By Victor Greto
He looks harmless enough.
When I first saw John Dominic Crossan, one of the premier scholars in the ongoing search for the Historical Jesus, I thought: small, old, fragile.
He met me at the door of his home sheepishly, with a crooked grin and a strong handshake. He’s short, his hair a thinning gray; his eyes shine small beneath large wire-rimmed glasses. His first word, “Hello,” betrayed a rich Irish accent.
This was the first time I’d met him. I had seen him once before at an event at Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore, speaking on a Sunday night after a week-long series of lectures by noted authors who write on religion and spirituality.
“I remember the Denver talk,” Crossan said to me when I mentioned I had seen him there as a silent member of the audience. “I felt very out of place.”
Although light, Crossan’s eyes grow dark when he smiles and nods at the same time. You’re in on his secret, the nod says. The secret, in this instance, was that Crossan didn’t belong there in the first place. Although just as spiritual as the next man or woman, Crossan prides himself on his contrariness in his chosen field, and the contentiousness his books have wrought in his chosen subject.
Capping a decade of success, he has recently published a memoir, A Long Way From Tipperary: What a Former Irish Monk Discovered in his Search for the Truth.
His condominium seems as deceptively small as himself. At the top floor of a complex in Clermont, Florida, about 10 miles west of Orlando, he leads me into a small alcove, through a stark white-tiled kitchen, into a long living and dining room decorated in black and white: black dining room table and chairs, black leather couches and a large glass oval coffee table, all set deep into a thick white carpet. Abstract art, which he collected over the years in Chicago where he taught at DePaul University for nearly three decades, cover the white walls. Toward the end of the living room and facing opposite to the rest of the home sit two recliners and a television set. Outside the window, Lake Mineola shimmers.
This is the home of one of the more provocative scholars of the Historical Jesus. Crossan, both reviled and praised by scholars and lay people alike, buzzes like a diminutive gadfly around the lumbering horse of early Christian scholarship. A Catholic because “I couldn’t be anything else,” he’s a self-conscious dissenter with more than a dozen books to his credit that, over more than three decades, have progressively skewered the accepted understanding of who Jesus of Nazareth was, or could have been.
The centuries-old quest for the Historical Jesus has grown into an American cultural phenomenon, a tempest in which historical methodology, theology and lay opinion have creatively collided to produce a plethora of books, essays and newspaper articles in the last decade.
Crossan writes at the eye of this storm. In fact, it is partially his success as a writer and lecturer that helped provoke the squall.
The 66-year-old Crossan physically resembles the thousands of other retired elderly that see Florida as the place to retire and cozily die. Although Crossan’s home is cozy enough, he’s not ready to comfortably wither away and let go of the search for the Historical Jesus.
He and Sarah, his wife of fifteen years, share a large office where they both write. Even though Crossan retired from teaching in 1995, this is where he spends much of his time. Crossan says he now works harder on his scholarship than ever before. Thanks to the Internet and his Macintosh, he doesn’t need to be geographically close to research materials. They come to him – just like the dozens of e-mail and letters he receives each week from people who read his books, hear his lectures and want to know what his problem is.
His problem – the ongoing search for the Historical Jesus – is as old as the burning of Jerusalem 1,930 years ago, which changed the course of early Christianity by sealing the doom of a strictly Jewish interpretation of Jesus’ message; as old as the nineteenth-century search for the Historical Jesus, when German Protestant scholars began tearing apart the texts of the New Testament; as old as the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille film King of Kings, which etched into the American visual imagination what Christ did and how he literally rose from the dead on the third day in a flash of heavenly might.
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Crossan’s own motivation and creativity spring from Irish soil.
His literary imagination began to soar as a child in Naas, Co. Kildare, Ireland, about twenty miles from Dublin. On walks along the Dublin road, he says, his father recited poetry to him, which the 10-year-old Crossan memorized for six pence a poem. Like his Irish forebears, his childhood was filled with the spoken word. More than fifty years later, Crossan can recite on request snippets of the Kipling he memorized along that dirt road.
