Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan

Intro

The four gospels do not represent all the early gospels available or even a random sample within them,
but are instead a calculated collection known as the canonical gosepels (x)

Luke and Mathew both come from Q gospel – “Q”uelle from the German for “source.”
-L and M both use Mark as a source, as well

e.g. of apocryphal gospel is Gospel of Thomas – found in upper Egypt in 1945

-a collection of sayings of Jesus without order or any descriptions of accompanying deeds

Crossan’s method of attempting biography of the historical Jesus locates itself at the vortex of three
independent vectors
-cross-cultural anthropology
-Greco-Roman and Jewish history
-literary or textual
-retention of materials
-development of materials
-creation of materials
-theological interpretations in various iterations of materials

Gospel = good news

This is a condensed and popularized version of his more complete academic work:
The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, 1991

Chapter 1

Only Matthew and Luke give account of Jesus’ birth or early years (4)

They are not so much the first chapters of Jesus’ life, from which other chapters about the rest of his
infancy and youth have been, as it were, hiden or lost, as they are overtures, condensed intertwinings of
the dominant themes in the respective gospels to which they serve introduction and summary. And, of ,
course, since those gospels have separate and distninc t visions of Jesus’ adult life, so must they also
have separate and distincet visions of his infancy-as-overture.
-Luke: shepherds, angels, in and manger, earlier presentation and later teaching in the Temple
-Matthew: Herod and the Magi, slaughter of the innocents, flight into Egypt (5)

Infancies of John and Jesus are given in such parallel form that they can be parsed into five parallel acts,
illustrating John as the keeper of the old tradition and Jesus as the new, and the exalted way:
1) Angelic announcements
a. To Zechariah about John in Luke 1:5-25
b. To Mary about Jesus in L 1:26-38
2) Publicized birth
a. John – L 1:57-58
b. Jesus – 2:7-14
 3) Circumcision and naming
a. John – L 1:59-63a
b. Jesus- L 2:21
4) Public presentation and prophecy of destiny
a. John – L 1:65-79
b. Jesus – L 2:21-38
5) Description of the child’s growth
a. 1:80
b. 2:40-52

Luke, in that double infancy story, sends two powerful messages to hearer or reader: John is the
condensation and consummation of his people’s past, but Jesus is far, far greater than John (10)

Parallel between Moses and Jesus in both cases of death of the innocents.

For Matthew, Jesus is both rejected by the Herodian authority and accepted by pagan wisdom (Magi).
(12)

Just as Pharaoh heard of the predestined child’s arrival and sought to kill him by killing all the infant
males, so did Herod the Great with Jesus. And just as Moses’ father (Amram) refused to accept the
general decision of divorce and received a heavenly message through Miriam announcing his child’s
destiny, so Jeseph considered by rejected divorce from Mary upon receiving an angelic message
announcing his child’s destiny. Moses would “save my people” from Egypt, but Jesus would “save his
people from their sins.” There are, of course, ironic reversals as well as parallel details in Matthew’s
account. Pagan wise men read the stars and come from afar to accept Jesus, while Herod reads the
Jewish Scriptures and seeks to kill him. And, above all, Jesus flees for refuge to Egypt, the very land from
which Moses finally escaped. But once again Matthew, like Luke, sends a strong and powerful message
by his very structure. Jesus is the new and greater Moses. (15)

Matthew and Luke both have in common a searching within foundational Jewish texts for signs and
pronouncements of his destiny. Three of these are:
-virginal conception
-Davidic ancestry
-Bethlehem birth of Jesus (16)

Virginal conception

In Isaiah 7:14…
Almah (Heb)= Parthenos (Gk) = newly married virgin not yet pregnant…not a virgin having conceived
immaculately

Clearly, somebody went seeking in the Old Testament for a text that could be interpreted as
prophesying a virinal conception, even in such was never its original meaning. Somebody had already
decided on the transcendental importance of the adult Jesus and sought to retroject that significance
onto the conception and birth itself. (18)
Davidic ancestry

…people imagined a future Davidic leader who would bring back the peace and glory of a bygone age
hallowed by longstanding nostalgia and suffused with utopian idealism. (19)

Micah 5:2 explicitly cited in Matthew 2:6

Matthew has Mary and Joseph already resident in Bethlehem

Luke begins his story with Mary and Joseph in Nazareth, returning to Bethlehem for the Roman census
because it was the place of Joseph’s birth.

Three problems with birth in Bethlehem:

1) No such “worldwide” census conducted by Octavius Augustus
2) Certainly no census of Judea during the reign of Herod the Great
3) Roman citizens usually registered where they were living and working so they could be taxed

No indication in Gospel of John that Jesus was known to have been born in Bethlehem (John 7:41-42)
(20)

--life expectancy of jewish males in the jewish state at that time was about 29

Tekton is often translated as “carpenter” to indicate Jesus’ and/or Joseph’s vocation.

