What is the difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith? That`s the question that De Paul University professor John Dominic Crossan has been wrestling with for nearly 20 years.
”It`s a thorny question,” admits Crossan, the author of a much-discussed and controversial new book, ”The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” (Harper, $30), which already has garnered a front-page story in The New York Times and a cover story in Christian Century magazine within the first month of its release.
”Everyone admits that there are various layers within the Jesus tradition, but the disagreement often comes as to where to draw the lines between them,” says Crossan, 57, in a soft-spoken brogue that betrays his native Ireland.
Among the layers Crossan distinguishes are the original words and deeds of Jesus, how oral and written tradition added to and transformed them, as well as how specific Gospel writers shaped such transmitted words and deeds to the specific theological needs of the communities they were serving.
Given that most of the sources concerning Jesus are documents associated with his adherents, some scholars and historians have concluded that it is impossible to recover much about the actual historical figure.
On the other side of the question are fundamentalists and conservative Christians who simply don`t see the problem: If it`s in the Bible, it`s historically accurate.
Says Crossan: ”A modern mind thinks truth equals historical truth. An ancient mind was far more willing to concede the role of imagination. If you read in this morning`s paper that President Bush began sprouting a pair of wings last night, you`re more apt not to think literally, but to wonder what the writer has in mind by telling you that.
”We have moved to the level of symbol and metaphor. I suspect that even the most die-hard fundamentalist knows that when Jesus tells a parable about a farmer sowing seed that it`s doubtful he`s giving a seminar on new farming techniques.”
”Crossan is certainly to be taken seriously,” says Martin Marty, professor of history and Christianity at the University of Chicago.
”There is a certain kind of biblical scholar that is very serious, solid and in the mainstream, which means they don`t ask provocative questions. … There is another kind that gets tremendous publicity, and they`re way out. ”There tends to be someone like that every couple of years: Someone tries to prove that Jesus was a Zealot who carried a dagger, or that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and the French monarchy are their descendants, or that Jesus was a member of a hallucinogenic mushroom-munching cult-until we learned that kind of mushroom never grew in Israel.
”Crossan is in neither of these camps. It may not be an orthodox portrait, but he`s not doing it for sensation or headlines. He is a very honest literary critic and he has worked very quietly a lot of years. What he`s doing adds color to the interpretation of faith rather than being a displacement of it.
”But there are limits to what history can tell. . . . The basic fact about all history is that the only access we have to it is through traces. If there is no monument or footprint or text, it is gone. All Crossan can do is locate the traces he`s got from the culture of that period and then draw deductions. He can never be certifiable. Faith is based on a good deal more.”
Venturing from the Bible
Much of the controversy over Crossan`s research is obver his free use of sources and gospels from outside the New Testament, which some Christians consider heretical.
”The canon of the New Testament was carefully chosen not just to include certain texts, but to exclude others as well,” Crossan says.
”The fact that certain texts were rejected theologically does mean that they couldn`t contain older layers of material directly from Jesus.”
”Crossan has a very original and interesting mind and he sees things I would never have seen,” says Jacob Neusner, a widely respected Jewish historian at the University of South Florida at Tampa. ”His work is persuasive and important-but every historian`s Jesus is unique.”
Some of the most important of those excluded texts Crossan has used were lost for nearly two millenniums but were discovered by natives digging for fertilizer in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Because of fear, ignorance and tribal warfare, the discovery remained unknown for years.
Among these ”Nag Hammadi Codeces,” as they gradually became known, was the Gospel of Thomas, a large collection of sayings of Jesus that Crossan and others believe are older than any of the New Testament Gospels, dating back to the early 50s of the 1st Century, or within 20 years of Jesus.
The earliest canonical gospels were written in the wake of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and some, such as the Gospel of John, date from near the end of the 1st Century.
”With all of the recent media fuss made about the Dead Sea Scrolls,”
Crossan argues, ”Thomas tells us more about the historical Jesus than all of the Dead Sea Scrolls put together.”
`Something strange`
Crossan became interested in the historical Jesus by studying the parables during the early `70s. ”I knew something strange was going on here,” he recalls.
”To say that the Kingdom of God is like a weed (as the parable of the Mustard Seed does) is very strange stuff.”
The first parable Crossan explored in detail was the Good Samaritan.
”The problem I began to see is that if the point of the parable were simply that we should be a good neighbor, then the Samaritan-a subversive image to a 1st Century Jewish audience-would have been the one robbed and thrown in the ditch, not the one to help out so magnificently.
”The priest and Levite (i.e., the usual good guys) are totally unsympathetic. The usual expectation as to who should do what and why has been completely turned upside-down.”
