Rating: 
Summary: A very impressive scholarly work, with some reservations
Review: One reviewer has remarked that Crossan brings up a lot of great ideas that you don't necessarily agree with and I agree with this. Being of the Jesus Seminar, many of the conclusions that Crossan draws are controversial and may lack familiarity; they are also sometimes quite unconventional and not always completely persuasive. However, Crossan is a brilliant scholar who has studied the Jesus question for decades and it shows. He goes further into the minutia of the study than the majority of his colleagues and for this his work deserves to be admired and studied. He brings an extraordinary wealth of information to the table when he discusses an issue and never fails to advance compelling ideas and conclusions. His methodology is thorough and comprehensive, much more so than many other scholars.This work, a follow up to The Historical Jesus examines Christian beginnings in an archaeological and anthropological context with a careful discussion of the roles of oral tradition, literary developments, community tradition, and gender roles. A very interesting set of chapters concerns the ability and role of memory in oral tradition. He makes it plainly clear that absent an accurate, recorded history of even the simplest event, the original story cannot but evolve and change as it is re-remembered, re-told, re-imagined. As in other cases, these acknowledgments are extremely helpful but not as persuasive as they might appear to be. In ancient cultures where oral tradition was the only way of transmitting stories among illiterate peasants, memory was emphasized and specific memorization of even long texts and stories occurred regularly. Nevertheless, the result in this case stands: the stories and sayings of Jesus evolved as the first believers re-told, re-imagined, even invented, the stories. This is precisely why so much of the narrative of the gospels lack a corresponding context and seem to hang in the air in a sort of timeless universe. Crossan also spends a decent amount of time evaluating the texts as we have them, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and the Didache. He relates a great deal of information regarding the Common Sayings Tradition, that material that the Gospel of Thomas shares with the Q document. This section was extremely interesting. I find the Thomas document intriguing since its seeming independence of Q and the gospels and its archaic, sayings-only format indicate an early date, while it's esoteric Gnostic feel and it's "kingdom of God among you" motif indicate a later date. Although I disagree with Crossan on the apocalypticism of Jesus (I believe Jesus was apocalyptic), I still find his discussions regarding the sayings traditions very interesting and thought provoking. The juxtaposition of traveling itinerants and their patron householders creates the primary context within which the message of early Christianity is preached. An evolving standard is evident from an evaluation of the earliest saying traditions such as Q and Mark compared to the Didache and other later writings. An idealistic, poverty and dependent faith had to be tempered in order to be workable in a world wherein Jesus had not returned in the time frame expected. Crossan provides an excellent discussion of this process. He also describes the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem and its leader, James, the brother of Jesus. He speculates on the Essene-like nature of the community incorporating ample evidence, but doesn't go further than that evidence warrants. He paints a compelling picture of earliest Christianity. It is vastly different from the one we have inherited. The final sections are the most intriguing, those that deal with the common meal tradition and the development of the passion/resurrection story itself. The common meal tradition is presented as a vitally important and fundamental aspect of the early history. Sharing meals, providing meals, feasting all are representative symbols of the kingdom of God: the kingdom is bounty, it is full, it is community and participative. And then came the story. Evaluating the early canonical texts and incorporating his extrapolation of The Cross Gospel from the Gospel of Peter, Crossan describes the development of the passion story. Since I haven't read his previous work, I am not in a position to opine about Crossan's early dating of the so-called Cross Gospel, nor its existence; I remain very skeptical. His argument has many valid points and contains persuasive elements. I find myself wanting to know more, and had hoped this book would give me much greater detail in regards to the development of the story, but it fell short of my expectations. After all, the story is what became orthodox Christianity. Crossan's explanation of the role of women in lamentation and the role of men in exegesis and how the interaction of those two elements created the stories that we have is fascinating. It is no wonder the women are so prominent in the resurrection and appearance events if they aren't in later writings. As I said, Crossan is not always totally convincing. I remain a skeptic on many of his arguments, but am persuaded on others. On the whole, this book is highly engaging, very thoroughly researched and tautly written. It's not an easy book to digest, and is not for the beginner in this subject. Even if I found myself disagreeing with Crossan, I was never unchallenged and always intrigued. This work is highly learned and very stimulating.
