In Search of Jesus
Some scholars seek answers in history and redefine the meaning of his life and deeds
That's the gospel according to John Dominic Crossan, one of the most prolific of the modern questers, whose 1991 book, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, broke new ground in the field of Jesus research. Since then, the former Roman Catholic priest and professor emeritus at DePaul University in Chicago has written two abbreviated works for popular audiences.
Born and raised in Ireland, Crossan considers himself "Catholic through and through" despite the fact that he quit the Servite order to marry in 1969 and hasn't attended mass regularly since then. "There has never been a more empowering figure than Jesus," he explains. "If you are empowered by Jesus's life, in my judgment that makes you a Christian."
Like many of his colleagues in the historical Jesus movement, Crossan rejects most of the gospel record as inaccurate. Using modern sociological and anthropological studies of ancient Palestine as a backdrop, he attempts to reconstruct the historical Jesus from early "Jesus traditions" buried within the gospels and other noncanonical texts from the early church. While he has come up with a vivid description and a list of sayings he believes can be traced to Jesus, Crossan thinks the evidence he's gathered would rule out most of Christianity's traditional teachings. Biblical accounts of the Last Supper and appearances of the risen Jesus, he says for example, are merely attempts by his devout followers to express their "continued experience" of his presence after the Crucifixion.
While Crossan's Jesus seems much more of a political animal than the traditional version that is made vivid in the nation's pulpits, he warns that it would be "the ultimate betrayal of Jesus" to make him either "totally political--he tried to start a political movement" or "totally religious--he was talking about the afterlife." The historical Jesus, says Crossan, "proclaimed God's radical justice, which is extremely critical of the structures of almost any society--including ours."
THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE As he surveyed the landscape of historical-Jesus research not long ago, Luke Timothy Johnson saw plenty that troubled him. Concerned that an "obsessive Jesus fixation" among biblical scholars posed danger for traditional understandings of Christianity, both among academics and the Christian faithful, he decided to join the fray. His new book, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, already has marked the former Roman Catholic monk as one of the sharpest critics of the field and a hero among conservative Christians.
Johnson, a professor of New Testament and Christian origins at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, takes his academic colleagues to task for producing what he considers ill-focused, often flimsy scholarship that reduces the "still powerfully alive" Christ of Christianity to a shadowy figure behind a thin chronology of sayings and deeds etched in unreliable ancient texts. The Christian faith, he argues, has never depended on the ability to verify details of Jesus's biography. "Religious knowledge," he says, "is not the same as historical knowledge." Rather, says Johnson, the faith of most Christians is sustained primarily by the "witness of the Holy Spirit in their present-day lives."
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