Customer Reviews

Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Dr. Crossan's hugely popular book has come to represent the much larger war of words between "conservative" and "liberal" Christians and the scholars who argue their respective viewpoints. As a lapsed Catholic and former altar boy struggling for twenty years with my beliefs, I have only one thing to say about this allegedly "non-Christian" book: It completely renewed my faith. It took away all the miracles, all the divine interventions and all the dogma of worshipping someone just because our traditions say we should. Yet what remained was the portrait of a humble man whose brilliance and humanity was two thousand years ahead of his time. Armed with nothing more than intelligence, love and the radical but essential truth that we're all in it together, this completely human Jesus changed the world solely through his divine message alone. I take it on faith that THAT Jesus is someone whose message is worth living and dying for. Thank you Dr. Crossan for restoring my faith as never before and for elevating Jesus of Nazareth to a height far higher and far more noble than my tradition ever dared to.

Judaica scholar Jacob Nuesner says we create God--and Jesus--after our own image. I think he's right in respect to Crossan and "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography." While I agree with Crossan's politics, I think he makes a mistake to so thoroughly secularize and 20th-Century-ize Jesus, as if he weren't a passionately religious 1st-Century Jew. I also think, however, that the passionate Judaism of Jesus would naturally translate into the kind of social activism and "radical egalitarianism" that Crossan describes in his book. Most valuable are Crossan's description of 1st-Century Mediterranean culture (and its phobia of body-, family-, culture-, and class-contamination), and his interpretation of the parables of Jesus (consistent, for a change, with Jesus's other more direct, less metaphorical, radical teachings). It's good to read this book along with "The Historical Figure of Jesus," by E.P. Sanders. In contrast to Crossan's strictly rationale, secular setting, Sanders describes a 1st-Century Mediterranean world where most people believe in religion and magic.

The historical Jesus seems to have become the Holy Grail of New Testament scholarship. He is sought just as fervently and proves just as elusive. This book is actually Crossan's second quest for the historical Jesus. His first was "The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant." That book was long, meandering, and not terribly interesting. This second book is a distillation of the theories presented in the earlier book, and it has two virtues its predecessor lacked: brevity and lucidity. Crossan brings a prodigious level of scholarship to the task of finding the historical Jesus, and a reading of this book will give the student fresh insight into Jesus' nature, personality, and teachings. It will not, however, give an accurate picture of the historical Jesus. Crossan commits the same error that almost all previous questers after the historical Jesus have fallen into: He finds the Jesus he set out to look for. What, then, is an accurate picture of the historical Jesus? That is a question we must all answer for ourselves. This book, and others like it, can give us pieces of the puzzle, but the proper assembly of those pieces is up to us.

This is perhaps the easiest book to understand Crossan's insights of the Historical Jesus. He uses the same frame of reference of previous works (Antrhopology, History, Literature), but unlike his other books this is readable, and one can appreciate his insight into the life of Jesus, whether we agree or disagree with his conclusions. In my case, "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography",was a helpful introduction to other Crossan's major works.

In this popular version of his more scholarly The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan attempts to pare Christ's life down to only those events for which we have the best evidence from: the Gospels; Gnostic Gospels; Roman history; archaeology; and anthropology. This makes for fascinating reading and he wields the various sources masterfully, but it leads to a Jesus whose centrality to world history seems to make little sense.

Crossan presents his arguments for what is most likely and most unlikely to have occurred and what it all means. For instance, he traces the various translation possibilities in the term leper and looks at the Jewish kosher laws and concludes that healing the unclean may simply have meant being willing to break bread with them. Likewise, by examining Roman criminal law practices and burial traditions for convicts, he argues that none of the disciples could possibly have known what happened to the body of Christ after the crucifixion and that he must have been left to the dogs. Ultimately, by imposing such textual rigor, Crossan leaves us with a Jesus stripped of miracles, which is fine, but also one who is, oddly, stripped of godliness. Instead, he presents him as merely a radical egalitarian Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. This may also be the case, but how then do we explain his followers' belief in the miracles and in Christ's divinity? And how do we explain his subsequent influence on the course of human history?

I disagreed with many of the interpretations and with this broader deChristifying of Jesus, but found Crossan's arguments to be consistently thought provoking. It is quite an enjoyable read.

GRADE: B

"You can only amputate the sick to a certain degree; if you amputate too much, you will kill the patient" says Dale Allison, another Jesus scholar, reacting to scholars in the line of Crossan and Marcus Borg, who have stripped the historical Jesus of his apocalipticism and jewishness, thus ignoring tons of ancient evidence. That Jesus was, for example, an apocalyptic prophet and an observant Jew is supported in the earliest layers of tradition, such as the Q gospel (50s CE), Mark (60s) and Paul (50s). This is not a problem for Crossan, who says that the apocaliptic material (the belief that the world was about to end) was added to the gospels by the early church soon after Jesus died. Of more historical value (at least for him) are documents like the late Epistle of Barbanas (100s), the Didache (70s), the Secret gospel of Mark (the earliest copy dating from the middle ages), the Gospel of Thomas (150s) and - how odd - the reliefs made in stone in the 3rd or 4th century that depict Jesus as a greek philospher. How far can you press your hypothesis in one direction?

Key to Crossan's method is the concept of multiple attestation. If one complex (for example, the relationship between children and the Kingdom of God) appears indeppendently in more than one source, then that complex goes back to the historical Jesus. I would have no problem with this if Crossan were consistent about his own methods. Other multiple attested complexes and events, such as there being a group of twelve apostles, or the passion narrative, or the words of Jesus at the last supper, or the so-called nature miracles, he simply says "they are inventions". On the other hand, some sayings appearing in only one source ("I will destroy this house...", in the gospel of Thomas) he considers authentic.

