Misquoting Jesus

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

June 27, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

O Lord, you are indeed the healer of all our ills. We bring to you, Lord, our bodies, minds and spirits hurting and broken by the violence, ills, trauma and cares of a world separated from you. Come to us now with your healing powers.

O God, we ask that you heal us. Give us the strength, health, wisdom and knowledge found only through you. Send your life-giving Spirit so that we may live our lives with courage in the profound peace of your love. Come to us now with your healing powers.

Breathe on me, O God, and make me whole.

O God, we ask that you sustain those who seek to alleviate the pain and suffering of this world. Give strength, courage, wisdom and knowledge to all doctors and orderlies, nurses and clerks, psychiatrists, researchers, and all other medical care givers, volunteers and professionals. Send your life-giving Spirit so that their ministries may bring healing and promote health. Come to us now with your healing powers.

Breathe on me, O God, and make me whole.

Be also with those who work to heal the wounds of societies and nations. Guide, protect and strengthen our lawyers and police, chaplains and pastors, healthcare and social workers, politicians, military, diplomats and all others who work for economic and social reform. Send your life-giving Spirit that they may promote your love and grace, bringing healing to those in conflict and stability to those who are vulnerable. Come to us now with your healing powers.

Breathe on me, O God, and make me whole.

God so loved this world and this people that God sent Christ to suffer and die for us. Accept now that gift. Know that you are forgiven, reconciled, accepted and loved.

Breathe on me, O God, and make me whole.
Amen.

 

Romans 16: 1-16

Personal Greetings

16 I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon^[a][b] of the church in Cenchreae. ² I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me.

³ Greet Priscilla^[c] and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus. ⁴ They risked their lives for me. Not only I but all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them.

⁵ Greet also the church that meets at their house.

Greet my dear friend Epenetus, who was the first convert to Christ in the province of Asia.

⁶ Greet Mary, who worked very hard for you.

⁷ Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among^[d] the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.

⁸ Greet Ampliatus, my dear friend in the Lord.

⁹ Greet Urbanus, our co-worker in Christ, and my dear friend Stachys.

¹⁰ Greet Apelles, whose fidelity to Christ has stood the test.

Greet those who belong to the household of Aristobulus.

¹¹ Greet Herodion, my fellow Jew.

Greet those in the household of Narcissus who are in the Lord.

¹² Greet Tryphena and Tryphosa, those women who work hard in the Lord.

Greet my dear friend Persis, another woman who has worked very hard in the Lord.

¹³ Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother, who has been a mother to me, too.

¹⁴ Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas and the other brothers and sisters with them.

¹⁵ Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas and all the Lord’s people who are with them.

¹⁶ Greet one another with a holy kiss.

All the churches of Christ send greetings.

 

A Message

“Misquoting Jesus”

Friends, we’re moving on in our summer sermon series of “stump the preacher” sermons, requested by you, then researched by me. This one was requested by our friend Bob. Bob likes to read, and he’s been delving into material by Bart Ehrman, who chairs the department of religious studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and who specializes in the New Testament. I, too, love to read Bart Ehrman’s material, I read a lot of his stuff in college and I’ve been hooked since. Bob was curious about one Ehrman book in particular, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, first published in 2005. I recommend this book myself. I’ve read it twice, and it’s both educational and fascinating, plus Ehrman is a great writer. So, Bob’s request was that I do something from the pulpit with this material. Challenge accepted, Bob! Now, there’s no way to cover a 200 page book in a sermon that will still get you to lunch on time, so you’ll hear me touch on a few things Ehrman mentions. But the big difference between me and Ehrman is that he stays in the academic realm, and I hope to help you decide how anything I’m about to say influences your faith life. I hope the answer will be a whole lot, and for the better.

