Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey Into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel

A global and pioneering leader of progressive Christianity and the bestselling author of Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Eternal Life explains why a literal reading of the Gospels is actually heretical, and how this mistaken notion only entered the church once Gentiles had pushed out all the Jewish followers of Jesus.

A man who has consciously and deliberately walked the path of Christ, John Shelby Spong has lived his entire life inside the Christian Church. In this profound and considered work, he offers a radical new way to look at the gospels today as he shows just how deeply Jewish the Christian Gospels are and how much they reflect the Jewish scriptures, history, and patterns of worship. Pulling back the layers of a long-standing Gentile ignorance, he reveals how the church's literal reading of the Bible is so far removed from these original Jewish authors' intent that it is an act of heresy.

Using the Gospel of Matthew as a guide, Spong explores the Bible's literary and liturgical roots--its grounding in Jewish culture, symbols, icons, and storytelling tradition--to explain how the events of Jesus' life, including the virgin birth, the miracles, the details of the passion story, and the resurrection and ascension, would have been understood by both the Jewish authors of the various gospels and by the Jewish audiences for which they were originally written. Spong makes clear that it was only after the church became fully Gentile that readers of the Gospels took these stories to be factual, distorting their original meaning.

In Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy, Spong illuminates the gospels as never before and provides a better blueprint for the future than where the church's leaden and heretical reading of the story of Jesus has led us--one that allows the faithful to live inside the Christian story in the modern world.

In this provocative work of biblical criticism, Bishop Spong reveals:

• The Gospels as Liturgy: How the Gospel of Matthew was structured around the Jewish liturgical year, designed to be read in the synagogue, not as literal history.
• A Gentile Heresy: The startling argument that biblical literalism is a profound misreading that only became possible after the church lost its foundational Jewish perspective.
• Non-Literal Interpretation: A new look at the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, and the resurrection--not as historical facts, but as powerful Jewish interpretive stories pointing to a deeper truth.
• Biblical Criticism for Believers: A framework from Bishop John Shelby Spong for engaging the Bible with intellectual honesty without losing faith, offering a path for Christianity to thrive in the modern world.

John Shelby Spong, the Episcopal Bishop of Newark before his retirement in 2000, has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard and at more than 500 other universities all over the world. His books, which have sold well over a million copies, include Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy; The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic; Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World; Eternal Life: A New Vision; Jesus for the Non-Religious, The Sins of Scripture, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?; Why Christianity Must Change or Die; and his autobiography, Here I Stand. He writes a weekly column on the web that reaches thousands of people all over the world. To join his online audience, go to www.JohnShelbySpong.com. He lives with his wife, Christine, in New Jersey.