Author: wpusername1487

Stevan L. Davies; Continuum; New York; 1995.

by James A. Bacon

After 200 years of scholarship, the quest for the historical Jesus seemingly has led us nowhere. Thousands of monographs have scrutinized Jesus’ words in every conceivable social, political and symbolic context, yet the academic community is nowhere near consensus on who Jesus was or what he said. Far from coalescing in agreement, the scholarly movement is schisming with more competing theories about the historical Jesus than ever before — creating more diverse schools of thought than 2nd century Gnosticism! Jesus as counter-cultural wisdom sage. Jesus as peasant Jewish Cynic. Jesus as Pharasaic rabbi. Jesus as anti-patriarchal communalist. Jesus as eschatological preacher.

The problem, suggests Stevan L. Davies in Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance and the Origins of Christianity, is the prevailing paradigm of Jesus as a teacher. Most research is based on the flawed assumption that it is possible to uncover a core set of sayings attributable to the historical Jesus and that those sayings form a coherent point of view. That paradigm, suggests Davies, has led to conceptual chaos.

With Jesus the Healer, Davies cuts the knot. Perhaps we shouldn’t try to understand Jesus as a teacher, he suggests. Perhaps we should look at him as a healer. Because most scholars have dismissed reports of healing miracles as legendary or allegorical accretions to the historical Jesus, they have devoted little effort to understanding them. But Davies believes that Jesus did, in fact, heal people of common psychosomatic disorders. The fact that Jesus’ contemporaries provided a supernatural explanation for those healing events — they thought that he healed by the power of God — should not dissuade us in the 21st century from seeking a naturalistic explanation.

Davies’ key thesis can be summarized as follows: Jesus experienced repeated occurrences of an altered state of consciousness, a phenomenon, common in agricultural societies, that anthropologists have identified as a possession-trance. Jesus attributed this altered personality/mental state to possession by the spirit of God. Those who believed in him accepted this explanation. Simultaneously, the Jews of Galilee and Judea suffered from widespread “somatization disorders,” also characteristic of pre-industrial societies, in which extreme stress or anxiety expressed itself in the form of chronic blindness, deafness, paralysis, muscle weakness or excessive menstrual bleeding. The Jews of the 1st century regarded these maladies as punishment for past sins. Jesus could heal people because they believed that the spirit of God possessing him had the power to forgive sin.

Likewise, inhabitants of the Mediterranean world suffered an affliction characterized by fits of shouting, flailing and other uncontrolled behavior, which they interpreted as demon possession. Davies applies the modern label of Multiple Personality Disorder. The spirit-possessed Jesus could cure this disorder because his contemporaries believed that God was more powerful than the demons. We can accept the healings as real even if we do not accept the early Christians’ supernatural explanation for them.

With this radical perspective, Davies reinterprets the significance of numerous New Testament passages. Like other scholars, he regards Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptism as a transforming event. But he draws unconventional conclusions from it. In all likelihood, the baptism induced in Jesus a possession-trance that he interpreted as a visitation by the spirit of God. Mark recalls the incident this way:

And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. (Mark 1: 10-11)

Early Christians did not invent this story, Davies argues. Jesus experienced a powerful, emotional event, which he described using the images of a dove and a voice from heaven. His disciples simply repeated his words until they found fixed form in the Gospel of Mark. The baptism marked the first of Jesus’ possession trances and the beginning of his public career as a conduit for the spirit of God. Thus began a virtuous cycle. As Jesus healed people, he gained credibility for his claim to be possessed by the spirit of God. In turn, that power of belief, or “faith” as Jesus called it, made people psychologically predisposed to being healed — which increased the likelihood that he would heal them. 

It is an axiom of New Testament scholarship today that Jesus did not regard himself as the “son of God.” Early Christians supposedly applied that label years or decades after his death. But once we grant that Jesus and his contemporaries believed that he was possessed by the “spirit of God,” Davies argues, it is but a small step to suggest that Jesus also referred to himself as the “son” of God. If Jesus did, in fact, apply this label to himself, then a host of sayings attributed to him — the spirit sayings in John and the Son-of-God sayings — are historical. The early Christians may have set those sayings in a different theological context and imparted a different meaning to them, but they did not fabricate them outright.

Applying insights from anthropological theory to the phenomenon of demon possession, Davies also provides a novel take on Jesus’ exorcisms. Cross-cultural studies suggest that demon- or ancestor-possessions usually affect individuals in socially subordinate family roles: primarily women and children. People having difficulty coping with their domestic situations find that demon possession gives them power because the people around them fear and respect the demon. Davies contends that this theoretical profile fits the evidence of the New Testament. With one exception, which will be noted momentarily, demoniacs in Galilee were women and children. Many of the women whose demons Jesus expelled, notably Mary Magdalene and Joanna wife of Chuza, subsequently became his followers. From this, Davies hypothesizes that Jesus recruited many of his disciples from among those he healed. His exhortation for people to abandon their families — often viewed as a call to reject earthly priorities and embrace heavenly ones — must be viewed in this new light. Jesus was speaking to people who already hated their families. By leaving their families, people removed themselves from the stress-inducing environments that caused the demon possession in the first place.

