Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
by John Dominic Crossan
In the Prologue, Crossan lays out the three intersecting points which guide his reconstruction of the historical Jesus. The first is cross-cultural anthropology. By examining cultures like that of first-century Israel, Crossan hopes to shed light on what we can know about Jesus, who lived in that sort of culture. “This information is crucial since it has no direct connection to Jesus and is therefore not likely to be skewed for or against him.” (xii) The second is Greco-Roman and especially Jewish history. “What is primary here is the situation of the Jewish homeland as a colony of the Roman Empire, as the land bridge between Syria to the north and Egypt to the south, and as a political unit either ruled directly by Roman governors or indirectly by Herodian rulers.” His primary source for this point is Josephus. The third intersecting point is the literary or textual one. Crossan holds to the idea that the synoptic gospels underwent serious revisions and redactions until they reached the form which we currently have in the New Testament canon. He writes that there are three successive levels in the evolution of the synoptic gospels: “retention of original Jesus materials, development of those retained materials, and creation of totally new materials…” (xiii) His proposition is that the synoptic gospels don’t tell us much about Jesus but tell us a lot about the early church and how the church perceived Jesus decades after his life and death. Consequently, the gospels can’t tell us a whole lot about the historical Jesus, unless we are able to “devolve” the gospels by stripping away that which was created and developed by the early church. This isn’t an original take on the gospels and has been Common Currency for a while, at least among a good percentage of gospel scholars; nevertheless (and Crossan doesn’t mention this), the idea that the gospels are windows into the early church rather than windows looking into Jesus has come under a lot of fire lately, and many gospel scholars are revisiting the very paradigms which have guided historical reconstructions of the Third Quest.
In Chapter One, Crossan looks at the similarities between the birth narratives of Caesar Augustus and Jesus of Nazareth. His argument is that just as the birth narratives of Caesar Augustus were “invented” to suit a theological story revolving around the Roman ruler, so it is with Jesus: the birth narratives are creations which carry theological undertones. “[Jesus’ infancy narratives] are not so much the first chapters of Jesus’ life, from which other chapters about the rest of his infancy and youth have been, as it were, hidden or lost, as they are overtures, condensed intertwinings of the dominant themes in the respective gospels to which they serve as introduction and summary.” (5) As far as infancy narratives, only two gospels (Matthew and Luke) contain anything on the matter; both Mark and John begin with John the Baptist at the burgeoning of Jesus’ prophetic career. Crossan argues that Luke’s infancy narrative “sends two powerful messages to hearer or reader: John [the Baptist] is the condensation and consummation of his people’s past, but Jesus is far, far greater than John.” (10) He argues that Matthew’s infancy narrative identifies Jesus as the new Moses: “Just as Pharaoh heard of the predestined child’s arrival and sought to kill him by killing all the infant males, so did Herod the Great with Jesus. And just as Moses’ father refused to accept the general decision of divorce and received a heavenly message through Miriam announcing his child’s destiny, so Joseph considered but rejected divorce from Mary upon receiving an angelic message announcing his child’s destiny. Moses would ‘save my people’ from Egypt, but Jesus would ‘save his people from their sins.’… Jesus flees for refuge to Egypt, the very hand from which Moses finally escaped… Jesus is the new and greater Moses.” (15)
Crossan then turns his attention on the most famous aspect of the birth narratives: the virgin conception. As Matthew puts it, the virgin birth was prophesied by the prophet Isaiah. “That cited prophet is Isaiah 7:14, and the original situation for the prophecy in 734-735 B.C.E. was a failed attempt to persuade Ahaz, king of the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah, which was under attack from the combined forces of Syria and the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel, to trust in God rather than appeal to the Assyrian emperor for assistance. Since Ahaz refused assurance of divine assistance, he received instead a prophecy of doom, in Isaiah 7:14-25. Before any ‘young woman shall conceive and bear a son’ and that child ‘knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good’—that is, grows to maturity—both the two attacking kingdoms and Ahaz’s own kingdom would lie devastated. God will indeed be ‘Immanuel,’ that is, ‘God with him’—but in judgment, not salvation.” (16-17) Crossan continues, “The prophecy in Isaiah says nothing whatsoever about a virginal conception. It speaks in Hebrew of an almah, a virgin just married but not yet pregnant with her first child. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures the term almah was translated parthenos, which in that context meant exactly the same thing—namely, a newly married virgin.” (17) It seems that Matthew read the Isaiatic prophecy as one of hope rather than doom and “took its term virgin to apply not only to the prior state of the mother but to her continuing state even during and after conception.” Crossan continues, “[Somebody] went seeking in the Old Testament for a text that could be interpreted as prophesying a virginal conception, even if such was never its original meaning. Somebody had already decided on the transcendental importance of the adult Jesus and sought to retroject that significance onto the conception and birth itself. It is not necessary, by the way, to presume that all early Christian traditions viewed Isaiah 7:14 as prophesying a virginal conception for Jesus. Indeed, it cannot be found anywhere outside that tradition independently known to Matthew and Luke and used only in their infancy narratives.” (18) Crossan humorously looks at the interpretation of the virgin birth from the point-of-view of the pagan philosopher Celsus who insisted that “a cover-up for bastardy must have been the real reason for such claims [as the virgin birth]. The illegitimate father was, he claims, a Roman soldier named Panthera, in whose name we catch a mocking and reversed allusion to parthenos, the Greek word for the young woman from Isaiah 7:14.”
