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Summary: 26 chapters capturing the dark years of early Christianity!
Review: In his latest book, Crossan (New Testament, DePaul Univ.) asks, "What in that original interaction [between Jesus and his first companions] made continuation from before to after [the Crucifixion] possible or even inevitable?" As with his massive The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (LJ 2/1/92), Crossan incorporates crosscultural anthropology, literary analysis, and the history and archaeology of Roman Judea in the first century C.E. to answer his pivotal question. Reading early Christian texts against a background he rigorously establishes in the first half of the book, Crossan teases out a picture of infant Christianity. Though he may not convince all readers'his case rests heavily upon the priority and independence of questionable documents'Crossan's work cannot be rejected out of hand. Recommended for seminary and academic libraries.
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Summary: My book is about the dance of history and faith
Review: In the beginning some said that Jesus was criminal and should be crucified but others said that Jesus was divine and should be worshipped. God, they said, was incarnate in the Jewish Jesus and not in the Roman Caesar despite imperial claims proclaimed on their coins for all to see. My book is about the dance of history and faith at the heart of Christianity ever since that beginning two thousand years ago. This is its challenge: of course you can have history without faith but can you have faith without history? And, in particular, can you have incarnational Christianity without historical research? The birth of Christianity was long and hard for those who lived it then but "The Birth of Christianity" is short and sweet for those who read it now.
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Summary: Stimulating but Historically Unconvincing
Review: In this book John Dominic Crossan continues with his"Jewish Cynic Jesus" thesis and attempts to extend thesupport for this thesis by digging behind the Synoptic Gospels andanalysing the "Common Sayings Tradition" he discoversthere. This latter "tradition" turns out to be, primarily, amix of Gospel of Thomas and Q sayings although there are someinteresting appendices to the rear of the book which include Synopticand other references in addition. Thus, Crossan is once more taking atrajectory approach to Jesus and Christian origins.This book is, ofcourse, based upon his former tour de force, "The HistoricalJesus: The Life of a Meditteranean Jewish Peasant". How theprospective reader of this book regards that book will largelydetermine their attitude here. Crossan has not had any Damascusexperience since 1991 and he is still plugging away at the same ideasand with the same tools. He has added one or two theories to hisarmoury (for example, taking onboard Stephen Patterson's thesis thatthe Gospel of Thomas is largely independent of the Synoptic Gospelsand early from Patterson's 1993 book "The Gospel of Thomas andJesus") but he is still noticably "Crossan". Simplyput, Crossan's thesis here is that the best possible historicalmethodology we can come up with (i.e. his!) demonstrates to us thatJesus was a believer in "ethical eschatology" and that,thus, he promoted a "kingdom of God" which was temporallypresent and physically demonstrated by the actions of healing andcoummunal eating among the poor, the outcasts and the marginal inPalestinian society. In historical context, this made Jesus and hisfollowers a counter-cultural movement (might one cynically suggestthat it also made it a "politically correct" movement?). ForCrossan, Jesus did not believe in or promote apocalyptic endings tothe world nor did he regard himself as an apocalyptic "Son ofMan" or, it seems, anything special in particulareither. Further, Jesus was of the peasant "artisan" class,something which didn't make him analogous to a present day middleclass carpenter, but, rather, made him a landless peasant, in manyrespects the lowest of the low. Crossan utilizes as manysocial-scientific tools as he can access to attempt to demonstratethese points. All this theorizing about Jesus takes place within aclearly delineated theological context: Crossan calls this thedifference between sarcophobic and sarcophilic Christianity, thatwhich finds Jesus in flesh something to be mitigated and that whichfinds it something to be embraced. This pans out to Crossan's thesisthat "the divine meaning of life is incarnated in a certain humanway of living". It gives him leeway to be less than enthusiasticwhen it comes to traditional Christian beliefs like the bodilyresurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion by transferring thisphenomenon to embodied belief in the historical Jesus bybelievers. Readers will pay their money and take their choice on thatone. The point to note is Crossan's theological engagement. Like somany of Crossan's books, I found this one engaging and interestingwithout being convincing. Crossan, for me, is one of those writers whobrings ideas to mind even though you find yourself disagreeing withhim the majority of the time. My own belief is that he makes thefundamental wrong turn when he seeks to avoid what he calls"apocalyptic eschatology" - I think for his own personal,ethical reasons. Readers should remember that our ethics and Jesus'own beliefs and motivations are allowed to be different and that theethicality of "apocalypticism" is a different question fromthat of asking whether Jesus, like John the Baptist before him and theearly Christians after him, held to it himself. Crossan confusesthese, I believe, and this choice will always skew his results.
