The Historical Jesus

John Dominic Crossan

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780061978210
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

"He comes as yet unknown into a hamlet of Lower Galilee. He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at a subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution. He looks like a beggar yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle. He speaks about the rule of God and they listen as much from curiosity as anything else. They know all about rule and power, about kingdom and empire, but they know it in terms of tax and debt, malnutrition and sickness, agrarian oppression and demonic possession. What, they really want to know, can this kingdom of God do for a lame child, a blind parent, a demented soul screaming its tortured isolation among the graves that mark the edges of the village?"

–– from "The Gospel of Jesus, " overture to The Historical Jesus

The Historical Jesus reveals the true Jesus––who he was, what he did, what he said. It opens with "The Gospel of Jesus, " Crossan's studied determination of Jesus' actual words and actions stripped of any subsequent additions and placed in a capsule account of his life story. The Jesus who emerges is a savvy and courageous Jewish Mediterranean peasant, a radical social revolutionary, with a rhapsodic vision of economic, political, and religious egalitarianism and a social program for creating it.

The conventional wisdom of critical historical scholarship has long held that too little is known about the historical Jesus to say definitively much more than that he lived and had a tremendous impact on his followers. "There were always historians who said it could not be done because of historical problems, " writes Crossan. "There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.'

With this ground–breaking work, John Dominic Crossan emphatically sweeps these notions aside. He demonstrates that Jesus is actually one of the best documented figures in ancient history; the challenge is the complexity of the sources. The vivid portrayal of Jesus that emerges from Crossan's unique methodology combines the complementary disciplines of social anthropology, Greco–Roman history, and the literary analysis of specific pronouncements, anecdotes, confessions and interpretations involving Jesus. All three levels cooperate equally and fully in an effective synthesis that provides the most definitive presentation of the historical Jesus yet attained.

PART I
Brokered Empire

Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.

Virgil, Aeneid 6.851–853 (Fitzgerald 190)

The city of Rome has never been an important center of trade…. Perhaps no major city in Western history has had so little commercial and economic importance as has ancient, medieval, and modern Rome.

William 1. Davisson and James E. Harper (175)

From the time Rome became an imperial city until today she has been a parasite-city, living on gifts, rents, taxes, tribute. That does not make Rome any less a city, only a different kind of city from Genoa.

Sir Moses 1. Finley (12S)

Rome attempted, not merely to cope with the large quantities of people it had brought together, but to give to its otherwise degraded mass culture an appropriate urban guise, reflecting imperial magnificence. To investigate this contribution one must fortify oneself for an ordeal: to enjoy it, one must keep one’s eyes open, but learn to close one’s nose to the stench, one’s ears to the screams of anguish and terror, one’s gullet to the retching of one’s own stomach. Above all, one must keep one’s heart on ice and check any impulse to tenderness and pity, with a truly Roman stolidity. All the magnitudes will be stretched in Rome: not least the magnitude of debasement and evil.

Lewis Mumford (214)

1
Then and Now

The voices that speak to us from antiquity are overwhelmingly those of the cultured few, the elites. The modern voices that carry on their tale are overwhelmingly those of white, middle-class, European and North American males. These men can, and do, laud imperialistic, authoritarian slave societies. The scholarship of antiquity is often removed from the real world, hygienically free of value judgements. Of the value judgements, that is, of the voiceless masses, the 95% who knew how “the other half” lived in antiquity.

The peasants form no part of the literate world on which most reconstructions of ancient history focus. Indeed, the peasants—the pagani—did not even form part of the lowly Christian (town dweller’s) world. They are almost lost to historical view, because of their illiteracy and localism.

Thomas F. Carney (xiv, 231 note 123)

The first century of the common era is obscured from our contemporary view by three giant filters. The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated. That already constricted report is available sometimes through the deliberate decision of later dominations but also through the vagaries of chance and luck, fate and accident. Either way, further constrictions. And our present looks back to the past, to that already doubly filtered past, dependent, of course, on where one’s present is located, but, let us say in individualistic, democratic, urban, middle-class America, often with ethnocentric presumptions it is not even aware of projecting.

Some demographic statistics from the past may serve, therefore, not as proofs about anything but as warnings about everything. Bruce Malina speaks of classes and masses. “The preindustrial city contained no more than ten percent of the entire population under its direct and immediate control. And of this ten percent that constituted the preindustrial urban population, perhaps less than two percent belonged to the elite or high class” (1981:72). Thomas Carney writes of death and taxes. On death: “We are used to a society in which very few infants are lost at birth or prior to weaning. Death, happily, tends to be remote from our experience, if we are below 30. People do not start dying in any numbers until their late fifties or, generally, their sixties or later. In preindustrial society, however, probably a third of the live births were dead before they reached the age of six. By sixteen something like 60% of these live births would have died, 75% by twenty-six, and 90% by forty-six. Very few—3% maybe—reached their sixties” (88). On taxes: “In general, resources extracted from the tax base were mostly redistributed to the men of the apparatus—who mostly invested their official gains in large estates. Taxation was generally regressive…. At best they protected the tax base; they rarely developed it—more often, indeed, they eroded it…. They took a larger share, in fact, than did the elites in more primitive societies before them, or in industrial societies after them” (341).

