MARTY MOSS-COANE   In his most recent book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes, (HarperCollins, 1996) Bishop John Shelby Spong says, "I do not believe that the Gospel offers us either reliable eye witness memory or realistic objective history. I do believe that Gospels are Jewish attempts to interpret in a Jewish way the life of a Jewish man in whom the transcendence of God is believed to have been experienced in a fresh and powerful encounter.

Spong goes on to explain that he believes that Christians have misread and distorted the Gospels, and by extension, misunderstood the message of Jesus because they have both ignored and dismissed the Jewish traditions, rituals, language and history which Spong believes undergird the content of the New Testament. He says that only by reading the Gospel with Jewish eyes can one truly understand the message of Jesus' life and death. He makes his argument in his new book, which promises to stir up controversy.

Spong is used to controversy. Over the years, he has challenged the traditional Christian teachings on sexual morality, on the role of women in the Christian Church, and on fundamentalist interpretations of the Scripture, and he's made a lot of enemies in the process. Some conservative members of the Christian church have accused him of heresy. But John Shelby Spong has his loyal supporters, too, and he is gainfully employed as the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey. It's a pleasure to have you back with us on Radio Times. Do you want to stir up controversy or do you just end up doing that?

SPONG   No, I really don't. That's not my agenda. But my agenda is to enable the message of the Christian faith to be heard. I do not believe that virgins can conceive or that people can walk on water or that a person can take five loaves and feed five thousand people. And if people insist that in order to be a Christian, you've got to approach it from this literal point of view, I think that Christianity is at its end.

On the other side, the reaction to the fundamentalist tradition is what I would call the empty, liberal, mainline churches. They don't know quite what they stand for. They've been rejecting fundamentalism and they keep trying to find some pearl of wisdom underneath it that they can cling to and it gets smaller and smaller. So, I think that what we need is a whole new starting place, and for me that starting place was discovered when I came to the understanding that the Gospels are written in a Jewish context. They make all sorts of sense in that Jewish context.

MOSS-COANE   When I interviewed you a couple of years ago for your previous book, which was about the resurrection, you talked about the Jewish tradition of midrash. When I read this book, I thought, "Aha! I can see where some of the ideas come from." Explain midrash for the audience.

SPONG   It's a difficult word outside Jewish circles. And even in Jewish circles. it's defined in a rather narrow way. In my attempt not to offend Jewish sensitivities, I use it as an adjective. I use the word "midrashic." What I mean by that is that the characteristic way that the Jews told their sacred story was to repeat in the present stories that occurred in the past.

For example, the traditional story of the Jewish Exodus, in which Moses split the Red Sea is retold as Joshua splitting the Jordan River and it's retold as Elijah splitting the Jordan River. Whatever lies behind those stories, certainly God did not spend all of his ancient history splitting every body of water to get every Jewish group through on dry land. Rather, its a midrashic tradition. Abraham stories are retold about Isaac, Moses stories are retold about David, and so on throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. What I'm suggesting in this book is that the Gospels, particularly the first three. Mark, Matthew and Luke, are written in this midrashic style....