Customer Reviews

Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I would account this a good book, well worth the read. The noble attempt to fuse archaeological evidence with Biblical exegesis is very helpful in giving a much clearer vision of life in the first century and thereby putting a context to Jesus' life and preaching.

It is not, however, free of flaws, and those have caused me to give it only three stars instead of four. One is that the jumping back and forth between archaeology and exegesis is sometimes confusing. Another is that whole paragraphs, whole physical descriptions, entire lines of argument, are sometimes repeated almost word for word. These are problems that superior editing could have and should have dealt with.

Another issue involves not so much a flaw as a caveat, but it does matter. I freely admit to not being a believer; my interest is in the historical Jesus, the real, actual flesh-and-blood person who sought to bring a prophetic message to the ignored and exploited, who died likely thinking himself a failure and convinced, if the Gospels are to be believed at all, that even God had forsaken him - but whose life and death became the basis for one of the world's great religions (and political forces).

In pursuing that interest, I've read several books on the Gospels and the life of Jesus by various authors (including Crossan) and I've noticed they all share one characteristic: Every author has his or her own Jesus, their own particular view of him and of how he himself saw his work and his intent, and they invariably interpret Biblical passages in ways that fit their notions. This is as true of devout believers as it is of dedicated debunkers. The current volume is no exception, and the caveat is thus that the book should be read with open eyes as well as open minds.

The world's premier Historical Jesus expert and a brilliant young archaeologist of the Galilee team up together in a fascinating new book that digs down through the complex layers of ancient ruins and ancient texts to uncover a fuller portrait of Jesus and the first century Palestine where he lived. In their unique collaboration, *Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts*, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed explore and weave together the ten most significant archaeological findings from ancient Palestine with the ten most significant textual discoveries of modern biblical studies. The result of their combined efforts is an unforgettable glimpse into the everyday life of Jesus of Nazareth as we've never seen before.

Crossan, the best-selling author of several authoritative books on the Historical Jesus including *The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant* and *The Birth of Christianity*, marries his exhilarating and provocative portrait of Jesus as a counter-cultural itinerant Jewish preacher of a radically just and egalitarian Kingdom of God with the phenomenal advances in biblical archeology and cultural anthropology that have revolutionized those disciplines over the last one hundred years. Reed, author of the highly-praised study *Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence* and lead archaeologist at the current Sepphoris excavations in the Galilee, provides compelling descriptions of first century material culture that persuasively paint a clear picture of the clash of two kingdoms--the earthly imperial Kingdom of Rome as practiced by the Herods and Caesar with tacit cooperation of leading Jewish elites, and the divine but also earthly Kingdom of God as preached by Jesus and his peasant followers.

Reed highlights the stark contrast between the lavish palaces and marble basilicas of the Roman client-king Herod the Great and his tetrarch son Herod Antipas with the grinding poverty and agricultural exploitation of Jesus'peasant neighbors in Nazareth who lived only an hour's walk from the Romanized city of Sepphoris, Herod's glorious capital in the Galilee. The authors demonstrate how the ubiquitous ritual baths, ritually pure stone vessels, absence of imperial icons and specialized burial chambers found throughout Palestine indicate the steadfast determination of first century Jews to resist non-violently and hold onto their distinct religious practices and covenental way of life under the divine rule of the Jewish God of Justice, even as those practices set them on a direct collision course with the distributive injustice of Roman-Herodian commercialization in the name of empire-building.

Crossan and Reed lead us on a pilgrim's view tour of Jerusalem's magnificent Second Temple that fills our senses with the sights, smells and sounds of the priestly sacrificial rites occurring there on a daily basis as Jewish and Gentile pilgrims from all over the Roman Empire crowded there to admire Herod the Great's architectual handiwork, all overseen by ever-vigilant Roman soldiers from the nearby Antonia fortress. But the beauty and majesty of Herod's Temple and its highly politicized elite cult of wealthy land-owning priests clashed ambiguously with the sacred Torah's insistence that land, the material basis of life itself, belonged to God, not Caesar.

