answers.
The second lecture dealt with the oddity that, for all the historic church has made of the centrality of Jesus's supposed resurrection, there is no clear account in the canonical gospels of any such event. Texts carefully analyzed suggest that the resurrection had as early as the end of the first century CE become a sticky problem for the intelligentsia of the nascent church.
I told the audience that, then went on to quarrel with the usual interpretation of a Greek term most often translated "was raised" in reference to Jesus. I pointed out that the term goes to the idea of "awakening" or "rousing" or "being returned to consciousness" rather than being propelled out of a grave as so many Easter hymn texts imply.** Likewise in Paul's statement at I Corinthians 15:8 to the effect that Jesus "appeared" to him or "was seen by me" there is a strong flavor of phantasm.
I did not say that such data could make an airtight case against the resurrection or that I wanted it to do so. I did say that I consider the case to be sound insofar as I had gone with it. I added that it could make Easter a tough go for congregations whose members come for reassurance that God had solved the problem of death much as the gods (Elohim) in Genesis were said to have wrested order from chaos by demanding it. Fiat lux! "Let there be light." Think of Jesus standing before the grave of Lazarus three days dead and saying (may as well stick with the Latin): Lazare. Veni foras! Same idea.
Then I read to them from the non-canonical Gospel of Peter (10: 38-43) what purports to be an actual eyewitness account of the resurrection of a Jesus. They saw immediately why the Peter gospel -- or at least that portion of it -- had never been admitted to the official text. It was too bizarre and incredible. It became clear to me that those South Carolinian Christians -- and one amazing Jewish woman among them named Roz Silverman -- had long since become very savvy folk about the limp theology ladled out at the retail level to many a congregation.
What's more, in discussions following each lecture it was plain to see that this audience had been down the road a good many times with serious speakers. As a lecturer there in what I believe to be the school's 51st year, I stood in a line of previous guests all of whom are far better known than I, viz. John Dominic Crossan, the late Marcus Borg, Bishop John Spong, writer and former priest James Carroll, Barbara Brown Taylor and in spring 2016 Diane Butler Bass.
Bishop Spong, a native of North Carolina, told me recently that the Anderson School of Theology for Lay Persons is "a bit of leaven in the lump of South Carolina." The bishop is a friend and mentor, and I am loath to contradict him.
That said, those perceived as dissidents often speak for a future as yet unrecognized. If that be the case, then the leaven of which the good bishop spoke -- nourished as it is by intellectual integrity -- seems to me well-prepared to transform its part of the lump. I wouldn't bet against it.
* The Works of Josephus (Complete and Unabridged). Peabody, Mass. 1987. 913-14
** Up from the grave he arose; with a mighty triumph o'er his foes;
he arose a victor from the dark domain,
and he lives forever, with his saints to reign.
He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!
A mid-19th century hymn text by Robert Lowry sung to this day in many a church on Easter Day.
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