Rating:
Summary: A very impressive scholarly work, with some reservations
Review: One reviewer has remarked that Crossan brings up a lot of great ideas that you don't necessarily agree with and I agree with this. Being of the Jesus Seminar, many of the conclusions that Crossan draws are controversial and may lack familiarity; they are also sometimes quite unconventional and not always completely persuasive. However, Crossan is a brilliant scholar who has studied the Jesus question for decades and it shows. He goes further into the minutia of the study than the majority of his colleagues and for this his work deserves to be admired and studied. He brings an extraordinary wealth of information to the table when he discusses an issue and never fails to advance compelling ideas and conclusions. His methodology is thorough and comprehensive, much more so than many other scholars. This work, a follow up to The Historical Jesus examines Christian beginnings in an archaeological and anthropological context with a careful discussion of the roles of oral tradition, literary developments, community tradition, and gender roles. A very interesting set of chapters concerns the ability and role of memory in oral tradition. He makes it plainly clear that absent an accurate, recorded history of even the simplest event, the original story cannot but evolve and change as it is re-remembered, re-told, re-imagined. As in other cases, these acknowledgments are extremely helpful but not as persuasive as they might appear to be. In ancient cultures where oral tradition was the only way of transmitting stories among illiterate peasants, memory was emphasized and specific memorization of even long texts and stories occurred regularly. Nevertheless, the result in this case stands: the stories and sayings of Jesus evolved as the first believers re-told, re-imagined, even invented, the stories. This is precisely why so much of the narrative of the gospels lack a corresponding context and seem to hang in the air in a sort of timeless universe. Crossan also spends a decent amount of time evaluating the texts as we have them, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and the Didache. He relates a great deal of information regarding the Common Sayings Tradition, that material that the Gospel of Thomas shares with the Q document. This section was extremely interesting. I find the Thomas document intriguing since its seeming independence of Q and the gospels and its archaic, sayings-only format indicate an early date, while it's esoteric Gnostic feel and it's "kingdom of God among you" motif indicate a later date. Although I disagree with Crossan on the apocalypticism of Jesus (I believe Jesus was apocalyptic), I still find his discussions regarding the sayings traditions very interesting and thought provoking. The juxtaposition of traveling itinerants and their patron householders creates the primary context within which the message of early Christianity is preached. An evolving standard is evident from an evaluation of the earliest saying traditions such as Q and Mark compared to the Didache and other later writings. An idealistic, poverty and dependent faith had to be tempered in order to be workable in a world wherein Jesus had not returned in the time frame expected. Crossan provides an excellent discussion of this process. He also describes the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem and its leader, James, the brother of Jesus. He speculates on the Essene-like nature of the community incorporating ample evidence, but doesn't go further than that evidence warrants. He paints a compelling picture of earliest Christianity. It is vastly different from the one we have inherited. The final sections are the most intriguing, those that deal with the common meal tradition and the development of the passion/resurrection story itself. The common meal tradition is presented as a vitally important and fundamental aspect of the early history. Sharing meals, providing meals, feasting all are representative symbols of the kingdom of God: the kingdom is bounty, it is full, it is community and participative. And then came the story. Evaluating the early canonical texts and incorporating his extrapolation of The Cross Gospel from the Gospel of Peter, Crossan describes the development of the passion story. Since I haven't read his previous work, I am not in a position to opine about Crossan's early dating of the so-called Cross Gospel, nor its existence; I remain very skeptical. His argument has many valid points and contains persuasive elements. I find myself wanting to know more, and had hoped this book would give me much greater detail in regards to the development of the story, but it fell short of my expectations. After all, the story is what became orthodox Christianity. Crossan's explanation of the role of women in lamentation and the role of men in exegesis and how the interaction of those two elements created the stories that we have is fascinating. It is no wonder the women are so prominent in the resurrection and appearance events if they aren't in later writings. As I said, Crossan is not always totally convincing. I remain a skeptic on many of his arguments, but am persuaded on others. On the whole, this book is highly engaging, very thoroughly researched and tautly written. It's not an easy book to digest, and is not for the beginner in this subject. Even if I found myself disagreeing with Crossan, I was never unchallenged and always intrigued. This work is highly learned and very stimulating.
Rating: 
Summary: The Definitive Work
Review: Phew! This book is "a whole lot of Crossan." This isn't light reading for the beach...this is heavy-duty scholarship by one of the leading experts in the field of the Jesus Movement. Crossan leaves no stone unturned, and he anticipates his critics (he answers possible objections to his theories throughout the book). And even though it is very thorough and scholarly, Crossan's style is very accessible. One need not be a Ph.D. in theology to understand this book. "The Birth of Christianity" is highly recommended for liberal Christians, agnostics, and others interested in the historical Jesus Movement.