Through its highly readable exploration of stones and texts, material remains and textual remains, ground and gospel, *Excavating Jesus* helps us thoroughly understand what Jesus of Nazareth's radical life, ignoble death and vindicating Resurrection were really about--enacting a vision of a Eutopian world of justice and equality under a covenental God who wants us to fairly share the bounty of the earth and the material basis of life among all God's children in both the first century and the twenty-first. After reading this book, you will never again see Jesus or the message of the Gospels in the same light.

I'm not necessarily stating my beliefs, just reporting the claims of this book and also in some cases extending to logical conclusions the authors' theories and suggestions as I felt them to be. I hope I neither offend anyone, nor misrepresent what Crossan was attempting to say.

Jesus was of rural, small-town origins.

Jesus was born into one of the most desolate areas of his homeland. Galilee of that era was the sticks and Nazareth was not a community so much as a commune. It was around twenty buildings housing circa a dozen families, their livestock, their possessions. There was no road leading to it, merely a footpath many miles through the wilderness. There was a communal well, but no public buildings such as a house of worship, law court or marketplace. The people of Galilee spoke in a "rural" accent so thick it was all-but incomprehensible to the more urbane Jews of Jerusalem. Jesus was from such an off-the-beaten-path place it is unlikely many living more than a few miles from it had even heard of Nazareth. In other words, we're talking remote.

Jesus was possibly an illiterate.

Before this sounds impossible, remember, even in a Jewish population that prized education among males, most people at that time and place were probably illiterates. This is not to say Jesus was unintelligent. The quotes and parables attributed to him suggest he was anything but mentally deficient. Jesus would have had a strong background in the oral traditions of his people and like most illiterates, the parts of his brain that dealt with memorization would have been highly stimulated, giving him a keen memory and immediate grasp of verbally-presented facts.

Jesus' parentage.

Jesus may have been conceived without sex and born to a virgin. The realm of religion makes amazing claims that cannot be proven or disproven. That being the case, I will say little on this claim except it bears much more resemblance to the Hellenistic purity cults' tales of virgin birth, a thing all-but unknown among the Jewish religious history. Sociologically speaking, I was surprised to learn in this book that it was a tradition among Jews of that era for an engaged couple to conduct sexual relations without dishonor, and a marriage took place only when the man was able to provide lodging for his wife. However, some Jews at this time had begun to rebel against this unscriptural conduct. These eschewed sex until the actual marriage, as pious Jews are supposed to today. The more rural Jews were especially known for this throwback to earlier piety, and since Jesus was of rural heritage, it seems likely the story in the Gospels of Joseph wanting to "quietly" break his engagement to Mary when she was found to be pregnant shows how Joseph was more concerned with making it clear he had not slept with her before marriage than with the fact his fiancée was pregnant with another man's child. In other words, he was a conservative person who would have been likely to give Jesus and his brothers a conservative upbringing.

Jesus was depressed during much of the record we have of his life.

Jesus would have sudden, violent swings of mood and he would alter his philosophical positions at the drop of a hat. He seemed to want to be friends with everyone from the Romans (healing the Centurion's servant; his remark render unto Caesar what is Caesar's) to the Temple priests (forestalling violence against the Temple) to the impoverished (the poor shall inherit Heaven), to the elite (there will be poor always).

Jesus never wanted to found a new religion.

It seems Jesus wanted a movement within Judaism (which was boiling with sectarianism and change at that time) not a separate faith. Jesus from circa 30 AD was not the Christ of modern Sunday schools, he was a flesh and blood man who was courageous enough to try to fit together the mysteries of life and God and act on what he thought of as right. To me this is more admirable, approachable and embraceable than the miracle-working deity myth has made of him. Jesus of Nazareth may not have always felt he was the Messiah. The written record shows him vacillating on whether he even was the Promised One. At no point does Jesus ever in the Bible call himself a Christian, tell anyone to stop being Jewish or conduct himself as other than a Jew, albeit a Jew with radical notions.