How, then, is it even possible for us to imagine the face of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant through those triple filters and across the gulf of those millennia? Three major sources help at least somewhat to counter those three filters just mentioned. First, on the macrocosmic level, there are anthropological or sociological studies and models, especially those using trans-temporal and cross-cultural disciplines. Next, on the mesocosmic and more local level, there are archaeological digs and discoveries. Finally, on the microcosmic level, there are papyrus documents and archives, documentary texts predominantly from Egypt in which ordinary peasants have preserved an individual voice and a personal presence normally denied them by their illiteracy and their poverty.

A Friendly Sea in a Hostile Landscape

Three terse judgments, sharp as Mediterranean shadows. “The Mediterranean,” in the words of Jane Schneider, “is something of a paradox: a friendly sea surrounded by a hostile landscape” (3). “All Mediterranean societies,” in the words of Julian Pitt-Rivers, “face the sea and their enemies— and customers—on the far side of it”(1977:ix). “A double constraint,” in the words of Fernand Braudel, “has always been at the heart of Mediterranean history: poverty and the uncertainty of the morrow” (1.245). But even to speak of the social and cultural anthropology of the Mediterranean basin demands three steps, each controversial in its possibility and fraught with difficulties in its execution.

The first step proposes a valid pan-Mediterranean construct open to anthropological investigation. John Davis limits this Mediterranean unity exclusively to historical contacts. Early in his book The People of the Mediterranean he describes that unity as, “those institutions, customs and practices which result from the conversation and commerce of thousands of years, the creation of very different peoples who have come into contact round the mediterranean shores” (13). That same judgment is reiterated at the book’s conclusion: “over the millennia it has proved impossible for mediterranean people to ignore each other. They have conquered, colonised, converted; they have traded, administered, intermarried—the contacts are perpetual and inescapable” (255).

Jeremy Boissevain, in reviewing Davis’s book, argues for a more profound unity, that of ecology. “The Mediterranean is more than just a field of interaction, commerce, and conquest. In spite of his materialist analysis of honour, Davis, in my view, has missed the most obvious materialist parameters that together give the region its distinctive signature: sea, climate, terrain, and mode of production…. These materialist parameters, placed in a comparative historical framework, provide a basis on which various differences and similarities characteristic of mediterranean societies may be usefully compared…. Mediterranean men have done a great deal besides ‘converse’ and ‘exchange’…. Men and women around the middle sea have also worked hard to solve similar problems of production under comparable physical conditions” (Boissevain et al. 83).

David Gilmore, in an invited reply to Davis’s book and Boissevain’s review, pushes this ecological basis for circum-Mediterranean unity even further by specifying Boissevain’s use of Fernand Braudel, who began his huge and magnificent study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by devoting three hundred pages to ecology. He claims that Boissevain, “is missing the most important implication of Braudel’s work, which is not simply that the Mediterranean is ecologically homogeneous, but rather that this unity derives from the consistent juxtaposition of opposites within nations, the close proximity of rugged topography with fertile riverine basins. It is this intranational contrast between remote, inaccessible mountain peaks and rich agricultural valleys that lies at the heart of mediterranean ecosystems. Throughout the region, one finds independent, egalitarian communities of peasants, tribesmen, or pastoralists in the marginal hills and in the adjacent plains something vastly different—the latifundium, the great estate, the commercial farm, heir to the Roman villa … often worked by day laborers under harsh conditions” (Boissevain et al. 88).

Writing for the same symposium of invited responses, Thomas Crump adds some other qualifications to the proposed ecological unity of the Mediterranean. “Boissevain is right to refer to the geophysical factors discussed by Braudel [but] he fails to note three critical sociocultural factors which give the area a quite distinctive character. The first, and perhaps the most important, is that almost every region of the Mediterranean has at some time in the past—generally more than 300 years ago—been very much more important than it is now. … The second factor is that the general hierarchical structure of Mediterranean societies has always been based on cities…. The third factor is that for more than 2,000 years every mediterranean society of any importance has had the use of a written language” (Boissevain et al. 86).

It seems, then, that we are dealing with a valid unity-in-diversity called Mediterranean society. But it is built up in interactive layers from geography and ecology, through technology and economics, and on to culture and politics.

The second step is particularly difficult for researchers trained to do specifically located fieldwork. Scholars begin with detailed ethnographies, say, of Andalusian villagers or Greek shepherds or Berber and Bedouin tribes. Next comes the call for comparison, from Davis, and for explanation of what such comparison means, from Boissevain. Analytically comparative social and cultural anthropology within the Mediterranean construct is precisely what the next step demands.

