From John_Dominic_Crossan@info.harpercollins.comSun Mar 10 12:56:35 1996 Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 14:59:53 -0500 From: John Dominic Crossan To: JESUS2000@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Week 4, Primary Message (Crossan) Dear Luke and Marcus: AGREEMENTS (AND A QUESTION). As I understand the present state of our debate, Luke, you have agreed to these positions (upper case added). First, from Week 1, the historical Jesus is necessary for Christian faith: "To dwell only in the present experience IS to be Gnostic (or something)." Second, from Week 2, "the evidence of Paul, Hebrews, and the four canonical Gospels point to the EARLIEST formative memory of Jesus being that of his character as a human person giving his life in service to others. Unless and until EARLIER AND MORE RELIABLE evidence suggests that this was not Jesus' character, then I think this gets us --- far more than the sorting through of sayings and specific actions --- as close as we can to 'the historical Jesus.'" Third, from Week 3, in your book you gave, as you said, "a brief sketch of what I think a historian can responsibly affirm about Jesus, BASED ON EXTRA-CHRISTIAN SOURCES, OTHER CHRISTIAN WRITINGS, and the gospels." I had noticed Josephus and Tacitus when I read your book but thought they were intended to be peripheral rather than programmatic. I thought your actual position was that the historical Jesus must be reconstructed from Gospel or at least New Testament texts exclusively. I now see your position as being, at least in theory, exactly the same as mine and Marcus'. The historical Jesus must be reconstructed from all the available evidence, Christian and non-Christian texts, intracanonical and extracanonical materials. You even agree with me (and I think Marcus) that EARLIER and EARLIEST are important criteria for that reconstruction. You also use words like RELIABLE and RESPONSIBLE., to which I return in a few minutes. One other small point, Luke, which I only bring up because you used such dismissive epithets for the scholarship of others in your book. I think you had not read Lenski for yourself before you talked about him in your last posting. My reasons for that judgment are that your criticism was vague enough to apply to any theory or hypothesis and also because you misspelt his name both times you used it. If I am wrong in that judgment, I apologise. But, since you dislike "sloppy" work and call for firm criticism and hard questions, that is a small query to you. I assure you that, if you ever invoked somebody crucial to your presentation to me, I would read that person before dismissing him to you. PROBLEMS (AND THREE QUESTIONS). I have absolutely no objection to your general description of Jesus' character (your word) or life (my word) as one who, in obedience to God, gave his life in service to others. But I ask three direct and specific questions. First, how did you decide on that character-summary rather than on any other one? Second, what about the why and how of that character-summary, what about the means and ends, what about the specifics of time and place? Third, how does your description distinguish Jesus, on the one hand, from a programmatically Christian terrorist in a suicide car-bomb or, on the other, from Gandhi? There is, after all, another Jesus in the book of Revelation (the killer Son of a killer Father?) where revenge rather than justice is awaited through divine ethnic cleansing. Those questions still stand, as far as I am concerned. But, for this posting, I return to that preceding paragraph and to your words which I put in upper case. After what you have now said, there is only one question left: how does the historian determine responsibly the "EARLIER AND MORE RELIABLE EVIDENCE?" What, in other words, is one's method? It now comes down to that. I speak of method and not just of criteria because method is criteria developed through some theoretical basis, organized through some interactive structure, and guided through some operational focus. You search certain New Testament texts for "NARRATIVE PATTERNS" (your emphasis) but, unfortunately, the result, even if correct, is so vague and general that it does not distinguish between situations and actions or intentions and motivations even in so far as those can be and must be discussed in historical reconstruction. In response to that, I now summarize my own method. It will be necessarily terse but it will also represent continued work in progress since 1990 on the method used in The Historical Jesus. METHODOLOGY. My method is interdisciplinary and interactive. It builds upwards from the more general to the more precise through cross-cultural anthropology, Jewish and Roman history (textual remains), Lower Galilean archeology (material remains), and finally the Jesus tradition itself. I imagine those successive data-bases like overlays but done in that sequence. ANTHROPOLOGY. The macrosociological basis is the Lenski-Kautsky model. In 1990 I used Lenski to establish the class structure of agrarian empire and peasant society with its abysmal gulf between haves and have-nots but would now insist also on Kautsky whose distinction between relatively stable traditional agrarian empires and highly volatile commercializing ones like the early Roman Empire is equally necessary. But while that model is the best I know (do you have a better one, Luke?) for the variable of class, it is utterly silent on the equally important variable of gender. For that I have been doing remedial reading in feminist anthropology, especially in those asking questions about the comparative power relations not just vertically between classes but laterally between, say, women and men within peasant society. I still have a