And like every Irish boy, his life became partially defined by British-Irish history, both in school and out. “My father’s sister was married to an IRA man,” he says, the same man who often drunkenly showed the boy the well-greased Luger he’d used – “not in the fight for Irish independence but in the Irish civil war which immediately succeeded its partial acceptance,” Crossan has written. “He was on Mike Collins’ side,” he says with a wink, referring to the leader of Sinn Fein. In school, he learned even more of the perennial bitterness between Britain and Ireland.
Even so, he says, his household was never seriously political. His father was a bank manager in Donegal. It was the policy of the bank to have no opinion on politics; it wouldn’t do to alienate either Catholic or Protestant.
“At school,” he says, “I had British-Irish history. At home it was Irish vs. Irish. That sort of history affected me in two ways. It sensitized me to revenge and justice, and to actually expand the options within resistance to oppression.”
That is, the option of non-revenge, the cornerstone of his interpretation of the Historical Jesus. Crossan will have nothing to do with what he calls the “killer God” of apocalyptic thought, the belief that God will end the world with a cataclysmic event, which will fully and finally separate the saints from the sinners, bringing the former eternal bliss, and the latter eternal damnation. Jesus was not preaching revenge against the Roman oppressor, or even against the biblically-stubborn Pharisees – literate first century Jews who discussed the meaning of the Jewish Scriptures and created an oral tradition surrounding its interpretation – in the form of a world-ending apocalyptic fervor, as many scholars and theologians have understood Jesus.
For Crossan, Jesus both preached and lived “radical egalitarianism,” a “realized eschatology” that understood the “kingdom of God” as a world-negating process here and now. As Crossan writes in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994), “Those who, like peasants, live with a boot on their neck can easily envision two different dreams. One is quick revenge – a world in which they might get in turn to put their boots on other necks. Another is reciprocal justice – a world in which there would never again be any boots on any necks.”
Why, then, the apocalyptic sheen lacquering most of the New Testament, from the Gospel of Mark to Paul’s 1 Thessalonians to the Book of Revelation?
Crossan shakes his head. Besides the notion of a killer God, Crossan seems unable to respect any reader who takes a work of religious literature at face value. Just look at the Gospels themselves, he says repeatedly.
The Gospels are the first four books of the New Testament, and include Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Since the 19th century, scholars have generally dated their origins from at least 40 years after the death of Jesus. The scholarly consensus has held for decades that Mark was probably written first, sometime after 70 C.E.; Matthew and Luke, perhaps in the 80s C.E.; John, the most enigmatic, as late as 100 C.E. Christian tradition, however, has understood Matthew and John to have been written by eyewitnesses, and Luke and Mark by men associated with the disciples.
On the contrary, the Gospels are interpretations, Crossan says, parables of a kind that turned the life of a man who told enigmatic stories of the kingdom of God into one of apocalyptic foreboding; that turned a life-affirming message into a death-oriented, the-end-is near religion fixated on sin.
Crossan seems to relish in his identification as the one spreading the “bad” news that the “good news” or Gospels are not what they seem, even though this idea is at least as old as David Friedrich Strauss’ 1835 Life of Jesus Critically Examined. This insight is perhaps the most intriguing one presented by contemporary scholars.
Were the Gospels ever what they seemed?
Of course not, says Crossan. “Christ becomes parable for the early Christians,” he says. “Mark knew what he was doing.”
The Gospel of Mark, many scholars argue, changed everything about the Jesus movements that sprang up during and after Jesus’ death. The author of Mark wove together oral traditions, including parables, miracle stories and sayings, into a written narrative structured to inevitably lead toward the passion and resurrection. This first “good news” of the kingdom of God – probably written more than 40 years after the crucifixion – showed Jesus as both a prescient and avenging Son of God. Why? Because when the author of Mark wrote, most did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God – even and especially the Jews to whom Jesus had originally preached – and the author of Mark became convinced that Jerusalem had just been razed to the ground (70 C.E.) by the Romans because of this stubborn non-belief.
Mark’s portrayal of the Pharisees as casuistic and resentful, the dullness of the Apostles, and Jesus’ certitude about the manner and meaning of his own death contributed to this general picture. There were evidently too few remaining original Jewish Christians to protest such a radically new interpretation of the movement Jesus began. Matthew and Luke, the two gospels that chronologically follow Mark, re-arrange and embellish it to suit their own growing communities’ needs. But the apocalyptic vision remains. John, which may or may not know Mark, both repeats and changes key events of the passion, but is not apocalyptic in Mark’s sense, showing Jesus as an all-knowing, in-control Son of God.