As an aside, Davies comes out swinging against the notion of demon possession as a symptom of colonial exploitation and anti-Roman nationalism. Proponents of this school of thought cite the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac who went by the name of Legion. In this story, Jesus expelled the demons, which leaped into a herd of swine — a gentile animal — which then drove them to destruction in into the Sea of Galilee. Davies finds it preposterous to draw a connection between demon possession and the injustices of “the colonial social system.” First, as an anti-Roman allegory, the story of the Gerasene swine is obviously a literary construction. Davies attributes the story to anti-Roman insurgents active in Galilee during the Great Revolt in 66 A.D., more than 30 years after Jesus’ death. The colonial system was a remote abstraction to Galilean peasants: There were no Roman troops stationed in Galilee during the reign of Herod Antipas. While Galilean peasants undoubtedly suffered under a heavy load of taxation, there is no indication that they paid more taxes than peasants elsewhere or suffered any greater psychological trauma from their burdens. Further, Davies might have added, demon possession (and analogous behaviors such as ancestor possession) is so ubiquitous across time, cultures and forms of political organization that it cannot be tied to a colonial-imperialist context.  As Davies rightly points out, the capacity for trance-possession is so universal that it must be regarded as part of the genetic endowment of the human species.

Spirit possession certainly was a defining characteristic of the early Christian movement. As Davies reminds us, the foundational event of Christianity was the Pentecost: the mass spirit possession of Jesus’ followers. Later, the ability to receive the spirit was a requirement for membership in the Christian community. And it was Paul’s belief that he was possessed by the spirit of Jesus that allowed him to assume a leadership position in the early church. Yet in their quest for the historical Jesus, contemporary scholars downplay the importance of the holy spirit in the origins of Christianity — even though  the 4th century church formally bequeathed the “Holy Ghost” co-equal status with God the father and Jesus the son in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Davies’ core thesis seems incontrovertible. Anyone steeped in anthropological theory will find it slap-in-the-forehead obvious that Jesus did experience possession trances similar to those of priests and shamans documented in hundreds of other cultural settings. In his enthusiasm to apply this insight in re-reading the New Testament, however, Davies does push the envelope. His theory tying Jesus’ exorcisms to his renunciation of family bonds is bold and intriguing, though still somewhat speculative. It warrants further investigation by scholars willing to subject it to close scrutiny.

Less persuasive is Davies’ endeavor to apply insights from Ericksonian psychotherapy to understanding the function of Jesus’ parables. In a nutshell, Davies argues that Jesus’ parables are best understood as paradoxical statements designed to jar people from conventional ways of looking at the world. By restructuring thought patterns in a technique similar to Ericksonian therapeutic practice, Jesus made people more receptive to achieving their own altered states of consciousness. It is one thing to experiment with such techniques in a clinical setting, however, and another to do so while preaching to a crowd. Davies seems to be stretching the evidence here. It would bolster his case if he could demonstrate that shamans and healers in other cultures successfully employed similar strategems. 

Finally, Davies is too quick to reject the work of Morton Smith (to whom he dedicated his book) who argued in Jesus the Magician that Jesus performed his works of healing and exorcism through the same kind of ritual magic found in the Egyptian papyri and ostraca. Davies says that he doesn’t find any evidence of ritual magic in the New Testament, but he doesn’t look very hard. There are abundant signs to suggest that Jesus was a devotee of throne mysticism, a spiritual discipline in which practitioners entered a trance for the purpose of ascending through the heavenly spheres and looking upon the face of God. By learning the names of angels and demons, masters of this discipline believed they could control them and exercise their power to perform mighty acts on earth. Various sources hint that Jesus initiated selected disciples into secret teachings associated with the ascent to heaven. And the Jews’ Beelzebub accusations may have been based on observations about Jesus’ thaumaturgic technique that were suppressed in the Gospel accounts. These topics warrant farther research, not being dismissed out of hand.

Still, all things considered, Jesus the Healer represents a breakthrough in the search for the historical Jesus. Davies makes a compelling case that Jesus experienced trance-possessions and believed himself to be possessed by the spirit of God. Mainstream scholarship must confront his challenge of re-interpreting the New Testament in light of this paradigm-shattering insight or run the risk of irrelevance.  

Sept. 9, 2000

The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus.

by James A. Bacon

If you’d like to read about “what happened” to Peter, John and the other disciples after Jesus’ crucifixion, look elsewhere. The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus does not reconstruct the acts of the apostles. Rather, John Dominic Crossan asks how Jesus’ followers transmitted his sayings, orally and in writing, before, as he supposes, Paul and the Gospel authors hijacked the memory of Jesus and transformed it beyond recognition.

In Crossan’s estimation, the sources most useful for understanding the Jesus and his disciples are not the epistles of Paul or the hopelessly tainted Gospels. To decipher the historical Jesus, he argues, the most useful documents include:

• The Gospel of Thomas, once deemed an apocryphal work of Gnostic heretics;
• The hypothesized “Q” sayings quoted by Matthew and Luke;
• A hypothesized “Common Sayings Source” that preceded both Thomas and Q;
• A hypothesized “Cross” Gospel; and
• A neglected but reassuringly real document, the Didache, discovered more than 100 years ago in a Greek monastery.