Crossan looks at another aspect of the birth narratives: Bethlehem. Micah 5:2 gives the hope of Israel’s future ruler coming out of Bethlehem. Because Jesus is assumed to be this future ruler, and because it was well-known he was from Nazareth, the authors of Matthew and Luke had to find a way to get him into Bethlehem at birth to make the prophecy stick. Crossan argues that they invented the census that required everyone to return to their place of birth to register; he insists that (a) there’s no historical evidence for such a census while Jesus was being born, and (b) a census done in this manner would be odd. Censuses for taxation purposes didn’t require you to go to your hometown; you registered where you lived, because that’s where you’d be taxed.
With both the virgin birth and the census, Crossan advocates that (a) we have no historical evidence for such events, and (b) the events themselves were invented by the gospel writers to accomplish the purposes of linking Jesus to Old Testament prophecies. I’ll admit that when it comes to the infancy narratives, I’m not sure what to think; if they are theological constructions, that doesn’t bother me in the least. If, for instance, Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin, and if the return to Bethlehem isn’t historical fact, it doesn’t impact my faith and convictions regarding Jesus in the same way that, say, the implausibility and historical indefensibility of the resurrection would do. The fact of the matter is that the resurrection has far more historical support than the virgin birth; at the same time, the bulk of Crossan’s argument against the historicity of the birth narratives has to do with his particular convictions regarding the evolution of the gospel narratives (a conviction that has been losing support) and that the historical records themselves don’t attest to the virgin birth. This is where we run into the problem of bias: if you approach the gospels as historical texts, applying to them the same historical methods and scrutinizes that you apply to the works of, say, Josephus or Cicero, then you are forced to conclude that they carry the same historical significance of either. The problem is that the gospels are theological in nature, and history as such doesn’t deal with the meaning of events (whether theological or mythological) but with the events themselves; because the gospels carry theological meanings that cannot be missed, they are placed by default in a category of their own. Because they are theological, they cannot be historical. This bias against the gospels as history is due not to historical analyses but to assumptions regarding history. My point is that if you consistently apply the historical method to the gospels in the same way that you apply them to other biographies of the same period, then you’re faced with a dilemma: both Matthew and Luke attest to the virgin birth, and in doing so they give the virgin birth more historical credence than a good number of historical events that are taken for granted precisely because they are attested to and do not carry theological meaning.
In Chapter Two, Crossan portrays John the Baptist as an apocalyptic prophet who was gearing up for a divine face-off with Rome by creating a network of peoples who were ready to share in God's new world when God made His move. A major question involves why Herod Antipas had the Baptist killed. After all, "[messianic] claimants must be distinguished from apocalyptic prophets. The latter do not presume any military rebellion but announce instead that transcendental power will soon effect what human resistance cannot imagine--a total victory of good over evil, of us over them, and a world of justice and goodness where earth and heaven coalesce forever." (40) The Baptist falls into the second category; prophets like him "led large crowds into the wilderness so that they could recross the Jordan into the Promised Land, which God would then restore to them as of old under Moses and Joshua." (42) Reenacting Israel's story, the Baptist went "out into the Trans-Jordanian Desert and submitted himself to the Jewish God and Jewish history in a ritual reenactment of the Moses and Joshua conquest of the Promised Land. He became part, thereafter, of a network within the Jewish homeland awaiting... the imminent advent of God as the Coming One. Presumably, God would do what human strength could not do--destroy Roman power--once an adequate critical mass of purified people were ready for such a cataclysmic event." (45-46) Crossan locates the Baptist "among those Jewish and peasant apocalyptic prophets appearing, according to Josephus, from the thirties through the sixties of that terrible first common-era history." (43) Though the gospels portray the Baptist's arrest and subsequent execution due to his criticism of Herod's family and the misplaced promises of the tetrarch, Crossan speculates that Herod Antipas executed John the Baptist because his movement was growing too large and threatening the social fabric of Galilee. Crossan presents Jesus as a disciple of John the Baptist who continued John's work after his death, albeit reworking the message so that he went from being an apocalyptic prophet to an eschatological figure. The term eschatology, as Crossan employs it, indicates "a radical criticism of culture and civilization and thus a fundamental rejection of the world's values and expectations. It describes those who have turned profoundly away from normal life in disappointment or anger, in sorrow or pain, in contempt or abandonment. They imagine another and more perfect world whose alluring visions trivializes the one all around them." (52)
In Chapter Three, Crossan presents Jesus' mission and message about the kingdom of God as a sapiential vision of radical egalitarianism. He begins by defining the kingdom of God: it's about "power and rule, [but] a process much more than a place, a way of life much more than a location on earth. The basic question is this: How does human power exercise its rule? The Kingdom of God is people under divine rule--and that, as ideal, transcends and judges all human rule. The focus of discussion is not on kings but on rulers, not on kingdom but on power, not on place but on process. The Kingdom of God is what the world would be if God were directly and immediately in charge." (55) He identifies two types of kingdoms:
(1) The Apocalyptic Kingdom. This type of kingdom "is dependent on the overpowering action of God moving to restore justice and peace to an earth ravished by injustice and oppression. Believers can, at the very most, prepare or persuade, implore or assist its arrival, but its accomplishment is consigned to divine power alone... [Its] consummation would be objectively visible and tangible to all, believers and unbelievers alike, but with appropriately different fates for each group." (55-56) While it would seem evident, by a number of Jesus' teachings, sayings, and stories, that the kingdom of God was much like this, Crossan denies it. He does what most liberal gospel scholars do: he eliminates as ahistorical those things that conflict when his assumptions regarding Jesus. He casts aside anything smacking of apocalyptic, declaring it to be a creation of the early church, and focuses on Jesus' moral or ethical teachings, which fall into the second category:
(2) The Sapiential Kingdom-Vision. "The term sapiential underlines the necessity of wisdom--sapientia in Greek--for discerning how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God's power, rule, and dominion are evidently present to all observers. One enters that kingdom by wisdom or goodness, by virtue, justice, or freedom. It is a style of life for now rather than a hope of life for the future. This is therefore an ethical kingdom..." (56)
This was Jesus' take on the kingdom, Crossan argues, and it's seen most evidently in Jesus' practice of open commensality, "an eating together without using tables as a miniature map of society's vertical discriminations and lateral separations." (69) By dining with the refuse of society, Jesus was both extending the kingdom to "the least of these" and challenging the power of the elite. "Since... Jesus lived out his own parable, the almost predictable counteraccusation to such open commensality would be immediate: Jesus is a glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners. He makes, in other words, no apprioriate distinctions and discriminations." (69) In lieu of the honor and shame inherent in such free dining, Crossan argues that "we might see Jesus' message and program as quaintly eccentric or charmingly iconoclastic (at least at a safe distance), but for those who take their very identity from the eyes of their peers, the idea of eating together and living together without any distinctions, differences, discriminations, or hierarchies is close to the irrational and absurd. And the one who advocates or does it is close to the deviant and the perverted. He has no honor. He has no shame." (70) Because of the groupist mindset of first-century Jews (over against modern individualism), Jesus' actions take on more meaning and carry more weight. My criticism of Crossan's take on the kingdom comes on several fronts: he employs a stretched reading of some passages, and he picks what is historical based on a hunch, totally disregarding apocalyptic texts simply because they don't jive with his assumptions.
In Chapter Four, Crossan examines Jesus' healings and exorcisms. Because Crossan doesn't believe that Jesus performed legitimate miracles or exorcisms (his worldview doesn't allow it), he has to find ways around what the vast majority of gospel scholars, liberal or conservative, seem as standard historical truth: Jesus did heal the sick and he did exorcise demons. To argue that these were invented after his time, or that the peasants of Galilee were too dumb to know the difference, is a gross oversimplification that doesn't carry weight in the scholarly world. In addition, his embracing of modern approaches to illness and disease, and attributing them back onto first-century Judaism, is a logical fallacy: people wouldn't think or understand in those terms. Furthermore, by looking at exorcism from a minority-held sociological perspective, Crossan executes the same fallacy that Richard Dawkins does when he approaches sociology from a biological perspective: he's way out of his league and in over his head. Now let's look at Crossan's take on the two subjects:
Jesus' Healings. Crossan embraces a modern distinction between disease and illness. He builds on the works of both Leon Eisenberg and Arthur Kleinman. Eisenberg argues that "[illnesses] are experiences of disvalued changes in states of being and in social function; disease, in the scientific paradigm of modern medicine, are abnormalities in the structure and function of body organs and systems..." (80) Kleinman, in the same vein, wrote, "Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychosocial experience and meaning of perceived disease. Illness includes secondary personal and social responses to the primary malfunctioning (disease) in the individual's physiological or psychological status (or both)..." (81) Crossan writes, "Disease sees the problem, unrealistically, on the minimal level; illness, realistically, on the wider level... A cure for a disease is absolutely desirable, but in its absence, we can still heal the illness by refusing to ostracize those who have it, by empathizing with their anguish, and by enveloping their sufferings with both respect and love." (81) I don't know if those actually suffering AIDS would see things as black-and-white as Crossan, but let's move past that analysis and ask, "Does this make sense of what we see in the gospels?" Crossan believes the distinction, though modern and unknown to the people of the New Testament, is invaluable in interpreting the gospel stories of Jesus' healings. He asks, "Was [Jesus] curing the disease through an intervention in the physical world, or was he healing the illness through an intervention in the social world? I presume that Jesus, who did not and could not cure [diseases], healed [illness] by refusing to accept the disease's ritual uncleanness and social ostracization." He continues, "By healing the illness without curing the disease, Jesus acted as an alternative boundary keeper in a way subversive to the established procedures of his society." Crossan can't believe in the miraculous healings because of his worldview, and so he must find a way around them, even if the vast majority of scholars accept that Jesus was a miraculous healer. Although clever, Crossan's argument fails because it doesn't take into account the fact that there is no historical reason to doubt that Jesus was a real healer who healed real things. Indeed, even most liberal sketches of "the historical Jesus" factor this into their equation.