Despite the evidence, in multiple independent sources, that there was a last supper (Paul, Mark, John) Crossan calls it an invention just because it isnt mentioned in a 1st century text known as Didache. If it isnt in the Didahce, then it never happened. (!)

This doesnt mean that Crossan is always far from the historical Jesus. The idea of a free exchange of food and miracles at the very roots of the Jesus movement, open commensality and radical egalitarianism must be very close to what actually happened. But as one reviewer put it, many, many pieces of the puzzle are missing... or have been ignored on purpose.

For more on the subject, I strongly recommend N.T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God.

Tom Hinkle's review below is long on criticism of Crossan's work but offers absolutely zero evidence to contradict anything Crossan says. Hinkle seems offended that Crossan does not give Jesus a special place. Crossan's work is a work of history, not of faith. Any reasonable historian, looking at the evidence, would conclude similar things to Crossan. Take the crucifixion. The Romans used this form of execution as pure terror, and part of the terror was in the utter destruction of the body. Of the THOUSANDS crucified, only one skeleton of a man that was actually crucified has been discovered. Why? Because all the others were eaten by wild dogs. It is a leap to think that somehow everything ended up different for Jesus, complete with an elaborate tomb in a beautiful garden, especially in light of scripture's own rendition that all the disciples had run away in fear.

You do not have to agree with Crossan. You might be completely uninterested in what he has to say, and that is fine. If you believe, your faith is your own, and one historian's take on the life of Jesus is not an assault on your belief. But roundly dismissing a work of history, without offering countering historical arguments, is nonsensical. For those interested in A historical view of Jesus, this is an excellent book. Even for people who are believing Christians, Crossan's work may be of interest, because he paints a vivid historical picture of the times during which Jesus lived, summarizing the work of Josephus well for non-specialists. But take the book for what it is, not what it is not.

One who feels he has cornered the market on religious truth will not take kindly to having anyone disagree with his interpretation of the Bible. Such a person is poorly equipped to review a this book.

A book about belief has value if the ideas resonate with the reader and provide insight into our place in the world.

There's no way anyone can know exactly who Jesus was, what he said and what he did. Everything we have on Jesus has been colored by interpretation. Crossan takes a historical approach, and this will be refreshing to people who are tired of interpretations that simply except every passage as truth but twist the meaning to reflect their wishes.

"A fool believes every word, but the reasonable man looks for proof" - Proverbs 14:15. You can't look for proof if you don't read many sources and judge for yourself.

About fifteen years ago in a search for faith, among the books I read, this one had the deepest impact on my life. I did not know Dominic Crossan before reading "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography" but I owe him a deep debt of gratitude for helping me get past the "Sunday school", caucasian, idealized version of Jesus, and understand the miracle and working of the Holy Spirit that a person born of a working or peasant class in a tiny and insignificant backwater country could transform world history, transform people's lives now, two thousand years later. Crossan made the life and meaning of Jesus real to me and touched my heart in a way I had never known. For me it was a moment of Grace that still informs and directs my life.
I have since read several more books by Dom Crossan and am always enlightened by his scholarship and understanding of the world of Rome and Palestine, and the deep faith that is revealed in his work.

Whether you regard John Dominic Crossan as a visionary or a heretic, you must nevertheless regard him. This once obscure yet academically honored professor has risen on the wave of interest in the search for the historical foundations of Christianity to the height of public renown. His credentials are not to be ignored. Seventeen books, an emeritus professorship at DePaul following a twenty two year career at that university, a six year chairmanship of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature - truly Professor Crossan is a force in the world of New Testament scholarship. Yet his books are still looked upon with suspicion by many Christians. Why?

One simple reason alone has gained Professor Crossan the suspicion of so many: he has questioned the accuracy of the story of Jesus as printed in the four canonical gospels. Worse yet, he has searched for and found answers to some of his questions. This work, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, is the result of his questioning. To those who have never questioned the literal truth of the Christian canon, it is a shocking, frightening, and blasphemous work. However, to those who have often wondered why the four canonical gospels differ from one another, why one includes a story not included in the others, or why the same basic story is quite different between two or three of the four, this book is a ray of light into a room too long left dark .

Professor Crossan tackles some of the basic questions surrounding the man who is perhaps the most significant man who ever lived. Who was Jesus - a revolutionary, a prophet, a lunatic, or the true human embodiment of God? What were his origins? Why did he do what he is recorded as doing, or did he do it at all? Truly, these are not questions that can be faced by anyone with a fear of ambiguity, for these questions will certainly inspire deep reflection as to what is to be believed about the namesake of the world's largest religion.

There are those who would say that the book is simply a reflection of Professor Crossan's own spiritual beliefs - that he does not substantiate his assertions with enough evidence and merely presents what he wants presented. These criticisms are only marginally justified. While it is true that most people who have ever written on the subject of Jesus of Nazareth do seem to come to the conclusion that he was just like they are, Professor Crossan does a better job than most in justifying his assertions with at least enough evidence to be plausible.

Truth be told, we do not know most of the very basic things about the life of this man from Nazareth (including if he was even from Nazareth); his childhood, genealogy, education, marital status, even his physical appearance are all mysteries only answerable by conjecture. No writers whose works have come down to us through history other than those within the Christian faith even record his existence. Moreover, the closest written document about him that has survived was written at least thirty years following his death. Hence we are only given one side of the story, as it were, right from the beginning. All these things considered, Professor Crossan's book is to be recommended. It will take a long time to cut through two thousand years of accumulated myth, theology, dogma, and schism. This book, along with many others from both the Jesus Seminar, and the Context Group as well, is at least a solid beginning.