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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
