John Dominic Crossan. HarperCollins. New York, NY; 1994
by James A. Bacon
For students new to the study of the historical “Jesus, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography” serves as a useful primer for the Jesus-as-social-critic school. Dominic Crossan is one of the best known New Testament scholars in the profession today and probably the most widely quoted — by the popular press if not necessarily by fellow academics. His dense and forbidding scholarly tomes, such as “The Cross that Spoke” and “The Historical Jesus,” drag the student through hundreds of pages of arcane social theory and line-by-line textual criticism. But “Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography” packs a career’s worth of research and insight into a single, slender volume.
This 200-page book is well worth reading, even for those who know before picking it up that they will disagree with this author’s highly publicized views. A leading advocate of the notion that Jesus was a wandering, poverty-embracing teacher of nonviolent social protest, Crossan lays out his case succinctly. Drawing insights from cross-cultural studies that place Jesus’ Galilee in the context of a larger Mediterranean civilization, Crossan employs perspectives often overlooked in New Testament studies. The questions he raises are interesting and worth pursuing even if his answers aren’t always persuasive.
After a refreshingly brief review of his methodology, Crossan commences his investigation into the life of the historical Jesus, logically enough, with his birth. The idea of applying divine status to mortal men was part of the cultural repertoire of the 1st century Mediterranean world, most notably in the cult of the Caesar Augustus. In the previous century Virgil had penned the Aeneid, constructing a mythological genealogy for the emperor’s family that extended back to Aeneas, the son of Aphrodite and hero of ancient Troy. Luke and Matthew adopted the Aeneid model when they invented genealogies tracing Jesus’ heritage back to King David and created stories of Jesus’ divine conception. The Lucan and Matthean accounts differ dramatically, however, both in detail and overall structure. Luke, as Crossan argues, used his birth narrative to assert Jesus’ primacy over John the Baptist — an issue that apparently still was not settled some 40 to 50 years after both men’s deaths. Matthew, by contrast, composed his narrative as a conscious parallel to the birth of Moses. Consequently, the two birth stories bore few similarities. The divine origins of Jesus, Crossan concludes, are as fictitious as those attributed to Octavius.
Crossan then moves to John the Baptist. Suffering under Roman oppression, the Jews yearned for miraculous deliverance. John was the first of many “peasant and apocalyptic prophets” in the mid-1st century who predicted the imminent intervention of God in the affairs of men and the establishment of the rule of heaven on earth. Through his baptisms, John played a critical role in building the apocalyptic expectations of the Jews. Unlike later prophets, however, he did not seek to precipitate the apocalypse through such symbolic action as crossing the Jordan River or encamping on the Mount of Olives.
Among the people whose lives John touched was Jesus. It is historically certain that John baptized Jesus, Crossan says, and it is highly likely that Jesus broke away from John to start his own movement. So far so good: Even evangelical scholars would acknowledge that some kind of rupture took place. But Crossan then makes a great leap of historical faith: Jesus transformed John’s apocalypse of the near future into an apocalypse of the here and now. Rather than waiting for God to change the world, Jesus embraced and taught a change in lifestyle, a radical egalitarianism at odds with the hierarchical structure of Jewish society under imperial Roman rule.
The heart of Jesus’ teaching and practice was something Crossan calls “open commensality.” Applying insights from anthropological studies, he defines commensality as the rules of tabling and eating. Table fellowship, he says, can be seen as “a map of economic discrimination, social hierarchy and political differentiation.” By sharing meals with sinners, tax collectors and unmarried women of uncertain virtue, Jesus ignored the prevailing distinctions of Judaic society. He didn’t just preach, “Blessed are the poor,” he put his words into practice.
Viewing Jesus’ healing “miracles” in the light of his egalitarian practices, Crossan draws a distinction between curing a disease, as in remedying the underlying physical malady, and healing the patient. In 1st century Galilee the physical afflictions of disease often were accompanied by social opprobrium. Jesus healed by refusing to accept the disease’s ritual uncleanness and social ostracism, asserts Crossan. “Jesus heals by refusing to accept traditional and official sanctions against the diseased person. Jesus heals him, in other words, by taking him into a community of the marginalized and disenfranchised.”
Wandering from village to village, preaching his radical egalitarianism, practicing open commensality and healing the socially marginalized, Jesus eschewed material reward. Unlike many other Mediterranean miracle healers, he never developed a geographically based cult and never sought to amass prestige or wealth. Jesus did not want to become part of the system: He defined an alternative to it. By advocating and practicing a novel social model, he acted out the ancient peasant dream of radical egalitarianism.