Rating: 
Summary: the new piety: triumph of "social scientific" determinism
Review: Scholars working in historical Jesus and other historical areas related to Biblical studies have for twenty years been enamored of what are often reverently referred to as "the social sciences" and especially anthropology. But many of these scholars, and Dr. Crossan is the most brilliant among them, fail to understand the limitations of "social sciences" as applied to history. In sharp contrast, social historians have been grappling with these thorny issues for decades. Edward P. Thompson, generally regarded as the founder of modern social history and arguably the leading Marxist historian of his generation broke with tradition and in his magisterial work The Making of the English Working Class demonstrated what real social history is. In this work he broke the strangle-hold of social science-based determinism (including crude Marxism) by showing how "class" is a process, not a category to be imposed or pre-determined. "By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a "structure", nor even as a "category", but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships," he wrote. Crossan and dozens of others laboring away in the fields of the Laws of Science and History have failed to understand this profound distinction. Crossan's book builds on his earlier "Historical Jesus" and both books show his obsession with methodology. Unfortunately, in reconstructing "what happened immediately after the execution of Jesus" three questionable anthropological, sociological and psychological theories triumph over well-established practices of contemporary social history and the tools of ancient historiography. For example, Crossan. In order to clear the ground for his own idiosyncratic foundations, Crossan breezily writes chapters drawn from current "memory wars" involving the controversy over childhood sexual abuse in an effort to undermine the credibility of the four gospel texts. (He also seems to believe that by using the label "gospel" the question of historicity is immediately settled in the negative.) Historical Jesus scholars are currently so enamored of the "scientific" aura of the "social scienes" that they latch on to the single theory that best bolsters their conclusions, in this case the writings of Elizabeth Loftus, who has for decades argued against the accuracy of eyewitness testimony in criminal law. Crossan seems blissfully unaware of the much wider debates in the field of memory research (Loftus' theories are vigorously disputed within the field and despite her role as a prominent "expert witness", eyewitness testimony still is used and accepted and subjected to test and examination in every court in America) and he is utterly dismissive of the whole field of oral history in which both field historians and theoreticians have argued and investigated the foundational questions that Crossan raises in great detail. This amounts to a gross misuse of interdisciplinary research. For example, Crossan "knows" that Jesus and all of his followers were "peasants" because Gerhard Lenski and John Kautsky have told him so. Because they were "peasants" they were all, ipso facto illiterate, again, because Gerhard Lenski told him so. Social historians, on the other hand, would find such argument both laughable and arrogant. While Crossan wants to find his intellectuals enemies among a vast conservative guild of pious fools, it would be such neo-Marxist historians as E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman who would rule Crossan's use of social science "observations" as old-fashioned "laws of history." (It is really possible that Crossan is unaware of the extraordinarily lengths that E. P. Thompson went to in The Making of the English Working Class to determine how literacy, religion, belief, church, state, economics and cultural institutions and real individuals must be in particular historical circumstances in order to draw the detailed portrait of history from the bottom up. No one in social history uses a quote from Lenski as a "proof" of what historical non-ruling class people actually did or didn't do.) On another note, although several dozen international scholars including archaeologists and ancient historians as well as religious scholars had completed a five volume examination of the historicity of the book of Acts--"The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting" , which work, along with the groundbreaking work of Colin Hemer, Crossan conveniently ignores. But then Crossan must dismiss Acts because it does not fit his model of "gospels" and because it would prevent him from privileging the Gospel of Thomas. It is the job of historians to test hypothesis, not to pretend that the "findings" of the "social sciences" (by which Crossan means those handful of cross-cultural anthropologists that Crossan has apparently read) have the funciton of laws or somewho determine the behavior of real individuals. (The use of the term "peasant" to describe Jesus and his followers is something very, very few ancient historians would follow no matter how many times one might quote Lenski and Eric Wolf.)
Rating: 
Summary: Crossan re-creates Jesus in his own image
Review: The co-founder of the Jesus Seminar trods much of the same ground he has covered in earlier works such as "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography." Crossan imposes an economic meaning on everything in the Gospels and early Christianity. To make the New Testament and other early Christian writings fit his perspective, he relies heavily on speculation; one of the most common words in the book is "assume." This is little more than the next step in Crossan's attempt to re-create Jesus in his own image. Save your money and get it at the library if you absolutely must read it. This isn't anything necessary for future research and is priced several times over its value.
Rating:
Summary: Tough read, but good
Review: This book can be seen as a companion volume to Crossan's earlier work, "The Historical Jesus". This book seeks to reconstruct the pre-textual Christianity; the time when Christianity was a loose knit group with no central doctrine. He attempts this through a very exhaustive examination of how oral traditions function and reconstruction (based on the earliest texts) of what these groups might have appeared. I think Burton Mack did a better and more inclusive (not to mention shorter) job of describing Early Christians in his book "Who Wrote the New Testament". For one Crossan seems to be still clinging to the idea of reconstructing the historical Jesus rather that the historical first Christians. Though this book is certainly enlightening I was not entirely converted to Crossan's conclusions. The part of this book that is fascinating and definitely worth while is the preliminary research Crossan describes. Crossan takes examples of oral histories from both the ancient and the modern world and describes how they work, why they work, and how sometimes they don't work exactly the way one believes. The section "does memory really remember" was especially absorbing.
