The Fourth Gospel

May 20, 2013
If he's written it once, Spong (The Sins of Scripture), like many Biblical scholars, has written dozens of times: do not take the Bible literally. He is adamant that readers must not take the Gospel of John as history. Spong, the high-profile former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, stands on solid scholarship with these ideas: the Gospel of John was written over decades by several authors; Jesus did not speak the words ascribed to him in the book of John; none of the miracles happened; most of the book's charac-ters, the Marys and Nicodemus and Thomas, are just that -- literary characters, not literal men and women. More important than the negatives to the profoundly persuasive author is the unburnished pos-itive: divorced from latter-day fictions, John is one powerful gospel. To prove its base in Jewish mys-ticism, Spong paces through the signs, the farewell discourses, the passion narrative, and resurrection stories. The Fourth Gospel, Spong argues, calls on the faithful to believe that Jesus achieved "the mys-tical oneness with the God who is the source of life...."

Starred review from June 1, 2013
The Gospel of John differs from Mark, Matthew, and Luke in terms of style, tone, and many of the events described. Further, the gospel's tendency to negatively call out the Jews has led, in many ways, to anti-Semitism. So it's surprising that Spong, a former bishop and educator who has written persuasively about the need for a nontheistic Christianity, would choose to devote a book to John. And in fact, Spong writes about his difficulties coming to terms with John's message. But, in his eighty-second year, Spong feels he at last understands John, seeing it now in a new light, as the writing of a Jewish mystic. He moves readers deliberately through the pages of the gospel, explaining by example how he's come to his conclusions. John, he maintains, was written after the Johanine community had been expelled from the synagogue. Consequently, John's purpose in writing is to use Jewish symbolism to explain Jesus and his movement to those who would not or could not accept him. Spong himself says that many of the ideas herelet's boil it down to God is lovearen't new. But Spong is writing for a lay audience, and he does so magnificently. His thoughts are bracing, his writing exciting, and his conclusions thought provoking. Those who love reading about religion in general and Christianity in particular may want to go through this volume more than once.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)