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Summary: 26 chapters capturing the dark years of early Christianity!
Review: In writing this book John Dominic Crossan has an arduous task before him. How can you write the history of the first years of Christianity before Paul wrote the first book of the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians, when there are no primary sources to work with? Moreover, how can you write this history without really discussing Paul? Basically, you have to speculate. The result is an eccentic book, and some of it is very interesting. The first parts are the most so, in the way that they discuss the problems of visions and the limits of oral tradition. These are useful because they point out the ubiquity of the first and the weaknesses of the second which undercut typical Christian apologetic. Crossan then goes on to discuss the anthropology, and the system of commercialization and social injustice in first century Palestine. He discusses matters such as healers, the common meal tradition, and the different resurrection narrative that appears in the exta-canonical Gospel of Peter. An important point is his discussion of the resurrection which, like other recent accounts, emphasizes the way prophetic exegesis preceded a historical narrative. But the crux of his book is in the centre, the distinction between an "eschatological" attitude, and an "apocalyptic" one. An eschatalogical attitude is one that sees a brand new world coming, and can be reformist and utopian. An apocalyptical one, by contrast, sees the end of the world and its replacement by hell and paradise, and is by definition anti-political, because very soon politics will be non-existent. The spectre haunting all Christians is the apocalyptic nature of Jesus' teachings. A reading of the gospels and the authentic letters of Paul, as well as other Christian documents, suggests that Jesus and the early Christians believed in the imminent end of the world, and that their moral injunctions were based on this premise. In this view they were, of course, wrong. The problem of this picture of Jesus is not, as Crossan's critics might suggest, that Jesus was not a 21st century liberal. The problem was that the historical Jesus was not a 21st century anything. So how does Crossan get around this problem? The earliest Christian souces, Mark, Paul's letters and Q all contain clearly apocalyptic elements. But there is another Gospel, the Gospel of Thomas. We have a complete copy that dates from the late fourth century, but we have fragments that were composed in the late second century. This is a collection of sayings, much like the hypothetical Q source, and it is NOT apocalyptic. Perhaps it is a later document, like other Christian documents that downplay the Apoocalypse? But suppose the Gospel of Thomas predated all the other documents? And suppose that Q was actually composed in stages, with the apocalyptic material coming in later? Then the Gospel of Thomas and Q-1 would, Crossan implies, be the closest to what Jesus actually thought, and that would be a non-violent radical movement of resistance to imperial and commercial oppression. What evidence does Crossan provides for this belief? Are there earlier references to or copies of the Gospel of Thomas? No. Are there any copies of Q at all, in any of its stages at all, except for what we have in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke? No. The sole evidence is stylistic. Thomas does not show any obvious pattern of dependance on the other four Gospels. It consists of a variety of sayings, many of which are repeated in the other Gospels, but which are noticeably shorter and terser than them. This seems to show they are independent, and it suggests that they are earlier. This is interesting, but there are other alternatives. One that comes to mind is that the version of Thomas we have was edited by a very terse writer who, as a Gnostic who preserved it for the Gnostic library it was found in, purged the text of its original apocalyptic meanings. Moreover, there are other problems with Crossan's work. Crossan relies on a model of peasant-lord conflict, most of which is based on models of transition from feudalism to capitalism. But the Roman Empire, and first century Palestine was neither. More important, while it is true that peasants were exploited, it does not follow that Jesus' message was a practical response to this. And consider how both Thomas and Q refer to Jesus declaring "If anyone does not have his own father and mother, he cannot be my disciple," a message so radically different from both Jewish tradition and simple decency, that it appears to be an apocalyptic aspect of Jesus' thought. Crossan argues that Jesus is not trying to break up families but trying to regroup families broken up by the pressure of Roman commercialization. But there is nothing in the facts to support such a suggestion, while the only problem with Jesus' own family was that it did not share his own high opinion of himself. Crossan does not really discuss Jesus' unusual celibacy, nor its possible apocalyptic implications, as can be seen in 1 Corinthians. And Crossan does not explain why this message, supposedly rooted in the crisis of the Jewish peasantry, would soon be so much more successful in the world of urban gentiles. Why would Gentiles be even more enthusiastic for an apocalyptic theory that developed from Jewish sources? Ultimately Crossan is too clever and too convenient by half.