lot more to read but already the work of Susan Carol Rogers, for example, has been very helpful. First, if men have political power and women have domestic power, what happens precisely in peasant society where peasant political power is non-existent and peasant domestic power is fundamental? Is there actually a balance of power-as-deference for men but power-as-control for women? Second, in situations of commercialization and/or colonization is peasant female power at least initially and even if only temporarily extended while that peasant male power is correspondingly diminished? The final anthropological model I hope to obtain will be as good on gender as it is on class, especially with regard to peasant society. HISTORY. I include here everything in Jewish tradition about the land as divine gift rather than entrepreneurial commodity and everything in the prophets about divine justice and God's specific concern for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. And everything, especially, in the northern traditions where God could destroy chariots through Deborah and Barak and topple dynasties through Elijah and Elisha. I also include the situation of colonial exploitation and indigenous collaboration in that first century where Herodians had replaced Hasmoneans and Romans appointed and dismissed high-priests at will. How did royal and priestly elites of doubtful legitimacy and recent establishment react to the boom economy of the Roman peace? There is for me a hard lock between the peasant unrest that Kautsky expects as commercialization hits a traditional peasantry and everything one can discern about the northern peasantry of ancient Israelite tradition under Antipas' regime. ARCHEOLOGY. What we can see most clearly under Antipas is Roman commercialization operating as it always did through urbanization. Antipas built two cities of 25,000 people in Lower Galilee within twenty miles of one another in the first twenty years of the first century. Sepphoris was rebuilt after its destruction in 4 BCE (Josephus; archeology?) and Tiberias built from scratch by around 19 CE. That is another hard lock from Kautsky's commercialization to Antipas' urbanization. It is true that Galilean archeologists have not produced the "archeology of imperialism" that Susan Alcock speaks of in Roman Greece but maybe that will come. Marble and mosaic are fine but what about peasant farms and peasant families? What about city AND countryside? In the meanwhile, however, there is enough cross-cultural anthropology and comparative Roman archeology to render secure an expectation of some peasant unrest in Antipas' booming Galilee (the Kingdom movement of Jesus?) and Perea (the Baptism movement of John?). GOSPELS. All of that is situation and cannot be used to determine from the vast mound of the Jesus tradition what goes back to the historical Jesus. That would be circular. My methodological question at this point was and is: what is the earliest material in the Jesus tradition and does it lock hard into that situation just as those three preceding layers have done into one another? I do not at all presume that later material is not a valid interpretation of Jesus but, like you, Luke, I begin with the "EARLIER AND MORE RELIABLE EVIDENCE" as a methodological discipline. We both also seem to invoke what I term multiple independent attestation but where you use it to discern "narrative patterns," I use it, as you state correctly, for "the sorting through of sayings and specific actions." As this posting is already getting too long, let me give but one example. There are 38 units common to the Q Gospel (whose existence I accept) and the Gospel of Thomas (whose independence I accept). It is such materials as those that I juxtapose most immediately to the situation of Antipas' Galilee and ask whether and how do they fit. That is why the dyad of eating and healing, itinerant and householder, found in that common material is so important for me in understanding Jesus' program. That also comes up, of course, in Mark, and in Paul who had to decline its mandated householder-dependence when patronal Corinthians sought to control him and he was forced to insist on working for his keep even against a saying of Jesus. You may not like my method but it is, to be blunt Luke, at least as reliable and responsible as yours and, moreover, it produces an historical Jesus (and in theological terms, an Incarnation) that specifies very clearly the dangerous vagueness of your own narrative-pattern summary. JESUS AND PAUL. Finally, a word about Paul, leaving aside my own method which only uses him (but does use him) within that constraint of multiple independent attestation. In Gal 3:28 Paul said that "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." I cannot imagine a simpler summary of what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God as the radical justice of Israel's God in this world. The denial of distinction let alone hierarchy on grounds of religion, gender, or class is what I call radical egalitarianism (to fairly universal laughter, I must admit). If all of that was wishful thinking or utopian dreaming without any immediate social consequence, we could all ignore it. But Paul takes that first negation with utter and total seriousness and follows it down the line through pain and suffering to the end of his life. Why not, then, those other two negations as well, just as literally and just as totally? Either all three are dreamy fantasies or all three are social challenges. What Paul had there, however, was an exact and precise summary of Jesus' vision and program for the Kingdom of God. Had he followed its three components with equal fervor, his ministry would probably have been as short as that of Jesus himself.