Rating: 
Summary: Ego Management
Review: This book is as much about ego management as anything. Each section, and there are many in his nearly 600 pages, starts with an epigraph containing a quote from another author whom, for the most part, Mr. Crossan proceeds to dispute. Unfortunately, his logic is sometimes distressing at least to this mathematician. For example, he quotes John P. Meier on p. 143: "The Semitic minds behind a good part of our biblical literature were not overly troubled by our Western philosophical principle of noncontradiction ..." and proceeds after two pages to say that he finds that view "not only unconvincing but condescending." Yet on p. 28 Mr. Crossan states "We know from the above examples, and dozens like them, that the earliest Christians lived in a world not yet bedeviled by either direct or indirect rationalism, ..." According to my OED, lack of rationalism certainly includes a lot of room for contradictions.
Mr. Crossan makes a "big deal" regarding his presuppositions, one of which being that John was dependent on the synoptic gospels for the passion and resurrection of Jesus and another on the priority of Mark. He is fond of saying "... how different the Agony in the Garden appears in Mark 14, which has no garden, and in John 18, which has no agony." On p. 141ff he recounts the differences in Mark 14-15 and John 18-19 with specific quotes. You may want to quibble over semantics but for my money, John clearly contradicts Mark. This is but one of many contradictory features in the Bible, and how Mr. Crossan can find Mr. Meier's statement condescending is beyond me. From a fundamentalist such discourse is expected, but I would hope for more from a purported academic.
There are some very interesting historical facts to be gleaned from this book. For example, elucidating the race between historians and Egyptian peasants to dig up papyrus which can enrich history as well as farm fields. The fact that of the oldest 10 papyrus gospel fragments, 2 are from scrolls, 8 are codex with half being extracanonical. The conjecture of an early central Christian authority, based in Jerusalem, is intriguing even if the argument for that is a little thin. Unfortunately, one has to wade through a lot of ego to get there. Lambasting Mr. Meier et al., especially with faulty logic, is not interesting.
Mr. Crossan assures us on p. 119, "When I need to establish a position, I write a book, not a footnote." On p. 147 he states: "First, my method is interdisciplinary, applying anthropology, history, archeology, and literary criticism to the same subject. Second, it is interactive, involving the reciprocal interaction of those disciplines with one another. Third, it is hierarchical, ... Fourth, and above all, it involves three states that I code with the words context, text, and conjunction. Finally, ..." Wow! On p. 149 he writes " You might be wrong on any or all of those decisions, but then so might your opponent." I feel like I have gotten into a family feud! I rescanned the first 25 pages, which include, in spite of the many quotes, over 90 occurrences of "I," "me," or "my." If possible, I would love to read the rest of this book with the ego filtered out. In the interim I will give Mr. Meier's book a try.
Rating: 
Summary: Only for the dedicated
Review: This book relies so heavily on positions established in earlier books that much of it will likely be missed by those who haven't kept up with Crossan's work. The enormity of this book, too, owes to a lot of detail better relegated to appendices. It's only appeal will be to other scholars, primarily those who might want to dispute Crossan's positions. BIRTH OF CHRISTIANTY does not strike the balance HISTORICAL JESUS did between scholarly rigor and common digestibility. Moreover, it does not, and does not seek to, establish the efficacy of historical Jesus inquiry and/or Crossan's method per se. The best encapsulation there resides in Chs. 5 & 6 in WHO KILLED JESUS? Because Crossan's work can be cumbersome and overwrought, it is unlikely that most of the dismissive critics reporting here have actually grasped his effort. Furthermore, because they are dismissive, it is unlikely they have made the attempt. I would suggest few of his demonizers have read this one at all. The "naturalist" critique is too generalized especially, missing the explicitness with which Crossan, Borg et al announce their presumptions at every turn. More pertinently, they use all the overtly secular methods available to contemporary historiography to interrogate issues of temporal historicity. When agreeing that Jesus must have been a extra-natural healer, or indicating that an event in his life associated with a miracle actually happened, they are at pains to maintain those extraordinary experiences must be encountered on their own terms. Those miracles and healings are not "explained away," and Crossan excoriates those who make the attempt. His work is to peel away stories of events that accrued AFTER the fact, not to invalidate what he finds to have actually occurred before redaction. He does not allow his historiography to step outside its bounds to "debunk" widespread experience of the miraculous Jesus. "Conservative" scions would do well to go to equal lengths to ensure their allegiance to the miraculous Jesus does not serve to "debunk" historiography, but rather to explicate the Christian meaning residing in the historicity of events Crossan and others seek to establish.
Rating:
Summary: From Jesus studies deliver us, O Lord!
