Reading the Bible again for the First Time

by Marcus J. Borg

  SA: How so?

  MJB: There came a time in my adolescence when the modern worldview — that reality consists only of the space-time world of matter and energy — was becoming sufficiently internalized within me that I came to believe if something wasn’t factual then it could not be true. And “factual” meant verifiable by scientific method or at least by reliable historical witnesses. And I see this in other people, too. Very frequently when a child or even a college student asks about a biblical story, “Is that story true?,” what they’re really asking is, Did it happen?

  SA: This brings us to some of the controversy surrounding the Jesus Seminar, with which you have some affiliation, I believe.

  MJB: I became a member, or a fellow, of the Jesus Seminar when it assembled in the mid-1980s, yes.

  SA: On the subject of Did it happen?, I refer to remarks made by Robert Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar, when he addressed the first gathering of biblical scholars at Berkeley: “We are about to embark on a momentous enterprise. We are going to inquire simply, rigorously, after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said.” I can see why many, many people would look askance at this project.

  MJB: One of the most commonly cited statistics about our work is that only eighteen percent of the sayings of Jesus received positive votes at the Jesus Seminar as most likely going back to him. The way the press often reports that figure is that we are saying only eighteen percent of the sayings of Jesus are true.

  SA: When in fact what you’re saying is merely, “This sounds like an utterance actually made by the historical Jesus.”

  MJB: Yes. I think one of the reasons the findings of the Jesus Seminar have been so controversial for many people is because they assume that we’re saying that the other eighty-two percent of the sayings of Jesus are not true — and therefore might just as well be thrown out. And of course that’s not what we’re saying at all. In my own view, a statement that cannot be traced back to Jesus doesn’t make it any less true.

  SA: Let’s not leave the subject of your speaking schedule just yet, because it’s really remarkable. In fact, we were lucky to catch you between gigs for this interview. How many events do you do a year?

  MJB: Let me put it this way: In the last four years, I’ve clocked over a hundred thousand flying miles each year. Almost all of those miles were for the sake of lecture trips.

  SA: How can you stand all that flying?

  MJB: Well, meditation helps — and flying first class. [Laughter]

  SA: You know, in terms of your travels, frequent-flyer-mile-upgrade ironies aside, I can’t help thinking of the apostle Paul, especially given the audience reactions discussed above. You’re really a kind of missionary in the wilds of postmodern Christianity, aren’t you? You’re married to an Episcopal priest; had you ever thought of a life in the ministry for yourself?

  MJB: I did. When I entered seminary about thirty-five years ago, I was undecided about whether to pursue a pastoral or academic career. A wise seminary professor told me he thought my gift was teaching, and so I didn’t seek ordination. But I still occasionally think about ordination — maybe in my retirement.

  SA: So how is a typical speaking event structured?

  MJB: A typical lecture weekend will involve usually five lectures: one on Friday night, three on Saturday, and one on Sunday morning. And over the last four or five years I’ve been averaging about, oh, thirty to thirty-five events like that a year, so I suppose that’s something like a hundred and fifty lectures a year. Ninety percent of them are to church groups — meaning local congregations, clergy conferences, annual conventions of church groups — and the other ten percent are to universities and colleges. So it’s mostly a church-related audience that I speak to.

  SA: Any Jewish groups?

  MJB: I’ve done three events in synagogues, twice speaking on my own and once in an exchange with a Jewish scholar. There’s relatively little Jewish interest in the historical Jesus, which is understandable given the history of Christian persecution of Jews. Jesus is a name that evokes deeply unpleasant associations for many Jews. However, I will say that I’ve heard from several Jewish readers of my books and also from Jewish people attending my lectures that they recognized the Jesus I discuss as a Jewish Jesus. I don’t see the historical Jesus as a divine figure, and I speak of him in radical shorthand as a Jewish mystic, as one so open to the spirit of God that he could become filled with the spirit of God. Not only does that view affirm the Jewishness of Jesus, it also sets aside the identification of Jesus with God. That is, Jesus as God in human form, a view that is still objectionable to Jewish monotheism. So the general comments are, and I’m speaking as if I were one of my Jewish audience members now, “Here’s a Jesus who doesn’t offend me, a Jesus I can affirm as a deeply Jewish figure.” And, perhaps most importantly, “Here’s a Jesus who would not have created all the problems for us over the centuries.”

  SA: I want to refer us to passages in “Jesus as ‘the Way,’ ” a section of chapter eight, “Reading the Gospels Again.” I’ll quote briefly:

  “[F]or John the way or path of Jesus is the path of death and resurrection understood as a metaphor for the religious life. That way — the path of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being — is the only way to God.

  “The same point is made in a story I once heard about a sermon preached by a Hindu professor in a Christian seminary several decades ago. The text for the day included the ‘one way’ passage, and about it he said, ‘This verse is absolutely true — Jesus is the only way.’ But he went on to say, ‘And that way — of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being — is known in all of the religions of the world.’ The way of Jesus is a universal way, known to millions who have never heard of Jesus.