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Crossan studied Greek and collected stamps in high school during the late 1940s. When he thought about what he was going to do after high school, it never crossed his mind to go into banking like his father. For studious, introspective 16-year-old Irish lads, there was the priesthood.
“I had been an altar boy since I was eight,” Crossan says. “Still, I never imagined I would become a diocesan priest.” He says he had no vocation. “This was Ireland. All of this is part of the woodwork. I wasn’t overtly pious; I was inside the system. But it was an option. The adventure struck me.”
Many representatives from monastic orders spoke at his high school; but it was the Servite Order that intrigued him most. “They had been to Africa, Asia. They said that after a one year novitiate, I could go to Rome, America or Belgium. And they were very interesting; they were an American group.”
In the fall of 1951, Crossan began studying at the order’s monastery outside of Chicago. After six years of philosophical and theological study, he was ordained a priest.
The prime virtues of the order, Crossan says, were obedience and silence. He could do both, at least for a while. “The whole vow of obedience,” he says, “if it involved place and subject was never a problem. When it meant what you say or think, it broke down.”
It took a while to break down. After all, he had never even read the Bible until long after he had left home. It took years to read and re-read and think about what he was reading. “I learned how to think,” Crossan explains of his Servite training. “I wasn’t getting so much the content but the confidence.” If he could hack his way logically through the works of Thomas Aquinas, he could tackle the New Testament itself. Some day.
“When I was growing up,” Crossan says, “Catholicism was the rosary and the stations of the cross, a sermon during the Mass. When I got to the monastery, it was the breviary – the liturgy. I only knew the New Testament as stories told to me. I had no idea or thought as to whether it was literally true or not.”
When he finally sat down and read the New Testament in its original, if relatively crude, Greek, it was “like a breath of fresh air. This was not scholastic theology.”
He read the New Testament as stories, as stories within stories: “It gave me sympathy for those who were listening to these stories in the first century.”
Crossan fell in love with those narratives, especially the parables. The parables are short, enigmatic tales told by Jesus to both his disciples and others as recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. They are often so puzzling that the gospel writers report Jesus explaining them to disciples who nonetheless may or may not understand their points.
Crossan cut his scholarly teeth on parable studies. His first slim books, published in the 1970s, were detailed analyses of such parables as the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37), the Great Feast (Matthew 22:1-13; Luke 14:15-24) and the Mustard Seed (Mark 4:30-32; Matthew 13:31-32; Luke 13:18-19 ). In those books, ruled by the structuralism of that decade, Crossan showed how those parables, pared down to their minimalist parts, revealed the Historical Jesus as a man who questioned the very nature of an oppressive social structure by telling stories that stood their listeners on their heads. The point of the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, is not how the author of the Gospel of Luke has it, to “Go out and do as he did” and help anyone in need, but to show through startling conjunctions (such as Levite-Samaritan) that a Samaritan could actually be good – this to an audience of Jews of the first century, to whom Samaritans were perhaps their worst enemies outside of the Romans. This story, Crossan argued in his early work, shows a vision of an entirely different society where assumptions became prejudices, enemies became lovers, and shame became sham. In other words, the kingdom of God was not hovering for a signal from an avenging God, but re-thinking the system and loving made it so – now.
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After he was ordained, Crossan earned his theological doctorate, and, in 1959, attended the Biblical Institute in Rome to specialize in textual analysis of the Bible. He returned to the U.S. in 1961, and taught the Bible at the Servite seminary. “I was the entire biblical department and taught my way through the complete bible over a four-year cycle,” he says.
As Crossan was immersing himself more deeply into the texts of the Bible, the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1959-1965, was changing Catholicism. Crossan says he and those his age “felt a euphoria” at the council’s general liberal tendencies. In 1965, Crossan went on a two-year sabbatical to the Ecole Biblique, a school of archaeology run by the French Dominicans in Jerusalem. From there, Crossan was able to make short trips to Jordan and Israel, Greece and Turkey, Iraq and Iran, Lebanon and Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. He returned to the U.S. just before the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967.
Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On The Regulation of Birth), changed Crossan’s life. Among many other statements, the encyclical declared (section 14) that “the direct interruption of the generative process already begun, and, above all, directly willed and procured abortion, even if for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as licit means of regulating birth.”
Crossan disagreed. Not just in thought, he says, but publicly and on television. “I was invited to come on a PBS program. I said yes, I would go as a theologian, not as a priest. There, I used the analogy of Vietnam,” that just as loyal Americans could oppose the war, so good Catholics could oppose such an encyclical. “I said (the encyclical) was a disastrous mistake.”
Crossan was already a source for journalists in Chicago who came to him for comments on church doctrine, history and theology. As now, he enjoyed nothing more than talking about his ideas, what he calls “teaching lay people. I love being a source. You come out of the seminary and schools with all this knowledge. You spent all this time studying; what you can do in class only went so far.”
He says he then ran up against the church hierarchy in Chicago, which challenged his fitness to be a priest. Although nothing came of it, Crossan says he wanted out. “The worst crimes in this century have been done in the name of obedience,” he says, “and that’s the super virtue of the church.” But, he importantly insists, he cannot not be Catholic. “Most Catholics go their own way on different issues. I equate the church not with its hierarchy, but with community and tradition.”
He also left the priesthood to marry Margaret Dagenais, who later founded the Fine Arts Department at Loyola University in Chicago. The following year he became a professor at DePaul University. Freed from both obedience and silence, Crossan could now indulge in what he loved best: textual analysis of the Bible, most especially the sayings, aphorisms and parables of Jesus.
It was within the aphorisms and parables of the gospels that Crossan began to see what he calls “the challenge of the Historical Jesus.” In his work during the 1970s, he says, he pulled the parables out of their context, analyzed their structures, detailed their common and differing points among the gospels. “It’s the lure of the parable to interpret it,” Crossan says. “I only found out through later research that the parables that always interested me were the ones from the Historical Jesus.”
It also was in those books that Crossan began looking outside of the New Testament canon of the four gospels for other versions of similar parables, including the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in 1945 in Egypt, and part of a larger collection of ancient religious texts known as the Nag Hammadi Library. Since Thomas’ discovery, some scholars have dated parts of it as having been written prior to Mark.
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Crossan’s first wife died of a heart attack in 1983. By himself for months, he says, he began to work on a book that changed his intellectual direction. At the prompting of an editor, Crossan fully left the confines of the New Testament canon in his book, Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of the Canon, and examined the gospels of Thomas, Secret Mark, Egerton and Peter. It was the latter fragmentary gospel, found in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, that led Crossan on a path to history and a portrait of Jesus quite different from what had previously been suggested. Peter offers a radically different account of the events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection, including a “harrowing of Hell,” where Jesus leads a horde of saints out of the tomb prior to the resurrection, as well as what amounts to an exoneration of the Jews as the killers of Jesus. The real culprits in this fragment are the Jewish leaders, including “Herod,” who is not even present in the canonical accounts of the same events (except for a brief moment in Luke 23:8-12).
Crossan’s 1988 book, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative, continued his analysis of Peter. There, he argued that a strata within Peter was written prior to Mark’s passion narrative. To prove this still highly controversial position, Crossan constructed meticulous charts of the five gospels’ similarities and differences, showing how the gospel writers created narrative detail from Old Testament prophecy and stories, as well as how some gospels inherited and then subtly changed certain details of the passion from either Mark or Peter to suit their own needs. One of the book’s more challenging arguments, based on the prominent inclusion of Herod in Peter, placed the date of the primary strata of Peter at between 41-44 C.E., the only time a member of the Herod family ruled all of Palestine since the more famous Herod the Great’s death in 4 B.C.E.
While Crossan constructed his argument, the Jesus Seminar began. The seminar, first convened in March 1985 by scholar Robert W. Funk, was organized under the Westar Institute, a self-proclaimed advocacy group for religious literacy. The seminar was founded to “renew the quest of the Historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to more than a handful of gospel specialists.”
It began with thirty scholars, including Crossan, and has since expanded to 200 “fellows.” It has published two major collaborative works: The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (1993), and The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds (1998). The publicity generated by these books in newspapers and magazines has stirred anger from both scholars and lay people, stunned by the seminar’s findings that, for example, only sixteen percent of the deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels are historically probable. Also, the seminar’s method of achieving consensus, by voting for authentic deeds and sayings using colored beads (red for probable, gray for unlikely, for example), has been drolly looked upon by some scholars.