Jesus' Exorcisms. When it comes to casting out demons, Crossan is in agreement with most westerners: demons don't exist, and therefore Jesus didn't cast out demons. But how do we make sense of the countless stories of exorcism? As with healings, so with exorcisms: there must be another explanation. Crossan approaches the subject from a sociological perspective, building upon the obscure works of a handful of sociologists who observed that exorcisms seem to flourish in cultures under domination. Crossan argues that belief in (and even manifestation of) demonic possession is directly linked to one's social psyche. "If [people] submit gladly to colonialism, they conspire in their own destruction; if they hate and despise it, they admit that something more powerful than themselves, and therefore to some extent desirable, is hateful and despicable. And what does that do to them?" (91) He continues, "[Colonial] exorcisms are at once less and more than revolution; they are, in fact, individuated symbolic revolution." (91) The split-personality of the Jewish people under rule is the culprit behind the belief in and manifestation of demonic possession. One word: hogwash.
In Chapter Five, Crossan looks at the similarities and differences between Cynic teaching and way of life to Jesus' teachings and Way of Life. "Cynicism was a Greek philosophical movement... The term itself means, literally, 'dogism,' coming from kyon, the Greek word for 'dog,' and it was used, as if quoting a well-known nickname, of Diogenes by Aristotle. It was originally a derogatory term for the provocative shamelessness with which Diogenes deliberately flouted basic human codes of propriety and decency, custom and convention. We use cynicism today to mean belief in nothing or doubt about everything, but what it means philosophically is theoretical disbelief and practical negation of ordinary cultural values and civilized presuppositions." (114-115) The chapter builds to a head, Crossan writing that both the Cynic teachers and Jesus "are populists, appealing to the ordinary people; both are life-style preachers, advocating their position not only by word but by deed, not only in theory but in practice; both use dress and equipment to symbolize dramatically their message. But [Jesus] is rural, they are urban; he is organizing a communal movement, they are following an individual philosophy; and their symbolism demands knapsack and staff, his knapsack and no staff. Maybe Jesus is what peasant Jewish Cynicism looked like." (122)
Chapter Six looks at Jesus' crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. "Passover celebrated the deliverance of the Jews from bondage in Egypt and their departure to conquer the Promised Land. It was obviously a rather dangerous festival in a colonized country with imperial overlords, with Romans replacing Egyptians, as it were--especially as it brought together very large crowds in a very concentrated space... With Jewish police within the Temple courts and Roman auxiliary troops overlooking them from the Antonia fortress to the north, force was poised to stop any trouble before it could begin. But what did Jesus do to get himself crucified?" (127-128) The event that led to Jesus' arrest and crucifixion is encapsulated in Mark 11.15-19, the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers in the Temple's outer courts. Crossan correctly observes, "[There] was absolutely nothing wrong with any of the buying, selling, or money-changing operations conducted in the outer courts of the Temple. Nobody was stealing or defrauding or contaminating the sacred precincts. Those activities were the absolutely necessary concomitants of the fiscal basis and sacrificial purpose of the Temple." (131) What, then, was the purpose? The writer of Mark knew "that Jesus was not just purifying but symbolically destroying the Temple, because he carefully framed his action within the fruitless fig tree's cursing in 11.12-14 and its withering in 11.20." How was Jesus doing this? Crossan writes that Jesus' action "[wasn't] a physical destruction of the Temple, but it is a deliberate symbolic attack. It destroys the Temple by stopping its fiscal, sacrificial, and liturgical operations." (131) Why did Jesus focus on the Temple? Crossan speculates that "the spiritual and economic egalitarianism he preached in Galilee exploded in indignation at the Temple as the seat and symbol of all that was nonegalitarian, patronal, and even oppressive on both the religious and the political level. Jesus' symbolic destruction simply actualized what he had already said in his teachings, effected in his healings, and realized in his mission of open commensality. But the confined and tinderbox atmosphere of the Temple at Passover, especially under Pilate, was not the same as the atmosphere in the rural reaches of Galilee, even under Antipas, and the soldiers moved in immediately to arrest him." (133) Throughout the rest of the chapter, Crossan looks at the passion narrative and the burial stories, attributing both fabrication by the early church. His interpretations are stretched, to say the least, and they don't explain why such fabrications would come up in the first place. Failed messiahs were nothing knew; what was it that set this crucified messiah, probably fed to the dogs rather than buried, apart from all the rest? Crossan has nothing to say on this point despite the question that is begged.