 

Now, when I told Sean the title for this book and what we were going to talk about, he said “Ohh, that’s dangerous! You might make some people mad this Sunday!” I don’t know if that’s true, but Sean has a definite point. Preaching on this is risky business. A lot of us were taught growing up, and would be comfortable maintaining, that the Bible was written in a more “simple” way. I can’t speak for you, but I was taught that Moses wrote the entirety of the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible (and if that’s true that means he wrote about his own death and burial!! Yikes!!!), and that all four Gospels were penned by Jesus’ own disciples within a few years of Jesus’ crucifixion. It would be a lot cleaner, and a powerful reminder of God’s place in this narrative, to imagine that God sent a lightening bolt down to a stack of paper, the Bible just appeared in print, and that was the end of that process. The actual writing of what we now call the Bible was far, far more complex. I think getting into that is incredibly interesting, but more than a few of my college classmates started getting burned out after a few semesters of what we call “higher biblical criticism”, or this research into how many different authors likely contributed to the Bible, how far removed the writing of these stories likely was from the actual time they took place, the social, political, and theological forces that went into changing these stories over time, the idea that we do not have the “original versions” of any of these stories, the oldest manuscripts we still have are copies of copies of copies, AND, to top it off, we have this reality that Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the oldest NT manuscripts we have are in Greek, and then the Greek needed to be translated into English for us to be able to read it, which means that when we read anything from the Gospels we’re reading a translation of a translation. I really really love this stuff, but if I was a “biblical inerrancy” person, someone who believes that the Bible is flawless in its original form, whatever that means, and that it contains no errors at all…I’d have a hard time listening to anything that’s about to come from this microphone. These ideas can be like Pandora’s Box, and a lot of us would much rather just keep that box shut.

 

So, if we’re going to get into how the Bible was written, and how it was changed, then let’s take a look at one of my favorite “where the Gospels came from” graphics:

 

 

Three of our four canonical Gospels are represented here. Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

We call them the “synoptic Gospels” because they share a ton of content, as you can see by the numbers on this pie chart, and the look very similar.

 

As you can see, each evangelist had content that was unique to just their community that they put in their Gospel. But stories that two Gospels share we call a “double tradition”, and stories that all three Gospels share we call a “triple tradition”.

 

Mark is the shortest of the Gospels—no birth story, no real introduction even, he gets right into the action. He’s a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of evangelist. He gets the content across as fast as possible, and we get the distinct impression reading his stories from beginning to end that he wrote in haste, maybe in the middle of a major crisis, and he wanted to get the story of Jesus out as fast as possible. Biblical scholars hypothesize that Mark was written first, likely shortly after Rome attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 66 CE.

 

Because Matthew and Luke share so much of Mark’s content, and yet say a lot more than him, write longer, and include birth narratives, biblical scholars believe Matthew and Luke were both written about ten to fifteen years after Mark, maybe between 75-80CE, and that they had Mark’s Gospel sitting right in front of them as a source. In antiquity this wasn’t plagiarism, if the author of Mark was still alive he would have been honored.

 

You don’t see John in here at all. His content is extremely different from anything we see in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Biblical scholars think John might have come from a fringe Christian group who called themselves “gnostics”, people who believed their special knowledge about Jesus was their key to heaven. We think John got included in what eventually became the Bible in the first place to try to reign in the gnostics and get them on the side of more orthodox, or “normal” Christians. There were lots of ancient stories about Jesus written down, and circulating. Lots and lots of Gospels. But by the fourth Century the early fathers of the emerging Christian Church decided these four Gospels, and only these four, were the ones they would see as authoritative, and truly inspired by God.

 

An interesting phenomena that you see going on between Matthew and Luke is this content that they share in common that you don’t find in Mark at all. Biblical scholars argue that there was another source that the authors of Matthew and Luke had in front of them in addition to Mark’s Gospel that they pulled from. But that “source” has never been found, and we have no name for it. So biblical scholars just called it “source”, and since a lot of them were from Germany that named that source “Quelle” which is just the German word for “source”. Since a lot of us can’t pronounce German words correctly, we nickname this mystery source “Q”. What is Q, and where did it come from? Will we ever find some old Q manuscript hiding somewhere? Only God knows.