A portrait of Jesus based on these sources, as interpreted by Crossan, looks very different from a picture drawn from Paul and the evangelists. Rather than engaging one another in surface-level discourse — Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet; no, he was a Jewish peasant sage; no, he was a social reformer — scholars need to discuss the underlying assumptions that support those divergent portraits, Crossan contends. “There is no point,” he says, “in scholars debating result and conclusion until after they have debated theory and method.”[1] Accordingly, The Birth of Christianity is all about theory, method and sources.

Crossan is quite right to emphasize fundamental issues. Unfortunately, he reminds me of my old boss, an elderly magazine publisher who jokingly insisted: “Our policies are firm. It’s our principles that are flexible!” In Crossan’s case, his portrait of Jesus — an itinerant, non-conformist social critic of Judean society and Roman imperialism — has remained fixed over the years. Only the methods he employs to justify this position have evolved.

The Mystique of Oral Tradition

But Crossan didn’t earn his reputation as one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars for nothing. He has always been creative in forging new techniques — whether squeezing insights from obscure manuscripts or gleaning insights from comparative anthropology — to fill in the cracks between the traditional sources. In The Birth of Christianity, Crossan takes on what he calls the “mystique” of oral tradition. Scholars such as Raymond Brown assume that the deeds and sayings of Jesus could be transmitted for years without significant corruption before achieving written form in the Gospels. But Crossan asks an important question: “On what general theories or empirical studies of oral memory are Brown’s conclusions based?”[2]

Citing contemporary psychological literature, Crossan notes that people can develop “memories” of events that never happened. A person’s memory is not merely an activated image of a past event, but a complex construction mixing emotion, imagination and layers of rationalization and interpretation. Oral tradition becomes even more problematic when a story passes from the original source to others. Studies have shown how stories transmitted through a series of individuals can become unrecognizable. Crossan recounts a 1930s-era investigation of illiterate bards who recited lengthy Serbo-Croatian epics with seemingly flawless accuracy. Comparing the same ballads decades later, Harvard professors found considerable variation, which they attributed to the bard’s creativity.

While highlighting the fallibility of memory and oral transmission, the studies Crossan cites do not by themselves discredit the Gospel accounts. For instance, Jack Hamilton, a pitcher for the California Angels who hit Red Sox player Tony Conigliaro in the face with a beanball, recalled several details of the incident inaccurately when interviewed 23 years later. The incident occurred in the fourth inning, not the sixth; the score was 0-0, not 2-1, and so on.[3] Based on an analogy with Hamilton, it would be proper to question — to pick an example — whether the Galilean women at Jesus’ tomb remembered accurately years later whether they had procured the spices that morning or two days previously, or whether Jesus’ body had been laid on the right-hand side of the tomb or the left. But those details were extraneous. Hamilton had no trouble recalling the traumatic fact that he had beaned Conigliaro and ended his baseball career. Likewise, there is no reason to question the women’s recollection that they found, much to their astonishment, an empty grave.[4] Memory plays tricks, but not tricks of that magnitude.

Crossan also cites studies demonstrating the corruption that can occur when material passes from one storyteller to another. Laboratory studies have shown that “serial reproduction” can create startling changes to narrative material: names transmogrify, events transpose, epithets change into their opposites.[5] This concern is largely irrelevant, however, if we suppose that the bulk of original New Testament material passed directly from Peter the eyewitness to Mark the scribe. On the other hand, the concern does apply to material attributed to oral traditions of vague, unspecified provenance in which stories may have been told and retold many times.

Ironically, the latter description is precisely the kind of source that Crossan employs to reconstruct his historical Jesus: the so-called “Common Sayings Source,” a hypothesized collection of Jesus sayings that anonymous followers collected and passed along until they took written form in the so-called “Q” source and the Gospel of Thomas. Remarkably, Crossan does not hold himself to the same standard that he sets for Raymond Brown. After concluding that oral memory is fallible and malleable, thereby casting doubt on Brown’s conclusions, Crossan never seriously addresses the topic again. He certainly doesn’t reveal which empirical studies of oral memory support his hypothesis of a Common Sayings Source.

The Paradigm of Oppression

Another pillar of Crossan’s methodology is the use of cross-cultural anthropology to illuminate the cultural environment that shaped Jesus and the early Christians. According to Crossan’s readings of anthropological literature, “peasant unrest and resistance escalate as agrarian empires increase their commercializing activities and take peasant land.”[6] The Roman Empire was just such an agrarian empire which, under the pax romana of Augustus Caesar, was urbanizing and experiencing a boom in commercial activity. By commercialization, Crossan means the spread of a monetary economy. One facet of this economy was an increase in money lending and, along with it, peasant indebtedness and the expropriation of peasant property. In pre-commercial agrarian societies, the ruling class and its retainers, accounting for one to two percent of the population, took 50 to 65 percent of the agricultural product in taxes and rents.[7] In a commercializing society, the aristocracy seized the land as well, depriving peasants of their independence and dignity.