In Chapter Seven, Crossan seeks to explain how the story of Jesus' resurrection came about. He begins this chapter distinguishing between resurrection and apparition, and he writes, "Christian faith experiences the continuation of divine empowerment through Jesus, but that continuation began only after his death and burial... It is precisely that continued experience of the Kingdom of God as strengthened rather than weakened by Jesus' death that is Christian or Easter faith. And that was not the work of one afternoon. Or one year." (161) He believes that after Jesus' death, his followers still felt his presence and empowerment, and they went out as missionaries "in imitation of Jesus' own life-style, practicing free healing and open commensality." (163) He writes that these "early Christians" weren't concerned with Jesus' death and resurrection but "with departure and return, passion and parousia." The idea of bodily resurrection, Crossan theorizes, comes from the odd-bird Paul the Apostle. If it weren't for Paul, Christianity as the continued experience of the crucified Christ wouldn't have been burdened by anything as outlandish as the resurrection. Crossan has no choice but to deal with 1 Corinthians 15.12-20, an early Christian creed predating the gospels and attesting to Jesus' appearing to countless people. He seeks to wiggle out of this "thorn in his side" not by attributing Jesus' appearances to trances, hallucinations, or visions as some scholars have done with laughable success; rather, he interprets the text not as telling us about events so much as telling us about the evolution of leadership in the Jerusalem church. Again Crossan tries to use sociology to dispel any problem areas, and it's about as successful as his attempts at doing the same with demonic possession. Crossan goes on to attribute the nature miracles in the gospels as fictional stories created to portray existential realities after Jesus. These nature miracles, he says, "were not concerned with control over nature before Jesus' death or with entranced apparitions after it; rather, they were quite dramatic and symbolic narratives about power and authority in the early Christian communities." He continues by saying that these stories "tell us nothing whatsoever about the origins of Christian faith but quite a lot about the origins of Christian authority. They tell us about power and leadership in the earliest Christian communities. They tell us about the establishment of leadership groups over general communities and they tell us very clearly about competing specific leaders within and among those groups." (190) Again he seeks to deal with texts by using the broad strokes of sociology.
Crossan has to answer the riddle about the growth of the church and Jesus becoming divine, and he seeks to do this in the Epilogue. He writes that "[those] who had originally experienced divine power through [Jesus'] vision and his example continued to do so after his death. In fact, even more so, because now this power was no longer confined by time or place... Some of Jesus' own followers, who had initially fled from the danger and horror of the crucifixion, talked eventually not just of continued affection or spreading superstition but of resurrection." (197) Christianity flourished, resurrection became a part of the narrative, and by the days of Constantine, other competing views with resurrection were extinguished with the Nicene Creed. One could even say, Crossan postulates, that orthodox Christianity is nothing more than Constantine's Christianity. He has no evidence to back up these claims (and he speaks with such authority that one wouldn't know how much of this he's just making up), and so his explanations are shaky, at best.
Thus throughout this book, Crossan portrays a type of Jesus that is wholly divorced from the Jesus we know today through hymns and doctrine. Jesus was a sort of Jewish Cynic. "Pagan Cynicism involved practice and not just theory, life-style and not just mind-set, in opposition to the cultural heart of Mediterranean civilization--a way of looking and dressing, of eating, living, and relating that announced its contempt for honor and shame, for patronage and clientage. Jesus and his followers... were hippies in a world of Augustan yuppies." (198) He writes, "The historical Jesus was a peasant Jewish Cynic. His peasant village was close enough to a Greco-Roman city like Sepphoris that sight and knowledge of Cynicism are neither inexplicable nor unlikely... His strategy, implicitly for himself and explicitly for his followers, was the combination of free healing and common eating, a religious and economic egalitarianism that negated alike and at once the hierarchical and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman broker... He was neither broker nor mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to force individuals into unmediated physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the unmediated or brokerless Kingdom of God."
