John Dominic Crossan

This is a book I've been waiting to come along since I was in 2nd grade. That was back in the sixties when my family lived and worked on a farm in New Mexico and every Sunday went to a small Grace Assembly of God church. Even being so young, the convoluted Jesus story with its strange ancient magic didn't make sense to me. It wasn't supposed to make sense,I was told. It was all real and I just had to have faith.

Not being able to just have faith has continued my whole life. I don't reject show more Jesus. I believe he lived and remarkably changed the world. But I never have been able to throw in with Christianity and its oddly self-congratulatory emphasis on belief and conversely its general rejection of inquiry and doubt. In my Western culture it's a subject -- overt and covert -- that never goes away . It makes me ask periodically but regularly, who was Jesus really and how did "his" religion become derisive like this?

At last, in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography there are answers, answers that don't dismiss the questions, answers that for me are even more inspirational because of their realism. In this "revolutionary biography," Crossan presents a realistic portrait of Jesus without dismissing his remarkable message. Of course, so much information has been lost to time, and so much was never saved in time anyway it's probably impossible to be sure about anything about Jesus, but Crossan puts the man Jesus in context based on what can be known by using contemporaneous written sources, plus modern archaeology and sociology. He places Jesus firmly in the life and times of a Jewish peasant man living under brutal Roman rule and steeped in a highly religious and highly regulated society that was under great pressure. Jesus had ideas and teachings that were original, amazingly progressive and, probably even then, puzzling. These ideas were -- and were not -- what we often are led to believe they were.

In a nutshell, Jesus was teaching and living radical social egalitarianism. (Remarkable how 2000 years of devotion and study later, we can fall so very far below the mark.) He used healing and communal eating to set the example of the Kingdom of God he believed in.

After his ignominious and tortuous death, the message morphed, and Crossan sifts through the many ways that happened.

Scribes went searching for and incorporating exegesis items to the gospels in order to boost Jesus as the Jewish prophesied messiah. Crossan points where messages were politically tweaked and subsequently encoded into the gospels based on the leadership struggles of the First Christian factions. Then there was even the need to make Jesus interesting and competitive with the standard gods of the day, when gentiles were accustomed to a good yarn about a god's magical life and was a virtual requirement in order for the new message to be received. In spite of all that, Jesus' message is still there to be teased out from the New Testament, and in the non-canonical gospels too. (Like Crossan, I dig the Gospel of Thomas for the feeling of it being the least adulterated voice and message of Jesus.)

Of course I'm not a Biblical scholar and am aware Crossan's ideas are controversial to some. While reading, I wasn't always fully convinced by certain of his arguments. But I doubt there is anyone else who has given more rational study and intelligence to Jesus than Crossan. I am indebted to his work, it's been a revelation. Good to know someone is out there dedicated to understanding a profound (not magical) Jesus. show less

Another excellent book in Crossan and Borg's ongoing project of providing a carefully grounded historical basis for a revival of social justice theology and politics at the heart of Christianity. Here they make dangerous again the familiar (and almost completely fictional) stories of Christ’s birth that have been largely drained of social and political significance by organized Christianity. They clearly and concisely analyze the historical construction of the Nativity stories found in show more Mathew and Luke in the now forgotten context of anti-imperial Judeo-Christian politics of first century B.C.E.. While they are careful as always to point out where the paucity of evidence forces them to speculate and interpret, Crossan and Borg do not shy away from the theological and political implications of their work for contemporary Christians struggling with new, more powerful and more dominant forms of empire. show less

Second book (in a row) about the Apostle Paul and, again, I was delighted to see some of my assumptions and many previous interpretations (ahem, Luther) busted wide open. Illumination of actual context scratched my Bible Study itch and busted out of its context to find its way into my April Fools / Easter service this year: If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you can become wise.

John Dominic Crossan, a former Catholic priest and perhaps the most respected living scholar of early Christianity, has written at least nine books about Jesus from the perspective of an historian, not as a devotional advocate. He indicates that our knowledge of the historical character known as Jesus of Nazareth is very sketchy, with no surviving contemporaneous mention of him in the historical record. Only two historians writing before the third century C.E. mention him, and then only in show more passing. And they, Josephus and Tacitus, wrote at least 50 years after his death. So we are left with the gospels (both apocryphal and canonical) and a handful of epistles as our only sources of the historical Jesus.

Indeed, since virtually nothing is known about any of the gospel writers, it is not clear that anyone who actually saw or heard Jesus wrote anything that has survived to the present day. Biblical scholars almost universally agree that the gospel of Mark was the first of the canonical gospels to have been composed. Mathew and Luke borrow heavily from Mark, and probably from another gospel known to scholars as the Q gospel, which has not survived. In any event, the three so called synoptic gospels tell a similar story, although they disagree with one another on numerous small details. [The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called synoptic (from the Greek syn- together and opsis appearance) because they can be compared column by column with each other.] The Gospel of John, written some 20 to 30 years after the others, differs from them not only in tone, but also (rather substantially) in the events described.

