Carolina QuotesThe Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.
John Shelby Spong Carolinian
Source
Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy (2016)
- year
- 2016
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“The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. …” John Shelby Spong. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-1305F3D43A. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/1305f3d43a
More from John Shelby Spong
Integrity and honesty, not objectivity and certainty, are the highest virtues to which the theological enterprise can aspire. From this perspective, all human claims to possess objectivity, certainty, or infallibility are revealed as nothing but the weak and pitiable pleas of frantically insecure people who seek to live in an illusion because reality has proved to be too difficult.
[T]he discovery of an empty tomb would never have issued in an Easter faith. If there had been a tomb, and if that tomb had been found empty, it would have meant only that one more insult had been delivered to the leader of the tiny Jesus movement. The disciples, whoever they were, would have concluded that not even the dead body of this Jesus had been spared degradation. No Easter faith would have resulted from an empty tomb. Therefore such a tradition could not have been primary. It was but a story incorporated later into the narrative.
The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel.