That a nice, if necessarily superficial, article. It's unfortunate when the message of "you don't have to accept the Jesus of dogma" becomes 'blasphemous.' Re-examination of 'dogma'—in any field—seems to be essential, not only for every thinking person, but for civilization as a whole.
The other line I love is "Jesus was extraordinary because of how he lived, not died."
I welcome Crossan to the unending Christian discussion of what Jesus was really all about. If he can enrich the debate so much the better.
But I see Crossan as rather limited in his view. I think you've got to check yourself when you start casting Jesus as some very familiar twentieth or twenty-first century character. Painting Jesus as a modern day liberal is no more legitimate than than painting him as a modern day conservative. Rep. Louie Gohmert in a speech in before Congress a year or so ago criticized the estate tax saying, "Jesus never advocated the government go steal." I'm not sure that Jesus had any strong views on the estate tax.
In the same way, I find scant Biblical evidence that Jesus advocated non-violent resistance to Rome and a just distribution of land and food. Mostly Jesus says to render unto Ceasar.
I also take issue with Crossan for refusing to grapple with the meaning of the cross and resurrection. There's a lot of rich territory there he's ignoring.
Finally, if there was a radical in the Gospels, it was Jesus' mother:
And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord ...
He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
Myk, not sure if we are reading about the same guy but he grapples plenty with the cross and resurrection. Crossan takes the approached as what the story meant to a first century Jew and not a 21th century christian,
"One of the talks I gave here in the conference at Morpeth, was about the Resurrection. And I really asked a question there that I had learned from listening to a Jewish scholar ask it, which was a terribly simple one when you think of it. What did it mean for Jews in the first century to use the term ‘resurrection’? If one Jew said to another ‘God has raised Jesus’ or anyone else from the dead, what did they mean?
Now usually when we Christians debate about the resurrection, we debate about whether bodies came out of the tomb, we debate about apparitions, we debate about the theology of the resurrection and do we believe it, and how we believe it. And I had never heard anyone really ask that most obvious question until I heard a Jewish scholar, an expert in the New Testament, ask that question.
….
we today are primarily concerned in highly individualistic terms with Me. I want to know do I survive, am I going to continue, is there life after death for me? The crucial thing for first century Jews was not about Me but about God, whether God was just. And it was raised by the fact that with increasing violence throughout the centuries since the time of Alexander the Great, the Jewish homeland had been awash in blood. The Egyptian, the Greco Egyptians coming through, the Greco Syrians coming through, then the Romans, then the period of Herod; every time you looked, there was revolution because were being killed, it was martyred. And it looked like it was the more just people who were being martyred. Now what they asked themselves was where in all of that was the justice of God. It’s a terribly simple question, it wasn’t ‘Do I live on?’ but ‘Is God just?’ And if God is not just, who cares about anything else, because the world then is utterly meaningless. So when they said ‘resurrection’ what they were stating was an act of faith that some day, somehow, and then it gets very vague how and when and all the rest of it, God is going to vindicate those who have suffered in their bodies, been martyred, been marginalised, been destroyed, and somehow it has to have to do with the bodies, it cannot be simply the Greek idea that immortality is the soul, which is very nice, but it’s sort of ‘for all of us’. So if the torturer and the tortured both have an immortality of the soul, that doesn’t say anything about the justice of God. So the problem they’re struggling with, now you could say, ‘Well the solution they came up with that some day, somehow, there’ll be a resurrection of the dead especially’, that didn’t happen the way they expected, sure. But that’s all right, they’re asking the right question. Is God just? And especially, how does God handle the sufferings of the innocent?"
He goes on how resurrection and accession into heaven, seconding coming is a common Jewish theme (aka Elijah)
I stand corrected. I read Crossan quite a while ago, and I made my grappling with the cross and resurrection comment solely on the line in the article that Jim quoted: "Jesus was extraordinary because of how he lived, not died." I took from that that the death and resurrection part of it wasn't important to Crossan.
Clearly that's wrong, so everyone can just ignore that part of my comment.
6 comments:
That a nice, if necessarily superficial, article. It's unfortunate when the message of "you don't have to accept the Jesus of dogma" becomes 'blasphemous.' Re-examination of 'dogma'—in any field—seems to be essential, not only for every thinking person, but for civilization as a whole.