On one thing, all four canonical gospels agree: Jesus taught in parables. A parable is a metaphorical story, always pointing to something externally beyond itself. Whatever its actual content may be, a parable is never about that content. Crossan argues that the gospels themselves are parables, each with a different implicit meaning that could have been divined by knowledgeable readers familiar with issues that affected Christianity at the time they were written.

The parable form of narration can be used to accomplish different goals. Crossan identifies four such goals: riddles, examples, challenges, and attacks. A parable can be a riddle that hides is meaning from all but the most astute or knowledgeable listeners; it can subtlely set an example; it can challenge the listener to think, discuss, or argue with others about its implicit or unstated meaning; or it can indirectly attack a person or an idea without literal confrontation. Crossan maintains that the challenge format is the best way to understand not only the parables of Jesus in the gospels, but also the structure of each of the gospels, as parables.

As an example of “challenge” parables, Crossan cites the stories of Ruth and Job. (He points out that the form of the stories Jesus told was an option already present in the biblical tradition.)

In the Book of Ruth, the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah demanded an immediate end to Israelite marriages with foreign women, in particular Moabites. And yet Ruth, a Moabite, turns out to be a grandmother of King David, one of Judaism’s most important figures. Thus, the story of Ruth serves as a challenge to the laws decreed by Ezra and Nehemiah. As Crossan notes wryly,

"This subversive challenge parable reminds us that general law proposes what a single story disposes.”

The Book of Job is even more of a challenge to Israelites of the Old Testament. It is, according to Crossan, a “three-level challenge parable.” In the first place, while Job is described as the holiest man on earth and “the greatest of all the people of the east,” he is not a Jew but a Gentile. Second, Job’s friends contend that he has been so cursed because he has disobeyed the Lord (as per Deuteronomy 28). But we know Job never disobeys; ergo Deuteronomy is wrong, at least in this one instance. And finally, Job is never told, even at the end, that all of his truly horrible woes have been the result of a wager between God and Satan. This is the ultimate challenge: what kind of God does this?

The teachings of Jesus described in the gospels, like the stories of Ruth and Job, challenge the listener or reader to step back from the literal content, and evaluate their deeper, figurative meanings. Crossan argues that Jesus urged the Jews of his time to cease looking for a military messiah, and look instead for a new “Kingdom of God” to be achieved through nonviolent resistance to imperial Roman control.

Crossan goes further, and argues that each of the four canonical gospels themselves, taken as a whole, can be seen on a meta level as a parable containing an implicit message in addition to the literal “facts” they purport to relate.

Crossan views the Gospel of Mark as a challenge to the authority of the twelve apostles, whom he generally describes as incompetent and less responsive to the message of Jesus than, say, various unnamed women. The Twelve are accused not only of incomprehension, but of culpable incomprehension. But since most of the Twelve were already dead, Crossan sees the challenge to “their ongoing theological tradition, leadership style, and named importance.”

Crossan labels the Gospel of Matthew as an “attack” parable. At the outset, Jesus begins with forbidding anger, insult, and name-calling (Matthew 5), but by Matthew 23, Matthew’s Jesus has upped the rhetorical violence: “this generation” of Mark becomes “an evil and adulterous generation” in Matthew. In Matthew we first hear Jesus threaten the “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew’s gospel is where we see the Jewish people as a whole say at the crucifixion, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Matthew does not see himself outside the Jewish community. To Crossan, “the very nastiness of his language indicates a stern family feud in the 80s between Christian Jewish scholars and Pharisaic Jewish scholars.” The message of Matthew’s parable is an attack on the non-Christian Jews of his time.

Crossan contends that the Gospel of Luke and the book called the Acts of the Apostles were actually one single book in two volumes by the same author. And in the book of [as he calls it] Luke-Acts, we see the Roman Empire treated rather mildly, whereas the Jews of his time are excoriated. Luke challenges Rome, but attacks Judaism.

The gospel of John is quite different from the three synoptic gospels. John regularly escalates accusations from part to whole, from Jewish authorities to the Jewish people. John writes from outside the Jewish tradition, possibly from a Samaritan tradition. John’s gospel is not only an attack on Judaism, but is also a challenge to the synoptic gospels.

In the Epilog, Crossan raises the question of whether Jesus was a real historical character or merely fictional. Crossan opines that Jesus was real, citing not only external evidence (Josephus and Tacitus) but also internal evidence. Here, cleverly, he analyzes the total change in the depiction of Jesus in the synoptic gospels to the description of him in his return to earth in the Revelation of John. In the Apocalypse, Jesus has morphed from a non-violent teacher into a mighty warrior. That very change suggests there was a real person. Why, he asks, would the early Christians invent a character they could not live with, but must steadily and terminally change into its opposite? Crossan concludes that “Jesus really existed, that we can know the significant sequence of his life . . . but that he comes to us trailing clouds of fiction, parables by him and about him, particular incidents as miniparables and whole gospels as megaparables.”

Evaluation: I have never found Crossan’s books to be anything but stimulating and insightful. He bases his observations on careful textural analysis that is unfortunately too detailed to summarize in a review. For those who have an interest in “the story behind the story” of early Christianity, one can hardly do better than to read the works of this eminent Biblical scholar.

(JAB) show less