Jesus would have belonged to one of the lowest classes of peasants – probably illiterate (95-97% of the
Jewish state was illiterate at that time) (25)

Scenes in Luke that describe Jesus’ wisdom of ancient texts (pronouncements at the temple, and
interpretation of passage from Isaiah) should be clearly read for what they are: Lukan propaganda
rephrasing Jesus’ oral challenge and charisma as scribal knowledge and exigesis. (26)

Pagan author Celsus criticizes Christianity in late 2 nd century ce:

It is not absurd, in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was
divine. What is incredible is that it could happen to a member of the lower classes. Celsus in his “True
Doctrine”:

…This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful
to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among
the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents.
And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its
beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant. (27)

Why was so much about Jesus’ life so fashioned and mythologized?

Chapter 2

Josephus – Jewish scholar born into priestly aristocracy in 37 CE. 2 main works:
1) Jewish War (mid 70s to mid 80s CE) describing the first Jewish War from 66-74 and a prefacing review
of 175 BCE to 66 BCE.
2) Jewish Antiquities (93-94 CE) detailing the period from the creation of the world till outbreak of war in
66 CE.

Therefore, he wrote two separate accounts of period between 175 BCE and 66 CE. Comparison
important to understand his emphases, prejudices, and purposes. Two major presuppositions:
1) In keeping with the traditional conjunction of biblical prophecy and imperial history, whatever
happens to the Jews in the contemporary world empire is interpreted in terms of God’s punitive
and salvific designs (applies to Romans, as well as all other earlier conquerors) (31)
2) Hope for a future ideal ruler, an Anointed One or Messiah, who would bring vack justice and
peace to a Jewish homeland overpowered by social discrimination, cultural domination, and
imperial oppression.

Story of the execution of John the Baptist in Mark 6:17-29:

-Mark’s account is best seen as his own creation, allowing him to emphasize certain parallels
between the fate of John and Jesus, especially how both were put to death at the insistence of others by
a reluctant and almost guiltless civil authority—Antipas for one, Pilate for the other. (35)

And it is precisely as an apolcalyptic prophet that John appears in the New Testament gospels, although
there too one sees a tendency to smother politics in piety and rebellion in religion. Josephus, for political
reasons, deemphasizes the apocalyptic and politically rebellious nature of John’s teachings, as outlined
in Mark 1:4-5:

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness
of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out
to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. (37)

***AN ASIDE FROM A CONVERSATION LAST NIGHT: 3/15/10***

According to Julia, we gain insight into a different way of thinking, a different paradigm of truth and
symbol by continuing to study and contextualize and interpret the ancient texts. The tradition, the
church, provides a continuity and connection to the people of that time and their wisdom—and builds
upon it. It matters little if we interpret a text in opposition to what the author “originally intended.” This
gets to the heart of the matter. Literary interpretation and the transmission of (symbolized) knowledge
across varying (in fact, infinite) viewpoints. The threshold of the Enlightenment and the Atlantic Ocean
are only larger thresholds amongst an infinite number of relatively smaller distances of time and space
and culture. How we approach this comparision and translation and transmission -- especially when
practiced at the interpersonal and mystical levels,-- is what creates meaning (and perhaps more). This is
the nature of mind/Tao/Logos/Word/God.
What is singular about the tradition of the church, as opposed to a more academic/secular knowledge
tradition is that which separates the sacred from the secular in general: the upholding of the reality of
perfection, and communal veneration of embodied perfection.

But something that is perfect is, logically, also inevitable and not subject to the content of our own
strivings. But is subject to the form of our existence: the presence of striving itself (biological nature of
human existence). To live is to strive is to move is to become is to be. To be is thus to be the cause and
the material of perfection. Of God.

(study Plato and Aristotle and revise)

Rebel general Calgacus describes the roman empire: “…To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they
misname empire: they make a desolations and they call it peace.”

Apocalyptic prophets led large crowds into the wilderness so that they could recross the Jordan into the
Promised land, which God would then restore to them as of old under Moses and Joshua. God didn’t,
and they died…..
…..Prophecy was, for Josephus, however, something to be exercised only by scribal and sacerdotal
classes, by Retainers talking to Governors, by himself talking to Vespasian, and not by peasant marchers
who could only talk with their bodies, write with their lives, and die with their hopes unfulfilled. (42)

John is placed among the Jewish peasant apocalyptic prophets. John is remembered favorably by
Josephus, because Antipas’ military defeat following the execution of John was viewed as divine
punishment for the execution. This must have been recalled by sufficient numbers of people to affect
Josephus’ account.

But Josephus was still writing amidst Roman rule, and his account of John as an apocalyptic prophet
would not have been consumed well. No wonder he never mentions the wilderness, or the Jordan. The
wilderness was not just sand and the Jordan not just water. They were symbolic of the Mosaic
deliverance. If all baptism required was water, that could be found in lots of places apart from the
Jordan itself. John did not, in other words baptize in the Jordan; he baptized in the Jordan. (43)

Baptism of Jesus (44)—makes the Christian tradition uneasy – these accounts clearly are meant to exalt
revelation over baptism. Awareness and inner purity over external symbolization.