Jesus died.

But Jesus almost made it. Yep, he seemed to go looking for death that Passover and he found it almost in spite of himself. Had he stayed out of Jerusalem altogether or even out of it at that tumultuous time he would have been no threat to anyone with the authority to put him to death. The Romans cared little what their subject people believed as long as they kept the taxes coming in and made no trouble for them. Since Jesus seemed to focus scant energies on opposing Roman rule, it is unlikely without instigation from the high priests whom he threatened directly, the Romans would ever have flicked a muscle to dispatch this backwoods charismatic. In fact, I have always thought Jesus would have been hosted as a philosophical radical and deep thinker and given respect had he settled among Rome's thriving, quiet Jewish community instead of in what was Rome's most annoyingly problem-ridden province. Jesus was most likely arrested by the Romans as a favor to the Jewish leadership, who were collaborators to Roman authority. The Romans frankly didn't want Jesus. They did not speak his language, they did not recognize his God. His claims to prophecy and miracles meant nothing to them. They regarded him as so insignificant that though his disciples were all in place and well-known, they were not arrested in Jerusalem alongside their master. The Romans tried to turn Jesus over to the Jewish "king" Herod to deal with, but Herod knew the possible consequences of punishing the leader of a volatile rabble, so this pleasure-loving man (rather like a fourth generation trust fund kid who lives off ancestral money in Palm Beach) turned the country preacher back over to the Romans, who made every attempt to avoid responsibility in this matter until the passionate fervor of Passover died down, but the Temple priests and religious aristocrats would not allow this, so Jesus was executed as a common criminal, in a very painful manner: a death he may have partly wanted but which he obviously did not deserve.

Jesus in the grave.

Jesus was buried in the manner usual to his time, place, and economic standing. His body was anointed with oils and herbs and placed in a woven shroud. He was set into a hillside niche and a stone was rolled before the opening. In a year or thereabouts, once the flesh had gone from the bones, family or friends (or professional undertakers) would have come and collected the remains for burial under the earth. The story of Jesus returning to life after three days in the tomb is, like his conception, an article of faith, unproven, unprovable. Did Jesus reappear from the grave? Premature entombments are not a thing of fiction but of fact. A cave sealed by a stone would have been infinitely more accessible to egress than a modern earthen grave. In fact, the Gospels tell us that Jesus seemed to die suddenly (or did he lose consciousness?) and that weather conditions were not the best. So is it possible Jesus was taken from the cross by Roman grunts who didn't want to be out in a storm and not given the most comprehensive autopsy in history? There was even a case cited in "Excavating Jesus" of a Jew who survived a death sentence on the cross, recovered and lived many years thereafter. In this claim we irreversibly leave behind the man Jesus and come to the deity Christ. We depart from facts and history and enter myth, faith, dogma and past this, no one can with certainty say what is valid and what is the brilliant construct of a band of radical Jews suddenly deprived of a beloved leader, who, out of nothing but the richness of a desert faith, invented a religion that has dominated western history for nearly 100 generations.

That is my take on the Jesus represented in the thought-provoking book "Excavating Jesus" a work that showed how separated from the weight of myth, Jesus the figure was extremely interesting in the context of historic reality.

Both Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed are experts in their respective fields who also happen to specialize in Bibical era explorations. Crossan deals with sociological and theological subjects whereas Reed handles the archeological aspects. Crossan has been on a crusade for what he sees as the truth - namely that what we know of the historical Jesus and the first Church is unfavorably or untruly colored by most people's sole source of knowledge, the Bible.

This book tries to carry both sides of the discussion forward but it does so unevenly. Still, the idea was quite original and the discussions within are food for thought. Both men are convinced that one cannot interpret Jesus without knowing his times and this involves physical as well as religious study. How did Jesus's past influence his life? What was the effect of Roman architecture on Jewish thought and more important, how did the material and social compositions shape their views? How were Jews affected by the various social movements that were rampant in those days?