Consider, for example, a specific and indeed fascinating ethnographic case study conducted by Julian Pitt-Rivers between 1949 and 1952 and published as The People of the Sierra in 1954. It is one of the earlier results of the postwar surge in Mediterranean anthropology centered around E. E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford University. The focal point of his investigation was Grazalema, or Alcalá, as he called it to protect the innocent, an Andalusian pueblo in the Sierra de Cádiz. It is hardly possible to work comparatively with contemporary Grazalema and, say, ancient Nazareth, just because both are Mediterranean hill-villages with a population of about two thousand inhabitants. Before any such trans-temporal comparisons can be attempted, the data from Andalusia or anywhere else has to be analytically compared with other contemporary data to establish modern Mediterranean constants. Only the results of such analysis will have any chance of valid retrojection to the Mediterranean of two thousand years ago. I would note in passing, however, that reading even such isolated and contemporary accounts of traditional societies is an excellent therapeutic against presuming that an ancient Galilean village is like, say, a modern American one, only much smaller, older, and without electrical utilities or electronic toys.

In a recent article on the current state of Mediterranean anthropology, David Gilmore, presuming the ecological constants, summarizes the other ones that have been suggested within the Mediterranean construct. There are sociocultural constants: “a strong urban orientation; a corresponding disdain for the peasant way of life and for manual labor; sharp social, geographic, and economic stratification; political instability and a history of weak states; ‘atomistic’ community life; rigid sexual segregation; a tendency towards reliance on the smallest possible kinship units (nuclear families and shallow lineages); strong emphasis on shifting ego-centered, noncorporate coalitions; an honor-and-shame syndrome which defines both sexuality and personal reputation … most villagers share an intense parochialism … and intervillage rivalries are common … There is a general gregariousness and interdependence of daily life characteristic of small, densely populated neighborhoods … [There is] institutionalized hostile nicknaming…. The evil eye belief is widespread” (1982:178–79). Later he calls that belief, “probably one of the few true Mediterranean universals. It is also one of the oldest continuous religious constructs in the Mediterranean area” (1982:198). There are also religious, marital, and political constants: “religion plays an important institutionalized role in both north and south, as do priests, saints, and holy men … Dotal marriage [dowry] is practiced in only 4 percent of the world’s cultures, and is limited geographically to eastern Eurasia and the mediterranean basin … At the micropolitical level… emphasis on informal personal power rather than formal institutions is reflected in the reliance on patronage” (1982:179).

The third step, then, is to control critically the retrojection of those constants from the modern to the ancient Mediterranean, and, that, to compound the problem, involves moving not only from now to then but from fieldwork among people to library work among texts. It must be said immediately that such forays have usually been conducted from ancient history into modern anthropology rather than in the opposite direction.

John Davis, who seems to have honed his writing style by watching fishmongers fillet fish, castigates his anthropological peers for ignoring history but then savages Pitt-Rivers’s essay on honor for “hugger-mugger … impression of potpourri… conceptual confusion which allows historical events, literature of the sort studied by literary critics, and folklore to tend to illustrate whatever real thing the general structure may be” (253) and for “elegant use of historical and literary sources which, in a more methodology-minded age, demands careful and critical analysis of the kinds of reasoning underlying the introduction of wayward material” (257). But at least Pitt-Rivers was trying to move from now to then and from field to text.

He tried even more formally and deliberately in a later book on the anthropology of Mediterranean sexuality that began once again with the Sierra de Cádiz in the early 1950s but ended with Shechem and the text of Genesis 34. His basic intuition on that text is that “the limits of endogamy and exogamy are debated throughout the length of Genesis” so that its stories ask repeatedly but implicitly, “how closely related must you be in order to be one people and how other must you be in order to be a spouse? Other sex? Other family? Other lineage? Other tribe? Other nation?” (1977:154). One answer is given in the earlier nomadic situation of political dependence. In Genesis 12, 20, and 26 the patriarchs are willing to give their wives (as “sisters”) to settled power brokers in exchange for pasture, a “form of sexual hospitality … amply testified from ethnographies of many nomadic people, who use their women as a means of establishing relations with the sedentary population” (1977:159). A very different answer is given in their later sedentary situation of political independence. There are two significant transitions in the new answer of Genesis 34. Not only are wives no longer given in sexual hospitality to outsiders, but neither are daughters to be given to them in marriage. And the guardians of this new answer are the new generation, the woman’s brothers rather than her father. So Simeon and Levi destroy Shechem and his city rather than allow him to marry Dinah even after all the male citizens accepted circumcision. In Genesis 34:30 Jacob protests against their action, but the brothers get the last word, in 34:31, “Should he treat our sister as a harlot?” Notice, however, that in 34:28 the sons of Jacob take with them not only all the property of the murdered Shechemites but their wives as well. The politics of sex is exactly the same in Genesis 12, 20, 26, and in 34: superiors take the inferiors’ women but do not give them their own. The difference is that in the former case the patriarchs are inferior, in the latter they are superior.

Pitt-Rivers had mentioned earlier that “there is however one area of the world which, though it is noted for being traditionally organised in corporate and even kin groups, refuses to exchange women: the Mediterranean” (1977:120). He is willing, therefore, to generalize from Genesis 34 and suggest that “it records in the cr...