In Chapter Three, Crossan presents Jesus' mission and message about the kingdom of God as a sapiential vision of radical egalitarianism. He begins by defining the kingdom of God: it's about "power and rule, [but] a process much more than a place, a way of life much more than a location on earth. The basic question is this: How does human power exercise its rule? The Kingdom of God is people under divine rule--and that, as ideal, transcends and judges all human rule. The focus of discussion is not on kings but on rulers, not on kingdom but on power, not on place but on process. The Kingdom of God is what the world would be if God were directly and immediately in charge." (55) He identifies two types of kingdoms:
(1) The Apocalyptic Kingdom. This type of kingdom "is dependent on the overpowering action of God moving to restore justice and peace to an earth ravished by injustice and oppression. Believers can, at the very most, prepare or persuade, implore or assist its arrival, but its accomplishment is consigned to divine power alone... [Its] consummation would be objectively visible and tangible to all, believers and unbelievers alike, but with appropriately different fates for each group." (55-56) While it would seem evident, by a number of Jesus' teachings, sayings, and stories, that the kingdom of God was much like this, Crossan denies it. He does what most liberal gospel scholars do: he eliminates as ahistorical those things that conflict when his assumptions regarding Jesus. He casts aside anything smacking of apocalyptic, declaring it to be a creation of the early church, and focuses on Jesus' moral or ethical teachings, which fall into the second category:
(2) The Sapiential Kingdom-Vision. "The term sapiential underlines the necessity of wisdom--sapientia in Greek--for discerning how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God's power, rule, and dominion are evidently present to all observers. One enters that kingdom by wisdom or goodness, by virtue, justice, or freedom. It is a style of life for now rather than a hope of life for the future. This is therefore an ethical kingdom..." (56)
This was Jesus' take on the kingdom, Crossan argues, and it's seen most evidently in Jesus' practice of open commensality, "an eating together without using tables as a miniature map of society's vertical discriminations and lateral separations." (69) By dining with the refuse of society, Jesus was both extending the kingdom to "the least of these" and challenging the power of the elite. "Since... Jesus lived out his own parable, the almost predictable counteraccusation to such open commensality would be immediate: Jesus is a glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners. He makes, in other words, no apprioriate distinctions and discriminations." (69) In lieu of the honor and shame inherent in such free dining, Crossan argues that "we might see Jesus' message and program as quaintly eccentric or charmingly iconoclastic (at least at a safe distance), but for those who take their very identity from the eyes of their peers, the idea of eating together and living together without any distinctions, differences, discriminations, or hierarchies is close to the irrational and absurd. And the one who advocates or does it is close to the deviant and the perverted. He has no honor. He has no shame." (70) Because of the groupist mindset of first-century Jews (over against modern individualism), Jesus' actions take on more meaning and carry more weight. My criticism of Crossan's take on the kingdom comes on several fronts: he employs a stretched reading of some passages, and he picks what is historical based on a hunch, totally disregarding apocalyptic texts simply because they don't jive with his assumptions.
In Chapter Four, Crossan examines Jesus' healings and exorcisms. Because Crossan doesn't believe that Jesus performed legitimate miracles or exorcisms (his worldview doesn't allow it), he has to find ways around what the vast majority of gospel scholars, liberal or conservative, seem as standard historical truth: Jesus did heal the sick and he did exorcise demons. To argue that these were invented after his time, or that the peasants of Galilee were too dumb to know the difference, is a gross oversimplification that doesn't carry weight in the scholarly world. In addition, his embracing of modern approaches to illness and disease, and attributing them back onto first-century Judaism, is a logical fallacy: people wouldn't think or understand in those terms. Furthermore, by looking at exorcism from a minority-held sociological perspective, Crossan executes the same fallacy that Richard Dawkins does when he approaches sociology from a biological perspective: he's way out of his league and in over his head. Now let's look at Crossan's take on the two subjects:
Jesus' Healings. Crossan embraces a modern distinction between disease and illness. He builds on the works of both Leon Eisenberg and Arthur Kleinman. Eisenberg argues that "[illnesses] are experiences of disvalued changes in states of being and in social function; disease, in the scientific paradigm of modern medicine, are abnormalities in the structure and function of body organs and systems..." (80) Kleinman, in the same vein, wrote, "Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychosocial experience and meaning of perceived disease. Illness includes secondary personal and social responses to the primary malfunctioning (disease) in the individual's physiological or psychological status (or both)..." (81) Crossan writes, "Disease sees the problem, unrealistically, on the minimal level; illness, realistically, on the wider level... A cure for a disease is absolutely desirable, but in its absence, we can still heal the illness by refusing to ostracize those who have it, by empathizing with their anguish, and by enveloping their sufferings with both respect and love." (81) I don't know if those actually suffering AIDS would see things as black-and-white as Crossan, but let's move past that analysis and ask, "Does this make sense of what we see in the gospels?" Crossan believes the distinction, though modern and unknown to the people of the New Testament, is invaluable in interpreting the gospel stories of Jesus' healings. He asks, "Was [Jesus] curing the disease through an intervention in the physical world, or was he healing the illness through an intervention in the social world? I presume that Jesus, who did not and could not cure [diseases], healed [illness] by refusing to accept the disease's ritual uncleanness and social ostracization." He continues, "By healing the illness without curing the disease, Jesus acted as an alternative boundary keeper in a way subversive to the established procedures of his society." Crossan can't believe in the miraculous healings because of his worldview, and so he must find a way around them, even if the vast majority of scholars accept that Jesus was a miraculous healer. Although clever, Crossan's argument fails because it doesn't take into account the fact that there is no historical reason to doubt that Jesus was a real healer who healed real things. Indeed, even most liberal sketches of "the historical Jesus" factor this into their equation.