 

The printing press wasn’t invented until about 1100 years after the early Church fathers decided on a canon that we now call the Bible, and in the meantime scribes copied those stories over, one letter at a time, by hand. And it was a messy process. They misspelled words. They got two pages stuck together and skipped one by accident. They used a lot of abbreviations to save time, and they got confused what word was supposed to be there. They made changes to one another’s work, sometimes to fix mistakes, and sometimes to change theology.

 

This morning’s reading is an example where a lot of those scribes from the olden days changed things because they didn’t agree with what they were supposed to copy over. This is from Paul’s letter to Rome, and it’s the big list of “say hi to my friends for me” that Paul liked to put in letters we know he actually wrote—like with the Gospels, there were lots more letters out there from Paul that didn’t make it into the Bible, and there are several epistles in the New Testament that claim to be from the pen of Paul but don’t match his writing style at all. In antiquity this wasn’t dishonesty. The people who wrote those letters lived much later than Paul, but loved and respected him, and wanted people to think of Paul and all of his wisdom when they read those letters. Anyway here in Romans we get down to verse 7, and the NIV tells us that Paul lifts up his friend Junia and Andronicus, who sat in a jail cell with him on account of their faith. These guys are real hard core apostles, Paul says. If you need an example of what it really means to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christ, just look at these two. But early scribes copying over that verse had a hard time believing that Junia, a woman, could really be this model apostle that men should model themselves after. So a lot of these scribes changed her name to Junius, to make it sound like she was a man that we were all looking up to. Today the NIV, the NRSV, and every other translation I use, say “Junia”, but there’s still several less popular translations, like the American Standard Version, that say Junius.

 

Now I could keep nerding out about this stuff for quite a while and not get bored. I could talk about how the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1945 shone a huge light on what the scriptures should contain. I could talk about how out Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox friends have books in their Bibles that we don’t have. I could bring up the ancient Latin Bible, called the Vulgate, or the ancient Greek New Testament, called the Septuagint. I could keep bringing up words that my spellcheck software didn’t recognize. And some of you might be nerding out with me, and some of you might think this stuff is about as interesting as watching paint dry. And y’all, that’s perfectly fine. You’re probably way more fun at parties.

 

There’s just two things I hope you might take away from all of this nerd speak:

1)     The next time there’s an argument brewing over some controversial issue like women’s rights or marriage equality or trans people going to the bathroom and someone cherry picks some verse out of the Bible and says “The Bible clearly says in Black and White…”, please understand, at least for yourself, that the Bible might not say that at all, and figuring out what the Bible says about most issues is super complicated and nuanced and absolutely not Black and White. And

2)     Y’all don’t have to be scared to engage your brains in the sanctuary. This stuff doesn’t take anything from my faith, it adds to it. The more I know about the Bible, the more I know about the Bible. This isn’t a case of “don’t learn how people make hotdogs if you ever want to eat one again.”

 

The Christian Church has struggled for most of its existence with how to handle academia, science, research, and, in general, people who ask too many questions. Your faith can survive intrigue and criticism, I promise. And if you dare to take the lid off of Pandora’s Box and start asking the hard God questions that scare you—what happens when we die? If God is good then why do bad things happen? Does Jesus love people who aren’t Christians? How did one guy get two of every animal on one boat and keep them there for a month and a half?—I really think you and Jesus will grow closer for it.

 

Amen.

 

Benediction:

Go out, among the outcast and the grieving,
and speak the word of life and hope.
Do not fear, but trust in God’s word.
Watch for the Lord with eager expectation,
and be generous with all God has given you.

And may God respond to your every cry with mercy;
May Christ Jesus take you by the hand and lift you to life;
and may the Holy Spirit build you up in faith, in speech,
........in knowledge, in passion and in love.
We go in peace to love and serve the Lord,
........In the name of Christ. Amen.