Stopped Clock Right Twice a Day

John Shelby Spong gets something right! Namely, the whole “Jesus never existed” thing seems stone blind to the fact that the entire story of Jesus is something that nobody would have invented in the first place. We’ve got oodles of hero stories from antiquity. They don’t look like the story of Jesus. Why? Because the gospel writers are constrained by hard facts. If you are going to creatre a god figure, you don’t have him hail from Bugtussle, Oklahoma or its equivalent, Nazareth. If you are inventing a god, you don’t have him asking questions, not knowing things, or saying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The gospels are quite obviously artefacts of a community that has a real historical memory of an actual human being who really lived.

Of course, the rest of what Spong has to say is an elaborately dumb misreading of the gospels, due to Spong’s applying his own distorting lenses and assumptions to the documents (How does he know Jesus was a disciple of John’s? How does he know that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem? How does he know the Resurrecion is a psychobabble ex post facto rationalization and not the fact the apostles assert it is at the cost of their lives? Answer: he doesn’t. But his preconceived narrative of liberal Episcopalianism commits him to those doctrines.) But even a Spong knows more about the reality behind the gospels than the mere dumb negations of the “Jesus never existed” crowd of Know-Nothing Atheists.