Jesus' Exorcisms. When it comes to casting out demons, Crossan is in agreement with most westerners: demons don't exist, and therefore Jesus didn't cast out demons. But how do we make sense of the countless stories of exorcism? As with healings, so with exorcisms: there must be another explanation. Crossan approaches the subject from a sociological perspective, building upon the obscure works of a handful of sociologists who observed that exorcisms seem to flourish in cultures under domination. Crossan argues that belief in (and even manifestation of) demonic possession is directly linked to one's social psyche. "If [people] submit gladly to colonialism, they conspire in their own destruction; if they hate and despise it, they admit that something more powerful than themselves, and therefore to some extent desirable, is hateful and despicable. And what does that do to them?" (91) He continues, "[Colonial] exorcisms are at once less and more than revolution; they are, in fact, individuated symbolic revolution." (91) The split-personality of the Jewish people under rule is the culprit behind the belief in and manifestation of demonic possession. One word: hogwash.
In Chapter Five, Crossan looks at the similarities and differences between Cynic teaching and way of life to Jesus' teachings and Way of Life. "Cynicism was a Greek philosophical movement... The term itself means, literally, 'dogism,' coming from kyon, the Greek word for 'dog,' and it was used, as if quoting a well-known nickname, of Diogenes by Aristotle. It was originally a derogatory term for the provocative shamelessness with which Diogenes deliberately flouted basic human codes of propriety and decency, custom and convention. We use cynicism today to mean belief in nothing or doubt about everything, but what it means philosophically is theoretical disbelief and practical negation of ordinary cultural values and civilized presuppositions." (114-115) The chapter builds to a head, Crossan writing that both the Cynic teachers and Jesus "are populists, appealing to the ordinary people; both are life-style preachers, advocating their position not only by word but by deed, not only in theory but in practice; both use dress and equipment to symbolize dramatically their message. But [Jesus] is rural, they are urban; he is organizing a communal movement, they are following an individual philosophy; and their symbolism demands knapsack and staff, his knapsack and no staff. Maybe Jesus is what peasant Jewish Cynicism looked like." (122)
Chapter Six looks at Jesus' crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. "Passover celebrated the deliverance of the Jews from bondage in Egypt and their departure to conquer the Promised Land. It was obviously a rather dangerous festival in a colonized country with imperial overlords, with Romans replacing Egyptians, as it were--especially as it brought together very large crowds in a very concentrated space... With Jewish police within the Temple courts and Roman auxiliary troops overlooking them from the Antonia fortress to the north, force was poised to stop any trouble before it could begin. But what did Jesus do to get himself crucified?" (127-128) The event that led to Jesus' arrest and crucifixion is encapsulated in Mark 11.15-19, the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers in the Temple's outer courts. Crossan correctly observes, "[There] was absolutely nothing wrong with any of the buying, selling, or money-changing operations conducted in the outer courts of the Temple. Nobody was stealing or defrauding or contaminating the sacred precincts. Those activities were the absolutely necessary concomitants of the fiscal basis and sacrificial purpose of the Temple." (131) What, then, was the purpose? The writer of Mark knew "that Jesus was not just purifying but symbolically destroying the Temple, because he carefully framed his action within the fruitless fig tree's cursing in 11.12-14 and its withering in 11.20." How was Jesus doing this? Crossan writes that Jesus' action "[wasn't] a physical destruction of the Temple, but it is a deliberate symbolic attack. It destroys the Temple by stopping its fiscal, sacrificial, and liturgical operations." (131) Why did Jesus focus on the Temple? Crossan speculates that "the spiritual and economic egalitarianism he preached in Galilee exploded in indignation at the Temple as the seat and symbol of all that was nonegalitarian, patronal, and even oppressive on both the religious and the political level. Jesus' symbolic destruction simply actualized what he had already said in his teachings, effected in his healings, and realized in his mission of open commensality. But the confined and tinderbox atmosphere of the Temple at Passover, especially under Pilate, was not the same as the atmosphere in the rural reaches of Galilee, even under Antipas, and the soldiers moved in immediately to arrest him." (133) Throughout the rest of the chapter, Crossan looks at the passion narrative and the burial stories, attributing both fabrication by the early church. His interpretations are stretched, to say the least, and they don't explain why such fabrications would come up in the first place. Failed messiahs were nothing knew; what was it that set this crucified messiah, probably fed to the dogs rather than buried, apart from all the rest? Crossan has nothing to say on this point despite the question that is begged.