The seminar worked on the sayings first. Crossan, however, was by then working on The Cross That Spoke. “I had been there, done that,” Crossan says of the sayings, but he joined the seminar anyway, drawn by the lure of its purpose to educate the general public through publicity. He provided the seminar with his database of sayings from both canonical and non-canonical early Christian writings, eventually published in 1986 as Sayings Parallels: A Workbook for the Jesus Tradition.
After The Cross That Spoke, Crossan says he poured himself into the history of the first century. But not your usual suspects, including the first century Jewish historian Josephus, whose upper-class bias – along with anyone else who was literate in the first century – inhibited any serious understanding of the period. He began to read cultural anthropology.
“I began reading the key books of cross-cultural anthropology, reading their bibliographies for other books to read,” Crossan says. Some of the authors he used later included Gerhard Lenski, Mary Douglas and Bruce Malina.
“It was the anthropology that pushed me (into finally writing a book on the Historical Jesus),” Crossan says. “The (traditional) history started to make sense to me. I finally understood what rebellion against the Romans meant. The elite will never tell you. But anthropology will tell you that rise of banditry in a commercial agrarian society, for example, is because of a social crisis. How do you learn to read your sources against themselves? It’s the anthropologists that taught me to see it from both points of view.”
If cross-cultural anthropology helped Crossan focus on class in the first century, it was Crossan’s fixation on method that finally put him over the top.
“As I was working on method, I knew I couldn’t just say the parables were the only thing to use,” he says. “I had to go to the deeds. I had been using double attestation (where an incident or saying appears in at least two independent sources) – many of the parables then went away – what jumped out was healing and eating. My method was drawing attention to certain things.”
Crossan’s 1991 book, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, was “written for my peers and to discuss methodology,” he says. “Without a method, you can do whatever you want with the Historical Jesus.”
Crossan’s stated method was three-fold, and included two strategies: in order to understand the Historical Jesus, he argued, a historian must use cross-cultural anthropology, or what is common across history to all those of the same ecological and technological type; he must understand Greco-Roman and Jewish history (elite or literate history); and he must use literary or textual evidence, writings both within and outside the New Testament. His strategies included a focus on the earliest stratum of tradition, which he dated from 30-60 C.E., and multiple attestation.
Crossan’s 500-page book became a religious bestseller after it was featured in a Dec. 23, 1991, New York Times article. Sales took off. A book, written ostensibly to scholars about method, and which did not even get to the life of Jesus until page 227, sold thousands of copies and changed his life.
Crossan’s ultimate point about Jesus, elaborated in different ways in his books through the 1990s, is perhaps best summed up in 1995’s Who Killed Jesus.
The Kingdom of God movement was Jesus’ program of empowerment for a peasantry becoming steadily more hard-pressed, in that first-century Jewish homeland, through insistent taxation, attendant indebtedness, and eventual land expropriation, all within increasing commercialization in the booming colonial economy of a Roman Empire under Augustan and a lower Galilee under Herodian urbanization. Jesus lived, against the systemic injustice and structural evil of that situation, an alternative open to all who would accept it: a life of open healing and shared eating, of radical itinerancy and fundamental egalitarianism, of human contact without discrimination and divine contact without hierarchy.
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Since 1991, Crossan has insisted repeatedly that Jesus was a radical “Jewish cynic” who moved continually to spread the idea of kingdom of God; that the “power” Jesus gave his followers was the belief that the process or reign of the kingdom of God was manifest in the act of living radical egalitarianism. Easter, Crossan argued in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, did not happen on the Sunday after his crucifixion. If anything, that DeMille-like understanding is insulting to those believers who felt empowered by Jesus with the kingdom of God long before his death. As a Christian, Crossan says he understands Jesus to be a manifestation of God – but not God.
“Here’s a sound bite for you about Jesus,” Crossan told me: “He was a peasant with an attitude. As a Christian, I believe that attitude is the attitude of God.”
Crossan’s Historical Jesus has become his full-time job. The quest for the Historical Jesus begun in Germany in the nineteenth century, he says, “is a huge unfinished business in Christianity. If you claim you’re a historical religion, everything you claim is historical should be open to historical discussion. What is really new is the attempt to create the dialectic between history and faith, between reason and revelation, and that this be done in public.”