Crossan employs this Kautsky-Lenski model, as he dubs it, to describe 1st century Judea and Galilee. Commercialization was spreading through the region, and money lenders were dispossessing peasants of their land. A growing class of rootless and desperate men worked as day laborers, resorted to beggary or pursued a life of banditry. Imbued with a sense that Yahweh was a just God who would never tolerate such evil, the Jews arose in full-scale revolt three times over a century and a half. When they weren’t revolting, they were heeding messiahs proclaiming that God would intervene himself to establish a kingdom of justice and righteousness. Jesus, says Crossan, can be properly understood only in this context of intensifying inequality and misery.

Crossan takes this Paradigm of Oppression as axiomatic. He never deigns to support it, however, by actually citing evidence. No student of the era would deny that 1st century Judea was a land of vast disparities in wealth. The problem is that Crossan insists that the inequities were getting worse. The literary and archaeological evidence is insufficient to support such a conclusion. Indeed, it can be read to suggest just the opposite.

First, Crossan presumes that economic conditions for the Judean peasantry was deteriorating during the lifetime of Jesus. To say that conditions were getting worse implies that in the pre-commercial era, before the pax romana took hold, conditions somehow had been better. But this necessary assumption flies in face of the known facts. The homeland of the Jews in the 1st century B.C. was wracked by invasion and civil war. Marauding armies had a nasty habit of conscripting peasants, stealing their food and looting their possessions. War displaced populations on a massive scale: The Romans sold entire villages into slavery. The lives of peasants could have only improved once Herod the Great secured control of the country and imposed stability.

I would hypothesize that land-tenure patterns favored the peasantry towards the close of the 1st century B.C., around the time that Jesus was born. Those who were lucky enough to survive the civil wars faced less competition in a depopulated country for access to land. Tenants and day laborers would have resettled in regions where they enjoyed a more favorable bargaining position with the landowners. Many would have even laid claim to land themselves, through purchase, marriage or a settlement sponsored by Herod. Next, I would advance a second theorem: In accordance with Malthusian laws, the peasant population increased steadily in the absence of war, famine or natural disaster to curtail it. Then dowry and inheritance would have diluted the wealth with each successive generation. First-century Jewish families endowed their daughters with dowries. Significant in size, these endowments functioned as a form of pre-mortem inheritance, and they materially diminished the estates of those who gave them. The Jews also divided land and other property between surviving sons upon the death of the patriarch, giving double portions to the eldest son. Typically raising three or more children to adulthood, Jewish peasant families would have sub-divided their original holdings into smaller and smaller parcels. It is possible to envision an increase in the number of landless or land-poor peasants without the intervention of Crossan’s predatory money lenders.

But a serious inquiry into socio-economic conditions would not end there. Unlike in Medieval Europe, peasants were not tied to the land. They were free to migrate, whether to Judea’s growing cities, to gentile territories under Jewish rule or to cities of the Jewish diaspora. The question then arises: To what extent were these outlets capable of absorbing large numbers of landless and land-poor Judean peasants? We cannot simply assume, as Crossan does, that dispossessed farmers passively accepted their lot as day laborers or, worse, fell into a life of beggary or banditry.

A thoughtful examination of socio-economic conditions must address another issue as well: To what extent did peasants contrive to increase their landholdings by bringing marginal lands under cultivation through irrigation, terracing or other techniques of water capture? To what extent did they manage to augment the yields of lands already under cultivation? We must consider the possibility that, during a period of peace and stability, Judean landowners invested in bolstering the productivity of their holdings. If so, an increased incidence of money lending to peasants would have been a positive phenomenon if it provided the capital needed to undertake such ventures. To Crossan, however, such a possibility does not exist.

This brings us to a second flaw in Crossan’s model. Without offering any evidence whatsoever, he presumes that money lending had universally baleful impact on the peasant population. In the process, he trots out a number of unproven statements. He boldly states that money-lending activity was on the increase. On what basis? Money lending was nothing new. As Crossan himself notes, Jewish law had prohibited Jews from charging interest on loans to one another since the creation of the Deuteronomic code centuries previously. It’s not an unreasonable hypothesis to state that loan activity increased in concert with the volume of money in circulation, but the point remains unsubstantiated.

Even if we assume that the volume of indebtedness was on the rise, as it may well have been, how does Crossan know that financiers were lending the money to peasants? He could have cited Flavius Josephus who describes one of the first acts of sedition in the war against Rome: burning the archives that stored the debt records. The insurrectionists hoped “to gain the multitude of those who had been debtors, and that they might persuade the poorer sort to join in their insurrection with safety against the more wealthy.”[8] By the “poorer sort,” Josephus could have been alluding to the Judean peasantry, although it’s possible that he was referring to the urban poor — artisans, laborers, peddlers and others connected to the city’s Temple economy. Josephus mentions only one debtor by name, and that was none other than the Herodian prince Agrippa, who spent much of his time dodging creditors before finally persuading the emperor Gaius to make him king of Judea! Similarly, it is possible that large landowners, prominent office holders and others with means — or, more likely, their young, dissipated and financially overextended offspring — also found themselves in debt. The fact is, we have little hard data. But, again, let’s give Crossan the benefit of the doubt and assume that money was lent in large volumes to peasants. What factual basis does he have to assert that, as a consequence, thousands were being dispossessed of their property? He offers nothing to support this assertion. First-century Judea was remarkably free of calamities that would have driven peasants into debt: just one natural famine worth recording during the reign of Herod the Great, and one about a decade after Jesus’ death, but none during Jesus’ lifetime. If it can be demonstrated that peasants did borrow money, one could argue that they did so to boost productivity — purchasing oxen, buying wagons, starting vineyards and olive groves, building granaries, digging cisterns, creating terraces or extending irrigation ditches. For all we know, the spread of a commercial economy could have launched Judea and Galilee into an era of unprecedented rural prosperity. But Crossan, who defines the peasantry as an exploited class, does not allow such a possibility.