Review: This thick book is the third in a planned series which began with The Historical Jesus and Who Killed Jesus? A further book would be concerned with the expansion of the Church. Crossan, a professor of theology (er, of religious studies) at DePaul, is an ex-priest raised inIreland, and was about 65 when he published The Birth. The period covered by The Birth runs from the Pentecost to the first epistles of Paul (early 50s) -- Crossan says, "as if Paul had never existed". We have no extant documents to describe these two decades. So, how does Crossan fill the book?First, Crossan will never skimp on words. No simple sentence is worth writing if it does not occasion a half-page of paraphrase and repetition. To carry this over 600 large pages, of course, you have to be dead serious all the time; in Crossan's case there is also a constant, slight undertone of scolding. Second, Crossan as a propensity for raising extensive theoretical edifices on sparse and ambiguous data (even, if at a loss, on the movie Philadelphia). I'd call this "theoretical immodesty", and it's a characteristic illness in "scholarly" fields where the foundation is not scholarship or observation. Third, most of what Crossan brings in does not especially apply to the period under study but to the entire first century (and later). My guess is that 80% of the text could figure in any of the four books in the series. You certainly get a far clearer image of John Dominic Crossan than of the Christian sect before Paul. But most bloating and tiresome of all is the trick known to smart sophomores with an essay to write and few ideas to write about. Tell the readers what you're going to write about. Define the terms. Explain each definition, introducing more terms to explain. When that's done, tell them you're going to write about it, and re-explain the topic. Then give a plan. Explain the plan. Etc. When I got the book I was struck by how physically light it is for its size. The paper is made from pulp somewhat cleaner than newsprint, which is blown up during drying to perhaps twice the thickness good newsprint would have, using the same amount of pulp. The enclosed air makes it more opaque. This is a fine figure for Crossan's writing. It can become ridiculous -- for instance, after entire chapters explaining the plan, we finally come to one that the plan sets up as crucial, "Judeo-Roman History". And what is that? Almost entirely quotations from the prophets and repeated paraphrases. Well, Crossan had to come up with something after insisting at such length that we need to know the historical condition of Galilee and Judea under Roman occupation. The true answer would be, "We don't know, no one left documents about the Galilean and Judean people at the time, and like everyone else they were over 90% illiterate." But that would ruin the game. What game? Jesus studies. A century ago, if you went beyond the extant texts and the available archeology to ponder what was behind the Scriptures, the result was called "devotional writing". As far as I can tell, Jesus studies is devotional writing that's trying very hard to make itself believe that it is not devotional, and that instead it is a form of scholarly historical study. But true scholarly historical study would stop at "we don't know". So, where scholars write articles for other scholars and students, Jesus studies specialists write big books for the general public, give interviews to Newsweek and go on TV. In Crossan's case, as we saw, a lot of the book is about the book. Then more of it is about what other Jesus studies specialists have written, notably concerning Crossan's previous books. About the same amount is straight quotes from a variety of sources. *Something* is being studied, but it's not the birth of christianity. This is a shame. Crossan does have some interesting material, he is quite learned and reliable, and he maintains a very sharp focus that easily illuminates what he's talking about ...inasmuch as there is anything there. But the interesting material comes from other fields and therefore is never discussed in depth. A Jesus studies specialist who did go into full expositions about textual analysis, economic history or resistance to ascetism in Judaism, for instance, would stop being a Jesus studies specialist. His object would have shifted away from some historical reality we don't know about, but that he is deeply concerned with because he is a believer. Conversely, once you purge all the explicit devotion from devotional writing, there really isn't much left for its stated topic except the stuff TV can deal with.
Rating: 
Summary: Informative, eye-opening, provocative
Review: What a pleasure it is to read a scholarly and erudite work that is this beautifully organized and this clearly written. How I wish that other academics, so often addicted to tangled syntax and opaque jargon, would learn from Crossan how to develop and present an argument. This is a long book. It is also a fascinating read that amply repays the time spent working through it. For readers who are open-minded and inquisitive about Christianity's beginnings, there are important insights in every chapter, sometimes on every page. Even those who reject Christianity as a faith and who, therefore, may have little interest in its roots will find much here, I suspect, to provoke and inform. Some topics that will interest even a secular or non-Christian reader:
- a theory of history;
- a fascinating discussion of memory and its functioning;
- a review of how oral transmission works in literature;
- a cross-cultural look at the effect of commercialization on peasant societies;
- a discussion of the distinction between sickness, disease, and illness and how that helps us to understand shamanistic healing;
- the role of lamentation in traditional grieving. That's not an exhaustive list, but only some of the areas that particularly interested me. I am not a theologian or a biblical scholar, and so I will not evaluate Crossan's analysis. It is clearly controversial, so that some parts of the book continue what I expect is a long-running academic slanging match. I can live with that in a book that is otherwise so rewarding. So, yes, The Birth of Christianity is another contribution to an on-going academic inquiry. But the discussion is so well organized, so thoughtfully developed, and so lucidly explained that the book is entirely accessible to the educated general reader.
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