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Summary: Eccentric, but not fully convincing
Review: In writing this book John Dominic Crossan has an arduous task before him. How can you write the history of the first years of Christianity before Paul wrote the first book of the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians, when there are no primary sources to work with? Moreover, how can you write this history without really discussing Paul? Basically, you have to speculate. The result is an eccentic book, and some of it is very interesting. The first parts are the most so, in the way that they discuss the problems of visions and the limits of oral tradition. These are useful because they point out the ubiquity of the first and the weaknesses of the second which undercut typical Christian apologetic. Crossan then goes on to discuss the anthropology, and the system of commercialization and social injustice in first century Palestine. He discusses matters such as healers, the common meal tradition, and the different resurrection narrative that appears in the exta-canonical Gospel of Peter. An important point is his discussion of the resurrection which, like other recent accounts, emphasizes the way prophetic exegesis preceded a historical narrative. But the crux of his book is in the centre, the distinction between an "eschatological" attitude, and an "apocalyptic" one. An eschatalogical attitude is one that sees a brand new world coming, and can be reformist and utopian. An apocalyptical one, by contrast, sees the end of the world and its replacement by hell and paradise, and is by definition anti-political, because very soon politics will be non-existent. The spectre haunting all Christians is the apocalyptic nature of Jesus' teachings. A reading of the gospels and the authentic letters of Paul, as well as other Christian documents, suggests that Jesus and the early Christians believed in the imminent end of the world, and that their moral injunctions were based on this premise. In this view they were, of course, wrong. The problem of this picture of Jesus is not, as Crossan's critics might suggest, that Jesus was not a 21st century liberal. The problem was that the historical Jesus was not a 21st century anything. So how does Crossan get around this problem? The earliest Christian souces, Mark, Paul's letters and Q all contain clearly apocalyptic elements. But there is another Gospel, the Gospel of Thomas. We have a complete copy that dates from the late fourth century, but we have fragments that were composed in the late second century. This is a collection of sayings, much like the hypothetical Q source, and it is NOT apocalyptic. Perhaps it is a later document, like other Christian documents that downplay the Apoocalypse? But suppose the Gospel of Thomas predated all the other documents? And suppose that Q was actually composed in stages, with the apocalyptic material coming in later? Then the Gospel of Thomas and Q-1 would, Crossan implies, be the closest to what Jesus actually thought, and that would be a non-violent radical movement of resistance to imperial and commercial oppression. What evidence does Crossan provides for this belief? Are there earlier references to or copies of the Gospel of Thomas? No. Are there any copies of Q at all, in any of its stages at all, except for what we have in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke? No. The sole evidence is stylistic. Thomas does not show any obvious pattern of dependance on the other four Gospels. It consists of a variety of sayings, many of which are repeated in the other Gospels, but which are noticeably shorter and terser than them. This seems to show they are independent, and it suggests that they are earlier. This is interesting, but there are other alternatives. One that comes to mind is that the version of Thomas we have was edited by a very terse writer who, as a Gnostic who preserved it for the Gnostic library it was found in, purged the text of its original apocalyptic meanings. Moreover, there are other problems with Crossan's work. Crossan relies on a model of peasant-lord conflict, most of which is based on models of transition from feudalism to capitalism. But the Roman Empire, and first century Palestine was neither. More important, while it is true that peasants were exploited, it does not follow that Jesus' message was a practical response to this. And consider how both Thomas and Q refer to Jesus declaring "If anyone does not have his own father and mother, he cannot be my disciple," a message so radically different from both Jewish tradition and simple decency, that it appears to be an apocalyptic aspect of Jesus' thought. Crossan argues that Jesus is not trying to break up families but trying to regroup families broken up by the pressure of Roman commercialization. But there is nothing in the facts to support such a suggestion, while the only problem with Jesus' own family was that it did not share his own high opinion of himself. Crossan does not really discuss Jesus' unusual celibacy, nor its possible apocalyptic implications, as can be seen in 1 Corinthians. And Crossan does not explain why this message, supposedly rooted in the crisis of the Jewish peasantry, would soon be so much more successful in the world of urban gentiles. Why would Gentiles be even more enthusiastic for an apocalyptic theory that developed from Jewish sources? Ultimately Crossan is too clever and too convenient by half.
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Summary: A New Ager's False Idea of Christianity is what I would call
Review: JD Crossan is really a New Ager who has stripped Jesus of all His miraculous life! Don't get this book. While Jesus still makes miracles today happen, this author tries to make a point that nothing of the sort happened 2000 years ago. Yes, sure and you're Fred Flintstone then.