In one of his rare recourses to hard data, Crossan examines archaeological evidence that supports the notion of rising living standards, but he chooses to interpret it in the most negative light possible. The villages of Kefar Hananya and Kefar Shikhin comprised a vigorous pottery manufacturing center that supplied wares to communities throughout Lower Galilee. Archaeologist David Adan-Bayewitz conjectured that the two villages enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the Galilean cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias, which may have functioned as distribution centers for marketing their goods. Such a relationship, noted Adan-Bayewitz, did not seem consistent with the picture, common among some scholars, that urban centers were exploiting the Galilean peasantry. Committed to his Paradigm of Oppression, however, Crossan reinterpreted the data to suggest that the pottery was not distributed through the cities, but marketed unidirectionally from the two villages by peddlers. In other words, the cities contributed nothing to the villages.

This case study provides an interesting insight into Crossan’s thinking. Let’s assume for purposes of argument that Crossan’s interpretation is preferable to the appraisal tendered by Adan-Bayewitz, and that peddlers did in fact travel from village to village selling the pottery. One could interpret such a scenario as a positive development for the Galilean peasantry: Rather than allow wealthy city merchants to capture the profit from distributing the pottery, local peasants garnered the economic value themselves! Likewise, one could regard the widespread sale of pottery in outlying Galilean villages as a positive sign. The fact that Galilean peasants could afford to purchase pottery rather than fabricate their own crude wares indicates that they retained enough cash after paying their taxes, tithes, rents and interest to raise the quality of their lives above subsistence. Judging by The Birth of Christianity, it apparently never occurred to Crossan to view the evidence this way.

For Crossan, peasants are by definition victims of exploitation. In his view, the fact that rural Galileans took up pottery making instead of farming is not a sign of increasing opportunity in the commercial economy, but an indication that overpopulation had driven peasants off the land and forced them into a less desirable occupation. He reaches this conclusion despite suggesting elsewhere in his book that a monetizing economy might have benefited women by devaluing the resources that men formerly dominated and placing a premium on resources the women controlled.[9] The reader waits in vain, however, for Crossan to apply this abstract insight to real-world conditions in Judea.

But we can fill in the blanks ourselves. Let us hypothesize a traditional division of sexual labor at Kefar Hananya and Kefar Shikhin in which the men worked on the farms and the women pursued domestic duties, including the manufacture of pottery for household use. As a monetary economy seeped into the region and as neighboring villages could afford to purchase their wares, we can hypothesize that pottery makers enjoyed a surge in demand for their skills. Deriving income from the sale of their products, the women of the two villages increased their bargaining power, hence their standing, in their households. Perhaps they even organized the shift in production from a household craft to mass-production artisanship, although Crossan notes that males often dominated the transition to larger-scale enterprises. (Crossan’s peddlers, for instance, probably were men.) This would suggest that commercialization created new opportunities for Galilean women, and possibly for entire households, to supplement their farm income.

The Texts

Amid the unremitting misery of Crossan’s Galilee, there arose Jesus of Nazareth with a new message. While other prophets and would-be messiahs proclaimed the imminent coming of Yahweh upon clouds of thunder to impose his divine rule upon earth, Crossan’s Jesus said that the kingdom had arrived already. His philosophy of “ethical eschatology” negated an unjust existence “by actively protesting and nonviolently resisting a system judged to be evil, unjust and violent.”[10] In practice, that meant renouncing worldly possessions, rejecting established social relationships — from Judea’s hierarchical class structure down to the patriarchal family unit — and embracing the socially marginalized. Crossan suggests that Jesus attracted followers like himself: dispossessed peasant freeholders, tenants, day laborers, the expendable. Contrary to the portrait daubed by the Gospels, Jesus did not look for future deliverance: He sought to change the here-and-now.

To support this argument, Crossan strips away all sayings from the Gospels suggesting that Jesus anticipated a divine chastisement of Judea’s oppressors, a resurrection of the dead and the rule of a heavenly kingdom. He rejects this material on the grounds that it reflects a Jesus conceived by the Christian community after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. But he retains any sayings that could be construed as a code of conduct for this life in this world. These fragments, he suggest, derive from a “Common Sayings Tradition” that can be traced back to the earliest days of the Christian movement.

In the process, Crossan adopts a series of hypotheses, some reasonable, some highly questionable, each one built upon the one before it. The sequence goes like this.