There are, of course, many conjectures but almost much detailed reasoning and findings. I found the flow a little uneven and sometimes the details ran to boredome but overall, a fine read.

There is much to be learned in this book, but my complaint is really about how it's written...a tad on the dry side. In fact, some of the writing was so cumbersome (do they make up words?) that I had to re-read entire paragraphs two or three times to figure out what they were trying to communicate.

So it's a little dry. However, there is some really good stuff if you "excavate." The book takes its thesis from the premis that in order to really understand who Jesus was, you have to uncover his life and world one layer at a time. They peel back the layers of archeology and ancient writing to try to reveal who Jesus might have been, and many of their conclusions are useful, though probably not earth-shaking. When you understand the context of his life, you understand better what the "Kingdom of God" movement was really about, i.e. a direct asault on the authority of the Kingdom of Rome, and very likely the reason he was executed.

I especially enjoyed the archeology, as I felt it was the more clearly elucidated portion of the book. They reconstruct Nazareth, many of the principle cities of Galilee, and Jerusalem, most notably the temple mount, and explain their significance to understanding the movements of Jesus and John the Babtist in that context. There are photos and reconstructions throughout the book which are very useful tools for the reader in seeing what the authors are talking about.

Add this to the growing library of books that suggest that Jesus is not the man we have grown up to believe in, but he was clearly of significance, and well worth the effort to get to know.

EXCAVATING JESUS is a very ambitious book. In order to fully appreciate the depth and seriousness of the effort it is essential to gain a good understanding of the authors' methods of research as described in the book's Introduction.

The most important thing I am learning from Crossan and Reed is that there is much more left to be uncovered about the historical Jesus. What I see in Crossan and Reed's studies are the possibilities for further explorations. However, I am sure they will be the first to admit that their approach may be refined in the future as more progress is made in archaeological finds and textual exegesis.

Crossan and Reed emphasize the itinerancy and commensality of the earliest Christians. Their theories are based on the existence of the Q Gospel and the independence of the Gospel of Thomas. In the future both of these assumptions may be altered due to additional discoveries. Meanwhile their greatest contribution may be simply in showing us the possibilities that lie in relentlessly digging for the truth.

Having struggled through Crossan's "The Birth of Christianity" I had several second thoughts on tackling this one. However, the shorter length of this book and the subject matter proved too much for me to resist. As a result, I am very glad that this was the case.

I found the book much easier to read that the earlier mentioned book as well as providing me with some solid background and understanding of the times in which Jesus Christ lived and in the communities in which he and his disciples moved.

If Crossan scares you...don't let it. If you are looking for an interesting historical account and understanding of the times and culture into which Jesus was born, then this is a book that will be to your liking.

Crossan and Reed (C & R) bring an interesting and unusual study with "Excavating Jesus" (2001 paperback). The subtitle of the book suggests that the authors will attempt to search for Jesus "beneath the stones and behind the texts". Their methodology focuses around their so-called "top ten" archaeological discoveries (page 2) and "top ten" exegetical discoveries (page 7). The book's 330 pages are dedicated to reviewing these findings to the authors' well-sourced (by scientific notation method which offers the source in the text face) satisfactions.

Beginning the book by considering the 2002 introduction of the "James ossuary" (with its controversial inscription "James the son of Joseph the brother of Jesus"), the authors declare the small bone box authentic (page 25). The following chapters direct readers to extensive archaeological findings and a general rethinking of the biblical witness at some key points. For example, no Nazareth synagogues existed, they say, during Jesus' life time thus bringing Luke 4:16-30 into question (page 59-63). C & R decide on the evidence before them that the virgin birth means St. Mary maintained virginity only until after Jesus' birth (page 87). These authors are challenging, but not always convincing, in their presentations.

