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Title: Jesus : A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan ISBN: 0-06-061662-8 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 18 February, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (40 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Hold On To Your Faith
Comment: As Crossan says, in biography, this is the shorter version of his much longer Jesus book, written because people didn't finish thelonger one. I boughtboth and didn't finish thelong one either. He presents a good statement of his research from the Jesus Seminar, but, like much of the material thus presented, a lot of traditional faith events get jettisoned. It is a thought provoking book, however, and presents a challenging and strong view of the career and purpose of Jesus.
Rating: 3
Summary: Good, but a lot of pieces are missing
Comment: "You can only amputate the sick to a certain degree; if you amputate too much, you will kill the patient" says Dale Allison, another Jesus scholar, reacting to scholars in the line of Crossan and Marcus Borg, who have stripped the historical Jesus of his apocalipticism and jewishness, thus ignoring tons of ancient evidence. That Jesus was, for example, an apocalyptic prophet and an observant Jew is supported in the earliest layers of tradition, such as the Q gospel (50s CE), Mark (60s) and Paul (50s). This is not a problem for Crossan, who says that the apocaliptic material (the belief that the world was about to end) was added to the gospels by the early church soon after Jesus died. Of more historical value (at least for him) are documents like the late Epistle of Barbanas (100s), the Didache (70s), the Secret gospel of Mark (the earliest copy dating from the middle ages), the Gospel of Thomas (150s) and - how odd - the reliefs made in stone in the 3rd or 4th century that depict Jesus as a greek philospher. How far can you press your hypothesis in one direction?
Key to CrossanÂ's method is the concept of multiple attestation. If one complex (for example, the relationship between children and the Kingdom of God) appears indeppendently in more than one source, then that complex goes back to the historical Jesus. I would have no problem with this if Crossan were consistent about his own methods. Other multiple attested complexes and events, such as there being a group of twelve apostles, or the passion narrative, or the words of Jesus at the last supper, or the so-called nature miracles, he simply says "they are inventions". On the other hand, some sayings appearing in only one source ("I will destroy this house...", in the gospel of Thomas) he considers authentic.
Despite the evidence, in multiple independent sources, that there was a last supper (Paul, Mark, John) Crossan calls it an invention just because it isnt mentioned in a 1st century text known as Didache. If it isnt in the Didahce, then it never happened. (!)
This doesnt mean that Crossan is always far from the historical Jesus. The idea of a free exchange of food and miracles at the very roots of the Jesus movement, open commensality and radical egalitarianism must be very close to what actually happened. But as one reviewer put it, many, many pieces of the puzzle are missing... or have been ignored on purpose.
For more on the subject, I strongly recommend N.T. WrightÂ's Jesus and the Victory of God.
Rating: 1
Summary: great work of fantasy, horrible work of scholarship
Comment: This book, even to an amateur student of the historicity and reliability of the gospels' account of Jesus, is utterly ridiculous. Crossan works from the perspective that what the Bible says must be wrong, and tries to fit all his evidence to fit that perspective. Relying on a number of historical documents that date much later than the gospels themselves is awfully bias for a supposedly objective scholar. William Lane Craig's book The Son Rises easily surpasses this laughable work in both objectivity and scholarly research. Craig's book, in addition to a number of other more reliable texts, paint an entirely more accurate, logical, and astutely researched portrait of Jesus' life.
On a side note, I recommend reading Jesus Under Fire, edited by JP Moreland, in response to the findings of Crossan's group, the Jesus Seminar.
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Title: The Historical Jesus : The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant by John Dominic Crossan ISBN: 0060616296 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 26 February, 1993 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Birth of Christianity : Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus by John Dominic Crossan ISBN: 0060616601 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images by John Crossan, Dominic Crossan ISBN: 0785809015 Publisher: Book Sales Pub. Date: January, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.99 |
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Title: The Historical Figure of Jesus by E. P. Sanders ISBN: 0140144994 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Excavating Jesus : Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts: Revised and Updated by John Dominic Crossan, Jonathan L. Reed ISBN: 0060616342 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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