1. Crossan assumes the theory of Marcan priority: the notion that Mark’s was the first Gospel written and that both Matthew and Luke drew upon it for material and organizational structure. Although a few stray scholars dispute this bedrock assumption of New Testament studies, Crossan is on safe ground.
2. Crossan accepts the existence of the “Q” source, a document of Jesus sayings that Matthew and Luke supposedly drew upon to supplement Mark. A hardy rear-guard of scholars questions the existence of such a source, but a significant majority embraces it. Here, Crossan stands safely within the mainstream of New Testament exegesis.
3. Crossan embraces the hypothesis that “Q” consists of three strata written at different stages of the evolution of the “Q” community. The harsh apocalyptic sayings that warn of a God coming in wrath and judgment reflect a later stage of development; the earliest sayings contained mainly language of a non-violent and radically egalitarian nature: Blessed are the poor, the weak, the dispossessed. This three-fold division of the Q sayings is highly controversial, but Crossan embraces it whole heartedly.
4. In The Birth of Christianity, Crossan boldly plunges one step farther into the quicksand of conjecture. In the beginning, there was a “Common Sayings Source” which provided material to the composers of the first-stage “Q” sayings and the early Gospel of Thomas sayings. This source gets us very close to the historical Jesus, but the specific identities of those who compiled it have been lost to history. However, Crossan suggests that those who compiled this sayings collection, whoever they were, wandered from village to village much like Jesus himself, healing the ill and accepting the hospitality of peasant householders in return.

Suffice it to say that Crossan’s reconstruction of the Common Sayings Source is highly speculative. However, having gone where no scholar dared venture before him, Crossan does look for supporting evidence in some interesting places. He draws upon the Didache, a community-rule manual of the early Christian-Jewish ecclesia, which he argues — in the face of considerable scholarly disagreement — was independent of the canonical Gospels. Then he deduces that his document reflected the perspective of rural householders who honored the itinerant-radical disciples of Jesus but sought to control their influence. By now, of course, we are dealing with supposition heaped upon theory piled high upon surmise.

Finally, Crossan turns to the Cross Gospel, the existence of which he has postulated for years now with little encouragement from other academics. This hypothesized passion narrative supposedly provided the basis for Mark and the other Gospels. Lost in its original form, he conjectures, it survives largely intact, though interwoven with later elements, in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter. In The Birth of Christianity, Crossan builds upon his previous work on the Cross Gospel in several ways. First, he sets the composition of the narrative during Agrippa I’s persecution of the early church. The Cross Gospel’s shifting of blame for Jesus’ execution from Pilate to the chief priests suggests that it was written during a period of persecution by Jewish authorities; Agrippa’s crackdown on the Christian community in Jerusalem around 40 A.D. fits this scenario. Second, Crossan finds parallels to his Cross Gospel in the Clementine Recognitions, a 3rd-century work scorned by most scholars. To his way of thinking, these parallels come from an authentic early tradition embedded in the Recognitions, thus indicating the existence of a pre-Marcan passion narrative similar to the Cross Gospel. Thirdly, Crossan fleshes out his conjecture on how the Cross Gospel made the transition from exegesis — finding Jewish scriptures that seemed to prophesy Jesus’ fate — to narrative. He introduces the cross-cultural phenomenon of the ritual lament, in which mourning women recounted, often poetically, biographical details of the deceased. The Cross Gospel, Crossan submits, arose from an integration of male exegesis and female lament, with the lament providing narrative structure for the prophecies.

It’s all very creative, but Crossan fails to address the fundamental problems that has dogged his Cross Gospel hypothesis from its inception. We will address only two of the most grievous examples.

The hypothesized Cross Gospel as replicated in an earlier work, The Cross That Spoke, contains the story of guards at Jesus’ tomb. In this passage, fearing that the disciples might steal Jesus’ body from the sepulcher and people might suppose that Jesus had arisen from the dead, the chief priests asked Pilate to post guards at the tomb. Pilate obliged, and the guards wound up as witnesses to the resurrection. Crossan never explains why only Matthew incorporates this supposedly early tradition into his Gospel. Such a story seemingly would have offered vivid proof of the resurrection. Why would Mark, Luke and John overlook it? The reality, of course, is that Matthew invented the guards-at-the-tomb story. It was his response to the Jews who, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., had begun combating Christianity with a counter Gospel which, among other things, accused the disciples of stealing the body from the tomb. What we see in the Gospel of Peter is not an early tradition but an elaboration upon Matthew. For instance, Matthew never names the guards at the tomb. Pseudo-Peter mentions a Roman centurion by the name of Petronius. Which is more likely: Matthew excising such a concrete detail from the Cross Gospel or Pseudo-Peter adding it to an expanded version of Matthew’s account?

Next, Crossan’s reconstructed Cross Gospel includes a description of Jesus’ ascension into heaven. In this passage, Petronius, the guards and various Jewish elders and scribes all witnessed two angels descend from the sky, roll aside the stone at the tomb then emerge with Jesus and arise to heaven. Needless to say, if this had been part of the earliest Christian tradition, one of the Gospels surely would have noted it. Yet Mark’s description of the empty tomb records the presence only of an unidentified young man dressed in a robe. The young man is not even described as an angel. Luke tweaked the tradition: He wrote that there were two people, and he explicitly identified them as angels. Matthew went farther: The Jewish guards at the tomb actually witnessed an “angel of the Lord” descend directly from heaven, but no one saw Jesus ascend. There was a clear apologetic trajectory in which successive Christians writers added increasingly fantastic elements to the empty tomb story. Crossan’s Cross-Gospel passages in the Gospel of Peter are the culmination of that trajectory, not the beginning of it.