In Chapter Seven, Crossan seeks to explain how the story of Jesus' resurrection came about. He begins this chapter distinguishing between resurrection and apparition, and he writes, "Christian faith experiences the continuation of divine empowerment through Jesus, but that continuation began only after his death and burial... It is precisely that continued experience of the Kingdom of God as strengthened rather than weakened by Jesus' death that is Christian or Easter faith. And that was not the work of one afternoon. Or one year." (161) He believes that after Jesus' death, his followers still felt his presence and empowerment, and they went out as missionaries "in imitation of Jesus' own life-style, practicing free healing and open commensality." (163) He writes that these "early Christians" weren't concerned with Jesus' death and resurrection but "with departure and return, passion and parousia." The idea of bodily resurrection, Crossan theorizes, comes from the odd-bird Paul the Apostle. If it weren't for Paul, Christianity as the continued experience of the crucified Christ wouldn't have been burdened by anything as outlandish as the resurrection. Crossan has no choice but to deal with 1 Corinthians 15.12-20, an early Christian creed predating the gospels and attesting to Jesus' appearing to countless people. He seeks to wiggle out of this "thorn in his side" not by attributing Jesus' appearances to trances, hallucinations, or visions as some scholars have done with laughable success; rather, he interprets the text not as telling us about events so much as telling us about the evolution of leadership in the Jerusalem church. Again Crossan tries to use sociology to dispel any problem areas, and it's about as successful as his attempts at doing the same with demonic possession. Crossan goes on to attribute the nature miracles in the gospels as fictional stories created to portray existential realities after Jesus. These nature miracles, he says, "were not concerned with control over nature before Jesus' death or with entranced apparitions after it; rather, they were quite dramatic and symbolic narratives about power and authority in the early Christian communities." He continues by saying that these stories "tell us nothing whatsoever about the origins of Christian faith but quite a lot about the origins of Christian authority. They tell us about power and leadership in the earliest Christian communities. They tell us about the establishment of leadership groups over general communities and they tell us very clearly about competing specific leaders within and among those groups." (190) Again he seeks to deal with texts by using the broad strokes of sociology.
Crossan has to answer the riddle about the growth of the church and Jesus becoming divine, and he seeks to do this in the Epilogue. He writes that "[those] who had originally experienced divine power through [Jesus'] vision and his example continued to do so after his death. In fact, even more so, because now this power was no longer confined by time or place... Some of Jesus' own followers, who had initially fled from the danger and horror of the crucifixion, talked eventually not just of continued affection or spreading superstition but of resurrection." (197) Christianity flourished, resurrection became a part of the narrative, and by the days of Constantine, other competing views with resurrection were extinguished with the Nicene Creed. One could even say, Crossan postulates, that orthodox Christianity is nothing more than Constantine's Christianity. He has no evidence to back up these claims (and he speaks with such authority that one wouldn't know how much of this he's just making up), and so his explanations are shaky, at best.
Thus throughout this book, Crossan portrays a type of Jesus that is wholly divorced from the Jesus we know today through hymns and doctrine. Jesus was a sort of Jewish Cynic. "Pagan Cynicism involved practice and not just theory, life-style and not just mind-set, in opposition to the cultural heart of Mediterranean civilization--a way of looking and dressing, of eating, living, and relating that announced its contempt for honor and shame, for patronage and clientage. Jesus and his followers... were hippies in a world of Augustan yuppies." (198) He writes, "The historical Jesus was a peasant Jewish Cynic. His peasant village was close enough to a Greco-Roman city like Sepphoris that sight and knowledge of Cynicism are neither inexplicable nor unlikely... His strategy, implicitly for himself and explicitly for his followers, was the combination of free healing and common eating, a religious and economic egalitarianism that negated alike and at once the hierarchical and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman broker... He was neither broker nor mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to force individuals into unmediated physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the unmediated or brokerless Kingdom of God."
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