From John_Dominic_Crossan@info.harpercollins.comWed Mar 20 18:13:25 1996 Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 14:08:51 -0500 From: John Dominic Crossan To: JESUS2000@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Week 5, Response Message (Crossan) Dear Luke and Marcus: You asked me two direct questions, Luke, so I begin by answering them in the order asked. First, about Caesar. I argued that, for Jesus, the Kingdom of God involved a profound criticism of the systemic and structural (not just personal and individual) evil of peasant exploitation, colonial collaboration, and imperial dominion as contrary to the radical, covenantal justice of Israel's God. You asked how I could say that in the light of the Render to Caesar text. We tend today to hear that as an isolated saying of Jesus and often interpret it as establishing twin spheres of influence, one for God and another for Caesar, one religious and other-worldly, one secular and this-worldly, something like separation of church and state. No first-century Jew or Christian (no any-century Jew or Christian?) would ever have agreed to that understanding of the statement. We know that not only from, say, Paul in Romans 13:1-7 but even from Josephus who, I suppose, is as pro-Roman a Jew as we know about. But he is pro-Roman because "without God's aid, so vast an empire could never have been built up" (see whole list of such statements in The Historical Jesus, pp. 97-99). With that as preliminary, back to the texts in question. There are, for me, three independent versions of this incident (it is not just a saying) in the Gospel of Thomas, the Egerton Gospel (but broken off before the coin appears), and Mark (excuse brevity, but full details are in Chapter 5 of my 1985 book Four Other Gospels). That makes the incident, for me, as original as you can get. What is striking for me is that, whether in the very long version in Mark or the very short one in Gos. Thom. 100, Jesus himself does not possess a copy of Caesar's coin with Caesar's image on it. It is the questioners who must produce it for him. Even Thomas, for whom sayings predominate over dialogues but especially over incidents, does not reduce this incident to its terminal saying. I emphasize: setting and saying must stay in tandem. Jesus' answer to their catch-you-either-way question is to catch them either way. If you carry Caesar's coin, pay Caesar's taxes, for you are in the system or Kingdom of Caesar. But if you get rid of that coin, as I have, then welcome to the system or Kingdom of God. Your reason for asking that specific question was to test whether my method (present) must always trump the data (past). For me historical reconstruction is neither a subjective nor objective but an interactive process. It seeks a creative dialectic between past and present in which each changes the other. The only way I know to avoid the false claim of objectivity or the dominating fact of subjectivity is by establishing a method to make interactivity as disciplined as possible. What I did was build an interdisciplinary model that can be criticized, changed, adapted or filled out on any of its three levels (if somebody showed anthropologically that the high productivity characteristic of agrarian empire's iron plow meant a better peasant life; if somebody showed historically that Israel's God was not concerned with covenantal justice but only with cultic fidelity; if somebody showed archeologically that lower Galilee experienced no basic changes --commercialization by urbanization -- in the first decades of the first common-era century). That interdisciplinary process has self-correction built into it: you should be able to see if I have twisted my levels or whether they actually do fit. Compare, for example, Lenski's emphasis on a religion's view of social justice for determining resistance to exploitation with even a cursory reading of Amos or Micah. Compare, for another example, Kautsky's emphasis on the role of incipient commercialization in creating peasant resistance with Antipas' urbanization program. All of that, however, is only one half of the problem. The other part was to organize the data and see if the earliest materials locked onto that situation and how and where they did. For all practical purposes, that earliest data is those 38 common units in the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas. I know that you have described that judgment as "fixing" the evidence but we all must make such judgments and our work stands or falls on their validity. If Mark's priority, Q's existence, or Thomas' independence is wrong, for example, then my reconstruction of Jesus must be totally redone. The same, of course, applies to the opposite judgments. Since my data preferences are controlled by multiple independent attestations in the earliest chronological levels, I have never used Gal 3:28 before but I did ask you, Luke, about it in a recent reply. I repeat: why did Paul take only the first of its three dichotomies as immediately and literally normative and what would have happened to him if he had taken all three with equally forceful commitment? The second question you asked, Luke, was about Jesus' character. Sorry, if I had not been clear in my response to you on that point. You asked: "is the character of Jesus as portrayed in the canonical framework, a Jewish man who gives his life in service out of radical obedience to God, essential or peripheral? To be included or excluded?" Yes: totally, fully, completely and absolutely (to use the same words I did in replying to Marcus' question on the importance of God for Jesus). I repeat my problems with that summary and I repeat them as questions: (1) how did you decide that the "the canonical framework" gave you that summary as distinct from any other? (2) how do you distinguish that "Jewish man" Jesus from other Jewish men such as John the Baptist, on the one hand, or Peter and Paul, on the other, or many, many others who died in divine obedience and human service in that terrible century? Those are not rhetorical questions but attempts to move this debate forward. I have no problem with your summary in itself. My problems are with its lack of methodological grounding and its lack of detailed specificity. You ask: "if you can agree with me concerning the 'character of Jesus' as I sketched it, why did that not emerge thematically in your publications?" The historical Jesus did not speak about the CHARACTER OF JESUS but about the KINGDOM OF GOD, which involved both radical obedience to God and radical service to others. That is why "my publications" are not about the character of Jesus but about the Kingdom of God. Jesus' character is in there, of course, but never as a refuge from facing the rather terrifying challenge of the Kingdom. He talked about the Kingdom, we prefer to talk about Him. In my opening message I said that Mark and John made up two radically divergent accounts of Jesus' passion, one intended to help persecuted Christians die and the other intended to help marginalized Christians live. I said both were true as gospel but neither was true as history (that is, I do not think either writer knew the exact details of Jesus' arrest or death). True as gospel, of course, means symbolically true for the Christians who wrote those stories and for us Christians who still read them as statements from faith, for faith, to faith. Please, Luke, why would you even ask after such an opening statement, whether "the canonical gospels ... are also 'wrong' in the meaning they give to Jesus'"? You insist, again and again, in creating a rejection where no rejection has been stated. I have spent over twenty five years publishing on the historical Jesus. I have not written except in Prologue or Epilogue about the theological implications of that research but I have always been absolutely aware of them and always willing, when asked, to discuss them. Hence, this debate. I conclude with a feeling of acute frustration, a feeling that everything in this reply has been said before during our debate. I still do not know exactly where you stand, Luke, on any of those three questions you have ignored (Gal 3:28? whence your summary of Jesus' character? why so vague?). But above all, and in a last effort to focus our disagreement, let me try this. Imagine three positions: (1) The historical Jesus is unimportant for Christian faith; (2) The historical Jesus is important for Christian faith but must be found within the New Testament; (3) The historical Jesus is important for Christian faith but must be found within contemporary standards for such research. (I emphatically do not equate history and faith but presume that Christian faith is in the meaning of certain historical events). Are those positions adequate, or do you envisage others I don't see? I myself, and Marcus, if I speak correctly for him, are in position 3 and I presume that you yourself are not there. But I am no longer certain whether you are in position 1 or 2? Please, Luke, do not consider this as sarcasm. I began the debate (and, as you know, my article in the Bible Review for April) thinking you were in position 1. Then I thought you were in position 2 when you drew Marcus' attention to non-Christian sources used to reconstruct your own Jesus. I have no intention of drawing you into my project, Luke, but since you criticized it so trenchantly, I need to know where you are to reply to those criticisms.