The past decade has been good to Crossan, both financially, with the sale of his books, and in fame. He has even published a paperback, Who is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus (1996), which prints e-mails and letters he’s received from lay people who’ve read his work. He answers the questions patiently and clearly, like the undergraduate teacher he had been for thirty years. The clarity and logic of his arguments in most of his books are part of the reason for his success.
Still, Crossan says his work during the 1990s has failed on the scholarship front.
“No one has taken up the challenge of the Historical Jesus book and adopted or discussed my method,” he says. “A reaction has set in. Some so-called scholars brush me off by saying I use non-canonical sources.” He shakes his head as he says this, amazed at such a childish reaction.
Crossan is a paradox. His demeanor and the tone of his voice remains unassuming, while the content of his speech and attitude reveal thoughts and feelings that are anything but humble. At the time of our interview, he had just received a signed copy of Paula Fredriksen’s latest book on the Historical Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity. When I asked Crossan what he thought of the argument of the book, he said quickly and with a sheepish smile, “Well, I just got it and scanned it, but it seems she’s basically arguing that her Jesus is more Jewish than mine.”
Crossan likes Fredriksen. But with Bart Ehrman he has no patience. Ehrman argues in his books, including, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, that Jesus was starkly apocalyptic in outlook. Crossan – and many contemporary scholars – think just the opposite. But it’s not just Ehrman’s position that bothers Crossan the most, and this perhaps points to Crossan’s attitude toward most of his fellow scholars.
“People like him don’t even recognize or challenge my historical methodology,” he says. They haphazardly accept certain passages in the Gospels as historically authentic, which many other scholars who use historical criteria do not. “Of course,” Crossan smiles, “I can find plenty of apocalyptic ideas in the New Testament. But are they from the Historical Jesus? No.”
On his black leather couch, surrounded by stark white, Crossan can’t help but smile and shake his head in pity. For a man who believes he has taken on the challenge of the Historical Jesus, the challenge of lesser, tendentious scholars seems hardly daunting.
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It was Crossan’s skill at writing and arguing historically in a field dominated by theologians that led me to assign his 1994 book, The Historical Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, for a history class on early Christianity I created as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
Although I received my Masters Degree in European history, specifically the Renaissance, the subject of history and religion had held my intermittent attention since the seventh grade, when I first read a book about the historical foundations of Hebrew culture and beliefs. Informed by movies and popular culture, my subsequent amateur investigations into the background of Christianity and Jesus led to a series of personal if muted epiphanies, which helped pour what personal faith remained within me into the historical method and fascination with the subject of history itself.
Early Christian and Historical Jesus scholarship became a sideline with me through college. I majored in English at Colorado College, but I took both an “Old Testament” and “New Testament” class there, which further piqued my interest and forced me to actually read the Bible. After I earned my Masters Degree at the University of Colorado, I began teaching basic survey courses in Western Civilization. Throughout my post-graduate education, however, I continued to read Historical Jesus scholarship both secretly and greedily. It spoke too much to home, to my Catholic upbringing, to the depth of my mother’s faith and how I remembered feeling as a child standing next to her in church.
I read everything I could get my hands on about the Historical Jesus, and during the first half of the 1990s, I noticed more and more books about the subject being published. With my growing knowledge of the subject, I proposed and was approved to teach a history class at the university about the Historical Jesus and early Christianity.
Books I read over those years ranged from the magisterially safe (John Meier’s three-volume work on the Historical Jesus) to the trenchantly theological (Raymond Brown’s The Birth of the Messiah and The Death of the Messiah) to the more radical (Burton Mack’s A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins and Who Wrote the New Testament?), to dozens of others old and new, in between and on the outer edges. Authors included E.P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, Robert Eisenman, Paula Fredriksen, Dennis Duling, Albert Schweitzer, Helmut Koester, Richard Horsley, James Charlesworth, Robert Funk, Marcus Borg, Hyam Maccoby and G.A. Wells. There are, of course, many more authors who have written on the Historical Jesus, but these have been the most interesting to me, the most challenging in one way or another.