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Summary: The book to read if you're into Christian History
Review: John Dominic Crossan will always get tough reviews because he's so controversial. Unlike Bishop Spong who pictures Jesus as someone who looks, acts, and feels just like Bishop Spong, Crossan attempts to piece the scant record together and separate fact from fiction. If you take the Bible at face value, period, then you won't care for this book. If you have a faith that allows certain precepts to be challenged, try it out. If you're not of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, you'll wonder what all the fuss is about. Try Luke Timothy Johnson, Raymond Brown, and J. Mier to balance Crossan's views.
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Summary: A Marvelous handbook to discover the nature of your God
Review: John Dominic Crossan, the leading contemporary scholar on the Historical Jesus, brings the disciplines of anthropology, history and archeology to bear in reconstructing life in the decades of the 30's and 40's AD. One intriguing thesis of the book is that the Christianity of the disciples may have been quite different from that handed down to us by Paul. Exploring that thesis, Crossan stimulates the reader to rethink one's ideas on history and Christianity. Along the way, he challenges modern intellect by bringing into play current images and words like reconstruction and interactivity. Crosssan compares the process of reconstructing history with looking down a well at your reflection. When you see your reflection, you cannot know the character of the water in the well, you must disturb it to do so. Disturbing the surface of the water distorts ones reflection. So the process of historical reconstruction goes on, using current science and knowledge to reconstruct the past and drawing from ancient interaction, lessons that increase our understanding of the human condition. As a Real Estate professional, I especially identified with Crossans description of the convergence of the Roman culture that treated land as an exploitable commodity with first century Judaism that looked at land as a Gift from God. As a recent visitor to Israel, I witnessed to current manifestations of the same forces. Crossan's description of Roman commercialism and it's effect on Jewish peasants in the area of the Galilee in the early first century was, for me, a fascinating and illuminating experience. From a firm, multi-discipline foundation, Crossan examines the Q Gospel, The Gospel of Thomas and the synoptic Gospels. He concludes that pre Paulian Christianity was more "Jewish." He emphatically denies that the God of the Old Testament was a God of anger and vengeance while the God of the New Testament was a god of love and mercy. Rather the first Christians experienced Yahweh as a God of justice and compassion. This complex, erudite exercise in reconstruction left me with more questions than answers, but with a commitment to learn more. When you look down your well of faith and see there a perfect reflection of yourself, it is time to stir the water. The Birth of Christianity is a marvelous handbook to help discover what lies below the surface; the nature of your God and the depth of your commitment.
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Summary: I love John Crossan!
Review: Mr. Crossan, a former monk and particpant of the Jesus Seminar, wonderfully lays out early Christianity for anyone with an open mind. (Mr. Crossan's work will most definitely be found objectionable by fundamentalists, though.) Following the implications of Q, as well as using several extra-canonical sources (such as the Didache & the Gospel of Thomas) Mr. Crossan discusses social trends, early Church traditions (communal dinners), the development of theological dogmas, etc. An excellent read!
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Summary: Yet another set of assumptions dictate the results
Review: One can understand the frustration of many with Crossan's approach, because it is simply an alternative mythology whose results follow from the premise...Since the only certain early document on Jesus is Paul, if you wish to doubt Paul, then there is no obligation in assuming a "pre-Paulian Jesus", and all options are open... Crossan stipulates Jesus as a Palestinian peasant, part of the anti-Roman stratum of "oppressed Palestinians." ... This ignores other possibilities, such as an historical Jesus within Hellenistic Jewry; or within other Hellenistic traditions, or a non-historical mythic figure (as in "Wisdom"--G.A. Wells), or as John the Baptist, or as other individuals, some much earlier, some even after the fall of the Temple. All bets are on, and equally speculative...Even the "new standard" dating (where the "Fourth Gospel" comes last) is an inference...More informative is what we do know: the religious beliefs in the Mediterranean world which are similar to, and precede, early Christianity; and the important expectation of the "age of Pisces." These determine the Christianities that swept the Roman Empire... Crossan is free to create a Jesus out of anti-Hellenistic or anti-Roman movements. But Crossan's postulate simply gives him the results HE wants...This leaves out the full scope of the religious and philosophical context of the time. ...Crossan's premise is (not too suprisingly) simply the latest manifestation of the theological movement that decided that Christianity was to be uniquely defined as the system opposed to Roman "paganism".
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