In conclusion, if you are seeking a book on what earliest Christianity was like this one might be a little too slanted; however, if you want to learn a lot about how oral traditions function and eventually become text, I would highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Tough read, but good
Review: This book can be seen as a companion volume to Crossan's earlier work, "The Historical Jesus". This book seeks to reconstruct the pre-textual Christianity; the time when Christianity was a loose knit group with no central doctrine. He attempts this through a very exhaustive examination of how oral traditions function and reconstruction (based on the earliest texts) of what these groups might have appeared. I think Burton Mack did a better and more inclusive (not to mention shorter) job of describing Early Christians in his book "Who Wrote the New Testament". For one Crossan seems to be still clinging to the idea of reconstructing the historical Jesus rather that the historical first Christians. Though this book is certainly enlightening I was not entirely converted to Crossan's conclusions. The part of this book that is fascinating and definitely worth while is the preliminary research Crossan describes. Crossan takes examples of oral histories from both the ancient and the modern world and describes how they work, why they work, and how sometimes they don't work exactly the way one believes. The section "does memory really remember" was especially absorbing.
In conclusion, if you are seeking a book on what earliest Christianity was like this one might be a little too slanted; however, if you want to learn a lot about how oral traditions function and eventually become text, I would highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Tough read, but good
Review: This book can be seen as a companion volume to Crossan's earlier work, "The Historical Jesus". This book seeks to reconstruct the pre-textual Christianity; the time when Christianity was a loose knit group with no central doctrine. He attempts this through a very exhaustive examination of how oral traditions function and reconstruction (based on the earliest texts) of what these groups might have appeared. I think Burton Mack did a better and more inclusive (not to mention shorter) job of describing Early Christians in his book "Who Wrote the New Testament". For one Crossan seems to be still clinging to the idea of reconstructing the historical Jesus rather that the historical first Christians. Though this book is certainly enlightening I was not entirely converted to Crossan's conclusions. The part of this book that is fascinating and definitely worth while is the preliminary research Crossan describes. Crossan takes examples of oral histories from both the ancient and the modern world and describes how they work, why they work, and how sometimes they don't work exactly the way one believes. The section "does memory really remember" was especially absorbing.
In conclusion, if you are seeking a book on what earliest Christianity was like this one might be a little too slanted; however, if you want to learn a lot about how oral traditions function and eventually become text, I would highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Mountains of Meaning out of Mole-Hills of Text
Review: This book has been roundly criticized by many reviewers on several grounds and with some merit: Style - It doesn't come the point and present a clear story. Also, to much focus on method and assumption. Relevance - It is a lot of scholarly commentary on scholarly commentary. Theology - It ignores the miraculous Jesus. And often enough some flavor of "it threatens my belief, so it cannot be true" masquerading as one of the other criticisms. As I read this book, it strikes me that many of these apparent shortcomings are also unavoidable given the limited amount and conflicting nature of the source data being studied. Everyone's interpretation of Jesus and the early church is based on the same few - not even a dozen - documents, each no longer than a chapter in a modern novel, and all written by different people (none of them eyewitnesses) in different places decades after the fact. Moreover, many of these documents, particularly the gospels, have a high degree of overlap in general content, but are frustratingly divergent in their details and their messages (or "theology" or even "spin" if you like). Given that there is so little historical evidence to go on, assumptions and methods necessarily assume major importance. Even the notion that the four canonical gospels are literal history telling the same Divinely dictated story is an assumption (or "act of faith" if you prefer) that is no less an assumption for being widely held. Crossan at least does us the favor of being as explicit as he is able about his own assumptions and methods, and informing us of other points of view besides his own. If nothing else, this book is a great introduction to Biblical textual analysis. All terms are explained and nothing more than a Sunday School knowledge of the Bible is assumed. It seems to me that for Crossan, the process of investigation is at least as important, if not more important, than whatever conclusion he may come up with. The book only appears to ramble if the reader expects it to be summarized in a single quick "sound bite" that leaves one with the impression that they understand something about the vast complexity of history, or even of God. It is as if he is leading the reader on an extended and mindful meditation on the question of who Jesus' followers were, and who He was in their eyes. I get the sense that even if readers reject all of Crossan's conclusions, he probably still would be pleased if they at least spent some time genuinely considering the question "what are MY assumptions about God?"
Rating:
Summary: Deep, thoughtful analysis of the beginning of Christianity
Review: This book is a scholarly study of the sources we have about the early years of Christianity. The most powerful material for me is the careful explorations of what we know about life in semi-literate peasant cultures under exploitation, and what that suggests about the life and times of Jesus. We ahve so little material on which to draw about the actual life of early Christians that much of that analysis feels like speculation, but by setting the scene Crossan provides a thoughtful framework for the birth of Christianity. It is a framework that challenges much of the tradition that makes up modern Christian churches, but that is compelling as a way of thinking about why Christianity began.
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