Listing them together would probably anger or embarrass most of them. For example, Crossan, though exceedingly polite, bristles at the mention of either Brown or Meier, Catholic scholars who have tried to marginalize him and his scholarship in their books.
Still, the ideas and evidence offered by those authors in their books were persuasive enough to at least challenge my preconceived notions of Jesus, notions incessantly fed by movies, media, memories of church homilies and hearsay.
One other thing about Historical Jesus scholarship that you catch on to quickly: after you read a bunch of these books, you can easily deduce an author’s background, from the Christian denomination to his or her theological conservatism or brand of Judaism. It seems you’re never going to find a writer on this subject that doesn’t have an ax to grind, an overt or implicit theological assumption to support. The lack of an obvious ax is what attracted me as a history teacher to Crossan’s work. Especially in his post-1990 work, he has married himself to an historical method that I used to challenge my students’ own wailing axes.
For a history teacher, presenting the historical possibilities and probabilities of early Christianity to college students is something as close to both fun and self-flagellation as it gets. The reward many teachers get out of teaching history to freshmen, who may range in age from eighteen to sixty, is the self-discovery bordering on awe that touches some of their faces when they suddenly realize the often-innocuous, always-complex beginnings of major ideas or movements, and how those movements or ideas subsequently flowered and grew into their own stolid assumptions.
Over time, I learned that at least teaching the history of early Christianity according to the latest historical scholarship is all about challenging one’s assumptions. Some students take it better than others. From the four times I’ve taught my class, I’ve noted reactions that ran from joyous discovery to bitter tears. Students have told me their faith was strengthened with their new-found knowledge. Others have told me that the class fully and finally exorcised Christian myth from their psyche. One student during a break tearfully accused me of deliberately destroying her faith in God and Christ. I told her – as I tell all my classes at the very beginning of each semester I teach the class – that the challenge of the class is to learn how to boldly apply the historical method to a text or to one’s assumptions one never thought of doing before. I explain that it’s the ultimate test of history as a legitimate discipline: like the law, it must apply to everything and everyone, or it means nothing. Disappointingly, many budding historians feel no regret in making exceptions to their most cherished beliefs.
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This is not, however, a fault confined to students.
Growing up in Ridley Park, a few short miles south of Philadelphia, my Italian-American Catholicism became defined by Catholic grade school and attending Sunday morning Mass with my mother. Unlike what I discovered about Crossan’s brand of Catholicism, our church’s rituals were not part of my everyday life. If anything, my Catholicism seemed much more emotionally-bound, tied into the faith of my mother and her quaint superstitions – one of which included facing a statue of the Blessed Mother out my bedroom window to prevent rain.
When I grew up during the 1970s, religion was something my family did only at selected times. The stories of Christ’s birth, resurrection and the compassionate intercession of the Virgin Mary, however, wove themselves tightly round my feelings about my mother and my understanding of the world as a prepubescent youth, and produced a self-satisfied pathos. As I grew older and slowly worked my way out of that cocoon, the discarded husk of the religion primarily became a source of emotional nostalgia for me, not a path toward any higher truth or feeling of community, as it evidently has with Crossan.
But it was a long time coming. As I browbeat that nostalgia with incessant reading on the subject, I grew increasingly restless and impatient with historians of early Christianity. Like Crossan, they seemed both proud and humble, careful not to hurt religious feelings. I noticed this in myself when I taught my class for the first time. I even caught myself looking into students’ eyes as though to ask forgiveness for daring to offer more probable historical scenarios.
One of the papers I assigned for the class dealt directly with Crossan’s biography of Jesus. I asked them to use Crossan’s own historical criteria and method to examine whether his conclusions about Jesus hold up under critical scrutiny. More than any other exercise, this one brought out both the best and worst in students.
The idea of the exercise, of course, was to put budding historians to the ultimate test: using only historical criteria, they must ask themselves if what Crossan claimed about Jesus in his book is possible, probable, or consistently applied. The point was for the student to use the historical method without prejudice.
Many of my students, however, simply refused to view the subject of early Christianity as they would view, say, the French Revolution or the rise of Islam. One student claimed Crossan’s thesis was false because Crossan was a Catholic. Of all things, I had been unprepared for inter-denominational religious bigotry. More often than not, however, these papers consistently ranged from a tiny minority of acute criticism to the overwhelming majority, which rehashed subliminally theological arguments.