  “The way of Jesus is thus not a set of beliefs about Jesus. That we ever thought it was is strange, when one thinks about it — as if one entered new life by believing certain things to be true, or as if the only people who can be saved are those who know the word ‘Jesus.’ Thinking that way virtually amounts to salvation by syllables. Rather, the way of Jesus is the way of death and resurrection — the path of transition and transformation from an old way of being to a new way of being.”

  Now, if I were a Christian fundamentalist, or even just a strong-believing Christian, I’d probably find this notion subversive, even dangerous. Isn’t this another way of saying that it’s the message and not the messenger that matters?

  MJB: I would probably not put it that way myself. On the one hand, I agree that the teaching of the way and so forth is valid, truthful, whether it comes from Jesus or not. So in that sense the message about the way is independent of the person who speaks it. On the other hand, I think it is utterly remarkable that the manner in which Jesus’ life ends embodies the path that he taught — namely his being crucified and then vindicated by God beyond death, which is what I see as the meaning of Easter. That is, I see him teaching the way or the path of death and resurrection and then he ends up being the incarnation of the path of death and resurrection. So in that sense we see the same thing in the messenger as we see in the message.

  SA: That makes good sense, but there is always a danger of, to use your phrase, “Christian triumphalism.”

  MJB: Indeed. However, I’m not interested in talking about the distinctiveness of Christianity for the sake of arguing for its superiority to other faiths. But there is something distinctive about Christianity that I do want to mention. Namely, Christianity is the only major religion that finds the decisive disclosure of God in a person. Islam finds it in a book, the Koran. Judaism in a sense finds it in a book, the Torah. Buddhism finds it in the teaching of the Buddha and not necessarily in the person of the Buddha. But Christianity finds the decisive disclosure of God in Jesus. And that’s something that’s very interesting about Christianity. I also think that suggests something about the primacy of Jesus, even over the Bible itself.

  I grew up as a Lut
heran and there are a lot of things Martin Luther said that I still like very much. One Luther statement that I remember from my childhood is that the Bible is the manger in which we find Christ. It’s a marvelously homely, earthy image for the Bible. A manger is a feeding trough, and in the feeding trough we find Jesus who is the bread of life, who satisfies our deepest hunger. Luther’s metaphor is once again a way of pointing to the utter centrality of Jesus for the Christian tradition. Even our sacred scripture is but a manger in which we find Jesus.

  SA: I don’t want to leave this just yet, because I think it’s a crucial point — namely, how someone may find the way without finding his way into that manger.

  MJB: The way or the path that I see embodied in Jesus is of course the path of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being. Or dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity. I think that path is at the heart of Islam, in the whole notion of submission to Allah. I think it’s found in the Jewish tradition: Job goes through that kind of experience in his climactic final vision in Job 42. Ecclesiastes also teaches this. And the way is of course utterly essential to the teaching of the Buddha. For the Buddha, the path is to let go of our grasping — our grasping being the source of our suffering.

  When you think of letting go as a metaphor, it is very close to what is involved in the psychological experience of knowing that you are dying. The dying process involves a letting go of your past, of your family, of your future, and it involves finally and ultimately a letting go of the present. So the path of the Buddha, which stresses that letting go, is, I think, the same as the path of dying to an old way of being. Some people may intuitively come to that, but I think most of us have a lot of resistance to that path because it’s frightening to let go of an old way of being. Even if that old way of being has become somewhat or totally unpleasant, it is at least familiar to us.

  I also think that following this internal path is pretty much necessary for every human being. The foundation for what I’m saying is that the growing up process, what we call the process of socialization, involves internalizing the messages of our elders and of our culture — messages about what’s worth pursuing in life, about what we should look like, about what being successful means, and so forth. And so we intrinsically end up living under the tyranny of all of these voices that are telling us what to do, and we will feel good or not good about our identity to the extent that we measure up to what those voices preach. And that’s intrinsically what St. Paul and what other Christians have called “life under the law,” or, to put it in psychological terms, life under the superego — the superego being that critical voice in one’s head. It’s a very unpleasant way in which to live. However, if you’re pretty good and pretty successful, then maybe the voice of the superego can be mostly congratulatory. But you may still feel, even if you’re successful, the need to measure up again and again and again.

  Because our socialization intrinsically leads to that kind of self-preoccupation, with how well the self is doing, the path of release and liberation from that self-preoccupation intrinsically involves dying to that way of being and being born to a life that is centered in the spirit, or in what William James in his wonderfully generic term for God called “the more.” To be centered in “the more” and not in the standards of my culture, not in the standards of my religious tradition, not in myself and how “well” I’m doing. To use Christian language once again, the primary fruit of centering in “the more,” according to St. Paul, are the four gifts of the spirit: peace, joy, freedom, and love. Now, who wouldn’t want a life filled with those things? And I see those fruits of the spirit to be the fruits of the spiritual life, in all of the major religious traditions. So, no, I don’t see this as peculiar to Christianity. I see Christianity as the revelation of a universal path, rather than its being the revelation or disclosure of a unique path.