C & R's review of 1st century Capernaum is helpful to their study (pages 119 to 135), but the purpose for their comprehensive examination of Caesarea Maritima (a city that Jesus is never said to have visited) is unclear. Later, the reader is subjected to considerations of "the villa of an aristocrat" (page146) and "houses of the elites" (page 149)- places where Jesus never went. Although such discussion is enlightening one wonders what it has to do with the book's topic. The authors bring a formidable study of Jesus' life and ministry among the poor and socially out cast (page 150 to 160). C & R's suggestion that "Jesus created a Kingdom franchise" is fresh and provocative (page 161).

"Excavating Jesus" offers a multitude of maps, colored photographs, drawings, and a handy archaeological sources section (near the back of the book). The writing style is somewhat technical. The authors assume a certain academic learning level. This book ought to be read with a copy of the Bible in hand (for example, the Paul vs. James controversy, on page 40- 41, should be thoroughly understood from the Scriptural source before attempting to comprehend C & R's potentially controversial position). The book's seven chapters average over 40 pages each. It is not a quick read.

By the book's conclusion the authors seemed more archaeological than exegetical. They simply raise more questions than they answer. (It could be argued, with some accuracy, that this book is an archaeological text with a Jesus title.) Perhaps that's the purpose for compelling history. C & R are often fascinating, sometime unconvincing, but always stimulating. They challenge conventional wisdom to renew itself by reviewing the archaeological and exegetical sources. This is a good read for a new generation of biblical scholars and those willing to test former learning.

Believing Christians need not fear any new discoveries about the life of Jesus and the birth of Christianity. New advances in textual understanding and future archaeological finds will only make the historical Jesus more real and the living Christ even more remarkable. I recommend this book to anybody who is seeking the truth.

I read this book for a class on the Greco-Roman world. The book looks very interesting from the outset, attempting to do what is not done very often: combining the efforts of archaeology and Biblical exegesis to gain a more accurate picture of what is happening specifically in the Gospels. They cover what they believe are the ten most important discoveries (or so, they kind of smudge the lines a little bit by combining certain discoveries together, but they're up front about that, so it's ok) of both archaeology and biblical exegesis. Using these examples and many others, they attempt to show what Jesus was about and how his "kingdom movement" compared to that of John the Baptist's as well as the current empire of Rome at the time. They come to some controversial conclusions, but they attempt to back everything with evidence they give.

There are two major problems with Excavating Jesus. One problem is the form of the book. To put it bluntly, it is a poorly written book. In an attempt to put as much information into the book as they can, they tend to get lost in the information and the point they are trying to make is lost within the plethora of evidence and information. If you're looking for a casual read that will not require much effort on the part of the reader, this is not a book to pick up. The reader is required to sift through a lot of information and sometimes guess at what the authors are trying to get at because their point is not stated clearly enough. The chapters are very large, usually around 80 pages, and though each chapter is trying to focus on a specific point, by the time the reader is finished, they are somewhat lost as to what point the authors were trying to make. The thesis of the book itself is not easily discernible. The method is made very clear, but ultimately overshadows what the authors are trying to do. So the important messages that the book is trying to get across are lost in poor writing and direction.

The other major problem with the book is the conclusions. They are not bad because they are controversial; the authors make it a point to try to back everything they present with evidence. What makes the conclusions problematic is that they are all fairly extreme. If there is any room to doubt something, the authors immediately jump to the farthest conclusion. For example, there is little evidence to suggest that there is a synagogue in Nazareth at the time Jesus would have lived there as Luke records. The authors automatically conclude that the events that take place in chapter 4 of Luke didn't happen. That's a fairly extreme jump to make, and there are other plausible explanations that can be made. The book does this quite a bit.

Overall, the book is not good. It's worth reading if one is willing to take the time to sift through the poor writing, but if you're looking for a simple book about how archaeology and exegesis can work together, I would look elsewhere, though the selection is somewhat thin.

One positive aspect of the book is in the discourse of the first chapter about the James Ossuary. This is a fascinating discussion and I think an important on when it comes to good archaeology and exegesis. However, it'd be better to check the book out from a theological library and read that selection rather than purchase the book for that section.