John went, in other words, out into the Trans-Jordanian Desert and submitted himself to the Jewish God
and Jewish history in a ritual reenactment of the Moses and Joshua conquest of the Promised Land. He
became part, thereafter, of a newtwork within the Jewish homeland awaiting, no doubt, with fervent
and explosive expectation, the imminent advent of God as the coming One. Presumably, God would do
what human strength could not do—destory Roman power—once an adequate critical mass of purified
people were ready for such a cataclysmic event. The major question is not whether Jesus began as an
apocalyptic believer but whether he continued as such and whether, when he began his own mission, he
did so by picking up the fallen banner of the Baptist.

Sayings of Jesus indicate that he broke with John’s vision and developed quite a different message for
his own program:
It is not enough to await a future kingdom; one must enter a present one here and now. By the time
Jesus emerged from John’s shadow with ihsi own vision and his own program, they were quite different
from john’s, but it may well have been John’s own execution that led Jesus to understand a God who did
not and would not operate through imminent apocalyptic restoration. (48)

The Hebrew or Aramaic term translated as “son of man” is simply, like mankind, in English, a chauvinistic
way to describe all of humanity, a patriarchal way for the part to describe the whole in its own exclusive
image.

Daniels provides symbolic imagery of evil kingdoms (Syria, Babylon, Egypt) incarnated as beasts, and the
coming perfect kingdom being incarnated as a human being. But conflations of the original translation
moved it to a titular usage. A generic usage for all human beings together became a titular usage for
some single human being alone (and an apocalyptic title, at that).

Did Jesus ever refer to himself as “the Son of Man” ? or is it merely an interpretation from early
Christianity? (50)

My main reason for denying that Jesus ever historically used the titular expression is that in the entire
Son of man tradition there is only a single instance where two independent sources have the expression
in more than a single version (50)

Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus:

There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at
hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of
the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is bring all ordinary history to a
close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of
bringing in the echataological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the
mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Hiimself as the
spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory
and His reign. (370-371)

And

That which is eternal in the words of Jesus is due to the very fact that they are based on an
eschatological world-view, and contain the expression of a mind for which the contemporary world with
its historical and social circumstances no longer had any existence. They are appropriate, therefore, to
any world, for in every world they raise the man who dares to meet their challenge, and does not turn
and twist them into nothingness, above his world and his time, making him inwardly free, so that he is
fitted to be, in his own world and in his own time, a simple channel of the power of Jesus…Why spare
the spirit of the individual man it appointed task of fighting its way through the world-negation of Jesus,
of contending with him at every step over the value of material and intellectual goods—a conflict in
which it may never rest? (402)

The wider term is eschatology or world-negation. It indicates a radical criticism of culture and civilization
and thus a fundamental rejection of this world’s values and expectations. There are all sorts of
eschatologies: mystical, utopian, ascetic, libertarian, anarchistic, etc. Also apocalyptic.
Symbology. Suchness.
Chapter 3

Basileia – Gk. “rule”

(sovereignty, majesty, dominion, power, domain)

I am not particularly happy with the work kingdom as a translation of the Greek word basileia (“king-“ is
chauvinistic, “-dom” seems to connote a specific, local site)- (55)

Basileia is more a process than a place, a way of life rather than a location

We should try to imagine a fourfold typology of the KoG in jewish usage, created by the intersection of
two axes: time distinction (bracketed by present and future), and class distinction (bracketed by
Retainers and Peasants)

Apocalyptic or Future imaginations of the KoG take two forms in the minds of either class disctinction.
1) The Retainers, or scribal bureaucrats, are exemplified by their hope for the imminent coming of
“their king, the Son of David” or “their king…the Lord Messiah.”
2) The Peasants are exemplified in those apocalyptic prophets like John the Baptist who modeled
their ritual actions on the unaugural victories of Moses and Joshua.
The scribal elites wrote and proclaimed, because that was what they could do, and the peasant leaders
marched and performed, because that was what they could do.

The other two forms come from an understanding of the KoG in the Present, or a sapiential view
-sapientia – Lt. wise discerning – for discerning how, here and now in this world, one can so live the
God’s power, rule, and dominion are evidently present to all observers. It is a style of life for now rather
than a hope of life for the future.

***aside***
One of the most important things to note about the Jewish law is its strict imposition of God’s law
over that of any single person. Kings could come and go, but the Law would remain, unmoved,
unchanged. Rule was not of the whims of one man or even a group of men, but of God.

What is essential about a tradition? What makes a tradition unique? Why do we deride certain
practices within our own traditions, but shy from deriding those same practices within other
traditions? Should we not, as Zizek suggests, treat other cultures like adults, and be honest about how
we react to their practices?

2 forms of sapiential view:

1) Retainers – the KoG is made of the wise, just, virtuous—the sages
2) Peasants – Jesus’ vision

The family