His widely influential ”In Parables” was one of the first studies to apply secular literary criticism to the parables of Jesus, and to view them within the context of the genre of parable.
”It turns out that the parables of Jesus have much in common with the parables of Borges and Kafka,” Crossan notes.
Several similar works followed before Crossan turned to the aphorisms of Jesus in the early `80s (”those quickie little one-liners,” he says) and then turned to more detailed work on sources on Jesus outside the New Testament.
”Four Other Gospels” sought to demonstrate the value of non-canonical sources, while ”The Cross That Spoke” was a detailed exploration of the death and resurrection accounts, which included Crossan`s controversial analysis that the four New Testament Gospels made use of an earlier passion-resurrection source preserved in the Gospel of Peter, which Crossan calls the ”Cross Gospel.”
”The Historical Jesus” is the culmination of all of those areas of past research, and then some.
”What`s new here is the attempt to understand the miracles of Jesus against comparative ethnomedicine and the anthropology of healing,” Crossan says.
”For instance, when Jesus heals a leper, its not so much the disease itself that`s cured-it`s the sickness of being a leper: of being isolated and ostracized from the community for religious, social and political reasons.
”If Jesus refuses to accept that isolation, he`s healing by taking the leper back into society. It would be similar to how AIDS patients are often treated today.”
Jesus is also seen in Crossan`s book against the background of a 1st Century peasant society.
”Eating was very important in such societies,” Crossan observes, ”but Jesus refused to eat only with the proper and approved table companions, and ate together with men and women, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, all without discrimination. That is as socially provocative an action as you can find, even in the 20th Century.
”You or I might give a party for the poor, but we wouldn`t invite the poor and our peers; not with the same food around the same table. Not in the 1st Century, not in the 20th Century-not in any century.”
Passing it on
If Crossan`s approach and conclusions concerning the historical Jesus seem unusual, it is only because such scholarship rarely filters through to a general audience.
One exception, however, is the California-based Westar Institute`s Jesus Seminar, of which Crossan is a charter member.
Its membership is made up of more than 100 professional scholars and interested lay persons who meet twice yearly to determine the difference between what Jesus really said and did, and what early Christian communities ascribed to him.
The seminar has just completed its first five-year phase by examining all 503 parables and aphorisms attributed to Jesus (Crossan`s own ”Sayings Parallels” was its official workbook), and is now turning to the deeds of Jesus.
”It is a major step,” Crossan says. ”It represents the first collaborative and comprehensive scholarly attempt to work through the layers of the Jesus tradition.”
The seminar has published a ”red-letter” edition of the parables and the Gospel of Mark, where words attributed to Jesus are shown in colors red through black: red indicates the highest level of consensus, black the least, with pink and gray representing intermediate certainty.
More such red-letter editions are planned, and communicating the results to the public and the media are high priorities.
The seminar has attracted the attention of at least one major filmmaker, director Paul Verhoeven (”RoboCop,” ”Total Recall”), who Crossan says has attended virtually every meeting of seminar across the country, and who, in discussions with Crossan and others, is trying to imagine how to make a film on Jesus that would reflect the best historical scholarship.
Says Robert Funk, the founder of the seminar and a New Testament scholar: ”It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Crossan`s work. Among a dozen or so premier New Testament scholars in the world, he certainly ranks up there as 1 or 2.
”The book is a gold mine of information about all sorts of things. It marks the culmination of an era of Jesus research and the beginning of another.”
Although Crossan came to De Paul in 1969, he has been more or less associated with the Chicago area since the early `50s, when he first came here from Ireland as a young Servite seminarian.
The monastic life of the Servites meant that he spent much of his time in the library, ”reading the complete works of everyone worth reading for the last 100 years.”
Returning home to teach for a time, he studied the Scriptures in Europe and the Middle East, before leaving the priesthood in the late `60s.
”I wanted to get married,” Crossan says, ”but I also wanted to be free of the irritation of having been trained to think critically, but of being in constant trouble for doing it.”
He lost his wife to a heart attack in 1983 and remarried in 1986.
Today the Crossans live in a downtown high-rise, but commute to their Indiana home on weekends and holidays.
As for how the Christian community at large might view his findings, Crossan acknowledges that ”we`re dealing with something that cuts very close to the bone for many people.”
But if the person who emerges from this historical research bears only a pale resemblance to the royal and divine Messianic figure later portrayed in the New Testament, ”it is precisely that development that rescued him for us,” Crossan says.
”If the message of Jesus had remained absolutely pure and untouched, it might well have been heard only by a few peasants before dying a quick death in the hills of Galilee.”
