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A New Birth? A Review of John Dominic Crossan's The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2000
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page 73 note 2 For our previous interchange, see Crossan, J. D., ‘What Victory? What God?’, in Scottish Journal of Theology 50.3, 345–358CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and my reply immediately following (pp. 359–79). I shall abbreviate Crossan's earlier work (Crossan, J. D., The Historical Jesus: The. Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991)Google Scholar) as HJMJP, and my two works The New Testament and the. People of God and Jesus and the Victory of God (vols I and II of Christian Origins and the Question of God; London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992, 1996)Google Scholar, as NTPG and JVG.
page 73 note 3 It would be interesting to see how Crossan locates this on a grid including Gadamer, Thiselton and NTPG Part II.
page 74 note 4 Crossan not only explains what he does and does not mean by this phrase; he does the same for the title he would have preferred, Life After Jesus (xxxii).
page 74 note 5 Unfortunately, among the book's rather too many misprints we find, as early as p. 2, ‘Monastic and Sacrophilic Christianity’ (monks in love with the sacred? mightn't they be dualistic and sarcophobic?); cf. too p. 38. Likewise, on p. 292 ‘Part VI’ should read ‘Part VII’; ‘nazirite’ (p. 507) is the normal spelling, not ‘nazarite’ (pp. 467, 468). I have no idea whether ‘self-desfoliation’ (p. 394) is a misprint or an unexplained coinage.
page 75 note 6 On p. 111 Crossan takes Meier to task for insisting that Q is a hypothetical document whose contents cannot be known, insisting in his turn that one can only say that if one has tested the hypothesis until it cracks. Frankly, reading the burgeoning anti-Q literature, one might ask: what would count as a crack?
page 75 note 7 p. 101; cf. pp. 21, 31, 140.
page 75 note 8 p. 140; cf. p. 524: ‘that is what gospels do in Catholic Christianity. That is their generic destiny and compositional function’. Why then has Catholic Christianity not continued to add new Jesus-stories to the present day?
page 77 note 9 On this division see esp. chapter 22, in dialogue with Koester. One of the book's more remarkable tours de force—and there are many vying for this distinction—is the attempt to align this hypothetical bifurcation with a divide between Galilee and Jerusalem on the one hand and rural and urban Christianity on the other.
page 77 note 10 In the same way, some reviewers of JVG guessed (wrongly), that the absence of the resurrection and second coming in JVG meant that I was not interested, or did not believe, in them.
page 77 note 11 This ‘tradition’ contains thirty-seven sayings, behind Q and Thomas; this is a ‘Q-behind-Q’ which can be pushed back very early. However, as Crossan says of another scholar: Layton ‘showed rather brilliantly how such a [reconstruction] could have been done. But if it was done and why it was done are even more preliminary points’ (p. 386, italics original).
page 77 note 12 Crossan notes (p. 326) that this is found in Paul as well, but does not discuss the passages (1 Cor. 9:14; 10:27).
page 78 note 13 On the former point, see for example, the discussion on Jesus’ commanding, or forbidding, the carrying of a staff (p. 330). Crossan says that Mark's permission (6:8) ‘certifies an earlier negation’, despite the fact that it does not occur in the pre-Markan Q (set out on p. 328). In Matthew 10:10 and Luke 9:3, however, it is forbidden; since according to the theory these are triple-tradition redactions of Mark 6:8 they would surely be later than Mark, not earlier. Nevertheless, by p. 335 the hypothetical earlier negation has become ‘the no-staff mandate’.
page 78 note 14 His vigorous defence of this document (which he describes, for all his repeated protestations of studied neutrality, as ‘theologically profound and communally beautiful’, p. 489) against the charges of anti-Judaism could be more widely applied, e.g. to the canonical gospels. He proposes, and then uses this as a major point, that the cross which follows the three figures out of the tomb (GPet 10:39–42) is a cruciform procession of all the righteous Jews saved by the Jesus of the text (pp. 498, 501–4, 549, 569). There is clearly a lot at stake for Crossan in this corporate cross-and-resurrection notion, but whether this is justified even within his own reconstructed text it is very difficult to say.