I find this ratio to be as true for scholars of the Historical Jesus as well.
Colorado College professor Sam Williams, who taught me both the Old and New Testaments while I attended that school in the mid 1980s, told me that contemporary Historical Jesus scholarship, though “faddish” in many respects, “offers a distinct advantage in that such an approach enables one to avoid the worst excesses of imposing our own inclination and our own pet doctrines. It allows the Bible to speak out of its own milieu.”
Like many other scholars, however, he has a problem with Crossan’s conclusions. “One can gain insight from Crossan’s work,” he told me, “but one has to be very careful with general insights, and then out of them creating specific conclusions. That’s a jump. In making that jump, one’s personal inclinations come out. It affects one’s reading of the evidence. We cannot say how Jesus was because we are so dependent on memory and tradition.”
Just like Crossan, however, Williams told me his Christian faith had been strengthened by his research. “It has allowed me to attain a more informed faith, a faith with its eyes wide open,” he said.
No matter how far apart both Williams and Crossan might claim to be, they’re satisfied with their respective faiths. So are most other Historical Jesus scholars. It’s enough to make an interested observer wonder what’s going on in early Christian scholarship.
Part of the reason for their religious satisfaction lies in Crossan’s remark that the search for the Historical Jesus is really a dialectic between history and faith, between reason and revelation. From that dialectic dance comes the jump Williams claimed Crossan made in his books, from historical insights to questionable, quasi-historical conclusions about Jesus. Yet this jump is made by most Historical Jesus scholars.
Most Historical Jesus scholars, including Crossan, create the groundwork for profound historical insights into the first century. But they consistently finish their books or discussions concerning the Historical Jesus as faithful believers. In a sense, they remain as naïve believers as Perceval; just like the knight, Christian faith is their Holy Grail – only these scholars believe they’ve come to a more fuller understanding of the Grail because they’ve grasped it through a more sophisticated and circuitous route than others. They think they feel more deeply the grain, color and texture of the Grail in their hands. But for all its glitter and polish, it is essentially the same Grail they knew existed before they even started.
If we strictly look at the Historical Jesus historically, Christian faith must be viewed as a historical product that has grown both around and from the life of Jesus, just as varieties of faith also have grown around and from, say, Muhammad, or Buddha, or David Koresh. But it has nothing to do with the Historical Jesus himself. For an ostensible historian – or anyone who claims to be searching for the Historical Jesus – to assume a dialectic between faith and history, reason and revelation, is a breach of historical discipline, an imposition, a betrayal of the historical method – the implicit denial in our ability to understand anything in the past on its own terms.
Is my lapsed Catholicism piquing my interest in the Historical Jesus? No doubt. Is part of what I’m doing simply to rationally justify my own lack of faith? Maybe. But doubt and skepticism are great levelers. Jesus is as interesting as any historical personality because of what his life and the subsequent interpretation of that life has wrought – not because he is, somehow, in some sense, on some complex level, a manifestation of God. I suppose that he may be a manifestation of God; but so may Muhammad, or Buddha, or David Koresh. As a historian, that sort of “truth” is of no interest to me.
“Any person who is engaged in thoughtful analysis of human existence owes it to himself to examine his religious assumptions,” Williams told me. That reminded me of the Socratic maxim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Perhaps both of those statements are just too pat. The coining and repeating of such phrases allows scholars to glibly pat themselves on the back while only lightly touching upon their formerly naïve assumptions. After all this searching and studying, most of these scholars say they feel more “informed,” “profound,” “knowledgeable,” even “strengthened” in their faith. What they’re feeling may actually be an ironic sense of relief; after all, the dialectic-dice had been loaded from the very beginning.
The search for the Historical Jesus may be a fad, a short-lived trend, but it has opened my eyes to the fact that most of us, no matter what our background, have proved incapable of profoundly questioning ourselves. Crossan’s impatient shake of the head may be easily transmuted into History’s annoyance at its purveyors’ recalcitrance, their distrust of its tenacious discipline, their unwillingness to fully digest its challenges.
The challenge of the Historical Jesus is really the challenge of history. Many have failed. For many Historical Jesus scholars, the past has become just another proof of religious faith.