Midrash texts make heavy use of literary allegory to illustrate meaning. A common technique is to tell us about new characters by having them replay events or speak words of older Biblical characters. In fact, in Jewish literature, every story that can claim inspiration must somehow be connected with a sacred moment of the past. This was something common to even the canonized Torah. The story of Joshua is told through the lens of Moses. Rich allegory is used to paint Joshua (Yahoshua, Hebrew for “Savior”) as the new Moses who takes over as the next heroic figure in Jewish antiquity. The Joshua story draws on symbolic acts of Moses including the way they told about the Israelites crossing the Jordan River in a miracle that is clearly an allegory to the Red Sea crossing a generation earlier. Even the Garden of Eden stories and their more developed Midrash complimentary texts appear to be formed as allegoric reference to the Promised Land.

Why is this important to Christians? To understand our own defining texts (the Gospels), we need to recognize their roots in Midrash. Long before western thinkers literalized our myths and symbols, Jesus (Greek for Joshua or savior) had his own life captured by writers steeped in Midrash tradition. Starting with a birth story that compares Jesus and Moses as survivors of infant genocide and ending with an ascension to the heavens that grounds Jesus in the legend of Elijah, the gospels tell us about Jesus through well known stories of Jewish antiquity. In between those two events, these symbolic Gospels include a story about the parting of heavens that is set in the Jordan River, another story about a walk across water, a dramatic set of new commandments delivered from a mountain, and a Palm Sunday donkey ride borrowed from the prophetic words of Isaiah. That merely scratches the surface of the allegorical texts in the gospels. All seem to point to the creative techniques of Midrash.

When studying midrash, students realize the question to ask of the texts is not, Did it really happen? That is a western question tied to a western mind-set that seeks by sensory perception to measure and describe those things defined as objectively real.
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The proper question of the midrsh tradition is, what was the experience that led, or even compelled, the compilers of the sacred tradition to include this moment, this life, or this event inside the interpretive framework of their sacred past? What was there about Jesus of Nazareth that required the meaning of his life to be interpreted through the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Passover, Exodus and wilderness, Sinai and the promised land, Hnnah and Samuel, David and Solomon, Elijah and Elisha, the servant figure and the son of man, Pentecost and Tabernacles, and a thousand other choices that served to incorporate the life of Jesus into the meaning of God known in the history of the Jewish people? That is the midrash question of which we were ignorant for so long, the question that could not be asked in any substantive way until we developed Jewish eyes and Jewish minds with which to read and understand our own holy gospel. – Bishop John Shelby Spong, “Resurrection: Myth or Reality” (p.9)

When I first began to look at the Gospels as symbolic narratives, I was concerned about the implications. Had we been lied to? Was this a 2000-year-old hoax? Was the modern liberal attempts to trivialize the stories the only way out of this problem? I think the answer to each of those questions is, No. Understanding the Gospels as products of Midrash tradition eliminates the intention of hoax and it provides for a reconciliation of ancient stories, modern scholarship, and postmodern deconstruction.