Having portrayed Jesus as non-violent, non-apocalyptic and a threat to the Jewish social order, not imperial Roman rule, Crossan then explains how he came to the attention of Pontius Pilate. On a trip to Jerusalem for the Passover, Crossan suggests, “the spiritual and economic egalitarianism [Jesus] preached in Galilee exploded in indignation at the Temple as the seat and symbol of all that was non-egalitarian, patronal, and even oppressive on both the religious and the political level.” By overturning the tables of the money changes, Jesus symbolically overthrew the Temple. One might think that such a disorder might agitate the high priests far more than the Roman governor, but Crossan goes to great pains to place responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion squarely upon the shoulders of Pilate.
Crossan side steps the issue of explaining exactly why Pilate would have executed Jesus for an offense to the priests, other than to note that the Roman governor was a man of excessive brutality and cruelty. Rather than building a positive case that Pilate had sound reasons for ordering the execution, Crossan expends most of his effort in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography ridiculing the scene, so vivid in the Gospels, of Pilate haggling with the high priests over Jesus’ fate. Pilate ruled Judea with supreme power, he says: He had no need or inclination to negotiate or plead with anyone. Likewise, he argues, the Barabbas episode was an obvious fabrication.
Other than the fact that Jesus was crucified, very little can be stated about Jesus’ last day, Crossan contends. Upon his arrest, the disciples all ran away. They had no way of knowing what happened at Jesus’ trial, or indeed if there even was one. They did not witness the crucifixion, and they knew nothing where Jesus was buried. The entire passion narrative in the Gospels is a legendary construct, invented years later in order to depict Jesus’ life and death as fulfillment of scripture. To a considerable degree, the Jesus we know from the New Testament is the creation of the Gospel authors who projected their apocalyptic expectations back onto him.
Crossan is undoubtedly correct that many of the specific details found in the passion narratives are legendary. But there is no reason to reject the broad outline of Jesus’ last days. To cite only one example, and only because Crossan makes so much of it, the account of Pilate negotiating with the high priests for Jesus’ life is, in fact, eminently plausible. The Gospel authors may have taken liberties, as ancient-world chroniclers typically did, of imagining the dialogue that took place. But they accurately described the key points at issue. The high priests, not Pilate, felt threatened by Jesus’ symbolic assault on the Temple. They initiated the arrest, and they brought Jesus before Pilate to demand for his execution. Pilate demurred, not because he worried about the injustice of crucifying an innocent man, but because he found Jesus a useful foil to irritate the priests. In the end, he gave in. Sejanus, Pilate’s patron in Rome, had been executed, and the emperor Tiberius was persecuting anyone associated with him. When the priests threatened to raise the issue with Caesar, the prefect had no option but to concede. Protecting the life of Jesus was not worth the risk of a hearing before Tiberius.
One could quibble with Crossan on many such interpretations, but there is little point in attacking the joists and timbers of his construct. The problem with Crossan’s craftsmanship stems from his grand architecture. He starts with a vision of Jesus as a non-violent social revolutionary, then trims his interpretations of specific events and sayings to fit. Because the grand design is flawed, the walls within his edifice often crack and buckle.
Crossan concedes that John the Baptist was an apocalyptic prophet, but he strains to convince us that Jesus, despite his close association with John, was not. Crossan acknowledges that many of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries yearned for supernatural deliverance, but he says Jesus did not. Crossan admits that the early Christians shared an apocalyptic vision, but he argues that they didn’t get it from Jesus. The most logical deduction from these facts — that Jesus also nurtured hopes for God’s deliverance and the kingdom of heaven — is the one possibility that Crossan steadfastly refuses to consider.
Crossan may deserve his reputation as one of the world’s leading Jesus scholars: His application of perspectives from the realm of cultural anthropology to the study of Jesus and his social milieu has moved the study of the historical Jesus several steps forward. Thanks to Crossan, for instance, any interpretation of Jesus must account for his taboo-breaking commensality with publicans and sinners. Students of the historical Jesus also can thank Crossan for making the scholarly study of Jesus accessible to a broad audience: The cover of the 1995 paperback imprint of Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography purports to be a “national best seller.” But Crossan’s vision of Jesus as an itinerant preacher of earthly social change takes us down a dead end.
July 30, 2000