These difficulties are so glaring that Crossan must have noticed them. But after finishing The Birth of Christianity, one wonders whether such inconvenient facts really matter to him. Crossan makes it quite clear: His god is a God of compassion and justice. Crossan’s God sides with the victims of discrimination, exploitation and oppression. How can his Jesus do otherwise? In The Birth of Christianity, theology comes first and history is configured to support it.

— 12/15/2000

[1] p. 141.

[2] p. 55

[3] p. 60

[4] One might legitimately ask if the tradition originated with the Galilean women or whether the empty-tomb pericope was invented by Mark. But that is a different grounds entirely for questioning the historicity of the story.

[5] p. 83

[6] p. 152

[7] p. 154

[8] Josephus, Flavius; The Jewish War; Book II, Chapter 17:6.

[9] p. 165. “If [Susan Carol] Rogers’s analysis is correct, the initial stages of colonial commercialization in Lower Galilee, for example, would have left peasant women in a temporarily better position than peasant men.”

[10] p. 284. 

Donald Harman Akenson; Harcourt Brace and Company; New York and London; 1998.

by James A. Bacon

In Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, Donald Akenson chronicles the development of the Judeo-Christian literary heritage: the Tanakh (known as the Old Testament to Christians), the Jewish apocryphal literature, the New Testament, the Mishnah and the Talmuds. Recapitulating 1,000 years of literary history, Akenson does not retell Bible stories or even appraise their historical context and authenticity. Instead, he recounts how these great works of religious literature were written and, in the process, illuminates what he calls the “grammar of invention” — the patterns by which new theological ideas emerged under the mantle of ancient authority.

Akenson’s big thesis is that Judaism and Christianity descend from a common religion — the cult of Yahweh practiced between the founding of the Second Temple in 538 B.C. and its destruction in 70 A.D. — which he calls Judahism. This novel perspective challenges the traditional view of Jewish and Christian origins: rabbinical Judaism as the heir to the Second Temple religion and Christianity as a radical offshoot from it. In Akenson’s view Judahism, “Siloam’s teeming pool,” was a fecund, mutating religious ecosystem that tolerated great diversity of thought. The Second Temple era accommodated not only the proto-rabbis known as the Pharisees and the proto-Christian followers of Jesus, but a kaleidoscopic array of Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, mystics, apocalyptic movements and anonymous groups that blinked in and out of existence, leaving only their literary fossils behind.

The destruction of the Temple in the calamitous revolt against Rome obliterated Judahism’s diversity, however, and set Christianity and rabbinical Judaism onto their modern-day paths. Both of these Judahistic remnants faced the same challenge: transforming themselves from a temple-focused worship of Yahweh to a religion that had meaning without a Temple. The two groups found radically different solutions.

According to Akenson, Christians adapted by substituting Jesus for the Temple. Through a massive retro reading of the scriptures, the Christians remade Jesus from a mortal man into the son of God whose suffering upon the cross atoned for the sins of mankind. This metaphysical sacrifice of Jesus, the “lamb of God,” served the same propitiatory function as the Temple’s sacrifice of cattle, sheep and doves to Yahweh. Once the Christians achieved this insight, they projected their theological schema backwards onto the historical Jesus by means of the canonical New Testament scriptures, rendering the real man all but unrecognizable.

The Pharisees/rabbis chose another course entirely. In committing their oral law into writing by means of the Mishnah, they reproduced every imaginable detail of the Temple liturgy. In effect, says Akenson, the rabbis reinvented the Temple as a mental construct. Until such time as the Temple could be rebuilt, they declared, studying the laws of Temple service was the equivalent in the eyes of God to actually performing the services. Lacking the means ever to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, the Jews eventually acclimated themselves to the permanent reality of being a Temple religion without a Temple.

Akenson stakes out a position of profound skepticism regarding the possibility of reconstructing the historical Jesus. Rather than starting with the earliest Christian writings and tracking their evolution forward, he adopts the point of view of the “editor-inventor” of the New Testament, a heuristic stand-in for various church councils that formulated the Christian canon. This “editor-inventor” selected only those writings that were compatible with one another. The result was a cohesive, unified work — the canonical New Testament — with interlocking motifs and symbols that were consistent with the new religion’s doctrine.

Key themes found in the New Testament — the Son of God, the Messiah, heavenly ascension, incorruptibility of the spirit, dualism of light and darkness — can  be traced to Second Temple scriptures. There is no need, says Akenson, to seek the influence of Greek mystery cults. Indeed, there is little need even for a Yeshua of Nazareth. Christianity could have developed the same Temple-religion-without-a-Temple theology without him.

In Akenson’s view, we can be confident that Jesus lived and died in the 1st century A.D. — his life and crucifixion are attested to by the Jew Flavius Josephus and the Roman Cornelius Tacitus — but we can be certain of very little else. Except for the letters of Paul, which say virtually nothing about Jesus the man, all the narratives of Jesus’ life were written after the destruction of the Temple. The four Gospels portrayed Jesus as having predicted the Temple’s demise and suggested that the fulfillment of his prophecy, along with his sacrifice on the cross, were all part of a divine plan. The Gospels’ rewriting of history was so extensive, Akenson contends, that very little can be accepted as accurate. Consequently, it is all but impossible to pierce the veil of the Temple’s destruction and ascertain pre-70 A.D. views of Jesus.