  SA: Well, then, let’s talk about one of the things that can block the path, and that’s the domination system, against which Jesus battled when it took the form of Rome. Not much later, of course, a domination system would arise in his own name — that is, the church itself. That domination system, too, has passed, to the extent that a Marcus Borg can write [in the “Concluding Reflections” part of “Reading the Prophets Again”]: “In our time, the end of Christendom creates the possibility of hearing and reading the prophets again as God-intoxicated voices articulating ‘the dream of God.’ God’s dream is a world of justice and peace.” You also note in this section the difficulty your current crop of students has in grasping the notion of social justice as articulated by the prophets — a difficulty shared by an affluent society as a whole. But first, please explicate what you mean by “the end of Christendom.” It’s a startling assertion, actually, and — as with your openness to a finding of the way other than through Christ — could set any number of Christians vibrating.

  MJB: Christendom is basically the wedding of Christianity and dominant culture that began with the emperor Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in the 300s. And so “Christendom” refers to that period of European and North American history in which the dominant religion was Christianity and in which it was assumed that Christianity and Western Civilization went hand-in-hand. Christendom probably ended in Europe with World War I. It persisted somewhat longer in the United States.

  I have an acquaintance who’s a sociologist of religion. She asserts that people born in the United States in 1963 or earlier were born into a culture that was still predominantly Christian and one in which it was taken for granted that everybody would be a member of some religious organization. People born in 1964 and later grew up in a different kind of world. Now, obviously, there’s something arbitrary about that date, but she felt that ‘64 was a good dividing point between Christian identity as a conventional expectation of American society versus Christian identity as not a conventional expectation of that society.

  I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in a small town in the northern Midwest. In that town of 1400 people, I think probably everybody would’ve had an answer to the question, What church do you belong to? And in the course of my lifetime that expectation has disappeared in most parts of the country. There may still be regions of the U.S. where it’s taken for granted that everybody is part of the church but the numbers are dwindling. So within, oh, twenty or thirty years from now, the only people left in the church will be people who have chosen to be there: people who are there with intent.

  SA: And of course whoever is there with intent is going to be especially intent on setting the agenda.

  MJB: That’s an important point. Because my generation and older, those of us who became part of the church for conventional reasons when we were kids and just stayed in the church, many of us — many of them, I should say. . . Many of them can’t believe what they’re seeing going on in the mainline church in our time. You know, the struggles about gay and lesbian people entering the church. And then the questions that arise as a result: can gay and lesbian people be ordained? Can they be married? For many people who became Christians for conventional reasons, these are just outrageous questions. But, as I say, in another twenty or thirty years those people will basically be dead, and thus the possibility of the church genuinely becoming an alternative community, one that calls business as usual and convention into question — that possibility will emerge for the first time in maybe 1500 years.

  SA: At just the time it’s in danger of being plowed under by certainly the most insidious domination system yet, to segue over to something your colleague John Dominic Crossan wrote in the concluding chapter, “Mine Eyes Decline the Glory,” of his wonderful memoir, A Long Way From Tipperary [2000]. I’ll just read this:

  “During the last few hundred years, the ideological war was between religion and science or, in its most degenerate form, between religious fundamentalism and secular rationalism. In that warfare science did not lose, and religion did not win. But the next few hundred years will see a differ
ent ideological war, one between religion and fantasy. As all things become entertainment, and all entertainment becomes sensation, and all sensation becomes illusion, religion will have to distinguish itself very clearly from fantasy or else become a minor subsidiary of that overwhelming trivialization of the human imagination.”

  Crossan precedes this statement with a little parable, “A Modest Disposal,” about the “global control of fantasy,” in which the Walt Disney Company and the Southern Baptist Convention merge to become BaptistDisneyEntertainments — no spaces between the names and “Entertainments” italicized as a dig at another conglomerate, HarperCollinsPublishers, publishers of John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and employer of yours truly. So to extrapolate from all of this, what of the notion that Entertainment is the new domination system?

  MJB: Yes, it’s a magnificent passage, and what I could say that seems somewhat relevant to Dom’s view is this: I see spirituality as one of the two primary focal points of the Christian life. The other focal point being compassion and a passion for justice in the world of the everyday. Now, if spirituality becomes the only focal point in the Christian life or in the religious life, then it can become merely the final item added to the life of an indulgent, affluent person: “Let’s see, I’ve experienced all the goodies the world has to offer and there’s still something missing so maybe I should become spiritual.” [Interviewer laughs] And spirituality becomes one more consumer item in a consumerist society, rather than spirituality being the means of our transformation into people filled with compassion and the passion for justice for the least of us.