The other line I love is "Jesus was extraordinary because of how he lived, not died."
Another 'historical Jesus' scholar I'd recommend is Thomas Sheehan. There are a few interesting interviews on Stanford's Entitled Opinions Podcast...
http://french-italian.stanford.edu/opinions/sheehan.html
Also recommended is his book, The First Coming.
I welcome Crossan to the unending Christian discussion of what Jesus was really all about. If he can enrich the debate so much the better.
But I see Crossan as rather limited in his view. I think you've got to check yourself when you start casting Jesus as some very familiar twentieth or twenty-first century character. Painting Jesus as a modern day liberal is no more legitimate than than painting him as a modern day conservative. Rep. Louie Gohmert in a speech in before Congress a year or so ago criticized the estate tax saying, "Jesus never advocated the government go steal." I'm not sure that Jesus had any strong views on the estate tax.
In the same way, I find scant Biblical evidence that Jesus advocated non-violent resistance to Rome and a just distribution of land and food. Mostly Jesus says to render unto Ceasar.
I also take issue with Crossan for refusing to grapple with the meaning of the cross and resurrection. There's a lot of rich territory there he's ignoring.
Finally, if there was a radical in the Gospels, it was Jesus' mother:
And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord ...
He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
Myk, not sure if we are reading about the same guy but he grapples plenty with the cross and resurrection. Crossan takes the approached as what the story meant to a first century Jew and not a 21th century christian,
"One of the talks I gave here in the conference at Morpeth, was about the Resurrection. And I really asked a question there that I had learned from listening to a Jewish scholar ask it, which was a terribly simple one when you think of it. What did it mean for Jews in the first century to use the term ‘resurrection’? If one Jew said to another ‘God has raised Jesus’ or anyone else from the dead, what did they mean?
Now usually when we Christians debate about the resurrection, we debate about whether bodies came out of the tomb, we debate about apparitions, we debate about the theology of the resurrection and do we believe it, and how we believe it. And I had never heard anyone really ask that most obvious question until I heard a Jewish scholar, an expert in the New Testament, ask that question.
….
we today are primarily concerned in highly individualistic terms with Me. I want to know do I survive, am I going to continue, is there life after death for me? The crucial thing for first century Jews was not about Me but about God, whether God was just. And it was raised by the fact that with increasing violence throughout the centuries since the time of Alexander the Great, the Jewish homeland had been awash in blood. The Egyptian, the Greco Egyptians coming through, the Greco Syrians coming through, then the Romans, then the period of Herod; every time you looked, there was revolution because were being killed, it was martyred. And it looked like it was the more just people who were being martyred. Now what they asked themselves was where in all of that was the justice of God. It’s a terribly simple question, it wasn’t ‘Do I live on?’ but ‘Is God just?’ And if God is not just, who cares about anything else, because the world then is utterly meaningless. So when they said ‘resurrection’ what they were stating was an act of faith that some day, somehow, and then it gets very vague how and when and all the rest of it, God is going to vindicate those who have suffered in their bodies, been martyred, been marginalised, been destroyed, and somehow it has to have to do with the bodies, it cannot be simply the Greek idea that immortality is the soul, which is very nice, but it’s sort of ‘for all of us’. So if the torturer and the tortured both have an immortality of the soul, that doesn’t say anything about the justice of God. So the problem they’re struggling with, now you could say, ‘Well the solution they came up with that some day, somehow, there’ll be a resurrection of the dead especially’, that didn’t happen the way they expected, sure. But that’s all right, they’re asking the right question. Is God just? And especially, how does God handle the sufferings of the innocent?"
He goes on how resurrection and accession into heaven, seconding coming is a common Jewish theme (aka Elijah)
I stand corrected. I read Crossan quite a while ago, and I made my grappling with the cross and resurrection comment solely on the line in the article that Jim quoted: "Jesus was extraordinary because of how he lived, not died." I took from that that the death and resurrection part of it wasn't important to Crossan.
Clearly that's wrong, so everyone can just ignore that part of my comment.
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