Akenson chastises those whom he characterizes as questors of the historical Jesus. Christian fundamentalists, secular liberals and even Jews who have undertaken the study of the authentic Jesus are on a fool’s errand. They are trying to do what cannot be done. Akenson finds value in only one criterion, of very limited value, for ascertaining the veracity of Jesus’ words and acts as depicted in the Gospels. If there are dissonant elements within the narratives, he concedes, they may indicate the presence of early traditions that survived the process of editorial revision, presumably because they were too notorious to ignore.

Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist was one of these embarrassments. The Gospel authors wanted to depict John as subservient to Jesus. They would not have invented a situation — John possessing the authority to baptize Jesus rather than the other way around — that required apologetic explanation. Accordingly, we can accept the baptism of Jesus as an authentic deed, even if we dismiss some of the legend surrounding it.

The only sayings that Akenson accepts as genuine are Jesus’ rulings on divorce, the strictness of which contrasted with his laxness towards ritual purity, the keeping of the Sabbath and other matters of law. Akenson suggests that this hyper-sensitivity toward “family breakdown” may have stemmed from accusations that he was the illegitimate son of Mary. Otherwise, Akenson grants no other quarter. One can conjecture, one can hypothesize, but no one can describe the historical Jesus with any degree of confidence.

Surpassing Wonder is lucid, eloquent and brilliantly argued. Akenson’s mastery of Biblical and Talmudic literature is breathtaking. He calls historians to account for sloppy analysis, and he compels all Argonauts of the historical Jesus to examine fundamental assumptions. But in the end, he fails. His agnosticism is too severe.

Akenson quite correctly argues that it is impossible to understand the evolution of either Christianity or Judaism without reference to the other. Yet he blithely skips over the rivalry between the co-sanguine faiths following the fall of the Temple. For a century or so following the fall of the Temple, Christians and rabbis contended for the loyalty of the Diaspora Jews. According to Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho, around the time of the Bar Kokhba rebellion in 135 A.D., the Jews “sent chosen and ordained men throughout all the world to proclaim that a godless and lawless heresy had sprung from one Jesus, a Galilean deceiver.” Similarly, Origen quoted the work of a certain Celsus, a pagan polemicist who employed a well-articulated Jewish critique of Christianity. The Mishnah and Talmud may not have preserved knowledge of what New Testament scholar Morton Smith referred to as a “Counter Gospel,” but the Christian literature did.

Why does this matter? Because it tells us that forces other than the destruction of the Temple shaped the Christian canon. If the rabbis accused Jesus of being a sorcerer, a charlatan and the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, we can follow the tracks these charges left in the Christian literature. Guided by rabbinical accusations, we can detect the spoor of ritual magic and illegitimacy in Mark that Luke and Matthew deleted or whitewashed in their rhetorical sparring with the rabbis. These adjustments were not related to the demolition of the Temple in any way. 

Furthermore, Akenson is unduly parsimonious in applying the one methodology he believes has value: the criteria of embarrassment. For instance, when Jesus sent his disciples throughout the land of the Jews, he admonished them, “Go not into the way of the gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not.” (Matthew 10:5). To Christian evangelists seeking to convert gentiles 40 years later, Jesus’ indifference to local Greeks and Samaritans could not have been helpful. It is inconceivable that Matthew would have inserted this inconvenient saying into his narrative were it not substantially true. Once again, we find that we can, in fact, pull aside the Temple veil and behold what lays before 70 A.D.

One more example should suffice: the Jesus of the Gospels believed that the kingdom of God would imminently appear. According to Mark 1:15, he began preaching soon after his baptism: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” The kingdom did not appear then, however, nor did it ever in his lifetime. Indeed, it had not arrived some 37 years later when Mark wrote his Gospel. In addressing this discomforting delay, the early Christians developed a somewhat labored explanation: Jesus’ earthly tenure — the “first” coming — marked the beginning of the kingdom of God, even though it wasn’t readily apparent, and Jesus soon would return with the power of God — the “second” coming — to punish the wicked and establish God’s rule on earth. We need postulate no influence from the destruction of the Temple to account for the development of this doctrine. Indeed, the theological gymnastics required to make sense of Jesus’ unfulfilled prophecy is a powerful indication that the words attributed to Jesus were, in fact, quite accurate.

In conclusion, Akenson is a pleasure to read. His passion for the subject is infectious. By illuminating well-worn Biblical materials from a different angle, he may even inspire some useful study. There is certainly merit to his argument that the trauma of the Temple’s destruction knocked the evolution of Christian doctrine into a new trajectory. But he wanders astray when he makes the Temple the determining factor in shaping all Christian doctrine. His cause seems as doomed as that of the Zealots who died defending the Temple from destruction by Roman legions. This marvelous book, in the end, will dissuade no one from the quest for the historical Jesus.

— July 20, 2000