page 79 note 15 For the common-sense tradition, see Crossan's epigraphs from D. L. Sayers and R. E. Brown (pp. 91, 519f.).
page 81 note 16 The complete absence of Acts from the index is (one assumes) an accident, but I think a revealing one.
page 81 note 17 See, e.g. Bauckham, R. J., James (London: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar; also idem, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990Google Scholar)—a highly learned work which, like those of Hengel, could have made quite a difference to Crossan's project.
page 82 note 18 On these questions cf. e.g. pp. 237f., 372; the ‘neutral’ disclaimer on p. 478 is promptly overturned on 489.
page 83 note 19 See e.g. the Preface; pp. 15–17, 404–5; 411; etc.
page 83 note 20 See Wright, N. T., ‘Two Radical Jews: a review article of Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (University of California Press, 1994)’, in Reviews in Religion and Theology 1995/3 (August), pp. 15–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page 84 note 21 See e.g. Philipians 3:21 with 1 Corinthians 15:50–8 (remembering that for Paul ‘flesh and blood’ does not mean ‘embodied existence as opposed to disembodied existence’ but rather ‘corruptible and rebellious human existence’). On the 
, the so-called ‘spiritual body’, in 1 Corinthians 15:44, see the commentaries, e.g. Hays, Richard B., First Corinthians (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997), p. 272Google Scholar, commending the Jerusalem Bible's translation: ‘When it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit. If the soul has its own embodiment, so does the spirit have its own embodiment.’
page 84 note 22 See pp. 134f., 466, 583.
page 85 note 23 See e.g. Horsley, R. A. (ed.), Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997)Google Scholar; Elliott, Neil, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and numerous other works cited in both.
page 85 note 24 For all this, see my commentary on Romans in the New Interpreter's Bible, vol. X (Nashville: Abingdon, forthcoming).
page 85 note 25 See Wright, N. T., The Climax of the Covenant (Edinburgh and Minneapolis: T&T Clark and Fortress, 1991/2), chapters 2–3Google Scholar.
page 86 note 26 See esp. 488–90, where Crossan rightly notes 1 Corinthians 15:20 on the same theme. This is important for Crossan, though he declares that ‘we do not like’ this meaning. Who is ‘we’ here? Clearly not Crossan himself.
page 86 note 27 See also pp. 549, 569 (‘he does not die alone, and he does not rise alone’). What is Crossan ruling out here? Who does he think holds such a view?
page 86 note 28 Cf. Ephesians 3:10. Crossan criticises Paul for not applying each aspect of Galatians 3:28 with equal consistency. This, I think, is mistaken; women clearly took active parts in worship (or why was it necessary to get them to dress appropriately?), and to tell a slave-owner that his slave was his ‘brother’ is as subversive as eating together across racial boundaries. Crossan's attack on Paul's supposed inconsistency looks to me like an attempt to avoid taking him seriously.
page 86 note 29 Cf. 1 Corinthians 4:6–13; 2 Corinthians 4:7–15; 6:3–10; and above all 11:16–12:10.
page 87 note 30 We should note carefully that after their period of rest in the hand of God, these souls are raised to a new life in the final kingdom of God (Wisd. 3:7–9).
page 87 note 31 Riley, G. J., Resurrection Reconsidered: Thomas and John in Controversy. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995Google Scholar.
page 87 note 32 Crossan, pp. xiii–xx.
page 87 note 33 Riley's comment (p. 47) that ‘it seems but a small step [from these post-death meals and libations] to the post-Easter events’, and his note on the same page that because ghosts in Homer consumed a draught of blood to enable them to talk we know that the dead could ‘eat’, and hence that stories like those in the gospels were commonplace, defy comment.
page 87 note 34 Sawicki, M., Seeing the Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), pp. 92f.Google Scholar, quoted by Crossan at p. 539.
page 87 note 35 I am aware, of course, of the subtle uses of ‘fiction’ according to which every writing of any story is ‘fiction’. I am using the word in the street-level sense.
page 90 note 36 Cf. e.g. pp. 29; 208, 405, and above all pp. 584–6.